I've applied these to about 15 servers this morning - boxes running IIS, SQL, Exchange, and so far nothing has blown up. What really gets me is the bandwidth they must be putting into the distribution. The 8 or so MB that the servers are downloading is coming across much more quickly than I've seen it in the past. Could just be an abberation, but usually the feeding frenzy is pretty intense.
You might consider my view less slanted if you were also taking some of the slant out of your analysis.
A policy of invasion inevitably has that effect
Invasion is not a policy. It's a step in the execution of a policy. The policy would more like: "Stop putting up with Saddam shooting, every day, at the planes enforcing the UN-approved no-fly zone over the villages that he gassed from the air." That policy might require the tactic of destroying the anti-aircraft weapons that he used to continue shooting at the UN-approved overflights. That requirement is certainly made more difficult when he places those weapons in a schoolyard, or deliberately uses his own women and children not as shields to prevent the removal of those weapons, but as deliberate sacrifices to produce good footage for Al Jazeera. Against a guy who thinks and acts that way, the policy of removing him from power certainly did ultimately require the tactic of force. Sanctions, which simply got him more cash personally, were never, ever going to play a role in removing him.
Funny how that kind of pressure works with the Sauds but not with Saddam or the Taliban. Or perhaps the benchmarks are different.
If, by "benchmark" you mean "results," then yes, they are different! The Taliban, for example, made quite the display of housing Bin Laden, and were very happy to run brutal little theocracy with his cash, and certainly weren't going to alter their posture through the UN's asking. No more than the UN was able to get them to stop demolishing ancient archeological treasures, or get them to stop making slaves of women. In Saudi Arabia, by contrast, the much more technically advanced and media-connected society there is far more able to respond to the call of liberty and the push for democracy. The Saudis have to fight their own battle with the Wahabis, but their fight is far, far more public and plugged-in, and the process will be much more like it has been for, say, Jordan.
Could it be that Saudi Arabia's small steps towards democracy are matched by small American steps towards fundamentalism and feudalism?
No, I don't think so. American attitudes towards constitutionally structured governance by the people runs deep, and is freshly reviewed every few years. Certainly there is the risk of some more EU-style government heavy-handedness as people are willing to trade perceived comfort and safety for some liberties, but I think we'll stay ahead, liberty-wise, on that front.
"Nice" that Libya responed to US intimidation (which in the past has been backed up by violence)
Exactly! Not that anyone else was willing/able to confront Muammar Ghadafi, but he really started rolling back a lot of his stupid behavior (like paying people to blow up airplanes over Scotland) one he got caught red handed doing it, and had pieces of his infrastructure removed when he refused to back off.
announcing the end of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities that it never had in the first place
You mean like the money Lybia spent with AQ Khan's network expressly in pursuit of nuclear weapons? Without the pressure put on Pakistan's regime to distance themselves from the extreme Islamists, much that network's dealings (including traffic with North Korea) would not have been as clear so soon, nor stopped.
Sure, call that a victory if you like
It's not "victory," it's avoiding the need for a military victory.
Please illustrate a situation, as we've dealt with avowed terrorist-harboring regimes like the Taliban, where the policy was to kill innocent people in their homes. As opposed, for example, to the Taliban's policy of dragging them out to the local soccer stadium and shooting them for, say, letting women work, or playing music. Please contrast the extremely difficult task of taking out people who store thousands of rocket propelled grenades in schoold and mosques (or that drive up to police stations and slaughter recruits to make a (not very clear) point), with the enormous effort and expense the US military has taken, unprecendented in history, to avoid accidental deaths. Even as the people who are trying to prevent anything like democracy and liberty in those regions deliberately lash out from, and then retreat back into neighborhoods full of men, women, and children specifically to provoke a fight in that environment. These are people from other countries, funded as proxies by other theocracies (like Iran) through yet more 3rd parties (like Syria) who are not at all loved by the people whose neighborhoods they are occupying.
they've brought about a change of government that coincides with their own interests
Please explain how a free, democraticly governed Iraq or Afghanistan goes against the interests of people in any part of the world? I'm expecting that you'd be about to launch into a defense of the fabulous freedoms enjoyed by the people of Iran? Or of how much more the people in Kuwait should be enjoying having their soccer team tortured by Uday or Qusay Hussein for not winning the Olympics?
