First, they're still making money off it now, just not in the end-user fat-client space.
Second, it includes code copyrighted by Microsoft, Adobe, and others, which are covered by all sorts of different licenses to IBM. That makes release a legal nightmare.
You'll notice, despite the somewhat shocking way I expressed myself, I didn't make any value judgments about Christianity. I was paraphrasing a point that's made in the Scriptures, in the works of the Church Fathers, and in the works of more recent writers like C.S. Lewis.
Is that akin to adultery for those who are married?
Looking upon a woman with lust is adultery according to a quote attributed to Jesus in Gospels that are considered the Word of God.
So, looking at porn on the 'Net is okay, as long as you don't get aroused by it. Otherwise, it's adultery -- a crime punishable (like murder) in the Old Testament and in the time of Jesus by death.
In short, according to the Word of God as accepted by Christians, looking at one nudie pic for the erotic thrill is as equally deserving/undeserving of the death penalty as murdering someone by slow torture.
But seriously folks, this is why the FCC was insane to sell (rather than lease) various frequencies
Why? If it turns out that the government needs a specific frequency (and large blocks are reserved anyway, so it's not likely that any one private frequency would be needed), they can seize it like any other private property in the U.S., subject only to paying due compensation.
And, under current interpretations of the law, that due compensation would not include transmision/reciever equipment replacement costs (unless the equipment was also seized), but only the market value of the frequency itself before the government expressed its interest.
And, of course, that price could be artificially depressed by the government selling off a block of "reserved" spectrum just before exercising eminent domain, and the money from that auction used to pay that price . . . if the government is being smart and Machivellian about it. At worst, it'd be a minor blip in spending to reacquire.
And of course having the government fund your U.S. Government class doesn't ever result in any "our system's good, their system's bad" propaganda, self-serving explanations of the powers of government, etc.
hmm everyone seems to say copper is good but I don't see any specs
Electricity passing through copper encouters less resistance and therefore produces less heat than electricity passing through aluminum (the current standard). This is why aluminum wiring in houses caused so many house fires and has been outlawed in the U.S. This is also why copper interconnects on a chip are better than aluminum -- less heat.
Less heat allows faster processors (ask any overclocker), but how much faster depends on specific factors of the implementation. Anything that says "copper processors are x% faster than the same design using aluminum" is BS unless accompanied by three pages of conditions and explanations.
People who go into government in the U.S. don't get respect, and don't get money. At low levels, you get job security. At high levels, the only incentive is power.
Everyone who is at a high level in the U.S. Government is there for the power. Maybe the reason is they want the power to do good, improve the world, and serve humanity. But, no matter why they want power, the only reward, the only great benefit, and the only reason anybody of ability and ambition goes into government work in the U.S. is power.
And then everybody's suprised for some reason when those who have acquired power try to extend it as far as possible.
First, the Japanese injunction isn't nearly as important as the article makes out. First, it's a preliminary injunction -- all Apple had to show is a prima fascie case and a significant possibility of irreperable damages.
Second, this is a summary and interpretation of an analyst's report, which itself is a summary and interpretation of available data. In the absence of hard facts, what does "While the company has sold over a million units since its inception last November, it has not even remotely created a business model that is sustainable," mean?
As a disclosure, I have an eMachine which I am very happy with. I didn't bother with the "internet service" rebate, and got a etower 366i2, 15" monitor, and Lexmark Z11 printer for an after-rebates-and-tax grand total of ~$550. Toss in a $100 external modem (I prefer external anyway), and I got a decent system for less than you'd pay for a comparable Compaq. And the eMachine has 4 mb SGRAM video instead of UMA SDRAM sharing like the Compaq. Still using my home-built for Linux, though...
Anybody remember that Handspring was formed because 3Com wouldn't spin Palm Computing back off? Now, after Handspring develops a Palm-killer (with the OS licensed from 3Com no less), 3Com decides that they should spin Palm Computing off.
