OK, now. Step back and look at the tone of your first comment. It's snide, and it's condescending. I'm not uncomfortable seeing that you're from overseas, and connecting that with the prevailing tone on such things. I found the original post interesting, as did obviously a lot of other people. Suggesting that it's just another US space agency money-grubbing ploy does have a certain slant to it, wouldn't you say? Given the overwhelmingly anti-US posture of most European comments here on slashdot, I suppose I was just anticipating the expected thread that would, as usually, really be more about ragging on the US and its various agencies (like NASA) than about the actual technical issues or cool geekiness at hand. And of course, referring to some interesting image-grabs, like the ones being discussed, as "every fart" that the program produces... that little bit of backhanded dismissiveness does say something about your opinion of the program, of NASA, and of course, about those of us funding it. If I made an incorrect association between that deliberate tone on your part, and the fact that you go out of your way, in your posts, to identify yourself as being from the Netherlands, well, then that was my mistake. I still like aged Gouda, though. Not so much tulips.
If your grandma is writing lines of code as a reboot window comes up, maybe she does need to know her command line syntax..
Heh. Well, the whole point of my comment was that someone who does write code should be able to get around a simple configuration issue, as annoying as that is.
You know I'm not talking about Grandma's typing skills. I'm talking about being able to have her granddaughter set up the windows update, using the dialogs I mentioned, one time, and then not having to think to even go to a command prompt, let alone remember what to type there (or where to go to look for instructions on what to type there), not to mention that the commands, as stand-alone bits of non-natural text, are meaningless to most people, and always will be.
A lot of people are comfortable with the notion that the "Control Panel" is where you control things about how the system runs, and that when someone tells you to check how your Automatic Updates are set up, that you'd use the icon labeled "Automatic Updates."
As for why your choices are disabled - I'm guessing that something in your security settings are preventing it from being changed. I've never seen that configuration on any of easily a couple hundred installations, so you've got some other layer involved. Without more from you on how your machine is set up, perhaps someone else can chime in on that scenario. I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking that it's just as likely to sit at the console of a Linux box and find an expected or familiar command missing or responding in an unexpected way because of how the distro is set up, or because of a user profile's behavior.
1) Open Control Panel
2) Open Automatic Updates
3) Choose 'Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them.' (this was the default, by the way!)
4) Done.
Was that so hard? Definately better, though, to teach grandma how to get her syntax exactly right at the command prompt. That's much better.
But the whole "is it NASA or the Europeans?" jealously thing seems completely one-sided to me
Honestly, I only mention that because I can't otherwise understand the snide tone from the.NL poster. It just sounds like someone with an axe to grind.
Needless to say, everytime the diaplog appeared it was when I was typing, and half a line of code got piped to Window's equivalent of/dev/null.
Or, you could take about a minute of your time and set up the Windows Update service to download the patches, remind once that it has them and hopes you'll install them, and then do it when you know it's convenient to restart services/the OS. It's a couple of mouse clicks.
Is it really that spectacular, som e white dots on a black background?
You'd see it better if you took your head out of your ass.
It's meaningful because it's a dramatic demonstration of precision control in the imaging systems, and an impressive show that what we know about the orbital mechanics involved is spot on.
I guess that funding for them flows though the press
If it wasn't picked up in places like this, and by the press, then the only way that the tangible progress and twists and turns of these projects would be seen outside of a very small group of people would be for them to advertise that, at some expense. And then you'd complain that they spent money on that.
Does nasa need so much funding...
Yes, and then some. Personally, I think this is a great exercise, and it passes the Geek Interest test really well. Is there any chance that, being from.NL, you're just mad because nothing Euro pulled this trick off first? Give these guys some credit for thinking up some interesting new tests with the hardware they've already got flying around out there.
What do you hope to accomplish? Bitching about piracy won't get them to buy American. why would they?
Umm... for the same reasons that it's so widely pirated? When you buy something like a big ticket accounting system from MS or SAP, you're buying a lot more than the CDs it ships on. You're connecting, contractually, to a serious bunch of people who support your implementation of the system, and who are there to help you run payroll on a Friday afternoon when your UPS fails and you torpedo a database table.
My point is, industry in Zimbabwe that wants the stuff that involves support from very expensive people have to pay for that value. If they don't have the scratch, then it's reasonable to expect them to do the same thing that everyone else has done - grow their expectations at the same pace as their buying power. That, or convince an investor that there's enough long-term promise in whatever they're pursuing to get all the infrastructure they need right away. Or, if a bunch of F/OSS types really have produced something of the caliber that it costs people like the Solomon developers (or Great Plains, or Axapta, or Oracle Financials, or SAP, etc) millions of dollars to produce - great! But I deal with small businesses every day here in the US, and they sure haven't found anything to replace the commercial products. So, Zimbabwe can: 1) continue to pirate and run the risks, 2) come up with the same money as a country that many businesses come up with - through investment, or 3) sweet talk people into giving them what they need.
