The American revolution only succeeded because the French were willing to commit troops and materiel to the American cause.
A more comparable scenario is the American Civil War, where the North (through diplomacy and naval blockades) was able to cut off the South from foreign aid, and thereby grind down Southern resistance by virtue of its superior logistical network.
If a similar rebellion were to happen today, I'd bet something similar would occur - the federal government would quickly isolate and blockade the breakaway areas, and then use its superior logistical network to grind down opposition.
Trust me, if you had the military start to invade Small Town USA, you'd probably have plenty of people in the surrounding area exercising their right to keep and bear arms.
And, by that point, it'd be too late anyway. No matter how many guns you've got, the US military has more, not to mention the training and tactics to deploy them effectively. The best you'd be able to hope for is a Iraq style guerrilla insurgency, but even that wouldn't work, since the troops you're fighting against would be from a similar cultural background as you.
So the point remains, what the hell's the point of stockpiling guns against the government?
Simply put, you can't. Look, this sort of scheme isn't for places like Burma, or North Korea, or Zimbabwe. Yes, in those places people don't have basic rights of speech, assembly, or privacy, and so any sort of communication mechanism is only likely to put its possessor in greater danger. However, there are places where this might work. Countries that are nominally democracies, but still have significant problems with corruption because the villagers are completely cut off from the outside world could be helped by this.
In particular, I'm thinking of countries like India and Thailand, where poverty and hunger are significant problems not because of autocracy, but because of apathy. In such a situation, it might be a good thing to give the people at the bottom of the ladder the tools and means to publicize their plight and work collectively to find solutions.
You want to know how to help out the shitholes of the world? Drop in a few special ops teams and blow off a few skulls. Seriously. Because these places WILL NOT CHANGE without cutting out the cancer that is the thugocracy running the place. Current ruler dies? Nothing changes - a crony steps in. And on and on. You want to change and better the lives of the people? It'll take a few 12.7mm sniper rounds, not dollars and flour (or flowers).
Great theory. Too bad that such a policy has never really worked in reality. Time and again, when the US has intervened (either to prop up or take down) in another country's affairs, it has backfired and resulted in even worse outcomes.
If the Generals have enough time to be micromanaging individual operations...
Maybe there are too many Generals?
Or perhaps the ones that are there are incompetent. After all, you've still got the possibility that these generals are ignoring wider aspects of their in favor or micromanaging the bits that they consider interesting.
First of all, how many of these drones are autonomous? Second, of the drones that are autonomous, how many are designed to return fire when fired upon?
Despite the military's interest in drone technology, they're still very wary about giving non-human piloted craft the ability to launch attacks. For a good example, look at the new Hellfire armed Predator drones. You'll note that it was the CIA that piloted the concept, not the military.
Except that calling "invading Irak" protecting the US country is a *very big stretch*.
Except that its not the individual soldiers role to question that objective. The question of invading Iraq is a political question that needs to be handled by our civilian politicians. And, while you may think its a shame that the military didn't object more strongly, I personally think its a good thing. I'd much rather live in a state where the civilians control the military, rather than vice versa.
That's unfortunate, but I don't see why it matters. If you're willing to sign over your privacy for internet access, then your privacy isn't that important to you.
Or, y'know, some of us aren't interested in drawing false dichotomies between privacy and Internet access.
Congress isn't the right place to settle your local bullshit that 99.9% of the country doesn't care about.
Except for precedence. If Charter gets away with this kind of shit, then there's nothing stopping Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, et. al. from implementing the same system. We need a national precedent (in the form of a court ruling or legislation) set early on in this, and Congress is a perfectly valid place to pursue that.
I believe it was Arab oil money and Afghan opiate money that funded AlQuida and the Taliban government of Afghanistan.
And how's that different from government money? The Taliban virtually controlled all opiate production in Afghanistan and over 90% of Gulf oil reserves are controlled by state-owned oil companies.
The funders don't only get to pay the.5M$ that were the most successful. The total cost to our 'friends' in the flowing robes was much higher. What was the cost to the Arab world to run AlQuida for 10 years?