prop up equally "medieval" misogynist dictatorships
Which do you think is better: acting to overthrow the house of Saud right now (though they haven't lately been in the habit of lobbing poison gas at Kurdish villages, invading Kuwait, etc), or doing exactly what we've been doing, which is applying continual pressure for them to modify (and moderate) their laws and customs into more sensible posture? They've just started having their first local elections. It was a small, small step towards doing it right - but they've also started waking up to the wack job Wahabis in their midst, and to the mysogynistic influences those people are having on the country's culture and conduct. Much as I'd like to see a completely democratic Saudi Arabia today, I'm not as worried about state-sponsored trafficing in missle sales there as I am about Syria. Different approaches, and timing, to different degrees of threat. Isn't it nice that Lybia took itself off the short list of hot spots? Or that the Palestinians are starting to put together leadership that might actually require less international action to keep Hamas, for example, from fueling all of this stuff? I won't miss a single theocratic backwards-looking regime anywhere in the world, but I'm realistic enough to know that we have to choose our battles. This stuff is going to unravel a lot more quickly than did, say, totalitarian communism in eastern Europe, and we had the patience for that.
Well, sure, why not. And every telecomm should donate what they do, and banks should make bottomless loans, and healthcare should all be donated from elsewhere, and the food should all be shipped in gratis, and so on. There's no reason that Brazilians should have to pay for anything, but they should definately have all of the standard-of-living stuff that everyone else has. It's only fair. In fact, there's really no reason why any software or services should be paid for by any user in Central or South America. Especially the services. Tech support for an entire country full of novice computer users should be free. I'm sure you were thinking the same thing - that if they all went Linux, that you'd be first in line to give away your time to support all of those operating systems. I mean, certainly no one should ever profit in any way as Brazilian businesses conduct profitable businesses using IT.
but Dutch people themselves that destroyed the lives of their (jewish) neighbours, in exchange for rewards, immunity, some favours, whatever
But if those Dutch people had refused to turn in their Jewish neighbors for cash, how would that have prevented German troops from physically occupying France, marching into Scandinavia, or using force to procure themselves new shipping ports, mines, and other things they wanted? Killing Jews wasn't the only thing on their plate.
but have US actions made the world a safer place
Hmmm... are totalitarian fascists running Europe? Is imperial Japan enslaving the entire Pacific? No. US actions made the world safe from those threats. Are people in Afghanistan able to vote for their leaders? Are people in Iraq? Sure, people not from those countries are anxious to terrorize (as in, use the tactic of terrorism) them in an effort to preserve the rule of thugs and prospects of a backwards-looking, medieval way of life - but I'd say that world is indeed safer, for more people, when larger and larger parts of it are not run by a tiny minority of brutal thugs that shoot women for dressing incorrectly, etc.
And the scary part: all this propaganda has caused US citizens to really believe that terrorism is the #1 problem in the world.
Not actually correct, but of course you're just being rhetorical. Even so: the real issue is that places where people are starving, uneducated, and killing each other over scarce (or badly managed) resources are kept that way precisely by the sort of people that resort to terrorist tactics to get or stay in control.
Is terrorism worse than poverty? A non-question. But if a state or organization gets its hands on a viable nuke, or smallpox, the answer is absolutely yes. But is poverty, as preserved by deliberately poor education and mafia-like "governance" by corrupt and violent groups like the Taliban "worse" than terrorism? Actually, it's kept propped up by terrorism - through the intimidation and horrific capricious violence of people like Mullah Omar, or like Saddam (who, of course, did it less in the name of religion, and more in the name of tribally-oriented Stalinst totalitarianism and just basic criminal regime building).
Worse than hunger? HIV?
Why make the comparison? The US (through both its government agencies and private organizations) provides more food and relief to the world's hungry and sick than any other country in the world. This isn't an either/or issue - we can do more than one thing at a time. For example, we provide cash and humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people (even more, now that we know Arafat isn't skimming off of the money), even as we help disable the terrorizing capacities of groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad. These activities are not mutually exclusive, even if you personally can only see one thing at a time.
Just the other day, a Dutch airliner heading for Mexico, was refused passage through US air space. Terrorists on board? Who knows, but essentially it's the US setting the agenda in many parts of the world, even if measures are violating local law.
What local law? It's US airspace. If KLM wants to fly to Mexico, it certainly doesn't have to fly over US territories. If it wants to, then it has to take into account US wishes about who flies through its airspace. Just like US airlines honor similar requests from other countries. The difference is that very few people are worried about airliners being crashed into the Krijtberg, the Van Gogh Museum, or The Rembrandt Tower - because despite the long reach of various Dutch banking and shipping interests around the world, most would-be medieval theocracy movements in the middle east don't think they'll get a lot of good local Al Jazeera press out of terrorizing the Dutch. As much fun as they had killing Spanish commuters on trains, they won't really get to crow about how much Allah is on their side unless they can demo
seems to be all about helping out your customers with every little thing they might need, while perhaps stopping just short of giving their passwords to the wrong people. There seem to be plenty of areas that merit more services research, if big companies can't seem to get past stuff like that. Or maybe IBM could just get into offering online courses in Remedial Critical Thinking for help desk staff.