At least 3Com figured out the PDA industry is outside their competence before it was too late to salvage any value for their stockholders.
whats to stop some private company from testing a new missle and blowing it up
Physics. You couldn't blow up the moon enough to upset the tides if you carefully placed and detonated evey nuclear weapon on Earth in a deliberate attempt to do so.
Also, we only have one moon and it would be a shame to destroy its surface with garbage, only to later find some other purpose for it
Ahem. You realize exactly how big the moon is? And you realize how toxic the garbage would have to be to make it harder to settle the moon than settlement already is?
I wonder what would have happened if, say, Czechoslovakia had tried to order Soviet troops out of their country like France did to the U.S. Oh, you mean they did, and the Soviets ran in and crushed them? Then, since we're no better, I assume we killed DeGaulle?
Of course we worked with nasty regimes during the Cold War. We worked with Stalin during WWII -- was that an endorsment of Communism? The enemy of my biggest enemy is my friend, no matter how nasty. Note U.S. pressure switched directions in 1990 in Chile, El Salvador, Angola, etc. -- when the Soviets left, we did, too.
Chomsky's left-wing anti-corporate fixation aside, the reason the U.S. hated Castro during the Cold War was that he was a Soviet ally. The reason we "hate" him now is that the Cuban expat vote is important in Florida and Florida is important to Presidential campaigns, and there isn't a big pro-Castro vote anywhere in the U.S.
Politicians care about those Cuban expat votes. They don't give a damn about any principle, and certainly nobody gives a damn about what somebody nationalized forty years ago, except a handful of people who court John Birch Society votes.
It was a war, if you recall, and a war that Japan instigated
Lemme put this straight --
Japan goes to war with China in 1936.
In 1941 we tell Japan that if they don't give up all the territory they've won in the last five years from China, we'll cut off their oil.
The nearest supply of oil to Japan is in Indonesia.
The sea routes from Indonesia to Japan go right by the Phillipines, a U.S. colony, making it a trivial task for the U.S. to interfere if the U.S. retains the Phillipines.
While we're at it, the U.S. has cut off Japan from many other raw materials, including scrap iron, seized Japanese assets in the U.S., and impounded Japanese merchant ships in U.S. ports.
Now, if you're the Japanese leadership, you've got a choice here.
Give in to U.S. demands to sacrifice gains won in five years of bloody fighting.
Invade the Dutch East Indies and hope the U.S. doesn't decide to take active measures where passive measures have failed.
Give the U.S. an ultimatum to back down and thus give an openly hostile state the time to prepare for a war.
Seize the Phillipines and smash the U.S. Pacific fleet, hoping that afterwards you can get the U.S. to accept the fait accompli.
While those who understand the psychology of Americans realize that #3 would have worked best, anyone who understands the psychology of 1930's-40's Japan can see that #4 is the most likely response.
Now, despite all that, I think the destruction of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified on both military and humanitarian grounds, and that the U.S. government of 1941-45 was morally superior to the Japanese government of the same time period that practiced the horrible atrocities in East Asia.
However, don't tell me Japan instigated the U.S.-Japanese conflict in 1941. FDR was doing everything he could to drag the U.S. people into WWII. Discussing joint war aims in 1940 with Churchill, giving Britain free weaponry, impounding Axis ships and assets, and blowing up German vessels on the Atlantic didn't work -- but FDR finally found something that did.
A media-oriented company can criticize and make fun of the guys who own it, because if those guys have even the slightest notion of what PR is, they'll never take the risk of shutting you up
Remember on the Simpsons when an Australian-accented fellow prisoner said "I own that network!" when Sideshow Bob criticized Fox? Even Citizen Murdoch doesn't kill his minions for making fun of him.
Actually, PM isn't very good. WPS is the best OOUI. You see, the Presentation Manager shell was Microsoft-written the 16-bit OS/2 1.3 GUI. You could later get it as an NT 3.x subsystem. The IBM-written Workplace Shell, which came with OS/2 2.0+, was an object-oriented successor that could run all of the old PM apps.
