Out of idle curiosity what Windows-oriented software can't your parents do without? Is it Intuit's QuickBooks? (There's a version sold for the Mac but it's a couple of generations behind the Windows versions?)
According to this article from long ago in Businessweek, BeOS would have been the foundation of the modern Apple OS had Gassee simply not wildly overplayed his hand. According to the article, Gassee's minimum asking price was rumored to be around a 200 million dollar stock deal. Considering that BeOS's assets were eventually sold for about 11 million, Gassee overvalued his property by about a factor of 20. Furthermore Gassee missed out on the opportunity to be Apple's savior instead of having the honor go to Jobs.
That VHS was the technologically inferior choice that consumers were "tricked" into purchasing is simply an urban myth that has been exposed by those examining the role of pornography in encouraging growth and adoption of new media. VHS won because its length was more convenient for the renting of pornographic movies versus Betamax's initial targetting of time-shifting. VHS served a real need for people to be able to more conveniently view pornography in the privacy of their home.
Open your mind and you'll see that the triumph of VHS was the triumph of freedom versus the corporate vision of Betamax, a decision the consumers wisely made. The consumers made the right decision.
For years the promotional literature and reviews for Dragon Naturally Speaking have mentioned the MouseGrid technology which was "patent-pending". The idea behind MouseGrid is precisely the basis for IC2D--dividing up a region into 3 x 3 squares, homing in by subdividing each subregion into 3 x 3 squares, etc; furthermore, Dragon Naturally Speaking uses voice commands to select these regions. I have seen no mention of Dragon Naturally Speaking on the IC2D web site. Shouldn't a researcher at least acknowledge prior work?
I'm beginning to think that the Bakers are the only true innovators in natural language processing.
DARPA has been funding in one way or another the premiere researchers in speech recognition, Dr. James and Dr. Janet Baker. Perhaps DARPA should have shown a little more foresight before the Bakers were permitted to sell off Dragon Systems to the Belgian corporation Lernout & Hauspie, which subsequently collapsed in bankruptcy amid fraud allegations, auctioning off assets such as Dragon Systems to ScanSoft, a Xerox spinoff.
If DARPA doesn't in the name of national security (look at the languages that are the candidates for the initial Babylon competitors) simply override what noncompete clauses, patents, etc. that would keep the Bakers from working full-time on this project then they have learned nothing from almost decades of the Bakers' kicking the ass of the entire speech recognition community with their superior statistical approach. Unfortunately I suspect that various government regulations would not permit DARPA to pay a fair market value for the Bakers' services. This to me illustrates how far the United States has fallen from any capacity to mobilize the scientific and engineering community for modern equivalents to the Manhattan Project, except for medical technology.
I hope that the same people who mocked the doctrine of "original intent", particularly with regards to the Second Amendment, aren't the ones promoting the Supreme Court's striking down copyright extension, an interpretation that relies precisely on the philosophy of ascertaining the intent of the framemakers of the Constitution. The "facts on the ground" are that the elected representatives of the people of the United States, both Congress and the President, have repeatedly within the past few decades agreed to extend copyright without any manifestation of widespread public protest. The opponents of copyright extension need to come up with something a little more substantial than an opinion that copyright extension damages the "public good".
I suspect that of the groups and people submitting amicus briefs about the only ones with "clean hands" are Phyllis Schlafly and the Eagle Forum and Milton Friedman. Love them or hate them, people such as Phyllis Schlafly and Milton Friedman at least have consistency in their viewpoints, a true worldview and not opinions that bend with each passing intellectual fad.
Phyllis Schlafly and Milton Friedman can argue with clear conscience that they have always been in the fight to limit the role of the federal government over the lives of the people, regardless of the issues. In contrast all of the NIMBY environmentalists and gun control advocates are merely carpetbaggers, passengers of convenience who the moment the issue is gone will revert to readvocating increased expansion of governmental authority and regulation. In essence the left-wing supporters of the movement to strike down the opinion of the elected representatives of the people are merely seeking to steal property for their own purposes, because they have no intellectual foundation for their critique of the current system.
If the Constitution is merely a piece of paper to be reinterpreted as each generation sees fit, why shouldn't eternal copyright extension be a legitimate interpretation of this generation? If it is just as legitimate to question the applicability of the Second Amendment to today's society, why isn't it legitimate to question whether an 18th century understanding of copyright is not applicable to today's reality of mass media corporations continuously producing new works in new formats that the people have no problem paying for without visible public protest? See what happens once you decide to jettison the entire opinion of the past for the sake of expediency, it might just come back to bite you.
A poster in a previous story mentioned that at Purdue the cost to students of any Microsoft product was only $5 USD. At many colleges students are able to get say MS Office XP at a cost far cheaper than Sun's StarOffice 6.0.
But I find it ironic that the same people who claim that Microsoft is deliberately encouraging illegal copying are the ones decrying when Microsoft makes any effort to enforce their copyright. These people think nothing of constantly arguing that Microsoft's product activation for consumer products is the tool of the devil, and these were the same people who argued that Intel should not automatically enable a processor identification number.
The proper cost of software is not the cost to replicate the product once made, for that completely discounts any research and development used to create and maintain the product. The true cost is some fraction of the utility the software will provide to the customer. $600 USD is about the point at which software's utility makes it a reasonable value for a business to purchase for an employee. If anything perhaps Adobe is underpricing Photoshop.
To tie this to a previous story today, a commercial user would certainly not be able to purchase a single license for Mathematica for $100. The proper price because of the utility to the customer is more than 10 times that. On the other hand Wolfram Research provides a sharp discount for a student version of Mathematica. Idiots who claim that software should be priced at the marginal cost of making one more CD need to explain how one is supposed to support a company that can create a product such as Mathematica that is 1000 times superior to anything that free software offers.
Similar conditions apply to software that services niches such as providing accessibility for the disabled. Such software easily runs $600 and over, because that's the value to the customer. Even if there were a software patent-free world I see little chance that free software could ever come up with an equivalent to Dragon Naturally Speaking Professional or Mathematica. The reason is that an army of coders, no matter how many, can never match the expertise of top professionals such as Drs. James and Janet Baker who routinely defeated the competition at DARPA contests of voice recognition software or of Dr. Stephen Wolfram.
$600 USD priced software is hardly the bane of the industry. A product that truly meets a desperate need in an innovative way has to be priced at least that in order to develop and continuously refine the technology. Countries whose attention to software theft is lax are not where these breakthrough technologies are being developed, and software developers from those countries cannot flee to the US fast enough.
Alan Cox admits he just can't make an economic argument to Nvidia why they should open source their drivers. He tries to save the situation by doing some hand-waving about patents and IP but eventually has to acknowledge that open-sourcing the drivers would help Nvidia's competitors.
Let's be blunt, if Nvidia were to open source their drivers even Alan Cox is admitting that say ATI could act as a parasite on Nvidia's IP. And that would simply be wrong. Nvidia has invested in a unified driver model where Linux support is almost on par with Windows support whereas ATI has chosen to not invest in skilled driver writers. It is incredible that card generation after card generation the universal complaint about ATI is always about the drivers, the company is based in Canada where presumably with any sort of effort they could hire extraordinary programmers to write these drivers, yet ATI management chooses this area to skimp on spending money.