'Know Thyself' as the Delphic Oracle slogan?
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Mapping the Mind
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· Score: 2, Informative
That's actually somewhat amusing, now that it's pretty clear that whatever priestess was on duty there at any given time was probably stoned out of her mind on hallucinogenic gases rising out of rock fissures.
It's not their subscribers' SSNs, it's the SSNs included in the data they sell to their subscribers. Their subscribers might be, say, a bank. The bank is trying to decide whether John Doe is worth the risk of a car loan. The bank gathers the info from John Doe, then compares it to what someone like L-N has to say about Mr. Doe. Without critical identifiers like SSNs, it's pretty hard to compare Jane Smith to all of her identically named counterparts around the world.
I've always considered web browsers free. I think most people see the web that way
I guess that's one of the first things that needs to change, Joe-user-education-wise. Most people can't even make a distinction between "the web" and the piece of software they're using to look at it.
The larger issue, of people that think things are "free" just because they see or get them without directly parting with money at that moment, is a symptom of a much larger cultural problem: basic ignorance of micro- and macro-economics across most of the population.
I always enjoy watching the lights come on when I show a kid that surfing to, say, Amazon, is actually him connecting the computer in his living room to another actual physical computer that that business is paying people to run. As boring as it might seem to some, kids can feel really (I gag on this word) empowered when they actually get a clearer picture of how things in their world work. It's at that point that some critical thinking starts to happen, and the truth of "there is no free lunch" kicks in, and they really begin to think through what's happening when someone offers them something for free, or in exchange for some form of their fleeting loyalty.
We can all help by being just a little more granular when we talk about surfing, and the actual layers that are in play when people "use the web."
My all time favorite was when I sat down at a client's web makeover kickoff meeting (they were a non-profit with a horrific web site), and I asked them, "Which web browser do you use here in the office?" The attendees looked around the conference table at each other, nodding for a moment, and the director said, "Well, I guess that would be Elizabeth [their newsletter editor] - she seems to know how to find stuff online. Maybe we should have her in this meeting?"
No doubt the post is referring to the beta release of the Google Googles, which will track which retailers you look at as you walk down the street, and stimulate your brain with ultrasound to make you want an very expensive cup of interactive, localized coffee.
Really, as an amateur cultural anthroplogist, I've found the slashdot editorial drift from Google = Cool to Google = Big Corporate Search Stooge to be really something to watch.
I think it's great, actually, that there's a tech/aerospace-centric museum in Kansas (its current curatorial difficulties notwithstanding), but I guess I'm finding that spark of interest in applied science hard to square with the whole retro-dark-ages-religiosity thing. Especially in a state that makes a living off of living things (advanced crops) that didn't exist even a few years ago, or that have to do regular battle with strains of bacteria in their cattle that have (evolved!) resistance to certain drugs. I hope the Cosmosphere continues to thrive despite the awkward press, and that a few Kansan kids have their Critical Thinking Epihpanies while gazing at the cool flying machines on display. I don't think the stolen t-shirt or water valve were probably going to help much on that front anyway.
That's the whole point if these services are run right: you get to enjoy good music without wading through thousands of titles and deciding what should be played. It's like going to a good restaurant, and telling the chef you trust to just fix you a really nice dinner. Some unexpected pieces are part of the experience, and just like the chef (who costs you more than the food would at the grocery store), you're buying someone's time and expertise - and trusting them to get it at least mostly right most of the time.
Places like RadioIO have been doing a pretty good job at this for a while now. It's worth the cost of a six pack of Guiness to have someone else spend all month digging up music for me to hear.
To the extent that the government is using non-proprietary OSes and and other cheaper/free pieces of infrastructure to conduct critical activities (like defense, or emergency response), we're looking at using up fewer tax dollars, and that's plenty of "giving back." Of course, the defense/intel community does very much distribute enhanced goodies where it can, and we've had plenty of conversations here about things like open source CAD stuff from the Navy.
Probably the most important thing, though, is that you get thousands of federal techies using different systems, and a lot of them will leave their stint with the DOD and head out into the wild with an appreciation for alternate ways to handle IT problems. Those folks, showing up at private sector HR desks looking for more lucrative jobs, will have more to do with corporate acceptance of things like Linux than any amount of code the feds might publish.
