Do the "odometer reading at license renewal" thing
The point of the GPS is that not all the miles you've driven were driven inside the jurisdiction in question (in this case, Oregon). If you drive across the country, those miles driven outside Oregon snouldn't count toward Oregon's road maintenence tax.
Only if you operate under the premise that cars running on fuels other than gasoline are incapable of causing road wear, or that mowing your lawn or running a chainsaw contributes to road wear. Some day soon gasoline will have to be replaced with something else - electric or hydrogen. This law's intent was to make it so you can't escape paying for the road maintenence by using a vehicle that runs on some other kind of fuel.
Use of gasoline does not equal use of the roads for which the gas tax money is earmarked.
Trucks pay extra on their annual license plate renewal to reflect the fact that they put more wear on road surfaces than cars. Yes, they pay more, but not via a change in the gas tax rate.
Your rant would make sense except that unlike income taxes, the tax rate for gasoline taxes is per volume sold, not per dollar amount sold. (cents per gallon, not cents per dollar.) That's why it's possible for it to not keep up with inflation.
But the problem with basing road maintenence on gas taxes is that how much maintenence the road needs has nothing to do with how fuel efficient the cars driving on it are. A fully electric car still puts just as much wear on the road as a gasoline car of rougly equal size and weight, yet pays nothing at all toward road maintenence if road maintenence comes from the gasoline tax.
The GPS system can work if done right. Just make it part of of the processes to renew the license plates on a car that you must bring in the tracker to tally road use.
Unless the small town in your example is less than 15 metres across, the GPS system will still be able to track the small movements around the small town just fine.
Ad as far as privacy goes, the GPS system can just report total distance travelled in Oregon and that's all that's needed. Nothing needs to be transmitted from the car either, the GPS recevier doesn't need to broadcast anything to know where it is. (So there's no worry of the authorities using the system to track down where you are.)
The books are already a musical. Every so often for no apparent reason that has anything to do with the plot, the characters break out into song. The reason I usually got bored at these parts is that seing lyrics written down with no reference to what the song actually sounds like just makes it look like bad poetry. (and the songs are always about things from the past that aren't really part of the story so I didn't care.)
A musical might actually work. I think the bigger problem is trying to do the visuals in the limits of a stage setting. There's no way to make the mines of Moria look huge when it has to fit on stage. And a flying Nazguul on wires will look truly silly.
Okay, so let's say SCO shows a series of lines of Linux kernel that match up exactly with UNIX system V code. How does that prove that:
1 - The code SCO claims is from UNIX sys V really is. After all they only show a subset and we have only their word to believe that this code came from their software, and since it's closed source, there's no prior proof it was ever in there.
2 - If they can prove it exists in their UNIX V code, how do they prove it appeared there first? It is possible there was copying, but in the opposite direction - from Linux to SCO. This again gets back to their code being closed. They trot out some file and claim it's from far in the past - but how do we know that if it was always secret?
It's a problem with legal battles between OSS and CSS that I've been wondering about for a while now. With OSS there's a good public record of what appeared in the code when. With CSS you have to take the supplier of the code at his word.
Double negation doesn't make sense to you on a much higher cognitive level where you start invoking rational thought.
Bullshit. This deeper level at which this occurs might describe *your* thoughts, but it doesn't describe mine. Ever since I can remember, I've always thought everyone else was doing it "wrong" when they parsed "I ain't got no foo" as meaning "I do not have any foo". This isn't some higher level of thought I picked up later. It sounded wrong to me from day 1. To this day I still cringe when I hear something like that even though I now know what other people mean by it, it offends my sensibilites to be expected to interpet it that way without complaint. It's like being asked to believe Oceana was always at war with East Asia. I can put on an outward mask of pretending to agree with it, just to smooth over interaction with other people, but I don't really feel inside that it makes any damn sense. And, NO I'm not alone in this.
I like the subtle shades of meaning I can express in English that are between absolutely true and absolutely false.
But when an utterance can mean either one at the same time, depending on speaker preference, then the langauge fails as a tool for communication. If I say, "I think either X or not X", I have said nothing at all.
When sarcasm is misinterpeted as serious, people are all gung-ho about blaming the reader for misinterpeting it. I say bullshit. The reason sarcasm is often mistaken for the real thing is that there really *do* exist people dumb enough to say stupid things and mean it. If I see a total stranger say something truely stupid, I can't safely assume that it was someone who knows better and was just trying to be funny. It is just as likely, nay even MORE likely, to be someone dumb enough to really mean it. Only if I know you better can I tell you aren't really that dumb.