I was only being sarcastic because I was responding to some nonsense. But I stand by the rest of my points on this.
Right. This doesn't in any way make the infringement legal, it just makes the infringers a trifle more comfortable. My guess is that because it will now be a little more difficult to track down the pirates/swappers, the studios will just go for larger settlements when they do connect the dots, just to make up for the effort.
Do you also look forward to not having the option of "owning" any of the software you have on your machine?
Come on, don't change the subject. The target here is institutional users with lots low-brow machines. When you sit down in a cube doing data entry for an insurance company, do you own that machine? Does that company's IT want you to install anything you personally do own on that machine? We're not talking about your personal box here, and you know it, so I call your comment a red herring. The scenario here is exactly one where centralized, server-based app configuration makes perfect sense. Someone doing accounts payable doesn't need to install MySQL or.Net or Max or Doom3.
You aren't asking how the Taliban got into power, or who was allied with the people oppressing the Kurds. America allowed the Taliban into power. America betrayed the Kurds to our Ally Saddam.
Let's not confuse the Taliban with the mujahadeen (and hence Bin Laden, and hence Al Queda). The Taliban, as a theocratic movement, is mostly an import that came along in the absence of a solid single power to fill the vacuum left by the ouster of the Soviets.
You're right about a mixed record - that we (the US) has had to hold its nose and deal with some very unpleasant types, especially while in proxy conflicts with the Soviets. The Middle and Far East, Central America... all are littered with the wreckage of indirectly combatting that now-dead bit of nastiness. The loss of the European colonial structure in the Middle East similarly set that area up for much of what we see today. On balance, though, I'd say that what we've striven to do in the years following WWII (including the many years it took to build the democracies in Germany and Japan, not to mention footing the bill for the reconstruction required by wars that those countries started!), was all, every bit of it, driven by our own national interests. But those interests directly overlap with, and reinforce the interests of free (or would-be free) people everywhere. Open trade, press, democracy - those have been our main exports.
If I lean towards sounding uncritical of individual granular acts, it's because I am definately not critical of the general notion that I (and everyone else, not that many of them care) will be better off as more and more people in the world adopt constitutionally balanced democracies and use the rule of law to support stable, growing economies. I don't think that minimizing the side effects of having to deal with unpleasantness all around the world is the same as minmizing the enormous benefits of liberty and democracy - which so many other people do. I prefer to stay focused on the objective, while keeping in mind the reality that we're dealing with, and the built-in cultural friction that we face in places where post-European-colonial tensions have as much or more to do with current events as anything American might.
I'm glad that you find some un-heated (though not dispassionate) discourse on this stuff as refreshing as I do - it's really a shame that the relatively high IQs of many of the slashdot demographic are wasted on finding ways to, say, justify pirating DVDs, and in doing so, get so wound up hating "the corporate man" (who don't want to run as charities) that they confuse their frustration over lack of free entertainment with a dislike of a market economy, which leads them to an irreducible dislike of that country which most successfully supports business (especially the entertainment business). While that may sound off-topic, issues like that pollute issues like discussions of history and national security. The slashdot self-reinforcing echo-chamber effect is something that I seek to unbalance somewhat by swinging the pendulum back the other way.
When it's pure Geek Talk, I can keep up with the best of them. When the "news" posted churns up conversations that drift into history, politics, and philosophy, the tone here becomes largely rhetorical, and so I usually switch gears accordingly.
Just hoping to give you a little something extra to think about.
Likewise! That's the whole point, isn't it. Life's too short to not think, or to drink cheap wine.
You're right, of course. Only one person should pay for the accounting software used to run things like Zimbabwe's banks or police departments - perhaps you, or maybe me. Thereafter, everyone should get it for free. Large software development shops should be able to subsist on just the one copy's retail price, right? OK, so $100 won't fund an entire company - we might as well just not charge at all. But those people may want paychecks as they work, so I guess they should be 1) government employees? or 2) waiters, living off of tips, and writing code on their days off?
How about this: Zimbabwe can use whatever free software that the volunteers who make it feel like making, and when some person or group in that country is doing something lucrative enough to pay for (and wants) a commercial title, then they can buy it, just like I do. Saying that Zimbabwe's local economy can't support $100 software purchases has to be said in the context of it also not locally producing software that would sell for $100 here in the states. It goes both ways. When they do something that's as valuable to me as that $100 piece of software, then we're all set! In the meantime, they'll have to grow their economy, just like everyone else. If they can do that on a platform of F/OSS, then great. If they choose to do it by pirating something, then it's reasonable to focus on that and say it out loud. If, though, there's enough promise in Zimbabwe to attract serious investment, and there's the expectation that rule of law and a stable society will support such... then $100 for the software on the desktop of every employee in the company being invested in is trivial.