Why should a company that is too cheap to hire sufficiently skilled programmers be given a free ride on Nvidia's investments?
Ironically enough it's the members of the MPAA who are using science and engineering to advance while the computer industry stagnates and refuses to pay any attention to consumers except for video games. And the video games industry is more a product of Japanese society--Americans are just resellers.
The motion picture industry in the past decade has accomplished the switch to having special effects be the real stars of movies. This results in a more uniform and dependable product where the consumer is guaranteed to at least have some payoff. The mass media also embraces scientific marketting where demographic segments are separately marketted to based on gender, age, etc. The American computer industry on the other hand has disinvested from consumer technology except for Apple. Resellers such as HP/Compaq and Dell add absolutely nothing of importance to their products. If there are cheaper and more powerful devices it is due only to the entrepreneurial hustle of Taiwanese, Koreans, and Japanese, not Americans. The basic PC experience for users of all categories remains a hellish nightmare of incompatibilities, nonfunctionality, and blatant lies.
The most elementary advances in the computer industry are made impossible by the industry's stubborn denial of mistakes and a refusal to adopt to technology even decades old. As a small example, the original programmers of C developed the language and Unix on a machine whose capabilities are laughable compared to modern machines. The operating system cut back on features that had been planned for the failed Multics project. In such a restricted environment decisions such as deliberately forgetting the true length of arrays were required just to have an operational system. There is no such excuse today, yet the computer industry persists in trying to sell to consumers knowingly defective products which are compromised by simple buffer overflows. The computer industry thinks its just fine that consumers should have to constantly try and engage in a futile endless quest of "upgrading" to patch security holes that would not exist if a proper computer language had been used to write the base system.
It is the computer industry that in recent years has suffered a complete collapse in revenue and valuation. It is the American computer industry that thinks marketting to consumers rectangular beige or black boxes with no style or gender customization is just fine while in Japan there is no reticence to market electronic devices directly to females.
The only reason the American computer industry didn't have a day of reckoning sooner was the incestuous selling between corporations for IT spending, with the last hurrah the bubble caused by Y2K sales. But that opportunity is now gone and the computer industry is openly admitting it has no new ideas. The motion picture industry for the most part spends the money to develop new movies that for a few hours can satisfy the dreams of its customers. The computer industry can't even make a reliable PC. The motion picture industry eventually embraced DVDs and has changed the economics of the industry so that even apparent flops eventually earn more money than was spent to produce them. The PC industry's idea of progress is removing serial ports, parallel ports, and floppy drives because it can't figure out how to otherwise manage the pathetically small number of IRQs. The American PC industry is quickly heading towards Dell being the only reseller to consumers and businesses while Apple fills a niche upper-class market. Meanwhile the motion picture industry keeps on churning out monster hits such as Spider Man and continuations of franchises such as Star Wars and The Matrix, not to mention potential new franchises in Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. So who are the dinosaurs and who are dying? It's not the motion picture industry.
In all probability your laptop already came with some version of Windows which could play the DVDs. It was your choice to wipe it off and replace it with an OS that was incapable of using the hardware. Would it have killed you to have kept Windows in a dual-boot system when you already paid for it in the Windows tax? I read Linux zealots using this logic all the time against FreeBSD exhilarating that the GPL is keeping some driver support from FreeBSD.
I just don't get the sheer obstinancy of some people who seem to think that using computers should be equivalent to Homer Simpson's repeatedly hitting his head against a brick wall. If using Microsoft's products kills you so much why didn't you buy a Mac, a machine that can play DVDs just fine AND whose OS is derived from Unix.
Neither 2600 nor the EFF have skin in this game
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2600 Appeal Rejected
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This case is being lost because the movement headed by the EFF simply does not have the incentive to win it. The American judicial system did not become conservative just yesterday, it has always been so. Just in fairly recent American history the African Americans after centuries of reverses in the legal system were able to persuade the Supreme Court to grant relief. In this case the African Americans simply were interested in winning above all. So they did everything they could to put forward good upstanding representatives such as Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to represent the face of the movement.
In contrast let's face it, neither 2600 nor EFF are threatened with nonexistence should they lose this case. In fact they are benefitting. Every time the EFF loses a case the movement argues that the solution is to give them more money, this despite a rather suspicious history of the EFF actually being on the wrong side such as the first head of ICAAN being former head of the EFF Esther Dyson. I doubt that 2600 is hurting either from having their name prominently displayed on the Internet news outlets every few weeks.
In this era of dotcom meltdown and competition is it so unlikely that without this controversy 2600 would be threatened with going out of business? What information exactly does 2600 have that's exclusive to them or is even that interesting anymore?
In contrast to the naysayers I think it's pretty clear that the Supreme Court takes seriously the First Amendment, and that is the ONLY reason 2600 even has a chance of getting them to review the case. The Supreme Court has for example repeatedly struck down the attempts by the Federal Government to regulate obscenity on the Internet. The Supreme Court is serious about its duties, too bad 2600 is not.
GNUArt misses the point
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Creative Commons
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The only thing GNUArt shares with what made GNU or Linux software successful is the "GNU" in the name. Totally lost is any concept of modularly separating out the pieces so that one can make works using the material yet not being derived works under copyright law. Two market leaders of free software are the Linux kernel and the gcc compiler. Note that the point of a kernel is a separation between the kernel and userland. A person or company can make a product that invokes only the Linux system calls and license this product under any terms. Similarly usage of the gcc compiler does not give RMS any say over the licensing terms of the resulting binary. In fact the Linux kernel's owners even permit distribution of proprietary binary drivers that work with the kernel. Ironically it was the overly restrictive license of Minux that caused Linus Torvalds to create Linux in the first place. Part of the genius of Linus is that he initiated a system where he simply doesn't have to care what people bundle his kernel with in their distributions, what applications they use with the kernel, or how much money they make doing so without sharing one penny with him.
The control of the mass media corporations may be disburbing, but to assert that the solution is to create a "commons" where the only recompense is recognition is in contradiction to the entire history of Western art. The craftsman deserves to be paid for his work.
Sacrificing RAM for a Radeon 8500 and WinXP Pro?
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Mass Motherboard Review
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
I followed the links from a reply that purported to be from the author (at the moment the AnandTech forum appears to be/.ed.) The author's home machine has 256MB of RAM, a ATI Radeon 8500 retail, and Windows XP Pro. I refuse to trust anything said about computers from a person who has this setup. There's nothing wrong about the individual pieces, it's the tradeoff in the aggregation that bothers me. How can someone who claims to have advanced knowledge of motherboards decide to go with only 256MB of RAM while blowing money on the latest generation of video card? Never, ever scrimp on RAM. The opinion of someone who doesn't know this as a first principle should not be trusted.
From what I vaguely recall all Microsoft EULAs for Windows products already have clauses restricting their use to properly licensed copies of Windows. This also applies to their DLLs. We'll just have to see whether Microsoft can or will be able to strictly enforce this.
Microsoft in 5 years has been completely overrun in the CS departments not by Linux but by Java. Java has a relatively simple syntax compared to C or C++, is comprehensive in its libraries, is object-oriented, and runs on almost every operating environment a student might have. It is the perfect programming language for quite a bit of the foundational computer science courses.