For sarcasm to work, the speaker has to be respected. Sarcasm from a total stranger doesn't work if the sarcastic comment is the first thing you've ever read by that person, or remember reading by that person.
So, when sarcasm fails, the fault lies with those dumb enough to say such things and really mean it, not with the reader who didn't "get it".
The point was the next sentence. He realized that material used for heat sheilds also made a good material for prosthetics and worked at getting the technology used for that purpose.
P.S. If you're so fscking smart, how come you're not running for - and winning - the Oval Office?
You appear to be operating under the misconception that intelligence helps get you elected President. It's not about IQ. It's about charisma. And that's not just me being cynical. Given what the President's job actually is, charisma really is more important than IQ. His job is to be the single point of communication in situations where that's needed - giving speeches and doing diplomacy with other nations. Domestically he has little authority to do much of anything. You should be more concerned with intelligence when electing someone to congress than when electing a president.
True, but the policy the US was carrying out does not fit the description "failure to lift a finger", as it was originally characterized higher up the thread, which was why I responded.
That has nothing to do with the point I was making. Let's say you are running a battle trench-warfare style, and you have to decide whether to take the heavy casualties of being the attacker, or be more timid and save lives in the short term, but prolong the conflict. Your decision is going to be heavily based on whether or not there are more troops in training to replace the ones that will die today. If you have no new troops getting ready to go to the front line, you won't want to attack with the ones you have, you'll want to preserve them. The fact that 2 million Americans were on their way and would be ready soon gave the British and the French the insurance they needed to engage in the causualty-high attacking strategy. Once they had that, they were able to puch fast and end it quickly - so quickly that the American troops only had time to get involved in the fighting a little bit here and there. But had they not been coming, the attack pushing the Germans back would not have been a good idea, and wouldn't have been attempted.
No, it's pretty clear I think. Seizing the oil wells from the outset isn't conclusive by itself, but going out of their way to shut off the oil to Syria before the fighting even stopped clearly demonstrates what the war was about. Control over oil.
That doesn't follow. I see no logical connection at all.
You drive an SUV?
On those occasions when I'm not biking to work, yes. And I carefully monitor where companies buy their oil from so I'm not filling it with any middle-east oil. So up yours.
Language does have an internal logic. It is just based on the human conceptual system, rather than some external, unintuitive metaphysics.
The problem I have with your closing sentence is this: 1 - I am human. 2 - This double-negative = still a negative rule makes no sense to me. So NO, it's not based on "the human conceptual system". The fact that it makes sense to you and not to me proves there is no such thing as "the" human conceptual way to interpet this. There is still difference of interpetation.
No, they should not. A "theist" is someone who believes in god (some x, x believes in god) An "atheist" is someone who does not believe in god (some x, x does not believe in god) What do we do with people who are undecided? Clearly, they are not subsumed under the meaning of "theist" or "atheist". Thus, "I am not an atheist" is a statement that it is not the case that you are someone who does not believe in god; you could be agnostic. "I am not no theist" is a statement that it is not the case that you are not someone who believes in god; you could be agnostic. In other words, the scope of negation in your examples are quite different, and that will effect the interpretation.
You switched context here. My statement wasn't about the way it actually gets interpeted, but about the way it *should* get interpeted. But your analysis is about the way it actually does get interpeted. I know that in practice the two statements aren't the same. My point was that logically, they *should* be.
And, NO, "not not X" is not a case of "-1 + -1", nor is it a case of "-1 * -1". It's a case of "negative negative one = - (-1) = 1"
...English teachers who didn't realize languages have a logic of their own,
More accurately: a LACK of logic all their own. I'm sorry but calling a double-negative still a negative is not reasonable. I know the majority of English speakers do it, but so what? That just means they don't give a flying fsck about speaking clearly. Some phrases have a literal and a slang meaning, and normally I'm okay with that, but it ticks me off when the slang meaning is directly the opposite of the literal. When the statement could mean one of two contradictory things depending on how you chose to interpet it, then it has been transformed into a useless utterance. It's one thing to say that you need to examine the surrounding context to determine the meaning, but when the possible meanings are so contradictory that the surrounding context has to repeat the entire set of information to clarify, then the original statemet is useless.