Virtually nothing. Remember, the seed money for Al Qaeda came from the CIA, who funded a vast variety of mujahadeen groups in the '80s, when our top concern was defeating the Soviets.
Opium will no doubt continue to be a revenue producer basically forever. We just need to keep it in the hands of pragmatic criminals willing to give the CIA its customary cut.
The problem with that approach is that those criminals have a troubling tendency to lose control to forces intensely hostile to the USA.
But it's a much better solution than one-party control or partisan deadlock, which is where we are now.
Well one party control, perhaps. However, I do plan on voting a "deadlock" ticket this fall. Fact is, the vast majority of introduced legislation sucks, and anything we do to cause more debate can only be a good thing.
Perhaps in the US or Europe, but certainly not in the third world. I'll give you an example. My grandfather is a civil engineer in India. When he went off to school in Australia, he did so by ship, despite coming from a middle class family with a substantial amount of savings. Fact is, flying was extremely expensive before the '80s/'90s, and, unless you had significant savings or a corporate sponsor, you didn't fly unless it was an emergency.
Competition with something that's free does not erase the fact that their bundling practices are anti-competitive, and therefore illegal.
Indeed, one of the reasons Linux on the desktop does not have a greater presences is that Microsoft threatened to revoke volume discounts for resellers that also bundle Linux.
Good point. Perfect example: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a budget of billions of dollars, easily exceeding the budget of many private corporations.
Moreover, WP is not a collection of static pages, if you're logged in at least, every pages is dynamically generated, and every page's history is updated within a few seconds.
That's not how it works. If you're just browsing Wikipedia, you're just looking at a collection of static pages that were generated earlier and cached. Only when you actually edit the page and save it is the page updated.
If Wikipedia had to freshly create every page for every user, even computational power on the order possessed by Google wouldn't be up to the task.
I take it that "Works great because it's not "Web 2.0" means that its fast and dynamic, whereas Web 2.0 generally means slow and dynamic.
Web 2.0 is a shorthand version of saying "dynamic pages served using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX)". Now, if you reread the parent, you'll see that he says:
Most of Wikipedia is a collection of static [emphasis mine] pages. Most users of Wikipedia are just reading the latest version of an article... So all Wikipedia has to do for them is serve a static page.
In other words, the parent is saying that Wikipedia is effective because avoids any sort of dynamism for the majority of use cases. Heck, even article editing isn't dynamic on Wikipedia. When you click the edit link, you're taken to a separate page which has a prepopulated form with the wikitext of the article. The only bit of dynamic content on Wikipedia I can remember is the new search box, which uses a bit of AJAX to generate autocomplete possibilities.
To be quite honest, I'd say that the Slashdot surge is probably a drop in the bucket as far as Wikipedia is concerned. I mean, they're the top result for loads of Google queries, and plenty of people go straight to Wikipedia when they need to look something up.
But they also do it without having to pay salaries, co location fees, or bandwidth costs...
Well, as far as salaries go, yeah, they don't have to pay for a full team of developers and administrators for the business, but they do need to pay people to go and check on the servers, replace faulty hardware, etc. Also, as far a co-location costs go, I'd say that running your own data center (i.e. providing your own electricity, cooling, backup power supplies, etc.) can't be cheap either.
Why restrict it to junk food? Why not have all food be taxed like this? After all, if you start taxing junk food, won't obese people just move on to eating more non-junk food, niftily side-stepping the tax?
How so? nVidia drivers are useless if I don't have an nVidia card. I'm not paying nVidia for their drivers, I'm paying them for their graphics cards.
They have as many people working on the drivers as they do the hardware.
And, by releasing code to the community, they could have even more people working on their drivers, perhaps adding features and conveniences that the original engineers had not thought of.
They gain no benifit from releasing the code.
On the other hand, they could benefit tremendously. nVidia's binary drivers already have a fairly good reputation on Linux. Open source drivers would only enhance that reputation, further entrenching nVidia's dominance in the growing open source market. Also, as people add features to the open source driver, the driver would become a product in its own right, and would become a justification for buying the card (much like what happened with the Netgear WRT54g).
