The preponderance of opinion on the thread appears to be that you're an under-informed argumentative fuckwit who's already lost and is too dumb to know it. This is, with respect, certainly the image you have projected in this discussion.
I suggest you cease posting (as will I) and ruminate on this.
I don't know about you, but if I said one thing and everyone else involved in the discussion (including at least one person deeply involved in the very project you are standing on the sidelines and sniping about) said something different, well, I'd consider reevaluating my opinion...
Briefly addressing your points, though:
1) There is no lack of decent argument - he clearly states that KOffice is (1) not hard-coded to X11, (2) has hard dependencies on kdelibs, but that kdelibs has (3) already been ported to QT4, which (5) already runs on Windows. Since the majority of the work has already been done, you appear to be the one without any basis for your criticisms here.
2) Great. You developed for QT, and found it hard. Maybe (1) they're already further along than you realise, (2) QT4 is already ported to Windows, so there's less work to do than you realised, or (3) they're just better developers than you?
3) It's an open letter. A public announcement. The product was therefore announced. Hence, it's a "product announcement". Not the product announcement, but a product announcement. Jesus tap-dancing Christ...
4) Then I'm definitely stopping replying to this thread. If you aren't going to realise how you sound to onlookers and stop making a prat of yourself, please have the last word since it's apparently the only way you'll ever give up...
Actually, the worst thing a dolphin could likely do would be to kill you by stoving your chest in or fracturing your skull or ribs. You'd likely then either die from your injuries or drown.
The dolphin's nose is extremely hard, and (IIRC) is its primary weapon. Dolphins have been known to fight off even larger sharks, and in any confrontation with a human they could easily dive out of reach and stage repeated charges, charging at you from below (which really doesn't bear thinking about) - remember, they can get up enough speed to lift their entire bodies may metres clear out of the water (up to 21mph), and that's leaving aside the bone-crushing amount of force they could generate simply by slapping you with their tail. They also tend to hunt in packs, and are intelligent enough to tactically herd and corral their prey first to make killing them easier.
So don't tell me a wimpy little out-of-his-depth naked ape thrashing around on the surface would be anything but fishfood to a highly-trained troop of 4-metre long 650kg sleek grey killing machines that can take out a great white shark...
As Terry Pratchett so presciently pointed out, never trust an animal that smiles all the time. It's up to something...;-)
1) He didn't apologise, merely stated that his harsh language towards a user was at least partly a function of having a splitting headache. It could also be partly a function of talking to an uninformed argumentative smug fuckwit who doesn't know when he's lost.
2) You may be a "long-time KDE user", but he's a KOffice developer. What makes you think for a single femtosecond that merely using the same platform as a software program is written for qualifies you to argue about it with a guy who writes the bloody thing? We also can't help noticing that you don't describe yourself as a "long-time KOffice user".
3) You don't appear to know the first thing about marketing or PR. Quick clue for you: do people announce films/products/events before they're released, or do they wait until they're actually ready before letting anyone know they exist?
You announce products before they're finished, to give time for the news to get around. You announce (estimated) completion dates as soon as you're confident of hitting them. This allows people to research, investigate and give mindshare to your film/product/event before it actually goes live, allowing it to make a bigger splash, which in turn generates more free publicity.
If you don't even announce the future existence of a product before you actually launch it, you engineer a huge gap between finishing the product and most of your audience knowing about it, which is a stupid and pointless waste of time.
4) Please sit down and STFU. You don't have a fucking clue about marketing, PR or development, and you're childishly arguing with someone who does all three. You've embarrassed yourself in front of the whole of/., but if you stop now this thread'll soon be forgotten, and frankly that's the best you can hope for now.
Actually, it's much, much worse than that. A few years ago it was discovered that the police had illegally retained as many as 3,000,000 (yes, that's three million) DNA samples taken in investigations.
Lest this be misunderstood, most of these weren't even from "real" suspects - where (say) a rape had been committed in a small town, the police investigation would take samples from every male in the town, and test to see if they could match anyone to samples recovered from the victim. Samples-taking was voluntary, but the overwhelming majority of people went along with procedures like this because they wished to help catch the attacker, and the samples were legally required to be:
1) Only used in a direct comparison with the attacker's sample from that crime (ie, the police couldn't just match against any other sample they had lying aroudn to see if you'd done anything else), and 2) Destroyed as soon as you were ruled out as a suspect - ie, as soon as your DNA didn't match the attacker's sample your DNA would be destroyed, along with any record/checksum/encoded version of it.
A few years ago it emerged that the police, instead of destroying the DNA like they were supposed to, had in fact been illegally retaining and storing it. They appealed to the courts for the right to use it in criminal investigations, and were (amid much uproar) granted the right.
If you ever, for any reason gave a DNA sample to the police since the late 80s, there's a good chance it's now in the national police DNA database, and can be matched against every sample of DNA evidence police recover from any crime, at any time in the future.
Now, to my mind this is a simple breach of contract - these people voluntarily donated their DNA under an agreement, which the Police subsequently illegally broke. The samples should have been destroyed the minute this became known, and the Chief Commissioner (or whoever was ultimately responsible) should have been subject to criminal proceedings, internal investigations and prosecution under the Data Protection Act (since if DNA isn't "personal information", I don't know what is).
Instead the Police unashamedly tried to hang onto the samples, the courts/Lords not only ignored hard evidence of a crime by the Police, but changed the law to avoid prosecuting anyone, and the rest of the government washed its hands of the whole matter.
Indeed. Here in the UK we've got the government trying to push us into national ID cards, and the police granted permission by the courts to retain 3 million "innocent" DNA samples taken during investigations and, completely illegally, not destroyed when the donors were proven innocent. We've also followed the US into two wars, and massively increased our risk of terrorist threats. We have so many CCTV cameras in major cities that on average you're photographed every ten seconds.
In the US you've got an unprecedented restriction of civil liberties, terror of (and scapegoating of) "the terrorists" (despite the fact that statistically you're still unimaginably unlikely to get injured or killed by one), a single political party with complete control of the presidency and all three wings of your government apparatus, and that party institutionally corrupted by religious and corporate special-interest groups. You've also invaded two other nations (one on provably trumped-up charges), massively increased your own exposure to terrorist threats, and incurred the disapproval of the world for your flouting of international law and opinion. You are also flouting violating human rights accords and engaging in torture, abuse and humiliation of prisoners on a daily basis, while your tame media keeps the populace ill-informed and apathetic.
But we're still the shining examples of Democracy and Freedom, right?
One question - exactly what has to happen before you'd agree with the statement "The US (and UK) are sliding inexorably to totalitarianism"?
From those of us watching the discussion on the sidelines, thanks for proving his point perfectly.
If you have a problem with people labelling countries "good" and "bad" (or "better" and "worse"), what gave the US the right to invade Afghanistan? Or Iraq? What gives you any right at all to tell people how to act, if you aren't "better" than them? Your position on this issue undermines your entire argument.
Read the GP post again. Nowhere did he say it was a good idea for N. Korea to have WMDs - quite the opposite, in fact. Neither did he explicitly call for unilateral disarmament of the current US ones, although I think everyone agrees that, were this feasible, the world would be a better place.
He did, however, call for people like you to pull your head out of your arse and try seeing things from other people's point of view. He also highlighted the problems with people (again: just like you) sticking their heads in the sand, assuming any attack on the US is automatically unjustified (because you're "t3h g00d guYz"), and completely ignoring difficult or uncomfortable thoughts that might just indicate the opposite.