The reason for the double-negative rule is that many words themselves already have negatives built into them, and the meanings shouldn't change just because you separated the word out. Consider the word "atheist" versus the phrase "not theist" They mean the same thing, but if you allow double-negatives to mean a single-negative, then they don't anymore: "I'm not an atheist" "I'm not no theist". Logically, those should mean the same thing, but they do only if you rule that double-negatives are positives. If "not no theist" ends up meaning "not theist", while "not atheist" does not just becuase the "not" is embedded into the 'a-' prefix, then there's an illogical hole in the language.
In British society we have an age old law that states "a man is guilty until proven innocent". The USA I believe also has this law. Nobody has to prove that what the US did was bad. They are the ones acting as executioner here, they are the ones who should prove their own actions to be right.
I can only hope that you got that backward and this is not really the way British Law works. I know it's not the way US law works. If you think otherwise, I invite you to pay me the 10,000 US Dollars you owe me. If you think you aren't in debt to me by that amount, I challenge you to provide the documents to prove it, since everyone is guilty by default, according to your own statement.
I suppose the fact that Saddam has a history of destroying oil wells as he retreats, letting the oil spew out to contaminate the water supply, or lighting it on fire had NOTHING AT ALL to do with the military decision to secure them quickly. Nope nothing at all. I find it funny that some people complain about how the troops secured oil wells before fixing water system in Basra. HELLLOOO!!! MCFLY!!! THEY'RE PART OF THE SAME GOAL! What's the point of fixing the water system just so it can pump oil-contaminated water around a city? First stop the threat of *contaminating* the water supply, then worry about fixing the mechanisms for delivering it.
The problem with the UN isn't the theory, it's the practice. After the second world war, there were some key players that ended up becoming permanent members of the security council, which gives them more than their fair share of influence. The problem is that the balance of power has shifted since then. Is France still an important enough country to have a permanent status on the security council? Why give 5 nations permanent status? Why even *have* the security council in the first place? The UN is NOT democratic, not in the slightest. Consider, that India has 1/7 of the world's population, but only 1 vote in the general assembly, the same as, for example, New Zealand with a small fraction of the population as India Thus citizens of New Zealand have "more vote" on the UN that citzens of India, on a per-capita basis. Also keep in mind that there are no rules in the UN about how an individual country appoints it's representative.
When was the last time you voted for your country's UN rep? In most countries, the representative is an appointed position. The UN represents the *governments* of the world, not the *people* of the world. I cringe when I hear people talk of turning the UN into some global governmening body. NO, NO, NO! First turn it into a democracy, then we can talk...maybe.
I think the only way for Bush to get re-elected is for the opposition to put up a complete moron against him (not that this is impossible. There is precedent). A lot of people dislike him on domestic policies (something that doesn't make the news much across the ocean). And the perception of him as an idiot hasn't improved, it's gotten stronger. Asking whether Americans support Bush in the war is a very different question from asking Americans if they would rather keep him or have someone else.
I know in Britain we've never had anything like the Vietnam war. I hear that wasn't a picnic in the park.
Actually you did - and it lead to the USA.
(The similarities are striking. The big difference is really the Vietnam was not our colony to begin with, it was French. Other than that the military situation was very similar. One side has a larger military might, better technology weapons, and the ability to move units around freely, dropping them at various towns and cities as needed via transports. The other side had people who could hide among the population, native knowlege of the terrain, and a strategic situation where a mere prolonging of the conflict is enough to achieve victory, without needing to win the majority of the battles.
Automatic takeoff and landings systems do not require GPS. The same thing already exists today using smaller-scale systems set up at every airport. You don't need precision down-to-the-meter to fly a plane from one city to another. You only need it when landing, and so the area needed to be covered by the navigation system with that level of accuracy is very small. Today it uses a two-tier system - wide ranging but less accurate radio beacons guide the planes between airports, and short-range high-accuracy systems bring the planes down to the runway.
What a GPS system could give you that the current system cannot is just the ability to land by instrument somewhere that wasn't really built for it - like a field or a smaller ariport. But if you're in an emegency situation like that, I want to see a human at the controls anyway, not an autopilot.
The UN was an idea formed between Chruchill and Rooseveldt, before even the US was officially at war. It was meant as an answer to the failed League of Nations. It was not set up as a response to the aftermath of WW2. The idea was formed when WW2 was still young and the devastation of Europe's cities was still yet to come. The irony is that the US had a strong hand in setting the damn thing up in the first place, and now hates the fact that it exists.
(One of the best things the UN could do would be to relocate outside New York. I think that would reduce US influence quite a bit.)