The issue isn't how Microsoft got its monopoly, its what Microsoft did afterward. Namely, their anti-competitive actions in the web browser market got them into trouble, not their possession of a monopoly.
Microsoft should have every right to push any software they see fit, whether or not its inducing a monopoly.
Now that's something that I can't agree with. That's the sort of justification Ma' Bell used when restricting the types of phones that one could use.
Slashdot Mirror
The American revolution only succeeded because the French were willing to commit troops and materiel to the American cause.
A more comparable scenario is the American Civil War, where the North (through diplomacy and naval blockades) was able to cut off the South from foreign aid, and thereby grind down Southern resistance by virtue of its superior logistical network.
If a similar rebellion were to happen today, I'd bet something similar would occur - the federal government would quickly isolate and blockade the breakaway areas, and then use its superior logistical network to grind down opposition.
And, by that point, it'd be too late anyway. No matter how many guns you've got, the US military has more, not to mention the training and tactics to deploy them effectively. The best you'd be able to hope for is a Iraq style guerrilla insurgency, but even that wouldn't work, since the troops you're fighting against would be from a similar cultural background as you.
So the point remains, what the hell's the point of stockpiling guns against the government?
Simply put, you can't. Look, this sort of scheme isn't for places like Burma, or North Korea, or Zimbabwe. Yes, in those places people don't have basic rights of speech, assembly, or privacy, and so any sort of communication mechanism is only likely to put its possessor in greater danger. However, there are places where this might work. Countries that are nominally democracies, but still have significant problems with corruption because the villagers are completely cut off from the outside world could be helped by this.
In particular, I'm thinking of countries like India and Thailand, where poverty and hunger are significant problems not because of autocracy, but because of apathy. In such a situation, it might be a good thing to give the people at the bottom of the ladder the tools and means to publicize their plight and work collectively to find solutions.
Great theory. Too bad that such a policy has never really worked in reality. Time and again, when the US has intervened (either to prop up or take down) in another country's affairs, it has backfired and resulted in even worse outcomes.
Maybe if you play Protoss, but certainly not if you play Zerg.
Or perhaps the ones that are there are incompetent. After all, you've still got the possibility that these generals are ignoring wider aspects of their in favor or micromanaging the bits that they consider interesting.
First of all, how many of these drones are autonomous? Second, of the drones that are autonomous, how many are designed to return fire when fired upon?
Despite the military's interest in drone technology, they're still very wary about giving non-human piloted craft the ability to launch attacks. For a good example, look at the new Hellfire armed Predator drones. You'll note that it was the CIA that piloted the concept, not the military.
Except that its not the individual soldiers role to question that objective. The question of invading Iraq is a political question that needs to be handled by our civilian politicians. And, while you may think its a shame that the military didn't object more strongly, I personally think its a good thing. I'd much rather live in a state where the civilians control the military, rather than vice versa.
Or, y'know, some of us aren't interested in drawing false dichotomies between privacy and Internet access.
Congress isn't the right place to settle your local bullshit that 99.9% of the country doesn't care about.Except for precedence. If Charter gets away with this kind of shit, then there's nothing stopping Comcast, Time Warner, Cox, et. al. from implementing the same system. We need a national precedent (in the form of a court ruling or legislation) set early on in this, and Congress is a perfectly valid place to pursue that.
We're talking about "back in the day", as in before 1970.
And how's that different from government money? The Taliban virtually controlled all opiate production in Afghanistan and over 90% of Gulf oil reserves are controlled by state-owned oil companies.
The funders don't only get to pay theVirtually nothing. Remember, the seed money for Al Qaeda came from the CIA, who funded a vast variety of mujahadeen groups in the '80s, when our top concern was defeating the Soviets.
Opium will no doubt continue to be a revenue producer basically forever. We just need to keep it in the hands of pragmatic criminals willing to give the CIA its customary cut.The problem with that approach is that those criminals have a troubling tendency to lose control to forces intensely hostile to the USA.