In response, you've ignored every important point he makes, deliberately misunderstood a very simply position to be one you can attack, and signally failed to apply any critical thought to your own position.
"The whole argument just smacks of fearmongering, and throws the word anthrax around as much as possible."
Well, y'know, the article's about anthrax. And nobody forced the US government to buy it. And even if they're only using it for testing decontimination procedures, why would anthrax be better than any other similar (but not so politically insensitive) organism?
"They're not creating a biological weapons lab, just procuring enough to probably use for threat assessment of biological weapon dispersion. This is something I'd actually expect a sane government to do, and not be surprised about."
First up, it's disingenuous to present your (forgive me: baseless) opinions as facts. You have absolutely no evidence that the US isn't pursuing a biological weapons program, so stop claiming absolutes. For the record, I don't think they necessarily are researching BioWMDs, but given the US's increasing disrespect for international agreements and opinion, you can't blame the rest of the world for getting antsy, especially when you've simultaneously gone on the biggest military romp through foreign countries in living memory.
As other posters have noted: Where the US is concerned, the benefit of the doubt has been withdrawn.
"It's not going to be used for weaponry, and the US has enough nuclear firepower to not need biological weaponry, which are much more unpredictable in effect, and less reliable."
Right, just like they don't need new types of nukes, or space-based weaponery, or an SDI shield, or...
Have I made my point yet?
"The US doesn't need" has never stopped the US from researching anything that will allow you to wage war more effectively. To be fair, it frequently doesn't stop other countries either, but the US is by far the most technologically advanced, least militarily threatened, most arrogantly disrespectful of international opinion and most militarity expansionist regime in the world today.
So... what? We should disapprove of the courts for not always deciding correctly in a high-cost court battle between two (biased) litigants, but not the USPTO for wrongly granting the patent that caused the problem in the first place? When the courts are called-on for a million different things, but examining and granting patents is the Patent Examiners only job?
Sorry - not following that one. If the USPTO did their job perfectly we wouldn't need the courts in these cases. You seem to be blaming the safety-net for not being good enough, and not the greased high-wire that causes the fall in the first place.
And Four More... (SPOLIERS, but only for old game)
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Games Can Make Us Cry
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· Score: 1
The original Quake (esp. in early 1997, when the graphics were still pretty cutting-edge). Living away at university for the first time ever. Alone. At 03:00 in the morning. In the dark. In a room so cold you can see your breath in front of you, lit only by the flickering blue light of the monitor. I fucking defy you not to flinch when you heard the random occasional growl coming from the speakers just over your right shoulder. And then, when you get so into the game you start instinctively flinching by turning your in-game viewpoint through 180 degrees.
Grim Fandango. Any of the long gaps between the four "years" of gameplay, but especially Manny giving up finding Meche and taking the job at the diner. Glottis apparently dying, your joy at finding you could (possibly) resurrect him, and the frustration of staring at the door to heaven, knowing you were inches away from entering, but can't yet because you have to go all the way back to save your faithful friend. No other game has ever got me closer to tears than the end of Grim Fandango.
X-COM: Terror From The Deep. Waiting on the Geoscape screen for the next UFO attack. The impossible tension of the (turn based!) missions, accentuated by the masterfully tension-inducing music. Knowing (esp. early-on) it doesn't matter how long you agonise over a decision - one wrong move and your carefully-nurtured favourite X-COM soldier is fish-food.
Half-Life, when you first meet the US Special Forces. And then they start shooting at you. What? Fuckers are supposed to be rescuing us!
Genius moments every one, and easily the equal of any film or book I've ever read.
That is unfortunate, but as you point out, it's inevitable. It'd be lovely if everyone in society was equally well-off, equally educated, equally teched-up and equally handsome or beautiful, but I don't think it's ever going to happen (not in the near future, anyway).
There will always be a gap between the "top" and "bottom" (bad phraseology, but I can't think of any better) of society - however, as long as it isn't insurmountable it's not any bigger a problem than it is currently.
I don't think basic computer-use (which is all we're talking about) is that hard to learn, and with improvements in software and user-interfaces (MS-DOS 1.0 vs OSX, or even Win XP) they're getting easier to use all the time, reducing the gap between the "capable users" and the "never touched a computer in their lives".
To be clear: developing technology is getting harder, but that's an inescapable function of its increasing complexity, and doesn't really bear on the "knowing how to use a computer" skills that is what we're really talking about.
In short, I don't think differing experience/ability with computers is a big deal. Certainly no bigger than (say) being able to drive or not, or being able to read. We should try as a society to eradicate these differences, but I don't think a gap in technology-proficiency makes it any worse, either...
Actually, they bought QDOS ("Quick 'n' Dirty Operating System", as the legend has it) - a (knowingly) cheap, shitty knock-off of CP/M.
They then minimally rewrote it, convinced IBM to bundle it with their hardware, and started coining it in. For MS-DOS version 2 they re-wrote practically the whole thing because, apart from the FAT filesystem, it was basically crap.
It's debatable whether QDOS was in fact much good, but with some good luck, fortuitous timing and a following wind Microsoft managed to convince IBM to use it anyway.
So, less "buying the rights from morons that didn't know what to do with their product" and more "licensing a shitty OS (while deliberately concealing their relationship with IBM to get it cheaper), convincing IBM to make it the standard with clever salesmanship, then re-writing the whole damn thing as soon as possible to make it any good at all".
Either way, it demonstrates absolutely no "innovation" whatsoever.
You raise a good point, and one which hadn't really occurred to me before.
That said, the internet is increasingly penetrating every aspect of our lives, and I can't see it stopping or reversing any time soon. In 1994 hardly anyone (comparatively) was on-line, but you still heard people worrying we'd be creating a "digital class" and an "offline class". These days even my grandmother is online, and with internet cafes and ever-cheaper hardware (and F/OSS) it's only getting easier and cheaper to get access.
The rich and educated will always form the early adopters of any expensive and complicated technology (in fact, that assertion is practically a tautology), but I find it hard to believe it won't trickle-down into all aspects of our culture in the near future. Even those who aren't on-line at home generally know what http://www.something.com/ means, or that wibble@blarg.com is something to do with your e-mail address.
Indeed, if anything I'd say since 1994 I've seen an acceleration of people getting net access, at least in the west. And there are increasing numbers of "sub-$100 PC" and "PCs to the third-world" projects, even they (in time) should catch up.
To be sure, there will always be people who any technology leaves behind, but then there are people who still can't read and write, and we've had that technology for thousands of years. I don't think we need to worry too much unless the barrier to entry for net access becomes prohibitive for large groups of the population, and since this requires a reversal of the obsolescence process and the eradication of cyber-cafes, I think we're safe for the moment.
That said, thank you for highlighting the fact that at the moment the "online world" is hardly in the enormous majority - far too many people seem to blithely assume everyone who's worth bothering about is already online, and massively over-estimate how important they are to the overwhelming majority of humanity.
Nope. Actually, Compaq (IIRC) "innovated" there... by reverse-engineering IBM's BIOS and producing compatible hardware.
Microsoft didn't innovate a thing - they just happened to be a mainstream OS which wasn't owned by anyone with a vested interest in pushing their own hardware. Right position, right time. Zero innovation involved.