In one case, you've got the camp that thinks that it's mostly about nurture - meaning, if only everybody (everywhere!) was raised correctly, there'd be no violence (or not enough to worry about, and certainly no aggressive actions by entire groups/nations leading to war-like conflict). The problem is that this camp also tends towards the slightly invertibrate orientation that doesn't want to consider any moral framework as objectively better than any others (i.e., "the Taliban may be harsh in how they treat women, what with killing them for working and all, but it's a cultural thing - who were we to say what's bad?"). These two lines of thinking tend to fall into the same political camps, and thus tangle each other up. So while they would seek to reduce violence by educating it out of people, they also recoil from any presumption that one way of life can be said to be (and taught to be) better than another. Thus, an impasse, and you have people who, rather than using Hollywood celebrities to voice their opinions, trick impressionable kids into blowing up police cadets standing in line for lunch as if that was going to somehow pursuade other people to see the world their way and join the mysoginistic fun.
Then, on the other hand, you've got people who think that it's all God, The Devil and whatnot directly causing all of this. Enough said: they're silly. They're the people who say that God was watching out for them when they survive a car wreck, but get sort of quiet when asked what God must have thought about the kid that died in the other car. Intellectual laziness doped up with superstitious mysticism early in life, and generally no escape. Alas, they vote for school board members, frequently in Kansas.
Then, you've got another group (I'm in this one). We assume that there are definately some educational/cultural problems here, and that putting liberty on parade in front of said cultures is the only way to get them to see the wisdom in it. The culture shock in doing so produces friction, which often manifests itself in large enough groups to cause serious conflict (see the Islamist terrorist crowd, and just-won't-die communists in China as examples). But even once you've got a society that more or less has its head screwed on right, you still get some fundamentally broken people. Some are that way congenitally, and some are shaped into being so by Really Bad Parents(tm). Regardless, out of that bunch, you sometimes get some crazies that are also, coincidentally, smart and charismatic. Or, sometimes just clever and ruthless enough (whether physically or just socially) to get a following, funding, and so on.
Now, it used to be we'd have to see those people rise to enough power, and pursuade enough people to back them (see Hitler) before we'd have a real threat. Now, with the increasinly refined art of terrorism and the very real threat of WMDs (from places like North Korea, or the leftovers from Iraq that were hustled into Syria, etc), you don't have to talk an entire country into backing up your craziness... you just need a few fellow crazies that are functional enough to get onto poorly guarded airplanes, or rent space in a shipping container. Whether these people are violent because they've had a lapse of reason long enough to derive some moral code that props up their urges, or whether they're just broken and think that they're doing God's work by killing people, or whether they're actually crazy and inherited Dad's job (see North Korea), or whether you're talking about a couple thousand years of cultural inertia combined with a more recent brand of totalitarianism (see China's twitchy behavior when it comes to Taiwan) the point is that the threats are there, and exist whether or not they could be educated out of future generations.
On a more local level, all of this plays out the same way with thugs on streetcorners and the need for citizens and their law enforcement agents to deal with them. No matter how well educated
Some of the most basic concepts are simple, and trying to nuance your way around them is when you wind up with philosophical contradictions written into law and policy. My point, in referring to keeping weapons (around the house, or in space) is that the tools themselves do not have a motive, or make decisions.
Any call for peace boils down to you can't protect your family!
How is being prepared to keep the peace, and having the capacity to deter aggression in the face of people demonstrably happy to slaughter, a bad thing? Regardless of scale - from burglaring punks kicking down doors (such as this example, right here in my county a couple days ago) to larger groups of them taking over countries (see Afghanistan, the Baltics, or Kuwait) - a demonstrated willingness to do something about it, and an established capacity to do so, are critical.
Do you not see a difference between owning a gun, and placing WMDs in space? Hmm?
Not really, no. We already have megatons worth of nukes floating silently through the seas every day, and fuel-burning aircraft with incredibly destructive payloads constantly circling the globe. The whole point of exploring how to use orbital positions and technologies is to make that same capacity more effective, efficient, and more of a consideration for bad guys. If we can take out a radar installation with more precision, less risk and loss of life, and with less old-fashioned hardware having to be maintained, deployed, and flown all over the place - that's a good thing.