Has advertising become effectively invisible to you?
I pay attention to it enough to get a sense of the pace, timing, and general arc of the commercials aired during the shows I care about, because this allows me to handle the TiVo fast forward with unerring accuracy.
The late 1800's and early 1900's saw much more radical change than we experience.
Well, I guess from that perspective, we should consider the change that came with the printing press. That event (where knowledge could spread more instantaneously and more widely than ever before) is actually more akin to what we're experiencing now (though the scales are stupifyingly different). My point, I guess, is that changes during the industrial revolution basically introduced speed and reliability to more or less familiar activities (moving things, lifting things, heating things, etc.) whereas we're now having a major change in the notion of what it means to ask questions and expect instant answers (however accurate) about, well, everything. In the Renaissance, it meant gaining access to a library, and now it's the net.
A tax break is not money. It is paying less taxes. A subsidy, I agree, is corporate welfare, and should be stopped. As should all forms of tax dollar handouts (whether to individuals, or groups of them called corporations).
Not really. Just tired of junior high school kids thinking that they're cool because they can type the word "fuck" on a computer, and who think that by being that cool, that they're somehow fighting The Man, and rebelliously making Linux their own cool thing, blah blah blah. It's just sort of painful to watch - kind of like when you see a bunch of identically dressed Goth kids in black clothes telling each other how unique they all are, or a bunch of a 14 year old fanboys who think they must really be saying something powerful because everyone's too intimmidated (um... more like don't give a damn) to respond. So, once in a while I like to respond, even if it's just to take a moment and observe that witless adolescents aren't shocking, or impressing anyone except their imaginary fan clubs by trying to sound caustic.
Actually, I wasn't really concerned at all about the actual meat of the story, but the fact that MS came up (in the context of someone who's not usually a big fan finding himself pleasantly surprised by something that MS did), and that the guy we're talking about now had no response other than, let's see... "You are a fucking tool" - that just confirms, to a casual visitor here, that all of the people who don't like MS are just stuck in some sort of low-brow, group-think, pre-adolescent rut, and can't actually articulate why they'd find the poster to be a Tool or why anything that MS does to block spam, or kiddiepr0n, etc., is bad. Inarticulate MS bashing (actually, just lamely trying to insult someone who is not bashing them - even better!) just makes the MS-hating crowd look like a pack of twits. And then they wonder why MS users feel like they'll have to hold their noses to get involved in some OSS areas, etc. Guess I'm just tired of responses like "You are a fucking tool" being the best thing so many people can manage to say in support of Linux these days.
A GBU-12 is $19K.. which would be around two DS-3 circuits for a month.
OK, I'll see your $10k and raise you another $10k, just to cover inflation for this year. Doesn't matter unless we're off by a couple of decimal points. That still doesn't even come close to supporting the concurrent traffic that NASA would like to be able to support during a launch. Sure, over a given month that would be nice for typical traffic - that much bandwidth would help them out a lot with visiting school kids and whatnot. But in the, say, 10 minutes before, and 60 minutes after a launch (or a landing, etc.), two DS-3's would still just be drinking straws for the half million (!!!) live video feeds they want to serve up.
The post to which I replied - where the poster suggests that NASA's infrastructure needs in this regard could be covered with the cost of one smart bomb - is just slanted, trolling rhetoric, and I didn't want to let it go unanswered.
The cost of one smart bomb will more than cover the bandwidth needs of nasa for the shuttle coverage. hmmm, says a lot about priorities
Well, let's see now. "Smart Bomb" covers a lot of territory, but take for example the one that we used the most of during the Gulf war. That would be the 500lb GBU-12 Laser-Guided Bomb. It's actually gotten a lot less expensive to produce those, but at the time, they cost about $9,000.
$9,000 isn't even going to but a dent in NASA's desire to run thousands of concurrent streaming video feeds during a shuttle launch. When you decide to make political points (never mind a discussion of what it costs in lives and dollars to not use guided munitions), please at least get within a few orders of magnitude of the facts - you'll at least sound more credible as your actual meaning is dissected.
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or else you are SOL
That should read, "or else you are too cheap to buy your operating system, or too dumb to use one that you're allowed to license for free."
You're not SOL when you're stolen thing can't be upgraded, you're exactly where you deserve to be.
I've applied these to about 15 servers this morning - boxes running IIS, SQL, Exchange, and so far nothing has blown up. What really gets me is the bandwidth they must be putting into the distribution. The 8 or so MB that the servers are downloading is coming across much more quickly than I've seen it in the past. Could just be an abberation, but usually the feeding frenzy is pretty intense.