Thanks to the incredible blunder of licensing the source code from Sun, Microsoft can never make a compatible version of Java 1.2 or higher. I predict that C# will never be able to overcome Java's head start as far as being the common programming language for CS. Java will dominate the CS curriculum for at least two decades--possibly forever.
It is not Linux that will contain MS's expansion to the enterprise, it is Java. Java is the language of interconnection, and it is interconnection that is the major computer project of our time. Sun's firm grip on its copyrights and trademarks for Java are a far more effective barrier against Microsoft than any antitrust judgment could have been. It is Java that has united everyone from Oracle to IBM to Sun against Microsoft. The line has been held. With everyone against them I see Microsoft making little further headway despite.Net.
TV shows should be produced by formula
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The Rise of CSI
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· Score: 2
CSI should hardly shatter any "conventional wisdom". TV shows should be marketable in one sentence formulas. CSI started on Fridays, and similar to the X-Files which also started its life on that day of the week, the formula was "bad and gory things happen to people, and there's a hot female costar".
Fox tried to follow up the success of The X-Files with Millenium which persisted for a few seasons only because the network wanted to remain on good terms with Chris Carter. Millenium also tried to follow the niche of a gory TV series set in the present time with something resembling police work to investigate crimes. Why didn't it have the success of CSI--because Fox let Carter get away with not following the formula used in The X-Files. For The X-Files Carter carefully chose the young and attractive Gillian Anderson and elevated her role to be equal to Duchovney's. Carter was not forced to do this either for Millenium or for Harsh Realm. In the past decade US television SF has swung decisively towards recognizing the importance of having hot young females as the stars, similar to how the Winter Olympics is really about figure skating and the Summer Olympics are about gynmastics, and similar to the last successful TV Western set in the past being Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman. Note that James Cameron created for Fox Dark Angel which follows Cameron's typical pattern of having a strong female character as the star. Unfortunately Fox failed to follow the formula again--almost no network SF other than the Star Trek franchise can build a large audience if the show is set in the future. At least Voyager management made the correct decision of introducing the 7 of 9 character in a skintight catsuit to save the show.
Almost all bombs can be explained by not following the formula. CBS's The Fugitive failed because CBS failed to follow the formula that the lead character should have some sort of superhero edge. The loner who comes to town and fixes things decades ago rapidly morphed in being a superhero or angel, not an ordinary guy. It would have been even better had the star been made female with martial arts ability.
It seems to me strcpy() was meant to be an innate part of C from the start? If you don't care about bounds checking, one of the fundamental C idioms taught in K&R is something like:
while (*s++ = *t++){... }
This idiom is so seductively terse that I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of the motivations behind what became C's syntax, similar to the influence that my Dog Spot has had in modern Perl. In contrast I believe a language such as say Java would frown on having an assignment being used as the conditional, especially in a syntax where equality is often expressed by ==.
Unix and C were coded as a reaction to the collapse of the Multics project, initially on quite underpowered machines. Terseness was good, sometimes essential to get things running on limited resources. And the initial environment inside a controlled corporate culture was a lot more secure than having to deal with the Internet. I suspect strcpy() was hardly an unfortunate accident, it was by design.
Stephen King will be known as the Charles Dickens of our time. His works will be read for at least two generations. King will live on because he isn't obsessed with the technicalities of the genres he writes in unlike many of the SF writers whose works are starting to look rather dated. King puts his efforts into crafting characters that appeal psychologically to his audience as having truth beyond the genre. King isn't a horror writer who stoops to write about people--he's a writer who analyzes the human condition who just happens to have used horror as his handle to establish an audience. I believe that King will grow stronger in reputation as time goes by because his being mainstream will allow further acceptance of his insights. In fifty years once the controversy over some of King's themes subsides, King will become the United States orthodox white male to assign to students to read. He will be acceptable to the interest groups because his opinions are politically correct, he will be acceptable to the parents because of familiarity, and he will be acceptable to the students because his characters reflect empathy to many of their struggles.
In my opinion, "victory" for the United States can be defined to be a narrow achievable objective: Victory is the prevention of another massive terrorist attack on United States soil led by foreign nationals from Middle Eastern countries. It remains to be seen whether the people of the US are prepared to pay the price.
The willingness of the terrorists to die in the commission of their attacks isn't a strength, it's a weakness. The willingness to die restricts potential recruits to a relatively small segment of the population. As far as detection goes, the situation is far better than in the 70s when people who looked like Japanese tourists could suddenly pull automatic weapons out of their bags as happened at Tel Aviv's Lod Airport in May 1972 at the cost of 24 lives. Radical Marxism backed by covert support from Easter bloc intelligence agencies is no longer turning out as many terrorists with different nationalities as Germany did with Baader-Meinhof or Venezuela did with Carlos the Jackal. Furthermore in the 1970s members of attacking terrorist teams often were female such as Leila Khaled.
Trying to track the terrorists back to their native lands is the United States weakness and their strength. On the other hand, their operating on United States soil should be their weakness and our strength. The suspicious eyes and mouths willing to inform the authorities of any suspicious activity should accompany them wherever they go.
Suicide attackers have to be kept in a constant state of psychological preparedness. They have to travel together in at least pairs because they have to have reinforcement of the need for them to die. Often their support comes from the only people they can trust, relatives.
In short, suicide attackers who are foreign nationals from a distinct ethnic group are the perfect targets for proactive profiling. The question is whether the people, the intelligence agencies, the leadership, and the judicial system of the United States are going to be willing to make the necessary painful decisions. To easily separate suspects from nonsuspects, reducing the amount of work by two orders of magnitude, the people will have to accept a comprehensive national database with easy means of checking attributes such as fingerprints, voice, DNA, photographs. The United States does have a population of millions of loyal citizens of Middle Eastern descent. (No suspected hijackers or accomplices born in the United States have been identified so far.) Some means must be found to quickly distinguish them from foreign nationals so that they can efficiently exercise their rights as citizens.
Intelligence agencies must find the means to share information and break the bonds of bureaucratic inertia. Analyses such as Alexander B. Calahan's apply far beyond how to organize assassination teams, they apply equally to how to organize terrorism prevention teams. It is becoming clear that United States intelligence agencies had all the clues needed to prevent the attack. The WTC had been a previous target by the same groups, there had been an earlier plot to hijack a large number of airplanes, two hijackers were under watch by the FBI. What are needed are anti-terrorism units organized like special forces units who are allowed the initiative and the time to follow-up leads and build complete dossiers on suspects and the people they interact with.
Of course for this to happen the leadership and especially the courts have to get out of the way. The courts have to recognize that there has to be a distinction between the rights of citizens and the rights of foreign nationals, especially when there is a clearly demonstrated danger that a segment of foreign nationals is plotting to inflict massive terrorist attacks on the nation.
Carnivore, Echelon are simply manifestations of the truth that supply will increase to meet demand. We are no longer talking about hypotheticals. Foreign nationals are now plotting acts of mass terrorism on United States soil that have the potential to claim 50,000+ lives a strike. Something has to be done and something will be done.