Keep your gun, I really don't care. I think you live in a fantasy world if you think you need it to protect your family
Guns are used more often in brandishments against intruders than you are obviously aware. A few years back, sitting at the same computer (well, different CPU) that I'm sitting at right now, I had the the 1:30AM delight of having my back door beat on by a guy in an obvious lather. Just "wanted to use the phone," he said. Some people were giving him trouble and he wanted to call his mom (now, mind you he was in his mid-twenties). I refused to open the door (a large glass one), whereupon he started beating it again, and then started rooting through the large rocks in the garden. I had a few moments to deal with that situation, and showing him that I was on the phone dialing 911 would do nothing. I'm happy to say that a long time friend, boarding with my wife and I, heard the ruckus and came downstairs armed. That completely changed the events of the next few minutes, and stopped the guy from smashing the glass. He ran aroud the front of the house and was looking in through other windows - including those of our neighbor - when the police finally arrived and took care of him (turns out he fled from a drug deal gone bad, had knifed someone, and was trying to lay low). If it had been just my wife home, I'd have been really glad for her access to the shotgun (a most wonderfully dramatic attitude adjuster that definately gives your average smash-in clown pause) and her long experience in using it. There is absolutely no fantasy involved in my personal experiences with this, the huge escalation of gang activity in my city (mostly MS13, a particularly violent and theft/burglary-financed central American gang that has taken root here as it has so many other places), or in my refusal to abandon whatever edge I may have over some twit with a knife or baseball bat. I'm legal about my readiness and use of force, unlike them. I'm trained, I'm a range officer, I've spent more time carefully placing shots with handguns, rifles, and shotguns than most people ever will. I spend time teaching people how to safely use guns, and because I'm a hunter, I've got intimate knowledge of the devastating effects that firearms can produce. There's nothing simplistic about my experiece, about
The question is, which of these roles is the US playing?
That's not really much of a question, is it? Ask the people in eastern Europe which large army was oppressing them, and which large army (still standing) helped push the bad guys out of existence. Check with the people in Kuwait, or South Korea, or Croatia and see what they think. Or, ask the a kid in Afghanistan (now allowed to fly kites again) whose mom was executed in a soccer stadium for working. Or check in with the Kurds.
Right, actions are moral or immoral. Placing weapons in space is an action.
De-orbiting the Hubble more or less at North Korea... now that's an action. Preparing for defensive capacity when you know that China, India, Japan, and so on are going to be increasingly lobbing things into orbit... it just makes sense. Because allowing for the possibility of needing to act is basic good sense (since we have some historical context), and the very nature of working in that environment (not to mention orbital mechanics and whatnot) means you have to be pro-active, not re-active.
I've got guns in my house. I use most of them for fetching various things to eat. I keep a couple of them around because I am morally in tune with the prospect of using them to defend my family. From your perspective, owning anything lethal makes you equal to a murderer. So, have any kitchen knives? You've placed weapons in your kitchen. Unless you don't mean to use them badly, but might still reach for one if it was a life-and-death situation. Can you do the mental exercise to see that eventuality? If you can, you've already dealt with the moral implications of owning and deploying tools that can be destructive, or through their destructive power, prevent capricious destruction by someone else.
Righto! Exactly. I actually felt that the mom's death sequence, followed by the slaughter and his conversation with Amidala in he's not very apologetic about it - by far the most effective few minutes of the film, and one suspects that Christianson was tapping into some good old fashioned lingering teen angst and actually played it the way he might feel it.
I don't buy that. I'd say that history shows that people inclined to start trouble build up large armies because they want to, and people called upon to stop them build up large armies because they have to.
I've always liked the idea of rowing-machine handles in place of the space bar or enter key.... just posting on slashdot I'd look like Mr. Universe. Or, I'd stop posting on slasdot and feel better anyway.
Yes - as long as we can't or won't do anything about it...
Hmmm. Of course, it was a rhetorical question, based on the assumption that most people would find it worthwhile to be able to protect the assets that we have in space. In what way (specifically) is it a good thing if we don't have, say, weather satellites, or research satellites, or the ability to track tankers carrying huge loads of liquid natural gas?
As opposed to guided missiles? Supersonic bombers? Flamethrowers? Trebuchets? The tool/venue is, by definition not a moral issue. What you do is. So, if China starts taking out our satellites, and we've got no means by which to prevent it... that's a good thing?
Much of the software you need to run a government is server-side stuff, with your choice of browser on the front end, or an ODBC interface, etc. Who cares what's on the desktop? Linux will work just fine in most of those cases, but the big ticket stuff - like financial packages, or huge payroll systems, or big databases like DB2, Oracle, etc., are just as much forced out of the Chinese government market as MS is. And MySQL doesn't cut it when you're trying to run, say, the Chinese Navy.
Don't you recognize that this also applies to software written in Korea, or Japan, or stuff from SAP in Germany, or anything cool produced in the UK, Israel, South Africa, or Camaroon, etc?
Actually, I thought the point there was pretty clear: it wasn't his mom's death (or the manner, or timing of it) per se, it was the anger at his own limitations, manifested as his inability to stop or reverse what happened. Mom's death brought it home to him, but what really got him was the knowledge that he's powerful, but just not that powerful... and he takes the route of partially blaming the Jedi (and Obi Wan) for being held back.