And even if you believe they deliberately put themselves in that position, innovating a new business model is hardly what real geeks would consider important innovation, right?
"They want the barest minimum information on how our products talk to each other so they can ensure interoperability"
is a lot more reasonable-sounding than
"They want the actual source code of our products" (implied: so they can rip-off our hard-created intellectual property).
Frankly nobody I know would want to touch MS source code, apart from possibly virus/worm writers. Everyone else'd rather see the access and comms protocols and write their own implementations. Ones that, y'know, work.
Unfortunately, this distinction is lost on many non-technical types, and Microsoft and its lawyers have hardly been correcting people when they make the mistakes, since it's to their advantage to have it presented this way.
Sorry - just to be clear on this, are you reading the same articles as I am?
Let's just take the very first link in that (factless) Google search you gave as "evidence". There were 8 "definitely invalid" votes, in a run to decide the govenor (not the president of the country, but a regional govenor).
Of those 8:
Doris McFarland said she voted for her husband, Earl, who died Oct. 7. "I called up the elections board and said, 'Can I do it because he wanted me to vote?'... The person... said, 'Well, who would know?' I said, 'I don't want to do anything that is wrong.'... If I did something that wasn't right, you can just throw that ballot out,". She's clearly a confused old lady and was clearly not intending to do anything wrong - this is hardly a concerted attempt at election fraud.
1 was already known to definitely be an administrative error, and would therefore be discounted.
Mary Coffey died on Sept. 29. Her husband, Michael Coffey states that he voted by mail, but destroyed his wife's ballot when it arrived in the mail - "I don't see how she could have voted. It doesn't make sense. There has to be some kind of error that happened", he states. This could either be another adminsitrative cock-up, or the husband could be lying. Either way, it's one vote.
Bob Holmgren said yesterday that he voted on behalf of his late wife, Charlette Holmgren, who died Sept. 29. "Her vote was important to her," Holmgren said. "She was very strongly against Governor-elect Gregoire". Again, either stupid or senile and confused. Not malicious.
James M. Courneya died Aug. 7. His wife Anna Courneya (who resides at the same address as her late husband) said her husband didn't receive a ballot but she did. She voted absentee but the King County voters list doesn't register her vote, only his. Clearly an administrative (or user-)error, and no extra votes counted as a result. No effect.
Rosalie B. Simpson, 81, died of a massive heart attack Aug. 4, but voter rolls show she voted at the polls. "If a voter dies after having voted, it's still perfectly legal", [the county's elections director] said. I don't know what date the election was, but this appears to be a valid vote, erroneously flagged because the voter died soon after.
Owen Skau of Federal Way made his choices before he died last October, said his wife, Maya. "He filled it out," she said. "He always voted.... He filled out his vote before he fell and had a heart attack. But he had it filled out. I went ahead and mailed it in". TBH, I don't even know if this is valid. I'd assume not (since he's dead when the vote happens), but it's an easy mistake to make.
I make that 8 definitely-invalid votes, of which 2 were a known (and since corrected, where appropriate) administrative errors, 3 were stupid or confused (and admitted) mistakes, 1 apparently-valid vote accidentally flagged as invalid. That leasves only two votes as remotely suspect.
Frankly, if that's the best a vote-rigging Democrat candidate can do to sway an election, he's too half-arsed to vote into office.
Are you seriously suggesting that 8 suspect votes in a regional election compares to tens of thousands knowingly disenfranchised in a national election to determine the president of your entire country? That a few confused old people mailing in their partners' forms compares to massive abuse of powers by Republican party-members to sway an entire election? An investigation that shows 3/4 of the invalid votes were mistakes compares to a biased supreme court full of republican-appointed judges that stops a legal recount minutes before Gore (according to later data-analysis and unofficial recounts) publically takes the lead in the polls?
Jesus. Politicking aside, the sheer bias in the way you present this kind of stuff is mind-boggling. You guys just amaze me.
1) "Invasive" wasn't referring to the adverts, but to Google's public habit of hoovering up every byte of data about you they can. Google Adwords/Adsense adverts are the only kind of advertising that I don't mind seeing.
2) You don't tackle the arrogance/privacy invasion angle, and this is what the overwhelming majority of people who dislike Google dislike about them. I don't dislike them, but I'm finding it increasingly hard to trust them, too.
Google are too clever to miss the fact that people don't like to be watched, but they've convinced themselves "it's alright if it's us doing it". This is wrong, and something they should address (don't require the Google cookie where it isn't necessary, allow Google Talk to use the s2s part of the jabber protocol, be more transparent about what they do with your data, etc).
Kudos to them for offering a free service like this, but they should be aware that they're in grave danger of losing all the goodwill and trust they've accumulated, by (stupidly) acting in a way that calls their motives into question.
But you're missing the point - if you don't retain some basic orbital capability, other nations might get manufacturing resources and defenceless spy-satellites into orbit before Bush can weaponise the entire orbital region and ensure US military supremacy in space. By the time you finally build the space elevator you might eventually reach orbit only to be confonted by China, or Eupore, or even "teh terrorists!!!!11!!1!one!".
Frankly, given the US is the only one making any moves at all in the direction of militarising space, I think having the US space program grounded for the next 20-50 years would be a great thing, especially if it was subsequently followed by cheap-to-the-point-of-negligibile access to space.
That said, you do still need a reliable, efficient way of getting up there to build the elevator. Every design I've ever seen relies on being able to get into orbit the hard way, then dropping the ribbon down from orbit to the ground.
Getting men on the moon is nothing but empty Bush cock-waving (now there's a weird concept), but there are good reasons to retain at least the ability to get into orbit - it's a prerequisite of building an elevator.
Granted, it's voluntary right now, but it's only going to get more pervasive as computing and the web become the primary medium of more and more of our culture. We've got web pages already, and with podcasts and RSS/bittorrent it's starting to take over radio, too. I already know people who don't watch any TV or go to the cinema, but download films and programs and watch them on their PCs. I know even more people who don't buy newspapers, but instead browse the BBC, CNN and/or Al Jazeera.
It's also interesting that (empirically demonstrated by the number of people shouting the OP down), most people don't perceive it as a problem. Something destructive to society can be voluntary all you like, but if the overwhelming majority of people don't notice or care, it doesn't matter - it's just as dangerous as if it were mandatory.
People (overwhelmingly) are lazy, and don't like to have their assumptions questioned - witness the success of Fox news, and ridiculously biased tabloid newspapers with astronomical readerships. Witness pundits and celebrities like Rush Limbaugh and his "loony left" equivalents - they sometimes barely bear any relationship to reality at all, and yet people listen, and believe what they're told.
Selective and preference-based news gathering allows us to only read what we want to hear, but they work below the threshold of conscious attention. Since all we see and hear confirms our existing prejudices, we start to define our own reality, and start to lose common ground with people with differing opinions. This is part of the root of the so-called "culture war" between the American Right and Left at the moment, and is demonstrated to great effect by a number of prominent political figures. It leads to a general breakdown of empathy with any and all opposing groups, and allows us to reject tolerance and understanding and retreat to a barbaric closed-minded tribal mindset - something our entire social evolution has (rightly) been moving us away from.
A culture is nothing but common ground agreed between all members of the culture. If everyone can define their own reality, political, economic, and philosophical (even perceived "factual"?) differences become overwhelming. This is tolerable when people live thousands of miles away form each other in differing countries. It's a lot harder to deal with when they're living next door.