I think you have a rather rosy view
You might consider my view less slanted if you were also taking some of the slant out of your analysis.
A policy of invasion inevitably has that effect
Invasion is not a policy. It's a step in the execution of a policy. The policy would more like: "Stop putting up with Saddam shooting, every day, at the planes enforcing the UN-approved no-fly zone over the villages that he gassed from the air." That policy might require the tactic of destroying the anti-aircraft weapons that he used to continue shooting at the UN-approved overflights. That requirement is certainly made more difficult when he places those weapons in a schoolyard, or deliberately uses his own women and children not as shields to prevent the removal of those weapons, but as deliberate sacrifices to produce good footage for Al Jazeera. Against a guy who thinks and acts that way, the policy of removing him from power certainly did ultimately require the tactic of force. Sanctions, which simply got him more cash personally, were never, ever going to play a role in removing him.
Funny how that kind of pressure works with the Sauds but not with Saddam or the Taliban. Or perhaps the benchmarks are different.
If, by "benchmark" you mean "results," then yes, they are different! The Taliban, for example, made quite the display of housing Bin Laden, and were very happy to run brutal little theocracy with his cash, and certainly weren't going to alter their posture through the UN's asking. No more than the UN was able to get them to stop demolishing ancient archeological treasures, or get them to stop making slaves of women. In Saudi Arabia, by contrast, the much more technically advanced and media-connected society there is far more able to respond to the call of liberty and the push for democracy. The Saudis have to fight their own battle with the Wahabis, but their fight is far, far more public and plugged-in, and the process will be much more like it has been for, say, Jordan.
Could it be that Saudi Arabia's small steps towards democracy are matched by small American steps towards fundamentalism and feudalism?
No, I don't think so. American attitudes towards constitutionally structured governance by the people runs deep, and is freshly reviewed every few years. Certainly there is the risk of some more EU-style government heavy-handedness as people are willing to trade perceived comfort and safety for some liberties, but I think we'll stay ahead, liberty-wise, on that front.
"Nice" that Libya responed to US intimidation (which in the past has been backed up by violence)
Exactly! Not that anyone else was willing/able to confront Muammar Ghadafi, but he really started rolling back a lot of his stupid behavior (like paying people to blow up airplanes over Scotland) one he got caught red handed doing it, and had pieces of his infrastructure removed when he refused to back off.
announcing the end of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities that it never had in the first place
You mean like the money Lybia spent with AQ Khan's network expressly in pursuit of nuclear weapons? Without the pressure put on Pakistan's regime to distance themselves from the extreme Islamists, much that network's dealings (including traffic with North Korea) would not have been as clear so soon, nor stopped.
Sure, call that a victory if you like
It's not "victory," it's avoiding the need for a military victory.
I hope you're right
Well, I hope so too.
kill men, women and children in their own homes
Please illustrate a situation, as we've dealt with avowed terrorist-harboring regimes like the Taliban, where the policy was to kill innocent people in their homes. As opposed, for example, to the Taliban's policy of dragging them out to the local soccer stadium and shooting them for, say, letting women work, or playing music. Please contrast the extremely difficult task of taking out people who store thousands of rocket propelled grenades in schoold and mosques (or that drive up to police stations and slaughter recruits to make a (not very clear) point), with the enormous effort and expense the US military has taken, unprecendented in history, to avoid accidental deaths. Even as the people who are trying to prevent anything like democracy and liberty in those regions deliberately lash out from, and then retreat back into neighborhoods full of men, women, and children specifically to provoke a fight in that environment. These are people from other countries, funded as proxies by other theocracies (like Iran) through yet more 3rd parties (like Syria) who are not at all loved by the people whose neighborhoods they are occupying.
they've brought about a change of government that coincides with their own interests
Please explain how a free, democraticly governed Iraq or Afghanistan goes against the interests of people in any part of the world? I'm expecting that you'd be about to launch into a defense of the fabulous freedoms enjoyed by the people of Iran? Or of how much more the people in Kuwait should be enjoying having their soccer team tortured by Uday or Qusay Hussein for not winning the Olympics?