This is pretty much like every teenager's episode of thinking that just because bad crap happens in life, that the universe must be particularly out to get them.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, now. Step back and look at the tone of your first comment. It's snide, and it's condescending. I'm not uncomfortable seeing that you're from overseas, and connecting that with the prevailing tone on such things. I found the original post interesting, as did obviously a lot of other people. Suggesting that it's just another US space agency money-grubbing ploy does have a certain slant to it, wouldn't you say? Given the overwhelmingly anti-US posture of most European comments here on slashdot, I suppose I was just anticipating the expected thread that would, as usually, really be more about ragging on the US and its various agencies (like NASA) than about the actual technical issues or cool geekiness at hand. And of course, referring to some interesting image-grabs, like the ones being discussed, as "every fart" that the program produces... that little bit of backhanded dismissiveness does say something about your opinion of the program, of NASA, and of course, about those of us funding it. If I made an incorrect association between that deliberate tone on your part, and the fact that you go out of your way, in your posts, to identify yourself as being from the Netherlands, well, then that was my mistake. I still like aged Gouda, though. Not so much tulips.
If your grandma is writing lines of code as a reboot window comes up, maybe she does need to know her command line syntax..
Heh. Well, the whole point of my comment was that someone who does write code should be able to get around a simple configuration issue, as annoying as that is.
You know I'm not talking about Grandma's typing skills. I'm talking about being able to have her granddaughter set up the windows update, using the dialogs I mentioned, one time, and then not having to think to even go to a command prompt, let alone remember what to type there (or where to go to look for instructions on what to type there), not to mention that the commands, as stand-alone bits of non-natural text, are meaningless to most people, and always will be.
A lot of people are comfortable with the notion that the "Control Panel" is where you control things about how the system runs, and that when someone tells you to check how your Automatic Updates are set up, that you'd use the icon labeled "Automatic Updates."
As for why your choices are disabled - I'm guessing that something in your security settings are preventing it from being changed. I've never seen that configuration on any of easily a couple hundred installations, so you've got some other layer involved. Without more from you on how your machine is set up, perhaps someone else can chime in on that scenario. I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking that it's just as likely to sit at the console of a Linux box and find an expected or familiar command missing or responding in an unexpected way because of how the distro is set up, or because of a user profile's behavior.
Methinks you doth protest too much. For me:
1) Open Control Panel
2) Open Automatic Updates
3) Choose 'Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them.' (this was the default, by the way!)
4) Done.
Was that so hard? Definately better, though, to teach grandma how to get her syntax exactly right at the command prompt. That's much better.
But the whole "is it NASA or the Europeans?" jealously thing seems completely one-sided to me
.NL poster. It just sounds like someone with an axe to grind.
Honestly, I only mention that because I can't otherwise understand the snide tone from the
Needless to say, everytime the diaplog appeared it was when I was typing, and half a line of code got piped to Window's equivalent of /dev/null.
Or, you could take about a minute of your time and set up the Windows Update service to download the patches, remind once that it has them and hopes you'll install them, and then do it when you know it's convenient to restart services/the OS. It's a couple of mouse clicks.
Is it really that spectacular, som e white dots on a black background?
.NL, you're just mad because nothing Euro pulled this trick off first? Give these guys some credit for thinking up some interesting new tests with the hardware they've already got flying around out there.
You'd see it better if you took your head out of your ass.
It's meaningful because it's a dramatic demonstration of precision control in the imaging systems, and an impressive show that what we know about the orbital mechanics involved is spot on.
I guess that funding for them flows though the press
If it wasn't picked up in places like this, and by the press, then the only way that the tangible progress and twists and turns of these projects would be seen outside of a very small group of people would be for them to advertise that, at some expense. And then you'd complain that they spent money on that.
Does nasa need so much funding...
Yes, and then some. Personally, I think this is a great exercise, and it passes the Geek Interest test really well. Is there any chance that, being from
What do you hope to accomplish? Bitching about piracy won't get them to buy American. why would they?
Umm... for the same reasons that it's so widely pirated? When you buy something like a big ticket accounting system from MS or SAP, you're buying a lot more than the CDs it ships on. You're connecting, contractually, to a serious bunch of people who support your implementation of the system, and who are there to help you run payroll on a Friday afternoon when your UPS fails and you torpedo a database table.
My point is, industry in Zimbabwe that wants the stuff that involves support from very expensive people have to pay for that value. If they don't have the scratch, then it's reasonable to expect them to do the same thing that everyone else has done - grow their expectations at the same pace as their buying power. That, or convince an investor that there's enough long-term promise in whatever they're pursuing to get all the infrastructure they need right away. Or, if a bunch of F/OSS types really have produced something of the caliber that it costs people like the Solomon developers (or Great Plains, or Axapta, or Oracle Financials, or SAP, etc) millions of dollars to produce - great! But I deal with small businesses every day here in the US, and they sure haven't found anything to replace the commercial products. So, Zimbabwe can: 1) continue to pirate and run the risks, 2) come up with the same money as a country that many businesses come up with - through investment, or 3) sweet talk people into giving them what they need.
I was only being sarcastic because I was responding to some nonsense. But I stand by the rest of my points on this.