The United States is facing a difficulty decision in how to strike back. After the Munich Olympics, Israel faced a similar decision. I think everyone should read Alexander B. Calahan's Master of Military Studies thesis "COUNTERING TERRORISM: THE ISRAELI RESPONSE TO THE 1972 MUNICH OLYMPIC MASSACRE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDEPENDENT COVERT ACTION TEAMS". This document is available from among other places the Federation of American Scientists website.
Golda Meir's decision was for Israel to resort to assassination of those responsible for organizing and carrying out the attack, an operation later referred to be the media as the "Wrath of God". Calahan concludes that method which worked was for Mossad to cut loose from bureaucratic restrictions a mostly independent operating team organized similar to current US special forces. This team was given a list of potential targets, a directive to not harm innocents, and autonomy to go hunting.
I am concerned that it would be simply impossible for any current United States government to authorize similar autonomy despite the necessity of success.
One key difference between then and today is that today's targets might be less inclined to be in Europe, an area in which it was relatively easier for the Israeli assassination teams to operate in than say Afghanistan or Pakistan for Americans. Calahan's thesis also mentions an operation where the proximity of Israel to Lebanon enabled a massive force of dozens of Israeli commandos to kill three major targets and about a hundred Palestinian guerillas.
In another disturbing article The Atlantic Monthly raises the issue of whether the unwillingness and/or inability of United States intelligence agencies to conduct longterm missions to penetrate local populations in areas such as Afghanistan might make any effective action against Osama Bin Laden's organization impossible. The United States doesn't even train agents in the local languages let alone assign agents to become experts specializing in a country.
1968, El Al 707 was hijacked to Algiers. After a month, Israel cut a deal to exchange the hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
September 6, 1970, the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) organized the attempted "simultaneous hijacking of four airliners bound for New York" . On one of the targetted planes, an El Al flight, the pilot put the plane into a nosedive, an armed air marshall shot dead hijacker Patrick Arguello, and the leader of the hijacking Leila Khaled "was overpowered by male passengers and savagely beaten". When the plane arrived at London, Khaled was taken into British custody. However two successfully hijacked airplanes had been diverted to Jordan at a former British airfield, Dawson's Field. The PFLP also successfully hijacked a fifth plane to bring their total to hundreds of hostages, dozens of them British. What followed were dramatic secret negotiations between the PFLP, Jordan, Britain, the United States, and Israel, some of whose details are now known because of a British law requiring release of documents after 30 years. A deal was struck to exchange Khaled and other Palestinians for the hostages. The PFLP had won again. Or had it?
King Hussein proceeded to launch a war which drove out the armed Palestinian groups he had formerly welcomed on his soil. This war was what came to be reviled by the Palestinians as Black September.
On the other hand, Leila Khaled has claimed "The success in the tactics of the hijacking and imposing our demands and succeeding in having our demands implemented gave us the courage and the confidence to go ahead with our struggle."
Malaysia and the British Re:How to Stop Terrorism
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More On Tragedy
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· Score: 2
"Hearts and minds"? From what I've read about the crushing of the Communist insurrection, none of its circumstances apply to the current situation. The British had a relatively freer hand than anything the US would be permitted to have in a Middle Eastern country. The task of the British was simplified by the Communists in Malaysia coming from a hated minority, the Chinese. The British decided in the Briggs plan to forcibly remove every single POTENTIAL Chinese sympathizer from his/her original home to new villages under incredibly strict control in regards to food. I suppose "hearts and minds" might refer to the Chinese being given title to their new land and better overall material circumstances than their original miserable existence as squatters. But underneath the velvet glove was the iron fist of the absolute control over the people's lives required to deny the export of a single cup of rice to the Communists. And this took place over TWELVE years.
I think the US tried a similar plan in Vietnam. It didn't work. There was no way to separate out a particular minority of the people who would be the sole source of enemy support. It was too big a task to try and take on an entire civilian population numbering many millions.
It is also possible that only the British were competent enough to accomplish such a feat. (That same factor might bode ill for the US if it tries to base its strategy on its own version of special forces. It might be better to let the British SAS lead a particularly critical mission such as a direct assault to apprehend Osama Bin Laden.)
There is also no way the rest of the world would stand for similar measures today. It would be the United States that would be accused of establishing concentration camps regardless of what conditions the people were given. The forceful removal of an entire minority population solely based on race to a controlled environment would create a wave of comparisons to prior shameful US events such as the Trail of Tears or the Japanese-American internment during World War II. In four years the rest of the world outside of a few allies would be calling for US leadership to be extradited to the Hague for trial, and internally the US would be at civil war.
A more meaningful comparison as far as a recent historic event would be the decision of Jordan's King Hussein in 1970 to crush the Palestinians, a war that was to become reviled by the Palestinians as "Black September".
Israeli/Palestinian conflict cannot be solved
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More On Tragedy
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I have read too many claims that if the US were to "moderate" its support of Israel and pressure Israel to sign a treaty with the Palestinians the conflict could be brought to a peaceful end.
In fact such a peace treaty is simply impossible. The Palestinians will never compromise on their demand for the right of return for the Palestinian refugees created in past wars. That demand is what sunk any hope of a deal even with Barak, who was willing to compromise on just about everything else. On the other hand, Israel can never accept such a demand, because to give in would mean instant demographic suicide, the end of Israel's being a Jewish state. (As it is, within 20 years Israel might have more Palestinians than Jews.)
What seems inevitable is that Israel will decide to create even more Palestinian refugees in a desperate effort to physically partition the nation with a defensible perimeter. On that day the other Middle Eastern nations will have to decide whether or not to start an all-out, possible nuclear, war with Israel. I'm not sure how US disengagement from the Arab governments surrounding Israel would help to prevent this war.
Considering the cost of a manned expedition to Mars, there will not be an economic incentive to do so because international treaty prohibits in Article II "national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."
But we have seen this before in human history, for example, the Ming Dynasty of China and the voyages of the eunuch Zhen He (Cheng Ho). China at that time had broken free from Mongol rule, and centuries of progress in engineering, science, arts, and philosophy could justify a Chinese feeling that the Ming Dynasty was the greatest civilization the Earth had ever seen. For seven voyages Zheng He captained a stupendous fleet that explored the coasts all the way to East Africa, trading and exacting tribute. In theory Southeast Asia, the surrounding islands, and the coasts of the Indian Ocean lay at China's feet.
The problem was that China was the center of civilization. There was no immediate reason to conquer and displace inferiors. What could they offer China? China had no incentive to put skin in the game. And since China's explorations were financed and controlled by the government, once the program lost favor with the leadership, all such exploration could be swiftly terminated.
Today's space craft sent to other planets or other outer space bodies are our equivalent of the voyages of Zheng He. For a generation the idea of exploring space captured the imagination of a rising and relatively rich civilization. But now the civilization is facing other concerns, concerns closer to home. And the civilization believes that it is the greatest of all time with no competitor on the horizon. The greatest science, the greatest engineering, the greatest arts, the greatest philosophy all permeate the civilization, one which can earnestly ask if it has reached the end of history.
And the civilization has a better alternate space program than one that could actually be physically constructed. Through the magic of special effects in television, movies, and games all potential space programs and futures can be experienced by the masses, the ultimate space program of the mind.