Of course, since the WPS was built to be compatible with PM-16 and to replace Microsoft's PM-32 in OS/2 2.0, various documents refered to WPS features and programming as PM features and programming. And the difference made little practical difference since the WPS program provided PM services to things like mshell anyway, and nobody bothered writing PM apps for 16-bit OS/2 anymore anyway.
But, it does make a major difference now, since the WPS is IBM code and thus could theoretically be released under an open-source license by IBM. Also, it (theoretically, at least) could be reengineered to work on top of X graphics services instead of PM graphics services, giving you an OOUI with all the features of both X and WPS...
Microsoft was the name developer through version 1.3, actually, and the early part of 2.0 development.
OTOH, the WPS was almost entirely IBM-written. The original "Microsoft OS/2 2.0" specs did not include the WPS but just an updated Presentation Manager (remember the add-on 16 bit PM subsystem for WinNT?) OS/2 2.0 was delayed after the divorce in large part because IBM decided to add the WPS.
Ideally, IBM would open-source the larger part of the WPS code, on which they have exclusive rights, and which is after all the best part of the OS anyway...
Er, both the/. and Stardock stories simply say that the OS/2 *client* is not going to be updated. You then yourself say OS/2 isn't dead on the server end, just the client isn't being developed.
I find it amazing that a post made by someone who didn't read either the Slashdot write-up or the linked article got moderated up at all, much less so far (to a 4 as I reply), but I know how I'd M2 the moderation...
Obviously, this doesn't by itself allow Sony to sue J. Random Webmaster for using the domain name -- but it does allow Sony to sue the band if the band tries to later use such a domain name without Sony's permission.
It looks like it's primarily intended as an end-run around the recently proposed U.S. legislation that would allow ex-band-members to use the band name in promotional materials. This way, Sony doesn't have to worry about the legislation allowing an ex-band-member from getting a URL that looks like an official-legal one.
See this article at the Register for another reason why this "NSAKey" isn't a Big Brother threat. In short, it says that the NSAKey amounts to a useful hook for people to make their copies of Windows more secure and the NSA's job harder.
OTOH, the Register article seems to imply that the NSA screwed up in allowing the export of Windows with such a hook, which counters the "NSA is too competent to be this dumb" approach to debunking the idea that this is an NSA backdoor.
But, whether a mistaken approval or an incompentent backdoor, it doesn't seem to be much of a real threat. All in all, it's only proof of nefarious intentions if you assume nefarious intentions to begin with.
But if I talk like this much more, the other Libertarians won't let me come to local party meetings anymore...
I'm not going to risk moderating anymore, because meta-moderation has all the potential for abuse as moderation without the built-in correction.
Why? If somebody M2's all positive moderation on pro-microsoft remarks and all negative moderation on pro-Linux remarks as unfair, while M2ing all positive moderation on pro-Linux remarks and all negative moderation on pro-Microsoft remarks as fair, it may very well not get caught by whatever heuristics Rob is using.
Thus, this M2er is unfairly zapping good moderators in the pursuit of his biases, while the moderator doesn't even know for what he's being zapped. And there isn't even the corrective of the M2 being flagged in disco threads like moderation is. At least unfair moderation could be reported as an abuse to Rob, but you don't even have that option for unfair M2, because you don't even know when or to what it happened!
It isn't as bad as it seemed. If people keep their heads and meta-moderate fairly, leaving it at a no-change whenever they don't have the context, it might be useful.
I went through and meta-moderated... I think that meta-moderation isn't going to improve anything, since it will be abused exactly the same way as moderation, but at least I got to nail someone who made a blatantly unfair attack on a reasonable post that dared to question/. orthodoxy.
Anyway, I'm not going to uncheck my "willing to moderate" box after all, but I still think/. would be better off if this meta-moderation code were assigned to the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky.