Well one party control, perhaps. However, I do plan on voting a "deadlock" ticket this fall. Fact is, the vast majority of introduced legislation sucks, and anything we do to cause more debate can only be a good thing.
Perhaps in the US or Europe, but certainly not in the third world. I'll give you an example. My grandfather is a civil engineer in India. When he went off to school in Australia, he did so by ship, despite coming from a middle class family with a substantial amount of savings. Fact is, flying was extremely expensive before the '80s/'90s, and, unless you had significant savings or a corporate sponsor, you didn't fly unless it was an emergency.
It wasn't a court case. From the description at the top, this was testimony given before a Congressional committee.
Competition with something that's free does not erase the fact that their bundling practices are anti-competitive, and therefore illegal.
Indeed, one of the reasons Linux on the desktop does not have a greater presences is that Microsoft threatened to revoke volume discounts for resellers that also bundle Linux.
Good point. Perfect example: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has a budget of billions of dollars, easily exceeding the budget of many private corporations.
That's not how it works. If you're just browsing Wikipedia, you're just looking at a collection of static pages that were generated earlier and cached. Only when you actually edit the page and save it is the page updated.
If Wikipedia had to freshly create every page for every user, even computational power on the order possessed by Google wouldn't be up to the task.
Web 2.0 is a shorthand version of saying "dynamic pages served using Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX)". Now, if you reread the parent, you'll see that he says:
Most of Wikipedia is a collection of static [emphasis mine] pages. Most users of Wikipedia are just reading the latest version of an article... So all Wikipedia has to do for them is serve a static page.In other words, the parent is saying that Wikipedia is effective because avoids any sort of dynamism for the majority of use cases. Heck, even article editing isn't dynamic on Wikipedia. When you click the edit link, you're taken to a separate page which has a prepopulated form with the wikitext of the article. The only bit of dynamic content on Wikipedia I can remember is the new search box, which uses a bit of AJAX to generate autocomplete possibilities.
To be quite honest, I'd say that the Slashdot surge is probably a drop in the bucket as far as Wikipedia is concerned. I mean, they're the top result for loads of Google queries, and plenty of people go straight to Wikipedia when they need to look something up.
Well, as far as salaries go, yeah, they don't have to pay for a full team of developers and administrators for the business, but they do need to pay people to go and check on the servers, replace faulty hardware, etc. Also, as far a co-location costs go, I'd say that running your own data center (i.e. providing your own electricity, cooling, backup power supplies, etc.) can't be cheap either.
Why restrict it to junk food? Why not have all food be taxed like this? After all, if you start taxing junk food, won't obese people just move on to eating more non-junk food, niftily side-stepping the tax?
The issue with cigarettes is that, unlike junk food, they affect those around you as well (via secondhand smoke).
How so? nVidia drivers are useless if I don't have an nVidia card. I'm not paying nVidia for their drivers, I'm paying them for their graphics cards.
They have as many people working on the drivers as they do the hardware.And, by releasing code to the community, they could have even more people working on their drivers, perhaps adding features and conveniences that the original engineers had not thought of.
They gain no benifit from releasing the code.On the other hand, they could benefit tremendously. nVidia's binary drivers already have a fairly good reputation on Linux. Open source drivers would only enhance that reputation, further entrenching nVidia's dominance in the growing open source market. Also, as people add features to the open source driver, the driver would become a product in its own right, and would become a justification for buying the card (much like what happened with the Netgear WRT54g).
Doubt it, and here's why. In the eleventh paragraph, he mentions this:
JavaScript had Netscape, Sun, and Microsoft (among others).This, of course, means that JavaScript is already a big language in his eyes, therefore, it cannot be the next big language.
The issue isn't how Microsoft got its monopoly, its what Microsoft did afterward. Namely, their anti-competitive actions in the web browser market got them into trouble, not their possession of a monopoly.
Microsoft should have every right to push any software they see fit, whether or not its inducing a monopoly.Now that's something that I can't agree with. That's the sort of justification Ma' Bell used when restricting the types of phones that one could use.