The cycles of history teach us that such a period of self-satisfaction turns into degeneration and finally collapse. After the wise king follows the corrupt sons and grandsons who cannot hold the kingdom together let alone promote expansion. The failure of this generation to take its shot at further manned space exploration means it will be a while until the next window of opportunity opens.
The final form of LISP notation occurred because of accident and the prejudices of the LISP community, exactly the factors you disparage. From McCarthy's recollections "The unexpected appearance of an interpreter tended to freeze the form of the language...Another reason for the initial acceptance of awkwardnesses in the internal form of LISP is that we still expected to switch to writing programs as M-expressions...It just receded into the indefinite future, and a new
generation of programmers appeared who preferred internal notation to any FORTRAN-like or ALGOL-like notation that could be devised." LISP was started as an extension of Fortran. The M-notation could not be used directly because of the character limitations of the IBM 026 key punch. S. R. Russell's observation about eval led to the implementation of an actual interpreter for LISP, this is what froze the language. This resistance to change was so great that it was impossible for McCarthy to even change 'car' and 'cdr' to names that had sense.
It is also good to read the history of LISP because we need to remember that LISP was developed specifically for the killer application of artificial intelligence. Unfortunately looking back we can now see that artificial intelligence stagnated for decades. What happened? The field was caught in an unhealthy fascination with exactitude, theorem-proving, logic. While these mathematical ideas are beautiful and engrossing, we have to keep in mind we are dealing with a problem area of artificial intelligence that is supposed to work in the real world. The right way to progress in artificial intelligence was to embrace statistical, evolutionary approaches.
Of course LISP is Turing-complete (provably), so in theory anything can be programmed in it. But we have to understand from reading the history the mindset associated with its origins, origins that are linked to an attempt to subsume artificial intelligence as a subset of mathematical logic. In this context, LISP can be argued to be computer science's greatest catastrophe. If great programs to finally succeed in conquering artificial intelligence are only now being written in LISP, it is just evidence that, academically speaking, the previous generation needed to die off to let progress resume.
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Out of idle curiosity what Windows-oriented software can't your parents do without? Is it Intuit's QuickBooks? (There's a version sold for the Mac but it's a couple of generations behind the Windows versions?)
According to this article from long ago in Businessweek, BeOS would have been the foundation of the modern Apple OS had Gassee simply not wildly overplayed his hand. According to the article, Gassee's minimum asking price was rumored to be around a 200 million dollar stock deal. Considering that BeOS's assets were eventually sold for about 11 million, Gassee overvalued his property by about a factor of 20. Furthermore Gassee missed out on the opportunity to be Apple's savior instead of having the honor go to Jobs.
Open your mind and you'll see that the triumph of VHS was the triumph of freedom versus the corporate vision of Betamax, a decision the consumers wisely made. The consumers made the right decision.
I'm beginning to think that the Bakers are the only true innovators in natural language processing.
DARPA has been funding in one way or another the premiere researchers in speech recognition, Dr. James and Dr. Janet Baker. Perhaps DARPA should have shown a little more foresight before the Bakers were permitted to sell off Dragon Systems to the Belgian corporation Lernout & Hauspie, which subsequently collapsed in bankruptcy amid fraud allegations, auctioning off assets such as Dragon Systems to ScanSoft, a Xerox spinoff.
If DARPA doesn't in the name of national security (look at the languages that are the candidates for the initial Babylon competitors) simply override what noncompete clauses, patents, etc. that would keep the Bakers from working full-time on this project then they have learned nothing from almost decades of the Bakers' kicking the ass of the entire speech recognition community with their superior statistical approach. Unfortunately I suspect that various government regulations would not permit DARPA to pay a fair market value for the Bakers' services. This to me illustrates how far the United States has fallen from any capacity to mobilize the scientific and engineering community for modern equivalents to the Manhattan Project, except for medical technology.
I hope that the same people who mocked the doctrine of "original intent", particularly with regards to the Second Amendment, aren't the ones promoting the Supreme Court's striking down copyright extension, an interpretation that relies precisely on the philosophy of ascertaining the intent of the framemakers of the Constitution. The "facts on the ground" are that the elected representatives of the people of the United States, both Congress and the President, have repeatedly within the past few decades agreed to extend copyright without any manifestation of widespread public protest. The opponents of copyright extension need to come up with something a little more substantial than an opinion that copyright extension damages the "public good".
I suspect that of the groups and people submitting amicus briefs about the only ones with "clean hands" are Phyllis Schlafly and the Eagle Forum and Milton Friedman. Love them or hate them, people such as Phyllis Schlafly and Milton Friedman at least have consistency in their viewpoints, a true worldview and not opinions that bend with each passing intellectual fad.
Phyllis Schlafly and Milton Friedman can argue with clear conscience that they have always been in the fight to limit the role of the federal government over the lives of the people, regardless of the issues. In contrast all of the NIMBY environmentalists and gun control advocates are merely carpetbaggers, passengers of convenience who the moment the issue is gone will revert to readvocating increased expansion of governmental authority and regulation. In essence the left-wing supporters of the movement to strike down the opinion of the elected representatives of the people are merely seeking to steal property for their own purposes, because they have no intellectual foundation for their critique of the current system.
If the Constitution is merely a piece of paper to be reinterpreted as each generation sees fit, why shouldn't eternal copyright extension be a legitimate interpretation of this generation? If it is just as legitimate to question the applicability of the Second Amendment to today's society, why isn't it legitimate to question whether an 18th century understanding of copyright is not applicable to today's reality of mass media corporations continuously producing new works in new formats that the people have no problem paying for without visible public protest? See what happens once you decide to jettison the entire opinion of the past for the sake of expediency, it might just come back to bite you.
A poster in a previous story mentioned that at Purdue the cost to students of any Microsoft product was only $5 USD. At many colleges students are able to get say MS Office XP at a cost far cheaper than Sun's StarOffice 6.0.
But I find it ironic that the same people who claim that Microsoft is deliberately encouraging illegal copying are the ones decrying when Microsoft makes any effort to enforce their copyright. These people think nothing of constantly arguing that Microsoft's product activation for consumer products is the tool of the devil, and these were the same people who argued that Intel should not automatically enable a processor identification number.
The proper cost of software is not the cost to replicate the product once made, for that completely discounts any research and development used to create and maintain the product. The true cost is some fraction of the utility the software will provide to the customer. $600 USD is about the point at which software's utility makes it a reasonable value for a business to purchase for an employee. If anything perhaps Adobe is underpricing Photoshop.
To tie this to a previous story today, a commercial user would certainly not be able to purchase a single license for Mathematica for $100. The proper price because of the utility to the customer is more than 10 times that. On the other hand Wolfram Research provides a sharp discount for a student version of Mathematica. Idiots who claim that software should be priced at the marginal cost of making one more CD need to explain how one is supposed to support a company that can create a product such as Mathematica that is 1000 times superior to anything that free software offers.
Similar conditions apply to software that services niches such as providing accessibility for the disabled. Such software easily runs $600 and over, because that's the value to the customer. Even if there were a software patent-free world I see little chance that free software could ever come up with an equivalent to Dragon Naturally Speaking Professional or Mathematica. The reason is that an army of coders, no matter how many, can never match the expertise of top professionals such as Drs. James and Janet Baker who routinely defeated the competition at DARPA contests of voice recognition software or of Dr. Stephen Wolfram.