Well, I just looked at a meta-moderation page, and I decided that the system is fundamentally screwed up.
For example, say I see a post that's rated as "Overrated" and "Underrated" -- those are contextual decisions based on the article's rating at the time the moderator voted on them. If the moderator has moderated it from 5 to 4 with an "overrated", I might think it fair -- but he might have moderated it from a 1 to a 0, with other moderators later spending points to correct that unfair demotion. How, then, can I rule on whether the "overrated" moderation was fair or not?
Similarly, how the hell can I judge a rating of "redundant" without going and reading the whole fscking thread?
Meta-moderation just looks ripe for misuse, abuse, and erroneous use. I suggest instead that, when moderator access is granted, the moderator also gets two "meta-moderation" points he can use to delete a moderation from a post. That helps check unfair moderation without the problematic context-dropping.
Anyway, I chose not to meta-moderate, since I felt I couldn't fairly judge. And, if this is the arbitrary process I'm going to be subject to, I'm going to stop moderating.
Simple. You, me, and anybody else can now get this info on areas with restricted airspace and without violating a country's soverignty. Which essentially amounts to third-world nations now having access data on troop movements and miliary installations behind the borders of their immediate neigbors.
Another thing: Why should 'closed' countries like North Korea have more to loose with these publicly available shots? I'm quite sure US reconnaissence watches them tightly, so what's the difference for them?
The U.S. isn't the only country closed societies have an interest in keeping data from. U.S. intel agencies, like most intel agencies, don't like sharing information with other intel agencies of their own government, like sharing with non-spooks in their own government even less, and can barely stand sharing data with other nations that have been their close allies for decades.
So, for example, commercial satellites could give Turkey data on Syria, Iraq, and Iran that it previously had to hope to get from the U.S.; and it could give Syria, Iran, and Iraq data on each other that none of them could get anywhere else.
Similarly, South Korea and the Japanese probably don't get all the data they would like from the U.S. regarding North Korea -- and China and Russia certainly don't.
It is like a bluff in a cards game; the last resort of the loser.
Er, a bit off-topic here (and it does avoid the point of your analogy) but then you're playing cards (at least poker) wrong. Reserving the bluff to the last resort is just a way to enrich your opponents, whereas more strategic uses of the bluff ultimately increase your take on strong hands.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't they open source OS/2?
Why?
First, they're still making money off it now, just not in the end-user fat-client space.
Second, it includes code copyrighted by Microsoft, Adobe, and others, which are covered by all sorts of different licenses to IBM. That makes release a legal nightmare.
[Nod.]
You'll notice, despite the somewhat shocking way I expressed myself, I didn't make any value judgments about Christianity. I was paraphrasing a point that's made in the Scriptures, in the works of the Church Fathers, and in the works of more recent writers like C.S. Lewis.
Is that akin to adultery for those who are married?
Looking upon a woman with lust is adultery according to a quote attributed to Jesus in Gospels that are considered the Word of God.
So, looking at porn on the 'Net is okay, as long as you don't get aroused by it. Otherwise, it's adultery -- a crime punishable (like murder) in the Old Testament and in the time of Jesus by death.
In short, according to the Word of God as accepted by Christians, looking at one nudie pic for the erotic thrill is as equally deserving/undeserving of the death penalty as murdering someone by slow torture.
But seriously folks, this is why the FCC was insane to sell (rather than lease) various frequencies
Why? If it turns out that the government needs a specific frequency (and large blocks are reserved anyway, so it's not likely that any one private frequency would be needed), they can seize it like any other private property in the U.S., subject only to paying due compensation.
And, under current interpretations of the law, that due compensation would not include transmision/reciever equipment replacement costs (unless the equipment was also seized), but only the market value of the frequency itself before the government expressed its interest.