Right. This doesn't in any way make the infringement legal, it just makes the infringers a trifle more comfortable. My guess is that because it will now be a little more difficult to track down the pirates/swappers, the studios will just go for larger settlements when they do connect the dots, just to make up for the effort.
Do you also look forward to not having the option of "owning" any of the software you have on your machine?
.Net or Max or Doom3.
Come on, don't change the subject. The target here is institutional users with lots low-brow machines. When you sit down in a cube doing data entry for an insurance company, do you own that machine? Does that company's IT want you to install anything you personally do own on that machine? We're not talking about your personal box here, and you know it, so I call your comment a red herring. The scenario here is exactly one where centralized, server-based app configuration makes perfect sense. Someone doing accounts payable doesn't need to install MySQL or
I can count on one hand the number of times, in the last six months, that a comment on /. as actually made me chuckle out loud. Nice.
You aren't asking how the Taliban got into power, or who was allied with the people oppressing the Kurds. America allowed the Taliban into power. America betrayed the Kurds to our Ally Saddam.
Let's not confuse the Taliban with the mujahadeen (and hence Bin Laden, and hence Al Queda). The Taliban, as a theocratic movement, is mostly an import that came along in the absence of a solid single power to fill the vacuum left by the ouster of the Soviets.
You're right about a mixed record - that we (the US) has had to hold its nose and deal with some very unpleasant types, especially while in proxy conflicts with the Soviets. The Middle and Far East, Central America... all are littered with the wreckage of indirectly combatting that now-dead bit of nastiness. The loss of the European colonial structure in the Middle East similarly set that area up for much of what we see today. On balance, though, I'd say that what we've striven to do in the years following WWII (including the many years it took to build the democracies in Germany and Japan, not to mention footing the bill for the reconstruction required by wars that those countries started!), was all, every bit of it, driven by our own national interests. But those interests directly overlap with, and reinforce the interests of free (or would-be free) people everywhere. Open trade, press, democracy - those have been our main exports.
If I lean towards sounding uncritical of individual granular acts, it's because I am definately not critical of the general notion that I (and everyone else, not that many of them care) will be better off as more and more people in the world adopt constitutionally balanced democracies and use the rule of law to support stable, growing economies. I don't think that minimizing the side effects of having to deal with unpleasantness all around the world is the same as minmizing the enormous benefits of liberty and democracy - which so many other people do. I prefer to stay focused on the objective, while keeping in mind the reality that we're dealing with, and the built-in cultural friction that we face in places where post-European-colonial tensions have as much or more to do with current events as anything American might.
I'm glad that you find some un-heated (though not dispassionate) discourse on this stuff as refreshing as I do - it's really a shame that the relatively high IQs of many of the slashdot demographic are wasted on finding ways to, say, justify pirating DVDs, and in doing so, get so wound up hating "the corporate man" (who don't want to run as charities) that they confuse their frustration over lack of free entertainment with a dislike of a market economy, which leads them to an irreducible dislike of that country which most successfully supports business (especially the entertainment business). While that may sound off-topic, issues like that pollute issues like discussions of history and national security. The slashdot self-reinforcing echo-chamber effect is something that I seek to unbalance somewhat by swinging the pendulum back the other way.
When it's pure Geek Talk, I can keep up with the best of them. When the "news" posted churns up conversations that drift into history, politics, and philosophy, the tone here becomes largely rhetorical, and so I usually switch gears accordingly.
Just hoping to give you a little something extra to think about.
Likewise! That's the whole point, isn't it. Life's too short to not think, or to drink cheap wine.
You're right, of course. Only one person should pay for the accounting software used to run things like Zimbabwe's banks or police departments - perhaps you, or maybe me. Thereafter, everyone should get it for free. Large software development shops should be able to subsist on just the one copy's retail price, right? OK, so $100 won't fund an entire company - we might as well just not charge at all. But those people may want paychecks as they work, so I guess they should be 1) government employees? or 2) waiters, living off of tips, and writing code on their days off?
How about this: Zimbabwe can use whatever free software that the volunteers who make it feel like making, and when some person or group in that country is doing something lucrative enough to pay for (and wants) a commercial title, then they can buy it, just like I do. Saying that Zimbabwe's local economy can't support $100 software purchases has to be said in the context of it also not locally producing software that would sell for $100 here in the states. It goes both ways. When they do something that's as valuable to me as that $100 piece of software, then we're all set! In the meantime, they'll have to grow their economy, just like everyone else. If they can do that on a platform of F/OSS, then great. If they choose to do it by pirating something, then it's reasonable to focus on that and say it out loud. If, though, there's enough promise in Zimbabwe to attract serious investment, and there's the expectation that rule of law and a stable society will support such... then $100 for the software on the desktop of every employee in the company being invested in is trivial.