$600 USD priced software is hardly the bane of the industry. A product that truly meets a desperate need in an innovative way has to be priced at least that in order to develop and continuously refine the technology. Countries whose attention to software theft is lax are not where these breakthrough technologies are being developed, and software developers from those countries cannot flee to the US fast enough.
Alan Cox admits he just can't make an economic argument to Nvidia why they should open source their drivers. He tries to save the situation by doing some hand-waving about patents and IP but eventually has to acknowledge that open-sourcing the drivers would help Nvidia's competitors.
Let's be blunt, if Nvidia were to open source their drivers even Alan Cox is admitting that say ATI could act as a parasite on Nvidia's IP. And that would simply be wrong. Nvidia has invested in a unified driver model where Linux support is almost on par with Windows support whereas ATI has chosen to not invest in skilled driver writers. It is incredible that card generation after card generation the universal complaint about ATI is always about the drivers, the company is based in Canada where presumably with any sort of effort they could hire extraordinary programmers to write these drivers, yet ATI management chooses this area to skimp on spending money.
Why should a company that is too cheap to hire sufficiently skilled programmers be given a free ride on Nvidia's investments?
Ironically enough it's the members of the MPAA who are using science and engineering to advance while the computer industry stagnates and refuses to pay any attention to consumers except for video games. And the video games industry is more a product of Japanese society--Americans are just resellers.
The motion picture industry in the past decade has accomplished the switch to having special effects be the real stars of movies. This results in a more uniform and dependable product where the consumer is guaranteed to at least have some payoff. The mass media also embraces scientific marketting where demographic segments are separately marketted to based on gender, age, etc. The American computer industry on the other hand has disinvested from consumer technology except for Apple. Resellers such as HP/Compaq and Dell add absolutely nothing of importance to their products. If there are cheaper and more powerful devices it is due only to the entrepreneurial hustle of Taiwanese, Koreans, and Japanese, not Americans. The basic PC experience for users of all categories remains a hellish nightmare of incompatibilities, nonfunctionality, and blatant lies.
The most elementary advances in the computer industry are made impossible by the industry's stubborn denial of mistakes and a refusal to adopt to technology even decades old. As a small example, the original programmers of C developed the language and Unix on a machine whose capabilities are laughable compared to modern machines. The operating system cut back on features that had been planned for the failed Multics project. In such a restricted environment decisions such as deliberately forgetting the true length of arrays were required just to have an operational system. There is no such excuse today, yet the computer industry persists in trying to sell to consumers knowingly defective products which are compromised by simple buffer overflows. The computer industry thinks its just fine that consumers should have to constantly try and engage in a futile endless quest of "upgrading" to patch security holes that would not exist if a proper computer language had been used to write the base system.
It is the computer industry that in recent years has suffered a complete collapse in revenue and valuation. It is the American computer industry that thinks marketting to consumers rectangular beige or black boxes with no style or gender customization is just fine while in Japan there is no reticence to market electronic devices directly to females.
The only reason the American computer industry didn't have a day of reckoning sooner was the incestuous selling between corporations for IT spending, with the last hurrah the bubble caused by Y2K sales. But that opportunity is now gone and the computer industry is openly admitting it has no new ideas. The motion picture industry for the most part spends the money to develop new movies that for a few hours can satisfy the dreams of its customers. The computer industry can't even make a reliable PC. The motion picture industry eventually embraced DVDs and has changed the economics of the industry so that even apparent flops eventually earn more money than was spent to produce them. The PC industry's idea of progress is removing serial ports, parallel ports, and floppy drives because it can't figure out how to otherwise manage the pathetically small number of IRQs. The American PC industry is quickly heading towards Dell being the only reseller to consumers and businesses while Apple fills a niche upper-class market. Meanwhile the motion picture industry keeps on churning out monster hits such as Spider Man and continuations of franchises such as Star Wars and The Matrix, not to mention potential new franchises in Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. So who are the dinosaurs and who are dying? It's not the motion picture industry.
In all probability your laptop already came with some version of Windows which could play the DVDs. It was your choice to wipe it off and replace it with an OS that was incapable of using the hardware. Would it have killed you to have kept Windows in a dual-boot system when you already paid for it in the Windows tax? I read Linux zealots using this logic all the time against FreeBSD exhilarating that the GPL is keeping some driver support from FreeBSD.
I just don't get the sheer obstinancy of some people who seem to think that using computers should be equivalent to Homer Simpson's repeatedly hitting his head against a brick wall. If using Microsoft's products kills you so much why didn't you buy a Mac, a machine that can play DVDs just fine AND whose OS is derived from Unix.
This case is being lost because the movement headed by the EFF simply does not have the incentive to win it. The American judicial system did not become conservative just yesterday, it has always been so. Just in fairly recent American history the African Americans after centuries of reverses in the legal system were able to persuade the Supreme Court to grant relief. In this case the African Americans simply were interested in winning above all. So they did everything they could to put forward good upstanding representatives such as Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to represent the face of the movement.
In contrast let's face it, neither 2600 nor EFF are threatened with nonexistence should they lose this case. In fact they are benefitting. Every time the EFF loses a case the movement argues that the solution is to give them more money, this despite a rather suspicious history of the EFF actually being on the wrong side such as the first head of ICAAN being former head of the EFF Esther Dyson. I doubt that 2600 is hurting either from having their name prominently displayed on the Internet news outlets every few weeks.
In this era of dotcom meltdown and competition is it so unlikely that without this controversy 2600 would be threatened with going out of business? What information exactly does 2600 have that's exclusive to them or is even that interesting anymore?
In contrast to the naysayers I think it's pretty clear that the Supreme Court takes seriously the First Amendment, and that is the ONLY reason 2600 even has a chance of getting them to review the case. The Supreme Court has for example repeatedly struck down the attempts by the Federal Government to regulate obscenity on the Internet. The Supreme Court is serious about its duties, too bad 2600 is not.
The only thing GNUArt shares with what made GNU or Linux software successful is the "GNU" in the name. Totally lost is any concept of modularly separating out the pieces so that one can make works using the material yet not being derived works under copyright law. Two market leaders of free software are the Linux kernel and the gcc compiler. Note that the point of a kernel is a separation between the kernel and userland. A person or company can make a product that invokes only the Linux system calls and license this product under any terms. Similarly usage of the gcc compiler does not give RMS any say over the licensing terms of the resulting binary. In fact the Linux kernel's owners even permit distribution of proprietary binary drivers that work with the kernel. Ironically it was the overly restrictive license of Minux that caused Linus Torvalds to create Linux in the first place. Part of the genius of Linus is that he initiated a system where he simply doesn't have to care what people bundle his kernel with in their distributions, what applications they use with the kernel, or how much money they make doing so without sharing one penny with him.
The control of the mass media corporations may be disburbing, but to assert that the solution is to create a "commons" where the only recompense is recognition is in contradiction to the entire history of Western art. The craftsman deserves to be paid for his work.