And, of course, that price could be artificially depressed by the government selling off a block of "reserved" spectrum just before exercising eminent domain, and the money from that auction used to pay that price . . . if the government is being smart and Machivellian about it. At worst, it'd be a minor blip in spending to reacquire.
Sounds goood -- except we already tax the far rich more heavily than everyone else. The top 10% of Americans already pay 49% of all federal taxes.
h tml for details.
So, the bottom 90% of Americans are paying for only 51% of the cost of the government.
See http://www.ncpa.org/~ncpa/oped/bartlett/sept1399.
And of course having the government fund your U.S. Government class doesn't ever result in any "our system's good, their system's bad" propaganda, self-serving explanations of the powers of government, etc.
hmm everyone seems to say copper is good but I don't see any specs
:-)
Electricity passing through copper encouters less resistance and therefore produces less heat than electricity passing through aluminum (the current standard). This is why aluminum wiring in houses caused so many house fires and has been outlawed in the U.S. This is also why copper interconnects on a chip are better than aluminum -- less heat.
Less heat allows faster processors (ask any overclocker), but how much faster depends on specific factors of the implementation. Anything that says "copper processors are x% faster than the same design using aluminum" is BS unless accompanied by three pages of conditions and explanations.
Me, I want gold interconnects
People who go into government in the U.S. don't get respect, and don't get money. At low levels, you get job security. At high levels, the only incentive is power.
Everyone who is at a high level in the U.S. Government is there for the power. Maybe the reason is they want the power to do good, improve the world, and serve humanity. But, no matter why they want power, the only reward, the only great benefit, and the only reason anybody of ability and ambition goes into government work in the U.S. is power.
And then everybody's suprised for some reason when those who have acquired power try to extend it as far as possible.
First, the Japanese injunction isn't nearly as important as the article makes out. First, it's a preliminary injunction -- all Apple had to show is a prima fascie case and a significant possibility of irreperable damages.
Second, this is a summary and interpretation of an analyst's report, which itself is a summary and interpretation of available data. In the absence of hard facts, what does "While the company has sold over a million units since its inception last November, it has not even remotely created a business model that is sustainable," mean?
As a disclosure, I have an eMachine which I am very happy with. I didn't bother with the "internet service" rebate, and got a etower 366i2, 15" monitor, and Lexmark Z11 printer for an after-rebates-and-tax grand total of ~$550. Toss in a $100 external modem (I prefer external anyway), and I got a decent system for less than you'd pay for a comparable Compaq. And the eMachine has 4 mb SGRAM video instead of UMA SDRAM sharing like the Compaq. Still using my home-built for Linux, though...
Anybody remember that Handspring was formed because 3Com wouldn't spin Palm Computing back off? Now, after Handspring develops a Palm-killer (with the OS licensed from 3Com no less), 3Com decides that they should spin Palm Computing off.
At least 3Com figured out the PDA industry is outside their competence before it was too late to salvage any value for their stockholders.
whats to stop some private company from testing a new missle and blowing it up
Physics. You couldn't blow up the moon enough to upset the tides if you carefully placed and detonated evey nuclear weapon on Earth in a deliberate attempt to do so.
Also, we only have one moon and it would be a shame to destroy its surface with garbage, only to later find some other purpose for it
Ahem. You realize exactly how big the moon is? And you realize how toxic the garbage would have to be to make it harder to settle the moon than settlement already is?
Sorry, thanks for playing. Please try again!
I wonder what would have happened if, say, Czechoslovakia had tried to order Soviet troops out of their country like France did to the U.S. Oh, you mean they did, and the Soviets ran in and crushed them? Then, since we're no better, I assume we killed DeGaulle?
Of course we worked with nasty regimes during the Cold War. We worked with Stalin during WWII -- was that an endorsment of Communism? The enemy of my biggest enemy is my friend, no matter how nasty. Note U.S. pressure switched directions in 1990 in Chile, El Salvador, Angola, etc. -- when the Soviets left, we did, too.