Interesting topic. Here's my take on it:
In one case, you've got the camp that thinks that it's mostly about nurture - meaning, if only everybody (everywhere!) was raised correctly, there'd be no violence (or not enough to worry about, and certainly no aggressive actions by entire groups/nations leading to war-like conflict). The problem is that this camp also tends towards the slightly invertibrate orientation that doesn't want to consider any moral framework as objectively better than any others (i.e., "the Taliban may be harsh in how they treat women, what with killing them for working and all, but it's a cultural thing - who were we to say what's bad?"). These two lines of thinking tend to fall into the same political camps, and thus tangle each other up. So while they would seek to reduce violence by educating it out of people, they also recoil from any presumption that one way of life can be said to be (and taught to be) better than another. Thus, an impasse, and you have people who, rather than using Hollywood celebrities to voice their opinions, trick impressionable kids into blowing up police cadets standing in line for lunch as if that was going to somehow pursuade other people to see the world their way and join the mysoginistic fun.
Then, on the other hand, you've got people who think that it's all God, The Devil and whatnot directly causing all of this. Enough said: they're silly. They're the people who say that God was watching out for them when they survive a car wreck, but get sort of quiet when asked what God must have thought about the kid that died in the other car. Intellectual laziness doped up with superstitious mysticism early in life, and generally no escape. Alas, they vote for school board members, frequently in Kansas.
Then, you've got another group (I'm in this one). We assume that there are definately some educational/cultural problems here, and that putting liberty on parade in front of said cultures is the only way to get them to see the wisdom in it. The culture shock in doing so produces friction, which often manifests itself in large enough groups to cause serious conflict (see the Islamist terrorist crowd, and just-won't-die communists in China as examples). But even once you've got a society that more or less has its head screwed on right, you still get some fundamentally broken people. Some are that way congenitally, and some are shaped into being so by Really Bad Parents(tm). Regardless, out of that bunch, you sometimes get some crazies that are also, coincidentally, smart and charismatic. Or, sometimes just clever and ruthless enough (whether physically or just socially) to get a following, funding, and so on.
Now, it used to be we'd have to see those people rise to enough power, and pursuade enough people to back them (see Hitler) before we'd have a real threat. Now, with the increasinly refined art of terrorism and the very real threat of WMDs (from places like North Korea, or the leftovers from Iraq that were hustled into Syria, etc), you don't have to talk an entire country into backing up your craziness... you just need a few fellow crazies that are functional enough to get onto poorly guarded airplanes, or rent space in a shipping container. Whether these people are violent because they've had a lapse of reason long enough to derive some moral code that props up their urges, or whether they're just broken and think that they're doing God's work by killing people, or whether they're actually crazy and inherited Dad's job (see North Korea), or whether you're talking about a couple thousand years of cultural inertia combined with a more recent brand of totalitarianism (see China's twitchy behavior when it comes to Taiwan) the point is that the threats are there, and exist whether or not they could be educated out of future generations.
On a more local level, all of this plays out the same way with thugs on streetcorners and the need for citizens and their law enforcement agents to deal with them. No matter how well educated
That's incredibly simple-minded
Some of the most basic concepts are simple, and trying to nuance your way around them is when you wind up with philosophical contradictions written into law and policy. My point, in referring to keeping weapons (around the house, or in space) is that the tools themselves do not have a motive, or make decisions.
Any call for peace boils down to you can't protect your family!
How is being prepared to keep the peace, and having the capacity to deter aggression in the face of people demonstrably happy to slaughter, a bad thing? Regardless of scale - from burglaring punks kicking down doors (such as this example, right here in my county a couple days ago) to larger groups of them taking over countries (see Afghanistan, the Baltics, or Kuwait) - a demonstrated willingness to do something about it, and an established capacity to do so, are critical.
Do you not see a difference between owning a gun, and placing WMDs in space? Hmm?
Not really, no. We already have megatons worth of nukes floating silently through the seas every day, and fuel-burning aircraft with incredibly destructive payloads constantly circling the globe. The whole point of exploring how to use orbital positions and technologies is to make that same capacity more effective, efficient, and more of a consideration for bad guys. If we can take out a radar installation with more precision, less risk and loss of life, and with less old-fashioned hardware having to be maintained, deployed, and flown all over the place - that's a good thing.