Slashdot Mirror
Do the "odometer reading at license renewal" thing
The point of the GPS is that not all the miles you've driven were driven inside the jurisdiction in question (in this case, Oregon). If you drive across the country, those miles driven outside Oregon snouldn't count toward Oregon's road maintenence tax.
The current system seems to work fine:
Only if you operate under the premise that cars running on fuels other than gasoline are incapable of causing road wear, or that mowing your lawn or running a chainsaw contributes to road wear. Some day soon gasoline will have to be replaced with something else - electric or hydrogen. This law's intent was to make it so you can't escape paying for the road maintenence by using a vehicle that runs on some other kind of fuel.
Use of gasoline does not equal use of the roads for which the gas tax money is earmarked.
"Gosh, I really wanted to drive 100 miles to Portland today, but to save taxes I'll just pitter around town for a while instead."
I doubt the tax incenteve you speak of would materialize.
Trucks pay extra on their annual license plate renewal to reflect the fact that they put more wear on road surfaces than cars. Yes, they pay more, but not via a change in the gas tax rate.
Your rant would make sense except that unlike income taxes, the tax rate for gasoline taxes is per volume sold, not per dollar amount sold. (cents per gallon, not cents per dollar.) That's why it's possible for it to not keep up with inflation.
But the problem with basing road maintenence on gas taxes is that how much maintenence the road needs has nothing to do with how fuel efficient the cars driving on it are. A fully electric car still puts just as much wear on the road as a gasoline car of rougly equal size and weight, yet pays nothing at all toward road maintenence if road maintenence comes from the gasoline tax.
The GPS system can work if done right. Just make it part of of the processes to renew the license plates on a car that you must bring in the tracker to tally road use.
Unless the small town in your example is less than 15 metres across, the GPS system will still be able to track the small movements around the small town just fine.
Ad as far as privacy goes, the GPS system can just report total distance travelled in Oregon and that's all that's needed. Nothing needs to be transmitted from the car either, the GPS recevier doesn't need to broadcast anything to know where it is. (So there's no worry of the authorities using the system to track down where you are.)
The books are already a musical. Every so often for no apparent reason that has anything to do with the plot, the characters break out into song. The reason I usually got bored at these parts is that seing lyrics written down with no reference to what the song actually sounds like just makes it look like bad poetry. (and the songs are always about things from the past that aren't really part of the story so I didn't care.)
A musical might actually work. I think the bigger problem is trying to do the visuals in the limits of a stage setting. There's no way to make the mines of Moria look huge when it has to fit on stage. And a flying Nazguul on wires will look truly silly.
Okay, so let's say SCO shows a series of lines of Linux kernel that match up exactly with UNIX system V code. How does that prove that:
1 - The code SCO claims is from UNIX sys V really is. After all they only show a subset and we have only their word to believe that this code came from their software, and since it's closed source, there's no prior proof it was ever in there.
2 - If they can prove it exists in their UNIX V code, how do they prove it appeared there first? It is possible there was copying, but in the opposite direction - from Linux to SCO. This again gets back to their code being closed. They trot out some file and claim it's from far in the past - but how do we know that if it was always secret?
It's a problem with legal battles between OSS and CSS that I've been wondering about for a while now. With OSS there's a good public record of what appeared in the code when. With CSS you have to take the supplier of the code at his word.
Double negation doesn't make sense to you on a much higher cognitive level where you start invoking rational thought.
Bullshit. This deeper level at which this occurs might describe *your* thoughts, but it doesn't describe mine. Ever since I can remember, I've always thought everyone else was doing it "wrong" when they parsed "I ain't got no foo" as meaning "I do not have any foo". This isn't some higher level of thought I picked up later. It sounded wrong to me from day 1. To this day I still cringe when I hear something like that even though I now know what other people mean by it, it offends my sensibilites to be expected to interpet it that way without complaint. It's like being asked to believe Oceana was always at war with East Asia. I can put on an outward mask of pretending to agree with it, just to smooth over interaction with other people, but I don't really feel inside that it makes any damn sense. And, NO I'm not alone in this.
I like the subtle shades of meaning I can express in English that are between absolutely true and absolutely false.
But when an utterance can mean either one at the same time, depending on speaker preference, then the langauge fails as a tool for communication. If I say, "I think either X or not X", I have said nothing at all.
When sarcasm is misinterpeted as serious, people are all gung-ho about blaming the reader for misinterpeting it. I say bullshit. The reason sarcasm is often mistaken for the real thing is that there really *do* exist people dumb enough to say stupid things and mean it. If I see a total stranger say something truely stupid, I can't safely assume that it was someone who knows better and was just trying to be funny. It is just as likely, nay even MORE likely, to be someone dumb enough to really mean it. Only if I know you better can I tell you aren't really that dumb.