Generally, within-group (band, group of friends, political party, subculture, whatever) disagreements/debates tend to be much more diplomatic than between-group ones.
Take any example:
Politics. Sure the Left and Right in the US hate each other, but in the face of "outsiders" (9/11, for example) they band together against the external threat.
Friends. You might disagree with a friend over something, but the second he's threatened by an outsider (eg, started on by someone you don't know in a club), most people will at least stand behind him and back him up.
Subcultures. Goths can be (disclaimer: I have many Goth friends who aren't) notoriously whiny and bitchy, but when they're sat in a pub bitching at each other and a punk/metaller/raver walks in, watch them forget their differences and close ranks against the intruder.
Basically, people "within our group" are for the most part within our monkeysphere. People "outside of our group" are for the most part not. Disagreements within groups tend to be limited in their intensity, or they tear the whole group apart (which no real group member wants). Conflicts between groups allow participants to demonise and dehumanise their opponents, and so have no upper limit on their intensity (Hiroshima, for example).
So do should we all walk, talk and think exactly the same? No.
Should we all strive to become part of one big group (humanity), but retain our individual differences as much as possible? I think so.
That's interesting. I'm hardly an avid environmentalist, but for argument's sake, which of these strikes you as the most arrogant:
"If global warming keeps up we could die, which is bad for the world!"
"We can do whatever the fuck we like to the planet and its biosphere, and who cares if it's ruined later - I'll be dead!"
Frankly, the planet's a lump of rock, and it doesn't give a fuck if we're alive, dead or dancing the can-can.
The world (as in, the biosphere, animals alive right now, us, the planet's current biodiversity, the evolutionary potential within every living creature) depends greatly on us not engineering an ecological collapse through shortsighted selfishness.
I think most people consider ecological collapse bad because you're basically making millions of species extinct, even long before we as a species are faced with extinction (king of the adaptable generalists, humanity). People view the world as a beautiful thing because of its intricacy and diversity, and if the alternative is a radioactive desert with three different types of cockroach frankly I see their point.
You're right, and this is always a pet peeve of mine - what's the "normal, background" level of extinction? Why get upset about individual species going extinct, when species do it all the time?
I think it's because people find it very hard to get worried that millions of species might die out, but tell them "You'll never see an Orangutan again" and they suddenly realise how serious it can be. People can't fit planetary-level problems into their monkeysphere, but never again seeing a particular cute little furry face tugs at the heartstrings and prompts them to act.
Is it misleading? Yes. Is it done for a noble purpose? Yes, I think so.
"which is why we need to engage the enemy on their own soil, rather than either not engaging them (then they will come to us), or trying to wait for them to get here (as you point out, impossible)"
We've taken it as read that you can never stop the terrorists getting through to you if they want to.
I've also shown that the barrier-to-entry for terrorism is so low you can't effectively prevent it in any kind of free society.
I suggest the US minimises its international interference, in order to reduce the terrorists' support and eventually eliminate their campaign of hate.
You suggest you need to meddle more, in the terrorists' own homelands?
While this may occupy the existing terrorists for a while (although, as the London tube/bus bombings show, not always), havent' we agreed that it's just prolonging the problem? For every terrorist you kill, you create a martyr that recruits tens or hundreds of new volunteers, especially if you kill them by invading their homeland and deposing the ruling regime rather than covert counter-terrorist actions, or police action in your country.
It's hard to get upset with a country for killing someone who was over there actively fighting them.
It's very, very easy to get upset with a country for invading your homeland, disrupting or destroying your way of life, killing lots of innocent civilians and also killing someone else who previously tried to attack them.
Terrorism isn't a universal constant. The majority of countries don't have a serious terrorist problem. Surely the US should be trying to get back to that position, rather than assuming the battle can never be won and merely making it as hard as possible for the terrosits while throwing them fresh recruits and actively prolonging the battle?
"I'm actually surprised that you would go for [sending in special forces] - surely that is the ultimate interference)"
Really? I'd have said it's actually the very minimal amount of inteference necessary to achieve your objectives.
Ideally diplomacy would win out, where you convince your opponent to change his mind (or blackmail him into it against his will). There's little bragging-rights for the "winning" country, but either way it involves very little disruption to the "losing" country or the average man-in-the-street.
Failing that, covert action merely removes the objectionable person from influence (ideally faking an accident). Again, this is nice and deniable, so there are no bragging rights, but still comparatively little disruption for the losers' way of life.
Failing that, you have invasion - you publically march straight into the country, kill a bunch of innocent civilians, and/or soldiers who have nothing to do with the decision you're objecting to, then you depose the ruling regime, optionally institute your own ideologically-friendly one. This involves massive disruption to the country, public violence/"atrocities" on both sides (but as aggressor, yours is the only important one), and practically guarantees the population of the country will hate you for killing their $FAMILYMEMBER/destroying their way of life/your incredible arrogance in telling them how to live their lives/stealing their natural resources/etc/etc/etc.
I know it's not popular these days (since it both lacks opportunities for obnoxious cock-waving and shifts the danger for a conflict from the armed forces to the politicians who actually started it), but I honestly think covert actions are more "ethical" than war. They're both Wrong, but at least with CAs you're minimising the disruption and collateral damage.
"The problem is that you believe that it is possible to not "meddle" in foreign affairs - but history shows that it is not possible. At the very least, if you don't officially meddle, there is no way to convince others that the unofficial meddling was not official. Also, given that from time to time we will be forced to meddle, we bett
Granted, but my ISP hasn't made it its public stated intention to categorise and present all the data in the world.
I used to believe that Google had the right idea (after all, more information is almost always good), but they seem to be blind or dismissive of perfectly valid privacy concerns.
They started off listening to their users (which is why, even now, www.google.com isn't a nasty Yahoo-style portal), but somewhere along the way they've come in grave danger of ignoring their users' privacy concerns, and igniting a backlash.
This level of "shut up, we know what's best" arrogance is also reminding me increasingly of Microsoft - they also started off listening to users, but at some point they decided They Knew Best, and stopped. Witness the Bill Gates quote about there being nothing they won't say or do to get people to do things their way (because "their way" and "the best way" are synonymous).
Like it or not, Google are now very powerful, and have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. People don't mind a webmail company hypothetically being able to read your mail. They (perhaps) don't mind a search engine linking every search you do to your cookie. They don't mind their ISP being able (in theory) to track their browsing habits.
However, when one company can do all of this, can tie it back to you, personally, refuses to respect users' privacy and has publically shown it likes to gather every scrap of information it can and use it for advertising purposes... well, suddenly a lot of people have a problem.
Don't get me wrong - I firmly believe Google have honourable intentions, and I'm not expecting to get junk-mail through my letterbox because I used GMail and happened to log onto a Google Access hotspot in the same week. However, despite their noble intentions they display incredibly (and unnecessarily) invasive behaviour, and seem to have no respect at all for user concerns or privacy. At the very least, they can't even be bothered to address these concerns and demonstrate they aren't stepping out of line.
While I still think they're trying to hold fast to "Don't Be Evil", arrogantly thinking you know better than the very legitimate concerns of your users is the first step on the way.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL!
Jesus Christ - I'm not getting roped in too...
The preponderance of opinion on the thread appears to be that you're an under-informed argumentative fuckwit who's already lost and is too dumb to know it. This is, with respect, certainly the image you have projected in this discussion.