I followed the links from a reply that purported to be from the author (at the moment the AnandTech forum appears to be /.ed.) The author's home machine has 256MB of RAM, a ATI Radeon 8500 retail, and Windows XP Pro. I refuse to trust anything said about computers from a person who has this setup. There's nothing wrong about the individual pieces, it's the tradeoff in the aggregation that bothers me. How can someone who claims to have advanced knowledge of motherboards decide to go with only 256MB of RAM while blowing money on the latest generation of video card? Never, ever scrimp on RAM. The opinion of someone who doesn't know this as a first principle should not be trusted.
From what I vaguely recall all Microsoft EULAs for Windows products already have clauses restricting their use to properly licensed copies of Windows. This also applies to their DLLs. We'll just have to see whether Microsoft can or will be able to strictly enforce this.
Thanks to the incredible blunder of licensing the source code from Sun, Microsoft can never make a compatible version of Java 1.2 or higher. I predict that C# will never be able to overcome Java's head start as far as being the common programming language for CS. Java will dominate the CS curriculum for at least two decades--possibly forever.
It is not Linux that will contain MS's expansion to the enterprise, it is Java. Java is the language of interconnection, and it is interconnection that is the major computer project of our time. Sun's firm grip on its copyrights and trademarks for Java are a far more effective barrier against Microsoft than any antitrust judgment could have been. It is Java that has united everyone from Oracle to IBM to Sun against Microsoft. The line has been held. With everyone against them I see Microsoft making little further headway despite .Net.
Fox tried to follow up the success of The X-Files with Millenium which persisted for a few seasons only because the network wanted to remain on good terms with Chris Carter. Millenium also tried to follow the niche of a gory TV series set in the present time with something resembling police work to investigate crimes. Why didn't it have the success of CSI--because Fox let Carter get away with not following the formula used in The X-Files. For The X-Files Carter carefully chose the young and attractive Gillian Anderson and elevated her role to be equal to Duchovney's. Carter was not forced to do this either for Millenium or for Harsh Realm. In the past decade US television SF has swung decisively towards recognizing the importance of having hot young females as the stars, similar to how the Winter Olympics is really about figure skating and the Summer Olympics are about gynmastics, and similar to the last successful TV Western set in the past being Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman. Note that James Cameron created for Fox Dark Angel which follows Cameron's typical pattern of having a strong female character as the star. Unfortunately Fox failed to follow the formula again--almost no network SF other than the Star Trek franchise can build a large audience if the show is set in the future. At least Voyager management made the correct decision of introducing the 7 of 9 character in a skintight catsuit to save the show.
Almost all bombs can be explained by not following the formula. CBS's The Fugitive failed because CBS failed to follow the formula that the lead character should have some sort of superhero edge. The loner who comes to town and fixes things decades ago rapidly morphed in being a superhero or angel, not an ordinary guy. It would have been even better had the star been made female with martial arts ability.
while (*s++ = *t++){
This idiom is so seductively terse that I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of the motivations behind what became C's syntax, similar to the influence that my Dog Spot has had in modern Perl. In contrast I believe a language such as say Java would frown on having an assignment being used as the conditional, especially in a syntax where equality is often expressed by ==.
Unix and C were coded as a reaction to the collapse of the Multics project, initially on quite underpowered machines. Terseness was good, sometimes essential to get things running on limited resources. And the initial environment inside a controlled corporate culture was a lot more secure than having to deal with the Internet. I suspect strcpy() was hardly an unfortunate accident, it was by design.
Stephen King will be known as the Charles Dickens of our time. His works will be read for at least two generations. King will live on because he isn't obsessed with the technicalities of the genres he writes in unlike many of the SF writers whose works are starting to look rather dated. King puts his efforts into crafting characters that appeal psychologically to his audience as having truth beyond the genre. King isn't a horror writer who stoops to write about people--he's a writer who analyzes the human condition who just happens to have used horror as his handle to establish an audience. I believe that King will grow stronger in reputation as time goes by because his being mainstream will allow further acceptance of his insights. In fifty years once the controversy over some of King's themes subsides, King will become the United States orthodox white male to assign to students to read. He will be acceptable to the interest groups because his opinions are politically correct, he will be acceptable to the parents because of familiarity, and he will be acceptable to the students because his characters reflect empathy to many of their struggles.
The willingness of the terrorists to die in the commission of their attacks isn't a strength, it's a weakness. The willingness to die restricts potential recruits to a relatively small segment of the population. As far as detection goes, the situation is far better than in the 70s when people who looked like Japanese tourists could suddenly pull automatic weapons out of their bags as happened at Tel Aviv's Lod Airport in May 1972 at the cost of 24 lives. Radical Marxism backed by covert support from Easter bloc intelligence agencies is no longer turning out as many terrorists with different nationalities as Germany did with Baader-Meinhof or Venezuela did with Carlos the Jackal. Furthermore in the 1970s members of attacking terrorist teams often were female such as Leila Khaled.
Trying to track the terrorists back to their native lands is the United States weakness and their strength. On the other hand, their operating on United States soil should be their weakness and our strength. The suspicious eyes and mouths willing to inform the authorities of any suspicious activity should accompany them wherever they go.
Suicide attackers have to be kept in a constant state of psychological preparedness. They have to travel together in at least pairs because they have to have reinforcement of the need for them to die. Often their support comes from the only people they can trust, relatives.
In short, suicide attackers who are foreign nationals from a distinct ethnic group are the perfect targets for proactive profiling. The question is whether the people, the intelligence agencies, the leadership, and the judicial system of the United States are going to be willing to make the necessary painful decisions. To easily separate suspects from nonsuspects, reducing the amount of work by two orders of magnitude, the people will have to accept a comprehensive national database with easy means of checking attributes such as fingerprints, voice, DNA, photographs. The United States does have a population of millions of loyal citizens of Middle Eastern descent. (No suspected hijackers or accomplices born in the United States have been identified so far.) Some means must be found to quickly distinguish them from foreign nationals so that they can efficiently exercise their rights as citizens.
Intelligence agencies must find the means to share information and break the bonds of bureaucratic inertia. Analyses such as Alexander B. Calahan's apply far beyond how to organize assassination teams, they apply equally to how to organize terrorism prevention teams. It is becoming clear that United States intelligence agencies had all the clues needed to prevent the attack. The WTC had been a previous target by the same groups, there had been an earlier plot to hijack a large number of airplanes, two hijackers were under watch by the FBI. What are needed are anti-terrorism units organized like special forces units who are allowed the initiative and the time to follow-up leads and build complete dossiers on suspects and the people they interact with.
Of course for this to happen the leadership and especially the courts have to get out of the way. The courts have to recognize that there has to be a distinction between the rights of citizens and the rights of foreign nationals, especially when there is a clearly demonstrated danger that a segment of foreign nationals is plotting to inflict massive terrorist attacks on the nation.
Carnivore, Echelon are simply manifestations of the truth that supply will increase to meet demand. We are no longer talking about hypotheticals. Foreign nationals are now plotting acts of mass terrorism on United States soil that have the potential to claim 50,000+ lives a strike. Something has to be done and something will be done.