For sarcasm to work, the speaker has to be respected. Sarcasm from a total stranger doesn't work if the sarcastic comment is the first thing you've ever read by that person, or remember reading by that person.
So, when sarcasm fails, the fault lies with those dumb enough to say such things and really mean it,
not with the reader who didn't "get it".
The point was the next sentence. He realized that material used for heat sheilds also made a good material for prosthetics and worked at getting the technology used for that purpose.
P.S. If you're so fscking smart, how come you're not running for - and winning - the Oval Office?
You appear to be operating under the misconception that intelligence helps get you elected President. It's not about IQ. It's about charisma. And that's not just me being cynical. Given what the President's job actually is, charisma really is more important than IQ. His job is to be the single point of communication in situations where that's needed - giving speeches and doing diplomacy with other nations. Domestically he has little authority to do much of anything. You should be more concerned with intelligence when electing someone to congress than when electing a president.
True, but the policy the US was carrying out does not fit the description "failure to lift a finger", as it was originally characterized higher up the thread, which was why I responded.
That has nothing to do with the point I was making. Let's say you are running a battle trench-warfare style, and you have to decide whether to take the heavy casualties of being the attacker, or be more timid and save lives in the short term, but prolong the conflict. Your decision is going to be heavily based on whether or not there are more troops in training to replace the ones that will die today. If you have no new troops getting ready to go to the front line, you won't want to attack with the ones you have, you'll want to preserve them. The fact that 2 million Americans were on their way and would be ready soon gave the British and the French the insurance they needed to engage in the causualty-high attacking strategy. Once they had that, they were able to puch fast and end it quickly - so quickly that the American troops only had time to get involved in the fighting a little bit here and there. But had they not been coming, the attack pushing the Germans back would not have been a good idea, and wouldn't have been attempted.
That's what I *said*. Read the rest of the post you reply to, not just the first line.
No, it's pretty clear I think. Seizing the oil wells from the outset isn't conclusive by itself, but going out of their way to shut off the oil to Syria before the fighting even stopped clearly demonstrates what the war was about. Control over oil.
That doesn't follow. I see no logical connection at all.
You drive an SUV?
On those occasions when I'm not biking to work, yes. And I carefully monitor where companies buy their oil from so I'm not filling it with any middle-east oil. So up yours.
Language does have an internal logic. It is just based on the human conceptual system, rather than some external, unintuitive metaphysics.
The problem I have with your closing sentence is this: 1 - I am human. 2 - This double-negative = still a negative rule makes no sense to me. So NO, it's not based on "the human conceptual system". The fact that it makes sense to you and not to me proves there is no such thing as "the" human conceptual way to interpet this. There is still difference of interpetation.
No, they should not.
A "theist" is someone who believes in god (some x, x believes in god)
An "atheist" is someone who does not believe in god (some x, x does not believe in god)
What do we do with people who are undecided? Clearly, they are not subsumed under the meaning of "theist" or "atheist". Thus, "I am not an atheist" is a statement that it is not the case that you are someone who does not believe in god; you could be agnostic.
"I am not no theist" is a statement that it is not the case that you are not someone who believes in god; you could be agnostic.
In other words, the scope of negation in your examples are quite different, and that will effect the interpretation.
You switched context here. My statement wasn't about the way it actually gets interpeted, but about the way it *should* get interpeted. But your analysis is about the way it actually does get interpeted. I know that in practice the two statements aren't the same. My point was that logically, they *should* be.
And, NO, "not not X" is not a case of "-1 + -1", nor is it a case of "-1 * -1". It's a case of "negative negative one = - (-1) = 1"
More accurately: a LACK of logic all their own. I'm sorry but calling a double-negative still a negative is not reasonable. I know the majority of English speakers do it, but so what? That just means they don't give a flying fsck about speaking clearly. Some phrases have a literal and a slang meaning, and normally I'm okay with that, but it ticks me off when the slang meaning is directly the opposite of the literal. When the statement could mean one of two contradictory things depending on how you chose to interpet it, then it has been transformed into a useless utterance. It's one thing to say that you need to examine the surrounding context to determine the meaning, but when the possible meanings are so contradictory that the surrounding context has to repeat the entire set of information to clarify, then the original statemet is useless.