prop up equally "medieval" misogynist dictatorships
Which do you think is better: acting to overthrow the house of Saud right now (though they haven't lately been in the habit of lobbing poison gas at Kurdish villages, invading Kuwait, etc), or doing exactly what we've been doing, which is applying continual pressure for them to modify (and moderate) their laws and customs into more sensible posture? They've just started having their first local elections. It was a small, small step towards doing it right - but they've also started waking up to the wack job Wahabis in their midst, and to the mysogynistic influences those people are having on the country's culture and conduct. Much as I'd like to see a completely democratic Saudi Arabia today, I'm not as worried about state-sponsored trafficing in missle sales there as I am about Syria. Different approaches, and timing, to different degrees of threat. Isn't it nice that Lybia took itself off the short list of hot spots? Or that the Palestinians are starting to put together leadership that might actually require less international action to keep Hamas, for example, from fueling all of this stuff? I won't miss a single theocratic backwards-looking regime anywhere in the world, but I'm realistic enough to know that we have to choose our battles. This stuff is going to unravel a lot more quickly than did, say, totalitarian communism in eastern Europe, and we had the patience for that.
Well, sure, why not. And every telecomm should donate what they do, and banks should make bottomless loans, and healthcare should all be donated from elsewhere, and the food should all be shipped in gratis, and so on. There's no reason that Brazilians should have to pay for anything, but they should definately have all of the standard-of-living stuff that everyone else has. It's only fair. In fact, there's really no reason why any software or services should be paid for by any user in Central or South America. Especially the services. Tech support for an entire country full of novice computer users should be free. I'm sure you were thinking the same thing - that if they all went Linux, that you'd be first in line to give away your time to support all of those operating systems. I mean, certainly no one should ever profit in any way as Brazilian businesses conduct profitable businesses using IT.
but Dutch people themselves that destroyed the lives of their (jewish) neighbours, in exchange for rewards, immunity, some favours, whatever
But if those Dutch people had refused to turn in their Jewish neighbors for cash, how would that have prevented German troops from physically occupying France, marching into Scandinavia, or using force to procure themselves new shipping ports, mines, and other things they wanted? Killing Jews wasn't the only thing on their plate.
but have US actions made the world a safer place
Hmmm... are totalitarian fascists running Europe? Is imperial Japan enslaving the entire Pacific? No. US actions made the world safe from those threats. Are people in Afghanistan able to vote for their leaders? Are people in Iraq? Sure, people not from those countries are anxious to terrorize (as in, use the tactic of terrorism) them in an effort to preserve the rule of thugs and prospects of a backwards-looking, medieval way of life - but I'd say that world is indeed safer, for more people, when larger and larger parts of it are not run by a tiny minority of brutal thugs that shoot women for dressing incorrectly, etc.
And the scary part: all this propaganda has caused US citizens to really believe that terrorism is the #1 problem in the world.
Not actually correct, but of course you're just being rhetorical. Even so: the real issue is that places where people are starving, uneducated, and killing each other over scarce (or badly managed) resources are kept that way precisely by the sort of people that resort to terrorist tactics to get or stay in control.
Is terrorism worse than poverty? A non-question. But if a state or organization gets its hands on a viable nuke, or smallpox, the answer is absolutely yes. But is poverty, as preserved by deliberately poor education and mafia-like "governance" by corrupt and violent groups like the Taliban "worse" than terrorism? Actually, it's kept propped up by terrorism - through the intimidation and horrific capricious violence of people like Mullah Omar, or like Saddam (who, of course, did it less in the name of religion, and more in the name of tribally-oriented Stalinst totalitarianism and just basic criminal regime building).
Worse than hunger? HIV?
Why make the comparison? The US (through both its government agencies and private organizations) provides more food and relief to the world's hungry and sick than any other country in the world. This isn't an either/or issue - we can do more than one thing at a time. For example, we provide cash and humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people (even more, now that we know Arafat isn't skimming off of the money), even as we help disable the terrorizing capacities of groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad. These activities are not mutually exclusive, even if you personally can only see one thing at a time.
Just the other day, a Dutch airliner heading for Mexico, was refused passage through US air space. Terrorists on board? Who knows, but essentially it's the US setting the agenda in many parts of the world, even if measures are violating local law.
What local law? It's US airspace. If KLM wants to fly to Mexico, it certainly doesn't have to fly over US territories. If it wants to, then it has to take into account US wishes about who flies through its airspace. Just like US airlines honor similar requests from other countries. The difference is that very few people are worried about airliners being crashed into the Krijtberg, the Van Gogh Museum, or The Rembrandt Tower - because despite the long reach of various Dutch banking and shipping interests around the world, most would-be medieval theocracy movements in the middle east don't think they'll get a lot of good local Al Jazeera press out of terrorizing the Dutch. As much fun as they had killing Spanish commuters on trains, they won't really get to crow about how much Allah is on their side unless they can demo
of your own, not stolen from a museum or library
I believe the local vernacular is "shared."
seems to be all about helping out your customers with every little thing they might need, while perhaps stopping just short of giving their passwords to the wrong people. There seem to be plenty of areas that merit more services research, if big companies can't seem to get past stuff like that. Or maybe IBM could just get into offering online courses in Remedial Critical Thinking for help desk staff.