Golda Meir's decision was for Israel to resort to assassination of those responsible for organizing and carrying out the attack, an operation later referred to be the media as the "Wrath of God". Calahan concludes that method which worked was for Mossad to cut loose from bureaucratic restrictions a mostly independent operating team organized similar to current US special forces. This team was given a list of potential targets, a directive to not harm innocents, and autonomy to go hunting.
I am concerned that it would be simply impossible for any current United States government to authorize similar autonomy despite the necessity of success.
One key difference between then and today is that today's targets might be less inclined to be in Europe, an area in which it was relatively easier for the Israeli assassination teams to operate in than say Afghanistan or Pakistan for Americans. Calahan's thesis also mentions an operation where the proximity of Israel to Lebanon enabled a massive force of dozens of Israeli commandos to kill three major targets and about a hundred Palestinian guerillas.
In another disturbing article The Atlantic Monthly raises the issue of whether the unwillingness and/or inability of United States intelligence agencies to conduct longterm missions to penetrate local populations in areas such as Afghanistan might make any effective action against Osama Bin Laden's organization impossible. The United States doesn't even train agents in the local languages let alone assign agents to become experts specializing in a country.
1968, El Al 707 was hijacked to Algiers. After a month, Israel cut a deal to exchange the hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
September 6, 1970, the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) organized the attempted "simultaneous hijacking of four airliners bound for New York" . On one of the targetted planes, an El Al flight, the pilot put the plane into a nosedive, an armed air marshall shot dead hijacker Patrick Arguello, and the leader of the hijacking Leila Khaled "was overpowered by male passengers and savagely beaten". When the plane arrived at London, Khaled was taken into British custody. However two successfully hijacked airplanes had been diverted to Jordan at a former British airfield, Dawson's Field. The PFLP also successfully hijacked a fifth plane to bring their total to hundreds of hostages, dozens of them British. What followed were dramatic secret negotiations between the PFLP, Jordan, Britain, the United States, and Israel, some of whose details are now known because of a British law requiring release of documents after 30 years. A deal was struck to exchange Khaled and other Palestinians for the hostages. The PFLP had won again. Or had it?
King Hussein proceeded to launch a war which drove out the armed Palestinian groups he had formerly welcomed on his soil. This war was what came to be reviled by the Palestinians as Black September.
On the other hand, Leila Khaled has claimed "The success in the tactics of the hijacking and imposing our demands and succeeding in having our demands implemented gave us the courage and the confidence to go ahead with our struggle."
I think the US tried a similar plan in Vietnam. It didn't work. There was no way to separate out a particular minority of the people who would be the sole source of enemy support. It was too big a task to try and take on an entire civilian population numbering many millions.
It is also possible that only the British were competent enough to accomplish such a feat. (That same factor might bode ill for the US if it tries to base its strategy on its own version of special forces. It might be better to let the British SAS lead a particularly critical mission such as a direct assault to apprehend Osama Bin Laden.)
There is also no way the rest of the world would stand for similar measures today. It would be the United States that would be accused of establishing concentration camps regardless of what conditions the people were given. The forceful removal of an entire minority population solely based on race to a controlled environment would create a wave of comparisons to prior shameful US events such as the Trail of Tears or the Japanese-American internment during World War II. In four years the rest of the world outside of a few allies would be calling for US leadership to be extradited to the Hague for trial, and internally the US would be at civil war.
A more meaningful comparison as far as a recent historic event would be the decision of Jordan's King Hussein in 1970 to crush the Palestinians, a war that was to become reviled by the Palestinians as "Black September".
In fact such a peace treaty is simply impossible. The Palestinians will never compromise on their demand for the right of return for the Palestinian refugees created in past wars. That demand is what sunk any hope of a deal even with Barak, who was willing to compromise on just about everything else. On the other hand, Israel can never accept such a demand, because to give in would mean instant demographic suicide, the end of Israel's being a Jewish state. (As it is, within 20 years Israel might have more Palestinians than Jews.)
What seems inevitable is that Israel will decide to create even more Palestinian refugees in a desperate effort to physically partition the nation with a defensible perimeter. On that day the other Middle Eastern nations will have to decide whether or not to start an all-out, possible nuclear, war with Israel. I'm not sure how US disengagement from the Arab governments surrounding Israel would help to prevent this war.
But we have seen this before in human history, for example, the Ming Dynasty of China and the voyages of the eunuch Zhen He (Cheng Ho). China at that time had broken free from Mongol rule, and centuries of progress in engineering, science, arts, and philosophy could justify a Chinese feeling that the Ming Dynasty was the greatest civilization the Earth had ever seen. For seven voyages Zheng He captained a stupendous fleet that explored the coasts all the way to East Africa, trading and exacting tribute. In theory Southeast Asia, the surrounding islands, and the coasts of the Indian Ocean lay at China's feet.
The problem was that China was the center of civilization. There was no immediate reason to conquer and displace inferiors. What could they offer China? China had no incentive to put skin in the game. And since China's explorations were financed and controlled by the government, once the program lost favor with the leadership, all such exploration could be swiftly terminated.
Today's space craft sent to other planets or other outer space bodies are our equivalent of the voyages of Zheng He. For a generation the idea of exploring space captured the imagination of a rising and relatively rich civilization. But now the civilization is facing other concerns, concerns closer to home. And the civilization believes that it is the greatest of all time with no competitor on the horizon. The greatest science, the greatest engineering, the greatest arts, the greatest philosophy all permeate the civilization, one which can earnestly ask if it has reached the end of history.
And the civilization has a better alternate space program than one that could actually be physically constructed. Through the magic of special effects in television, movies, and games all potential space programs and futures can be experienced by the masses, the ultimate space program of the mind.
The cycles of history teach us that such a period of self-satisfaction turns into degeneration and finally collapse. After the wise king follows the corrupt sons and grandsons who cannot hold the kingdom together let alone promote expansion. The failure of this generation to take its shot at further manned space exploration means it will be a while until the next window of opportunity opens.
generation of programmers appeared who preferred internal notation to any FORTRAN-like or ALGOL-like notation that could be devised." LISP was started as an extension of Fortran. The M-notation could not be used directly because of the character limitations of the IBM 026 key punch. S. R. Russell's observation about eval led to the implementation of an actual interpreter for LISP, this is what froze the language. This resistance to change was so great that it was impossible for McCarthy to even change 'car' and 'cdr' to names that had sense.
It is also good to read the history of LISP because we need to remember that LISP was developed specifically for the killer application of artificial intelligence. Unfortunately looking back we can now see that artificial intelligence stagnated for decades. What happened? The field was caught in an unhealthy fascination with exactitude, theorem-proving, logic. While these mathematical ideas are beautiful and engrossing, we have to keep in mind we are dealing with a problem area of artificial intelligence that is supposed to work in the real world. The right way to progress in artificial intelligence was to embrace statistical, evolutionary approaches.
Of course LISP is Turing-complete (provably), so in theory anything can be programmed in it. But we have to understand from reading the history the mindset associated with its origins, origins that are linked to an attempt to subsume artificial intelligence as a subset of mathematical logic. In this context, LISP can be argued to be computer science's greatest catastrophe. If great programs to finally succeed in conquering artificial intelligence are only now being written in LISP, it is just evidence that, academically speaking, the previous generation needed to die off to let progress resume.