The reason for the double-negative rule is that many words themselves already have negatives built into them, and the meanings shouldn't change just because you separated the word out. Consider the word "atheist" versus the phrase "not theist" They mean the same thing, but if you allow double-negatives to mean a single-negative, then they don't anymore:
"I'm not an atheist"
"I'm not no theist".
Logically, those should mean the same thing, but they do only if you rule that double-negatives are positives. If "not no theist" ends up meaning "not theist", while "not atheist" does not just becuase the "not" is embedded into the 'a-' prefix, then there's an illogical hole in the language.
In British society we have an age old law that states "a man is guilty until proven innocent". The USA I believe also has this law. Nobody has to prove that what the US did was bad. They are the ones acting as executioner here, they are the ones who should prove their own actions to be right.
I can only hope that you got that backward and this is not really the way British Law works. I know it's not the way US law works. If you think otherwise, I invite you to pay me the 10,000 US Dollars you owe me. If you think you aren't in debt to me by that amount, I challenge you to provide the documents to prove it, since everyone is guilty by default, according to your own statement.
I suppose the fact that Saddam has a history of destroying oil wells as he retreats, letting the oil spew out to contaminate the water supply, or lighting it on fire had NOTHING AT ALL to do with the military decision to secure them quickly. Nope nothing at all. I find it funny that some people complain about how the troops secured oil wells before fixing water system in Basra. HELLLOOO!!! MCFLY!!! THEY'RE PART OF THE SAME GOAL! What's the point of fixing the water system just so it can pump oil-contaminated water around a city? First stop the threat of *contaminating* the water supply, then worry about fixing the mechanisms for delivering it.
The problem with the UN isn't the theory, it's the practice. After the second world war, there were some key players that ended up becoming permanent members of the security council, which gives them more than their fair share of influence. The problem is that the balance of power has shifted since then. Is France still an important enough country to have a permanent status on the security council? Why give 5 nations permanent status? Why even *have* the security council in the first place? The UN is NOT democratic, not in the slightest. Consider, that India has 1/7 of the world's population, but only 1 vote in the general assembly, the same as, for example, New Zealand with a small fraction of the population as India Thus citizens of New Zealand have "more vote" on the UN that citzens of India, on a per-capita basis. Also keep in mind that there are no rules in the UN about how an individual country appoints it's representative.
When was the last time you voted for your country's UN rep? In most countries, the representative is an appointed position. The UN represents the *governments* of the world, not the *people* of the world. I cringe when I hear people talk of turning the UN into some global governmening body. NO, NO, NO! First turn it into a democracy, then we can talk...maybe.
I think the only way for Bush to get re-elected is for the opposition to put up a complete moron against him (not that this is impossible. There is precedent). A lot of people dislike him on domestic policies (something that doesn't make the news much across the ocean). And the perception of him as an idiot hasn't improved, it's gotten stronger. Asking whether Americans support Bush in the war is a very different question from asking Americans if they would rather keep him or have someone else.
I know in Britain we've never had anything like the Vietnam war. I hear that wasn't a picnic in the park.
Actually you did - and it lead to the USA.
(The similarities are striking. The big difference is really the Vietnam was not our colony to begin with, it was French. Other than that the military situation was very similar. One side has a larger military might, better technology weapons, and the ability to move units around freely, dropping them at various towns and cities as needed via transports. The other side had people who could hide among the population, native knowlege of the terrain, and a strategic situation where a mere prolonging of the conflict is enough to achieve victory, without needing to win the majority of the battles.
Automatic takeoff and landings systems do not require GPS. The same thing already exists today using smaller-scale systems set up at every airport. You don't need precision down-to-the-meter to fly a plane from one city to another. You only need it when landing, and so the area needed to be covered by the navigation system with that level of accuracy is very small. Today it uses a two-tier system - wide ranging but less accurate radio beacons guide the planes between airports, and short-range high-accuracy systems bring the planes down to the runway.
What a GPS system could give you that the current system cannot is just the ability to land by instrument somewhere that wasn't really built for it - like a field or a smaller ariport. But if you're in an emegency situation like that, I want to see a human at the controls anyway, not an autopilot.
The UN was an idea formed between Chruchill and Rooseveldt, before even the US was officially at war. It was meant as an answer to the failed League of Nations. It was not set up as a response to the aftermath of WW2. The idea was formed when WW2 was still young and the devastation of Europe's cities was still yet to come. The irony is that the US had a strong hand in setting the damn thing up in the first place, and now hates the fact that it exists.
(One of the best things the UN could do would be to relocate outside New York. I think that would reduce US influence quite a bit.)