Chomsky's left-wing anti-corporate fixation aside, the reason the U.S. hated Castro during the Cold War was that he was a Soviet ally. The reason we "hate" him now is that the Cuban expat vote is important in Florida and Florida is important to Presidential campaigns, and there isn't a big pro-Castro vote anywhere in the U.S.
Politicians care about those Cuban expat votes. They don't give a damn about any principle, and certainly nobody gives a damn about what somebody nationalized forty years ago, except a handful of people who court John Birch Society votes.
Lemme put this straight --
Now, if you're the Japanese leadership, you've got a choice here.
While those who understand the psychology of Americans realize that #3 would have worked best, anyone who understands the psychology of 1930's-40's Japan can see that #4 is the most likely response.
Now, despite all that, I think the destruction of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified on both military and humanitarian grounds, and that the U.S. government of 1941-45 was morally superior to the Japanese government of the same time period that practiced the horrible atrocities in East Asia.
However, don't tell me Japan instigated the U.S.-Japanese conflict in 1941. FDR was doing everything he could to drag the U.S. people into WWII. Discussing joint war aims in 1940 with Churchill, giving Britain free weaponry, impounding Axis ships and assets, and blowing up German vessels on the Atlantic didn't work -- but FDR finally found something that did.
A media-oriented company can criticize and make fun of the guys who own it, because if those guys have even the slightest notion of what PR is, they'll never take the risk of shutting you up
Remember on the Simpsons when an Australian-accented fellow prisoner said "I own that network!" when Sideshow Bob criticized Fox?
Even Citizen Murdoch doesn't kill his minions for making fun of him.
Actually, PM isn't very good. WPS is the best OOUI. You see, the Presentation Manager shell was Microsoft-written the 16-bit OS/2 1.3 GUI. You could later get it as an NT 3.x subsystem. The IBM-written Workplace Shell, which came with OS/2 2.0+, was an object-oriented successor that could run all of the old PM apps.
Of course, since the WPS was built to be compatible with PM-16 and to replace Microsoft's PM-32 in OS/2 2.0, various documents refered to WPS features and programming as PM features and programming. And the difference made little practical difference since the WPS program provided PM services to things like mshell anyway, and nobody bothered writing PM apps for 16-bit OS/2 anymore anyway.
But, it does make a major difference now, since the WPS is IBM code and thus could theoretically be released under an open-source license by IBM. Also, it (theoretically, at least) could be reengineered to work on top of X graphics services instead of PM graphics services, giving you an OOUI with all the features of both X and WPS...
Microsoft was the name developer through version 1.3, actually, and the early part of 2.0 development.
OTOH, the WPS was almost entirely IBM-written. The original "Microsoft OS/2 2.0" specs did not include the WPS but just an updated Presentation Manager (remember the add-on 16 bit PM subsystem for WinNT?) OS/2 2.0 was delayed after the divorce in large part because IBM decided to add the WPS.
Ideally, IBM would open-source the larger part of the WPS code, on which they have exclusive rights, and which is after all the best part of the OS anyway...
Er, both the /. and Stardock stories simply say that the OS/2 *client* is not going to be updated. You then yourself say OS/2 isn't dead on the server end, just the client isn't being developed.
I find it amazing that a post made by someone who didn't read either the Slashdot write-up or the linked article got moderated up at all, much less so far (to a 4 as I reply), but I know how I'd M2 the moderation...
Obviously, this doesn't by itself allow Sony to sue J. Random Webmaster for using the domain name -- but it does allow Sony to sue the band if the band tries to later use such a domain name without Sony's permission.
It looks like it's primarily intended as an end-run around the recently proposed U.S. legislation that would allow ex-band-members to use the band name in promotional materials. This way, Sony doesn't have to worry about the legislation allowing an ex-band-member from getting a URL that looks like an official-legal one.
See this article at the Register for another reason why this "NSAKey" isn't a Big Brother threat. In short, it says that the NSAKey amounts to a useful hook for people to make their copies of Windows more secure and the NSA's job harder.