That's actually somewhat amusing, now that it's pretty clear that whatever priestess was on duty there at any given time was probably stoned out of her mind on hallucinogenic gases rising out of rock fissures.
Why did L/N need to know their subsribers SSNs?
It's not their subscribers' SSNs, it's the SSNs included in the data they sell to their subscribers. Their subscribers might be, say, a bank. The bank is trying to decide whether John Doe is worth the risk of a car loan. The bank gathers the info from John Doe, then compares it to what someone like L-N has to say about Mr. Doe. Without critical identifiers like SSNs, it's pretty hard to compare Jane Smith to all of her identically named counterparts around the world.
I've always considered web browsers free. I think most people see the web that way
I guess that's one of the first things that needs to change, Joe-user-education-wise. Most people can't even make a distinction between "the web" and the piece of software they're using to look at it.
The larger issue, of people that think things are "free" just because they see or get them without directly parting with money at that moment, is a symptom of a much larger cultural problem: basic ignorance of micro- and macro-economics across most of the population.
I always enjoy watching the lights come on when I show a kid that surfing to, say, Amazon, is actually him connecting the computer in his living room to another actual physical computer that that business is paying people to run. As boring as it might seem to some, kids can feel really (I gag on this word) empowered when they actually get a clearer picture of how things in their world work. It's at that point that some critical thinking starts to happen, and the truth of "there is no free lunch" kicks in, and they really begin to think through what's happening when someone offers them something for free, or in exchange for some form of their fleeting loyalty.
We can all help by being just a little more granular when we talk about surfing, and the actual layers that are in play when people "use the web."
My all time favorite was when I sat down at a client's web makeover kickoff meeting (they were a non-profit with a horrific web site), and I asked them, "Which web browser do you use here in the office?" The attendees looked around the conference table at each other, nodding for a moment, and the director said, "Well, I guess that would be Elizabeth [their newsletter editor] - she seems to know how to find stuff online. Maybe we should have her in this meeting?"
Ah, consulting clients!
No doubt the post is referring to the beta release of the Google Googles, which will track which retailers you look at as you walk down the street, and stimulate your brain with ultrasound to make you want an very expensive cup of interactive, localized coffee.
Really, as an amateur cultural anthroplogist, I've found the slashdot editorial drift from Google = Cool to Google = Big Corporate Search Stooge to be really something to watch.
Well, at least on a couple more keys, anyway.
I hope there isn't any other fallout from this
Well, I suppose they could turn it into the Kansas Museum Of They're-Only-Theories.
I think it's great, actually, that there's a tech/aerospace-centric museum in Kansas (its current curatorial difficulties notwithstanding), but I guess I'm finding that spark of interest in applied science hard to square with the whole retro-dark-ages-religiosity thing. Especially in a state that makes a living off of living things (advanced crops) that didn't exist even a few years ago, or that have to do regular battle with strains of bacteria in their cattle that have (evolved!) resistance to certain drugs. I hope the Cosmosphere continues to thrive despite the awkward press, and that a few Kansan kids have their Critical Thinking Epihpanies while gazing at the cool flying machines on display. I don't think the stolen t-shirt or water valve were probably going to help much on that front anyway.
music that I can't choose
That should read: 'don't have to choose'
That's the whole point if these services are run right: you get to enjoy good music without wading through thousands of titles and deciding what should be played. It's like going to a good restaurant, and telling the chef you trust to just fix you a really nice dinner. Some unexpected pieces are part of the experience, and just like the chef (who costs you more than the food would at the grocery store), you're buying someone's time and expertise - and trusting them to get it at least mostly right most of the time.
Places like RadioIO have been doing a pretty good job at this for a while now. It's worth the cost of a six pack of Guiness to have someone else spend all month digging up music for me to hear.
contributed back to the community
To the extent that the government is using non-proprietary OSes and and other cheaper/free pieces of infrastructure to conduct critical activities (like defense, or emergency response), we're looking at using up fewer tax dollars, and that's plenty of "giving back." Of course, the defense/intel community does very much distribute enhanced goodies where it can, and we've had plenty of conversations here about things like open source CAD stuff from the Navy.