Keep your gun, I really don't care. I think you live in a fantasy world if you think you need it to protect your family
Guns are used more often in brandishments against intruders than you are obviously aware. A few years back, sitting at the same computer (well, different CPU) that I'm sitting at right now, I had the the 1:30AM delight of having my back door beat on by a guy in an obvious lather. Just "wanted to use the phone," he said. Some people were giving him trouble and he wanted to call his mom (now, mind you he was in his mid-twenties). I refused to open the door (a large glass one), whereupon he started beating it again, and then started rooting through the large rocks in the garden. I had a few moments to deal with that situation, and showing him that I was on the phone dialing 911 would do nothing. I'm happy to say that a long time friend, boarding with my wife and I, heard the ruckus and came downstairs armed. That completely changed the events of the next few minutes, and stopped the guy from smashing the glass. He ran aroud the front of the house and was looking in through other windows - including those of our neighbor - when the police finally arrived and took care of him (turns out he fled from a drug deal gone bad, had knifed someone, and was trying to lay low). If it had been just my wife home, I'd have been really glad for her access to the shotgun (a most wonderfully dramatic attitude adjuster that definately gives your average smash-in clown pause) and her long experience in using it. There is absolutely no fantasy involved in my personal experiences with this, the huge escalation of gang activity in my city (mostly MS13, a particularly violent and theft/burglary-financed central American gang that has taken root here as it has so many other places), or in my refusal to abandon whatever edge I may have over some twit with a knife or baseball bat. I'm legal about my readiness and use of force, unlike them. I'm trained, I'm a range officer, I've spent more time carefully placing shots with handguns, rifles, and shotguns than most people ever will. I spend time teaching people how to safely use guns, and because I'm a hunter, I've got intimate knowledge of the devastating effects that firearms can produce. There's nothing simplistic about my experiece, about
The question is, which of these roles is the US playing?
That's not really much of a question, is it? Ask the people in eastern Europe which large army was oppressing them, and which large army (still standing) helped push the bad guys out of existence. Check with the people in Kuwait, or South Korea, or Croatia and see what they think. Or, ask the a kid in Afghanistan (now allowed to fly kites again) whose mom was executed in a soccer stadium for working. Or check in with the Kurds.
Right, actions are moral or immoral. Placing weapons in space is an action.
De-orbiting the Hubble more or less at North Korea... now that's an action. Preparing for defensive capacity when you know that China, India, Japan, and so on are going to be increasingly lobbing things into orbit... it just makes sense. Because allowing for the possibility of needing to act is basic good sense (since we have some historical context), and the very nature of working in that environment (not to mention orbital mechanics and whatnot) means you have to be pro-active, not re-active.
I've got guns in my house. I use most of them for fetching various things to eat. I keep a couple of them around because I am morally in tune with the prospect of using them to defend my family. From your perspective, owning anything lethal makes you equal to a murderer. So, have any kitchen knives? You've placed weapons in your kitchen. Unless you don't mean to use them badly, but might still reach for one if it was a life-and-death situation. Can you do the mental exercise to see that eventuality? If you can, you've already dealt with the moral implications of owning and deploying tools that can be destructive, or through their destructive power, prevent capricious destruction by someone else.
Righto! Exactly. I actually felt that the mom's death sequence, followed by the slaughter and his conversation with Amidala in he's not very apologetic about it - by far the most effective few minutes of the film, and one suspects that Christianson was tapping into some good old fashioned lingering teen angst and actually played it the way he might feel it.
History shows
I don't buy that. I'd say that history shows that people inclined to start trouble build up large armies because they want to, and people called upon to stop them build up large armies because they have to.
I've always liked the idea of rowing-machine handles in place of the space bar or enter key.... just posting on slashdot I'd look like Mr. Universe. Or, I'd stop posting on slasdot and feel better anyway.
Yes - as long as we can't or won't do anything about it...
Hmmm. Of course, it was a rhetorical question, based on the assumption that most people would find it worthwhile to be able to protect the assets that we have in space. In what way (specifically) is it a good thing if we don't have, say, weather satellites, or research satellites, or the ability to track tankers carrying huge loads of liquid natural gas?
It's a dangerous idea, one devoid of morals
As opposed to guided missiles? Supersonic bombers? Flamethrowers? Trebuchets? The tool/venue is, by definition not a moral issue. What you do is. So, if China starts taking out our satellites, and we've got no means by which to prevent it... that's a good thing?
Much of the software you need to run a government is server-side stuff, with your choice of browser on the front end, or an ODBC interface, etc. Who cares what's on the desktop? Linux will work just fine in most of those cases, but the big ticket stuff - like financial packages, or huge payroll systems, or big databases like DB2, Oracle, etc., are just as much forced out of the Chinese government market as MS is. And MySQL doesn't cut it when you're trying to run, say, the Chinese Navy.
OK, so you're an ass. We get that.
Don't you recognize that this also applies to software written in Korea, or Japan, or stuff from SAP in Germany, or anything cool produced in the UK, Israel, South Africa, or Camaroon, etc?
The ignorance is unbearable sometimes!
No shit.
Actually, I thought the point there was pretty clear: it wasn't his mom's death (or the manner, or timing of it) per se, it was the anger at his own limitations, manifested as his inability to stop or reverse what happened. Mom's death brought it home to him, but what really got him was the knowledge that he's powerful, but just not that powerful... and he takes the route of partially blaming the Jedi (and Obi Wan) for being held back.
This is pretty much like every teenager's episode of thinking that just because bad crap happens in life, that the universe must be particularly out to get them.