I suggest you cease posting (as will I) and ruminate on this.
I don't know about you, but if I said one thing and everyone else involved in the discussion (including at least one person deeply involved in the very project you are standing on the sidelines and sniping about) said something different, well, I'd consider reevaluating my opinion...
Briefly addressing your points, though:
1) There is no lack of decent argument - he clearly states that KOffice is (1) not hard-coded to X11, (2) has hard dependencies on kdelibs, but that kdelibs has (3) already been ported to QT4, which (5) already runs on Windows. Since the majority of the work has already been done, you appear to be the one without any basis for your criticisms here.
2) Great. You developed for QT, and found it hard. Maybe (1) they're already further along than you realise, (2) QT4 is already ported to Windows, so there's less work to do than you realised, or (3) they're just better developers than you?
3) It's an open letter. A public announcement. The product was therefore announced. Hence, it's a "product announcement". Not the product announcement, but a product announcement. Jesus tap-dancing Christ...
4) Then I'm definitely stopping replying to this thread. If you aren't going to realise how you sound to onlookers and stop making a prat of yourself, please have the last word since it's apparently the only way you'll ever give up...
Actually, the worst thing a dolphin could likely do would be to kill you by stoving your chest in or fracturing your skull or ribs. You'd likely then either die from your injuries or drown.
;-)
The dolphin's nose is extremely hard, and (IIRC) is its primary weapon. Dolphins have been known to fight off even larger sharks, and in any confrontation with a human they could easily dive out of reach and stage repeated charges, charging at you from below (which really doesn't bear thinking about) - remember, they can get up enough speed to lift their entire bodies may metres clear out of the water (up to 21mph), and that's leaving aside the bone-crushing amount of force they could generate simply by slapping you with their tail. They also tend to hunt in packs, and are intelligent enough to tactically herd and corral their prey first to make killing them easier.
So don't tell me a wimpy little out-of-his-depth naked ape thrashing around on the surface would be anything but fishfood to a highly-trained troop of 4-metre long 650kg sleek grey killing machines that can take out a great white shark...
As Terry Pratchett so presciently pointed out, never trust an animal that smiles all the time. It's up to something...
1) He didn't apologise, merely stated that his harsh language towards a user was at least partly a function of having a splitting headache. It could also be partly a function of talking to an uninformed argumentative smug fuckwit who doesn't know when he's lost.
/., but if you stop now this thread'll soon be forgotten, and frankly that's the best you can hope for now.
2) You may be a "long-time KDE user", but he's a KOffice developer. What makes you think for a single femtosecond that merely using the same platform as a software program is written for qualifies you to argue about it with a guy who writes the bloody thing? We also can't help noticing that you don't describe yourself as a "long-time KOffice user".
3) You don't appear to know the first thing about marketing or PR. Quick clue for you: do people announce films/products/events before they're released, or do they wait until they're actually ready before letting anyone know they exist?
You announce products before they're finished, to give time for the news to get around. You announce (estimated) completion dates as soon as you're confident of hitting them. This allows people to research, investigate and give mindshare to your film/product/event before it actually goes live, allowing it to make a bigger splash, which in turn generates more free publicity.
If you don't even announce the future existence of a product before you actually launch it, you engineer a huge gap between finishing the product and most of your audience knowing about it, which is a stupid and pointless waste of time.
4) Please sit down and STFU. You don't have a fucking clue about marketing, PR or development, and you're childishly arguing with someone who does all three. You've embarrassed yourself in front of the whole of
Actually, it's much, much worse than that. A few years ago it was discovered that the police had illegally retained as many as 3,000,000 (yes, that's three million) DNA samples taken in investigations.
Lest this be misunderstood, most of these weren't even from "real" suspects - where (say) a rape had been committed in a small town, the police investigation would take samples from every male in the town, and test to see if they could match anyone to samples recovered from the victim. Samples-taking was voluntary, but the overwhelming majority of people went along with procedures like this because they wished to help catch the attacker, and the samples were legally required to be:
1) Only used in a direct comparison with the attacker's sample from that crime (ie, the police couldn't just match against any other sample they had lying aroudn to see if you'd done anything else), and
2) Destroyed as soon as you were ruled out as a suspect - ie, as soon as your DNA didn't match the attacker's sample your DNA would be destroyed, along with any record/checksum/encoded version of it.
A few years ago it emerged that the police, instead of destroying the DNA like they were supposed to, had in fact been illegally retaining and storing it. They appealed to the courts for the right to use it in criminal investigations, and were (amid much uproar) granted the right.
If you ever, for any reason gave a DNA sample to the police since the late 80s, there's a good chance it's now in the national police DNA database, and can be matched against every sample of DNA evidence police recover from any crime, at any time in the future.
Now, to my mind this is a simple breach of contract - these people voluntarily donated their DNA under an agreement, which the Police subsequently illegally broke. The samples should have been destroyed the minute this became known, and the Chief Commissioner (or whoever was ultimately responsible) should have been subject to criminal proceedings, internal investigations and prosecution under the Data Protection Act (since if DNA isn't "personal information", I don't know what is).
Instead the Police unashamedly tried to hang onto the samples, the courts/Lords not only ignored hard evidence of a crime by the Police, but changed the law to avoid prosecuting anyone, and the rest of the government washed its hands of the whole matter.
So, how far away is totalitarianism now then?
Indeed. Here in the UK we've got the government trying to push us into national ID cards, and the police granted permission by the courts to retain 3 million "innocent" DNA samples taken during investigations and, completely illegally, not destroyed when the donors were proven innocent. We've also followed the US into two wars, and massively increased our risk of terrorist threats. We have so many CCTV cameras in major cities that on average you're photographed every ten seconds.
In the US you've got an unprecedented restriction of civil liberties, terror of (and scapegoating of) "the terrorists" (despite the fact that statistically you're still unimaginably unlikely to get injured or killed by one), a single political party with complete control of the presidency and all three wings of your government apparatus, and that party institutionally corrupted by religious and corporate special-interest groups. You've also invaded two other nations (one on provably trumped-up charges), massively increased your own exposure to terrorist threats, and incurred the disapproval of the world for your flouting of international law and opinion. You are also flouting violating human rights accords and engaging in torture, abuse and humiliation of prisoners on a daily basis, while your tame media keeps the populace ill-informed and apathetic.
But we're still the shining examples of Democracy and Freedom, right?
One question - exactly what has to happen before you'd agree with the statement "The US (and UK) are sliding inexorably to totalitarianism"?
Really? Please? I'd like a short list.
"Hate to discontinue the comedy thread in this article, but dolphins don't have breasts."
These are B-Movies we're talking about. In Hollywood. Surgical enhancement of breasts is practically mandatory.
From those of us watching the discussion on the sidelines, thanks for proving his point perfectly.
If you have a problem with people labelling countries "good" and "bad" (or "better" and "worse"), what gave the US the right to invade Afghanistan? Or Iraq? What gives you any right at all to tell people how to act, if you aren't "better" than them? Your position on this issue undermines your entire argument.
Read the GP post again. Nowhere did he say it was a good idea for N. Korea to have WMDs - quite the opposite, in fact. Neither did he explicitly call for unilateral disarmament of the current US ones, although I think everyone agrees that, were this feasible, the world would be a better place.