OTOH, the Register article seems to imply that the NSA screwed up in allowing the export of Windows with such a hook, which counters the "NSA is too competent to be this dumb" approach to debunking the idea that this is an NSA backdoor.
But, whether a mistaken approval or an incompentent backdoor, it doesn't seem to be much of a real threat. All in all, it's only proof of nefarious intentions if you assume nefarious intentions to begin with.
But if I talk like this much more, the other Libertarians won't let me come to local party meetings anymore...
I'm not going to risk moderating anymore, because meta-moderation has all the potential for abuse as moderation without the built-in correction.
Why? If somebody M2's all positive moderation on pro-microsoft remarks and all negative moderation on pro-Linux remarks as unfair, while M2ing all positive moderation on pro-Linux remarks and all negative moderation on pro-Microsoft remarks as fair, it may very well not get caught by whatever heuristics Rob is using.
Thus, this M2er is unfairly zapping good moderators in the pursuit of his biases, while the moderator doesn't even know for what he's being zapped. And there isn't even the corrective of the M2 being flagged in disco threads like moderation is. At least unfair moderation could be reported as an abuse to Rob, but you don't even have that option for unfair M2, because you don't even know when or to what it happened!
It isn't as bad as it seemed. If people keep their heads and meta-moderate fairly, leaving it at a no-change whenever they don't have the context, it might be useful.
/. orthodoxy.
/. would be better off if this meta-moderation code were assigned to the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky.
I went through and meta-moderated... I think that meta-moderation isn't going to improve anything, since it will be abused exactly the same way as moderation, but at least I got to nail someone who made a blatantly unfair attack on a reasonable post that dared to question
Anyway, I'm not going to uncheck my "willing to moderate" box after all, but I still think
Well, I just looked at a meta-moderation page, and I decided that the system is fundamentally screwed up.
For example, say I see a post that's rated as "Overrated" and "Underrated" -- those are contextual decisions based on the article's rating at the time the moderator voted on them. If the moderator has moderated it from 5 to 4 with an "overrated", I might think it fair -- but he might have moderated it from a 1 to a 0, with other moderators later spending points to correct that unfair demotion. How, then, can I rule on whether the "overrated" moderation was fair or not?
Similarly, how the hell can I judge a rating of "redundant" without going and reading the whole fscking thread?
Meta-moderation just looks ripe for misuse, abuse, and erroneous use. I suggest instead that, when moderator access is granted, the moderator also gets two "meta-moderation" points he can use to delete a moderation from a post. That helps check unfair moderation without the problematic context-dropping.
Anyway, I chose not to meta-moderate, since I felt I couldn't fairly judge. And, if this is the arbitrary process I'm going to be subject to, I'm going to stop moderating.
Simple. You, me, and anybody else can now get this info on areas with restricted airspace and without violating a country's soverignty. Which essentially amounts to third-world nations now having access data on troop movements and miliary installations behind the borders of their immediate neigbors.
The U.S. isn't the only country closed societies have an interest in keeping data from. U.S. intel agencies, like most intel agencies, don't like sharing information with other intel agencies of their own government, like sharing with non-spooks in their own government even less, and can barely stand sharing data with other nations that have been their close allies for decades.
So, for example, commercial satellites could give Turkey data on Syria, Iraq, and Iran that it previously had to hope to get from the U.S.; and it could give Syria, Iran, and Iraq data on each other that none of them could get anywhere else.
Similarly, South Korea and the Japanese probably don't get all the data they would like from the U.S. regarding North Korea -- and China and Russia certainly don't.
It is like a bluff in a cards game; the last resort of the loser.
Er, a bit off-topic here (and it does avoid the point of your analogy) but then you're playing cards (at least poker) wrong. Reserving the bluff to the last resort is just a way to enrich your opponents, whereas more strategic uses of the bluff ultimately increase your take on strong hands.