Probably the most important thing, though, is that you get thousands of federal techies using different systems, and a lot of them will leave their stint with the DOD and head out into the wild with an appreciation for alternate ways to handle IT problems. Those folks, showing up at private sector HR desks looking for more lucrative jobs, will have more to do with corporate acceptance of things like Linux than any amount of code the feds might publish.
Has advertising become effectively invisible to you?
I pay attention to it enough to get a sense of the pace, timing, and general arc of the commercials aired during the shows I care about, because this allows me to handle the TiVo fast forward with unerring accuracy.
The late 1800's and early 1900's saw much more radical change than we experience.
Well, I guess from that perspective, we should consider the change that came with the printing press. That event (where knowledge could spread more instantaneously and more widely than ever before) is actually more akin to what we're experiencing now (though the scales are stupifyingly different). My point, I guess, is that changes during the industrial revolution basically introduced speed and reliability to more or less familiar activities (moving things, lifting things, heating things, etc.) whereas we're now having a major change in the notion of what it means to ask questions and expect instant answers (however accurate) about, well, everything. In the Renaissance, it meant gaining access to a library, and now it's the net.
The point is that Google does something besides spit out HTML. Their software runs on my desktop, and then some.
Google and eBay distribute HTML
Hmm. I could swear that the Google appliance in my rack, and the Google toolbar on my desktop weren't just hunks of HTML.
A tax break is not money. It is paying less taxes. A subsidy, I agree, is corporate welfare, and should be stopped. As should all forms of tax dollar handouts (whether to individuals, or groups of them called corporations).
Hahaha you seem to be quite bothered by this
Not really. Just tired of junior high school kids thinking that they're cool because they can type the word "fuck" on a computer, and who think that by being that cool, that they're somehow fighting The Man, and rebelliously making Linux their own cool thing, blah blah blah. It's just sort of painful to watch - kind of like when you see a bunch of identically dressed Goth kids in black clothes telling each other how unique they all are, or a bunch of a 14 year old fanboys who think they must really be saying something powerful because everyone's too intimmidated (um... more like don't give a damn) to respond. So, once in a while I like to respond, even if it's just to take a moment and observe that witless adolescents aren't shocking, or impressing anyone except their imaginary fan clubs by trying to sound caustic.
Actually, I wasn't really concerned at all about the actual meat of the story, but the fact that MS came up (in the context of someone who's not usually a big fan finding himself pleasantly surprised by something that MS did), and that the guy we're talking about now had no response other than, let's see... "You are a fucking tool" - that just confirms, to a casual visitor here, that all of the people who don't like MS are just stuck in some sort of low-brow, group-think, pre-adolescent rut, and can't actually articulate why they'd find the poster to be a Tool or why anything that MS does to block spam, or kiddiepr0n, etc., is bad. Inarticulate MS bashing (actually, just lamely trying to insult someone who is not bashing them - even better!) just makes the MS-hating crowd look like a pack of twits. And then they wonder why MS users feel like they'll have to hold their noses to get involved in some OSS areas, etc. Guess I'm just tired of responses like "You are a fucking tool" being the best thing so many people can manage to say in support of Linux these days.
A GBU-12 is $19K .. which would be around two DS-3 circuits for a month.
OK, I'll see your $10k and raise you another $10k, just to cover inflation for this year. Doesn't matter unless we're off by a couple of decimal points. That still doesn't even come close to supporting the concurrent traffic that NASA would like to be able to support during a launch. Sure, over a given month that would be nice for typical traffic - that much bandwidth would help them out a lot with visiting school kids and whatnot. But in the, say, 10 minutes before, and 60 minutes after a launch (or a landing, etc.), two DS-3's would still just be drinking straws for the half million (!!!) live video feeds they want to serve up.
The post to which I replied - where the poster suggests that NASA's infrastructure needs in this regard could be covered with the cost of one smart bomb - is just slanted, trolling rhetoric, and I didn't want to let it go unanswered.
The cost of one smart bomb will more than cover the bandwidth needs of nasa for the shuttle coverage. hmmm, says a lot about priorities
Well, let's see now. "Smart Bomb" covers a lot of territory, but take for example the one that we used the most of during the Gulf war. That would be the 500lb GBU-12 Laser-Guided Bomb. It's actually gotten a lot less expensive to produce those, but at the time, they cost about $9,000.
$9,000 isn't even going to but a dent in NASA's desire to run thousands of concurrent streaming video feeds during a shuttle launch. When you decide to make political points (never mind a discussion of what it costs in lives and dollars to not use guided munitions), please at least get within a few orders of magnitude of the facts - you'll at least sound more credible as your actual meaning is dissected.