He did, however, call for people like you to pull your head out of your arse and try seeing things from other people's point of view. He also highlighted the problems with people (again: just like you) sticking their heads in the sand, assuming any attack on the US is automatically unjustified (because you're "t3h g00d guYz"), and completely ignoring difficult or uncomfortable thoughts that might just indicate the opposite.
In response, you've ignored every important point he makes, deliberately misunderstood a very simply position to be one you can attack, and signally failed to apply any critical thought to your own position.
Well done.
"The whole argument just smacks of fearmongering, and throws the word anthrax around as much as possible."
Well, y'know, the article's about anthrax. And nobody forced the US government to buy it. And even if they're only using it for testing decontimination procedures, why would anthrax be better than any other similar (but not so politically insensitive) organism?
"They're not creating a biological weapons lab, just procuring enough to probably use for threat assessment of biological weapon dispersion. This is something I'd actually expect a sane government to do, and not be surprised about."
First up, it's disingenuous to present your (forgive me: baseless) opinions as facts. You have absolutely no evidence that the US isn't pursuing a biological weapons program, so stop claiming absolutes. For the record, I don't think they necessarily are researching BioWMDs, but given the US's increasing disrespect for international agreements and opinion, you can't blame the rest of the world for getting antsy, especially when you've simultaneously gone on the biggest military romp through foreign countries in living memory.
As other posters have noted: Where the US is concerned, the benefit of the doubt has been withdrawn.
"It's not going to be used for weaponry, and the US has enough nuclear firepower to not need biological weaponry, which are much more unpredictable in effect, and less reliable."
Right, just like they don't need new types of nukes, or space-based weaponery, or an SDI shield, or...
Have I made my point yet?
"The US doesn't need" has never stopped the US from researching anything that will allow you to wage war more effectively. To be fair, it frequently doesn't stop other countries either, but the US is by far the most technologically advanced, least militarily threatened, most arrogantly disrespectful of international opinion and most militarity expansionist regime in the world today.
So... what? We should disapprove of the courts for not always deciding correctly in a high-cost court battle between two (biased) litigants, but not the USPTO for wrongly granting the patent that caused the problem in the first place? When the courts are called-on for a million different things, but examining and granting patents is the Patent Examiners only job?
Sorry - not following that one. If the USPTO did their job perfectly we wouldn't need the courts in these cases. You seem to be blaming the safety-net for not being good enough, and not the greased high-wire that causes the fall in the first place.
The original Quake (esp. in early 1997, when the graphics were still pretty cutting-edge). Living away at university for the first time ever. Alone. At 03:00 in the morning. In the dark. In a room so cold you can see your breath in front of you, lit only by the flickering blue light of the monitor. I fucking defy you not to flinch when you heard the random occasional growl coming from the speakers just over your right shoulder. And then, when you get so into the game you start instinctively flinching by turning your in-game viewpoint through 180 degrees.
Grim Fandango. Any of the long gaps between the four "years" of gameplay, but especially Manny giving up finding Meche and taking the job at the diner. Glottis apparently dying, your joy at finding you could (possibly) resurrect him, and the frustration of staring at the door to heaven, knowing you were inches away from entering, but can't yet because you have to go all the way back to save your faithful friend. No other game has ever got me closer to tears than the end of Grim Fandango.
X-COM: Terror From The Deep. Waiting on the Geoscape screen for the next UFO attack. The impossible tension of the (turn based!) missions, accentuated by the masterfully tension-inducing music. Knowing (esp. early-on) it doesn't matter how long you agonise over a decision - one wrong move and your carefully-nurtured favourite X-COM soldier is fish-food.
Half-Life, when you first meet the US Special Forces. And then they start shooting at you. What? Fuckers are supposed to be rescuing us!
Genius moments every one, and easily the equal of any film or book I've ever read.
That is unfortunate, but as you point out, it's inevitable. It'd be lovely if everyone in society was equally well-off, equally educated, equally teched-up and equally handsome or beautiful, but I don't think it's ever going to happen (not in the near future, anyway).
There will always be a gap between the "top" and "bottom" (bad phraseology, but I can't think of any better) of society - however, as long as it isn't insurmountable it's not any bigger a problem than it is currently.
I don't think basic computer-use (which is all we're talking about) is that hard to learn, and with improvements in software and user-interfaces (MS-DOS 1.0 vs OSX, or even Win XP) they're getting easier to use all the time, reducing the gap between the "capable users" and the "never touched a computer in their lives".
To be clear: developing technology is getting harder, but that's an inescapable function of its increasing complexity, and doesn't really bear on the "knowing how to use a computer" skills that is what we're really talking about.
In short, I don't think differing experience/ability with computers is a big deal. Certainly no bigger than (say) being able to drive or not, or being able to read. We should try as a society to eradicate these differences, but I don't think a gap in technology-proficiency makes it any worse, either...
Actually, they bought QDOS ("Quick 'n' Dirty Operating System", as the legend has it) - a (knowingly) cheap, shitty knock-off of CP/M.
They then minimally rewrote it, convinced IBM to bundle it with their hardware, and started coining it in. For MS-DOS version 2 they re-wrote practically the whole thing because, apart from the FAT filesystem, it was basically crap.
It's debatable whether QDOS was in fact much good, but with some good luck, fortuitous timing and a following wind Microsoft managed to convince IBM to use it anyway.
So, less "buying the rights from morons that didn't know what to do with their product" and more "licensing a shitty OS (while deliberately concealing their relationship with IBM to get it cheaper), convincing IBM to make it the standard with clever salesmanship, then re-writing the whole damn thing as soon as possible to make it any good at all".
Either way, it demonstrates absolutely no "innovation" whatsoever.
You raise a good point, and one which hadn't really occurred to me before.
That said, the internet is increasingly penetrating every aspect of our lives, and I can't see it stopping or reversing any time soon. In 1994 hardly anyone (comparatively) was on-line, but you still heard people worrying we'd be creating a "digital class" and an "offline class". These days even my grandmother is online, and with internet cafes and ever-cheaper hardware (and F/OSS) it's only getting easier and cheaper to get access.
The rich and educated will always form the early adopters of any expensive and complicated technology (in fact, that assertion is practically a tautology), but I find it hard to believe it won't trickle-down into all aspects of our culture in the near future. Even those who aren't on-line at home generally know what http://www.something.com/ means, or that wibble@blarg.com is something to do with your e-mail address.
Indeed, if anything I'd say since 1994 I've seen an acceleration of people getting net access, at least in the west. And there are increasing numbers of "sub-$100 PC" and "PCs to the third-world" projects, even they (in time) should catch up.
To be sure, there will always be people who any technology leaves behind, but then there are people who still can't read and write, and we've had that technology for thousands of years. I don't think we need to worry too much unless the barrier to entry for net access becomes prohibitive for large groups of the population, and since this requires a reversal of the obsolescence process and the eradication of cyber-cafes, I think we're safe for the moment.
That said, thank you for highlighting the fact that at the moment the "online world" is hardly in the enormous majority - far too many people seem to blithely assume everyone who's worth bothering about is already online, and massively over-estimate how important they are to the overwhelming majority of humanity.
Nope. Actually, Compaq (IIRC) "innovated" there... by reverse-engineering IBM's BIOS and producing compatible hardware.
Microsoft didn't innovate a thing - they just happened to be a mainstream OS which wasn't owned by anyone with a vested interest in pushing their own hardware. Right position, right time. Zero innovation involved.
And even if you believe they deliberately put themselves in that position, innovating a new business model is hardly what real geeks would consider important innovation, right?
Indeed. It's a subtle straw-man.
"They want the barest minimum information on how our products talk to each other so they can ensure interoperability"
is a lot more reasonable-sounding than
"They want the actual source code of our products" (implied: so they can rip-off our hard-created intellectual property).
Frankly nobody I know would want to touch MS source code, apart from possibly virus/worm writers. Everyone else'd rather see the access and comms protocols and write their own implementations. Ones that, y'know, work.
Unfortunately, this distinction is lost on many non-technical types, and Microsoft and its lawyers have hardly been correcting people when they make the mistakes, since it's to their advantage to have it presented this way.
Sorry - just to be clear on this, are you reading the same articles as I am?
... said, 'Well, who would know?' I said, 'I don't want to do anything that is wrong.'... If I did something that wasn't right, you can just throw that ballot out,". She's clearly a confused old lady and was clearly not intending to do anything wrong - this is hardly a concerted attempt at election fraud.
... He filled out his vote before he fell and had a heart attack. But he had it filled out. I went ahead and mailed it in". TBH, I don't even know if this is valid. I'd assume not (since he's dead when the vote happens), but it's an easy mistake to make.
Let's just take the very first link in that (factless) Google search you gave as "evidence". There were 8 "definitely invalid" votes, in a run to decide the govenor (not the president of the country, but a regional govenor).
Of those 8:
Doris McFarland said she voted for her husband, Earl, who died Oct. 7. "I called up the elections board and said, 'Can I do it because he wanted me to vote?'... The person
1 was already known to definitely be an administrative error, and would therefore be discounted.
Mary Coffey died on Sept. 29. Her husband, Michael Coffey states that he voted by mail, but destroyed his wife's ballot when it arrived in the mail - "I don't see how she could have voted. It doesn't make sense. There has to be some kind of error that happened", he states. This could either be another adminsitrative cock-up, or the husband could be lying. Either way, it's one vote.
Bob Holmgren said yesterday that he voted on behalf of his late wife, Charlette Holmgren, who died Sept. 29. "Her vote was important to her," Holmgren said. "She was very strongly against Governor-elect Gregoire". Again, either stupid or senile and confused. Not malicious.
James M. Courneya died Aug. 7. His wife Anna Courneya (who resides at the same address as her late husband) said her husband didn't receive a ballot but she did. She voted absentee but the King County voters list doesn't register her vote, only his. Clearly an administrative (or user-)error, and no extra votes counted as a result. No effect.
Rosalie B. Simpson, 81, died of a massive heart attack Aug. 4, but voter rolls show she voted at the polls. "If a voter dies after having voted, it's still perfectly legal", [the county's elections director] said. I don't know what date the election was, but this appears to be a valid vote, erroneously flagged because the voter died soon after.
Owen Skau of Federal Way made his choices before he died last October, said his wife, Maya. "He filled it out," she said. "He always voted.
I make that 8 definitely-invalid votes, of which 2 were a known (and since corrected, where appropriate) administrative errors, 3 were stupid or confused (and admitted) mistakes, 1 apparently-valid vote accidentally flagged as invalid. That leasves only two votes as remotely suspect.
Frankly, if that's the best a vote-rigging Democrat candidate can do to sway an election, he's too half-arsed to vote into office.
Are you seriously suggesting that 8 suspect votes in a regional election compares to tens of thousands knowingly disenfranchised in a national election to determine the president of your entire country? That a few confused old people mailing in their partners' forms compares to massive abuse of powers by Republican party-members to sway an entire election? An investigation that shows 3/4 of the invalid votes were mistakes compares to a biased supreme court full of republican-appointed judges that stops a legal recount minutes before Gore (according to later data-analysis and unofficial recounts) publically takes the lead in the polls?
Jesus. Politicking aside, the sheer bias in the way you present this kind of stuff is mind-boggling. You guys just amaze me.
You're right in much of what you say, but:
1) "Invasive" wasn't referring to the adverts, but to Google's public habit of hoovering up every byte of data about you they can. Google Adwords/Adsense adverts are the only kind of advertising that I don't mind seeing.
2) You don't tackle the arrogance/privacy invasion angle, and this is what the overwhelming majority of people who dislike Google dislike about them. I don't dislike them, but I'm finding it increasingly hard to trust them, too.
Google are too clever to miss the fact that people don't like to be watched, but they've convinced themselves "it's alright if it's us doing it". This is wrong, and something they should address (don't require the Google cookie where it isn't necessary, allow Google Talk to use the s2s part of the jabber protocol, be more transparent about what they do with your data, etc).
Kudos to them for offering a free service like this, but they should be aware that they're in grave danger of losing all the goodwill and trust they've accumulated, by (stupidly) acting in a way that calls their motives into question.
But you're missing the point - if you don't retain some basic orbital capability, other nations might get manufacturing resources and defenceless spy-satellites into orbit before Bush can weaponise the entire orbital region and ensure US military supremacy in space. By the time you finally build the space elevator you might eventually reach orbit only to be confonted by China, or Eupore, or even "teh terrorists!!!!11!!1!one!".
Frankly, given the US is the only one making any moves at all in the direction of militarising space, I think having the US space program grounded for the next 20-50 years would be a great thing, especially if it was subsequently followed by cheap-to-the-point-of-negligibile access to space.
That said, you do still need a reliable, efficient way of getting up there to build the elevator. Every design I've ever seen relies on being able to get into orbit the hard way, then dropping the ribbon down from orbit to the ground.
Getting men on the moon is nothing but empty Bush cock-waving (now there's a weird concept), but there are good reasons to retain at least the ability to get into orbit - it's a prerequisite of building an elevator.
Granted, it's voluntary right now, but it's only going to get more pervasive as computing and the web become the primary medium of more and more of our culture. We've got web pages already, and with podcasts and RSS/bittorrent it's starting to take over radio, too. I already know people who don't watch any TV or go to the cinema, but download films and programs and watch them on their PCs. I know even more people who don't buy newspapers, but instead browse the BBC, CNN and/or Al Jazeera.
It's also interesting that (empirically demonstrated by the number of people shouting the OP down), most people don't perceive it as a problem. Something destructive to society can be voluntary all you like, but if the overwhelming majority of people don't notice or care, it doesn't matter - it's just as dangerous as if it were mandatory.
People (overwhelmingly) are lazy, and don't like to have their assumptions questioned - witness the success of Fox news, and ridiculously biased tabloid newspapers with astronomical readerships. Witness pundits and celebrities like Rush Limbaugh and his "loony left" equivalents - they sometimes barely bear any relationship to reality at all, and yet people listen, and believe what they're told.
Selective and preference-based news gathering allows us to only read what we want to hear, but they work below the threshold of conscious attention. Since all we see and hear confirms our existing prejudices, we start to define our own reality, and start to lose common ground with people with differing opinions. This is part of the root of the so-called "culture war" between the American Right and Left at the moment, and is demonstrated to great effect by a number of prominent political figures. It leads to a general breakdown of empathy with any and all opposing groups, and allows us to reject tolerance and understanding and retreat to a barbaric closed-minded tribal mindset - something our entire social evolution has (rightly) been moving us away from.
A culture is nothing but common ground agreed between all members of the culture. If everyone can define their own reality, political, economic, and philosophical (even perceived "factual"?) differences become overwhelming. This is tolerable when people live thousands of miles away form each other in differing countries. It's a lot harder to deal with when they're living next door.
But is this a good thing?
Generally, within-group (band, group of friends, political party, subculture, whatever) disagreements/debates tend to be much more diplomatic than between-group ones.
Take any example:
Politics. Sure the Left and Right in the US hate each other, but in the face of "outsiders" (9/11, for example) they band together against the external threat.
Friends. You might disagree with a friend over something, but the second he's threatened by an outsider (eg, started on by someone you don't know in a club), most people will at least stand behind him and back him up.
Subcultures. Goths can be (disclaimer: I have many Goth friends who aren't) notoriously whiny and bitchy, but when they're sat in a pub bitching at each other and a punk/metaller/raver walks in, watch them forget their differences and close ranks against the intruder.
Basically, people "within our group" are for the most part within our monkeysphere. People "outside of our group" are for the most part not. Disagreements within groups tend to be limited in their intensity, or they tear the whole group apart (which no real group member wants). Conflicts between groups allow participants to demonise and dehumanise their opponents, and so have no upper limit on their intensity (Hiroshima, for example).
So do should we all walk, talk and think exactly the same? No.
Should we all strive to become part of one big group (humanity), but retain our individual differences as much as possible? I think so.
That's interesting. I'm hardly an avid environmentalist, but for argument's sake, which of these strikes you as the most arrogant:
"If global warming keeps up we could die, which is bad for the world!"
"We can do whatever the fuck we like to the planet and its biosphere, and who cares if it's ruined later - I'll be dead!"
Frankly, the planet's a lump of rock, and it doesn't give a fuck if we're alive, dead or dancing the can-can.
The world (as in, the biosphere, animals alive right now, us, the planet's current biodiversity, the evolutionary potential within every living creature) depends greatly on us not engineering an ecological collapse through shortsighted selfishness.
I think most people consider ecological collapse bad because you're basically making millions of species extinct, even long before we as a species are faced with extinction (king of the adaptable generalists, humanity). People view the world as a beautiful thing because of its intricacy and diversity, and if the alternative is a radioactive desert with three different types of cockroach frankly I see their point.
You're right, and this is always a pet peeve of mine - what's the "normal, background" level of extinction? Why get upset about individual species going extinct, when species do it all the time?
I think it's because people find it very hard to get worried that millions of species might die out, but tell them "You'll never see an Orangutan again" and they suddenly realise how serious it can be. People can't fit planetary-level problems into their monkeysphere, but never again seeing a particular cute little furry face tugs at the heartstrings and prompts them to act.
Is it misleading? Yes. Is it done for a noble purpose? Yes, I think so.
Indeed. But it's of great interest to me that this happen a billion years in the future, rather than tomorrow.
What's so hard about that to understand?
"which is why we need to engage the enemy on their own soil, rather than either not engaging them (then they will come to us), or trying to wait for them to get here (as you point out, impossible)"
We've taken it as read that you can never stop the terrorists getting through to you if they want to.
I've also shown that the barrier-to-entry for terrorism is so low you can't effectively prevent it in any kind of free society.
I suggest the US minimises its international interference, in order to reduce the terrorists' support and eventually eliminate their campaign of hate.
You suggest you need to meddle more, in the terrorists' own homelands?
While this may occupy the existing terrorists for a while (although, as the London tube/bus bombings show, not always), havent' we agreed that it's just prolonging the problem? For every terrorist you kill, you create a martyr that recruits tens or hundreds of new volunteers, especially if you kill them by invading their homeland and deposing the ruling regime rather than covert counter-terrorist actions, or police action in your country.
It's hard to get upset with a country for killing someone who was over there actively fighting them.
It's very, very easy to get upset with a country for invading your homeland, disrupting or destroying your way of life, killing lots of innocent civilians and also killing someone else who previously tried to attack them.
Terrorism isn't a universal constant. The majority of countries don't have a serious terrorist problem. Surely the US should be trying to get back to that position, rather than assuming the battle can never be won and merely making it as hard as possible for the terrosits while throwing them fresh recruits and actively prolonging the battle?
"I'm actually surprised that you would go for [sending in special forces] - surely that is the ultimate interference)"
Really? I'd have said it's actually the very minimal amount of inteference necessary to achieve your objectives.
Ideally diplomacy would win out, where you convince your opponent to change his mind (or blackmail him into it against his will). There's little bragging-rights for the "winning" country, but either way it involves very little disruption to the "losing" country or the average man-in-the-street.
Failing that, covert action merely removes the objectionable person from influence (ideally faking an accident). Again, this is nice and deniable, so there are no bragging rights, but still comparatively little disruption for the losers' way of life.
Failing that, you have invasion - you publically march straight into the country, kill a bunch of innocent civilians, and/or soldiers who have nothing to do with the decision you're objecting to, then you depose the ruling regime, optionally institute your own ideologically-friendly one. This involves massive disruption to the country, public violence/"atrocities" on both sides (but as aggressor, yours is the only important one), and practically guarantees the population of the country will hate you for killing their $FAMILYMEMBER/destroying their way of life/your incredible arrogance in telling them how to live their lives/stealing their natural resources/etc/etc/etc.
I know it's not popular these days (since it both lacks opportunities for obnoxious cock-waving and shifts the danger for a conflict from the armed forces to the politicians who actually started it), but I honestly think covert actions are more "ethical" than war. They're both Wrong, but at least with CAs you're minimising the disruption and collateral damage.
"The problem is that you believe that it is possible to not "meddle" in foreign affairs - but history shows that it is not possible. At the very least, if you don't officially meddle, there is no way to convince others that the unofficial meddling was not official. Also, given that from time to time we will be forced to meddle, we bett
Granted, but my ISP hasn't made it its public stated intention to categorise and present all the data in the world.
I used to believe that Google had the right idea (after all, more information is almost always good), but they seem to be blind or dismissive of perfectly valid privacy concerns.
They started off listening to their users (which is why, even now, www.google.com isn't a nasty Yahoo-style portal), but somewhere along the way they've come in grave danger of ignoring their users' privacy concerns, and igniting a backlash.
This level of "shut up, we know what's best" arrogance is also reminding me increasingly of Microsoft - they also started off listening to users, but at some point they decided They Knew Best, and stopped. Witness the Bill Gates quote about there being nothing they won't say or do to get people to do things their way (because "their way" and "the best way" are synonymous).
Like it or not, Google are now very powerful, and have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. People don't mind a webmail company hypothetically being able to read your mail. They (perhaps) don't mind a search engine linking every search you do to your cookie. They don't mind their ISP being able (in theory) to track their browsing habits.
However, when one company can do all of this, can tie it back to you, personally, refuses to respect users' privacy and has publically shown it likes to gather every scrap of information it can and use it for advertising purposes... well, suddenly a lot of people have a problem.
Don't get me wrong - I firmly believe Google have honourable intentions, and I'm not expecting to get junk-mail through my letterbox because I used GMail and happened to log onto a Google Access hotspot in the same week. However, despite their noble intentions they display incredibly (and unnecessarily) invasive behaviour, and seem to have no respect at all for user concerns or privacy. At the very least, they can't even be bothered to address these concerns and demonstrate they aren't stepping out of line.
While I still think they're trying to hold fast to "Don't Be Evil", arrogantly thinking you know better than the very legitimate concerns of your users is the first step on the way.