Lots of things (like dogs for example) are embued with special significance that totally goes over the heads of someone who isn't enculturated.
Did you ever find that there were things the Muslim kids said or did that offended you? I'm curious if it was a one-way thing (implying that the culture of the Islamic kids was some how more restrictive or intolerant) or if you felt like they sometimes tread on things that triggered reactions in you. I only ask because where I grew up it was essentially about as white bread as you can get.
The cultural aspect of it does seem to muddle things, doesn't it? For example, my understanding is that much of what happens in the Arab Muslim world has as much to do with ancient Arab traditions as with Islam per se. Treatment of women springs to mind. In Somalia we had been briefed before arrival not to talk to the women, especially if they didn't have a man present. But although the Somalis are Muslims, the women were often our best source of intel. They would come up to us and volunteer information and ask questions, and if the men had serious objections to this, they certainly would have let us know.
The new Iraqi constitution may ban women from voting, but Benazir Bhutto was the Prime Minister of Pakistan and Indonesia, the largest Islamic nation on earth, elected a woman president.
For me that makes it very difficult to filter the relegion from the region, probably akin to what it's like for a Russian Orthodox worshipper to understand the differences between the Anglican Church and the Southern Baptist Convention.
That's why the whole "monolithic militant Islam" argument just doesn't make sense to me. In practice, people, particularly True Believers, tend to have competing interests, and those get in the way of realizing world-altering goals.
I think Cuba's main downfall was they were an island nation with limited resources and they had little chance to succeed once they were embargoed by the nation that economically dominated the region.
That's a really good point. I probably applied too broad a brush there. I've heard many good things about Cuba. Basically it seems that if you go with the program and don't speak out, life there isn't bad. The standard of living hasn't moved much in recent decades, but as you mention, being shut out by the US hasn't helped that.
It may be a useless chicken and egg question, but I wonder if Cuba would have been able to survive as long as it has if it hadn't been isolated by the United States. The Soviets propped up Cuba for decades, so the tourism bucks were perhaps offset. Then again, when have communist states ever been tourist destinations? Would Cuba have remained voluntarily open to tourism, given its treatment of political prisoners? Would it really have wanted foreigners poking around and spreading capitalist ideas to the people? I don't know the answer to these questions, but I do think the US embargo has been a useful political tool not just for the US government, but also for Castro.
The larger question you raised about the viability of socialism on an island nation brings us right back to one of the central tenets of communist ideology, which is that world revolution is necessary. The Soviets plumped for detente only because they realized the worldwide revolution wasn't going to happen. By then they were already just a totalitarian state with not even the most remote connection to the original ideal of the Bolsheviks.
I hope that when Castro dies, Cuba is able to make a peaceful transition into some sort of situation that preserves what gains they have made, rids them of the political prisons, and keeps them in control of their own destiny. My guess is there's going to be an awful lot of money from Florida being pumped into Cuba as soon as the socialist government falls. Not all of that will be bad, but if Cuba turns into a giant island version of Las Vegas, that would be really sad.
We can't contain them because they have no country, and we can't wait for them to collapse economically because they have no economy.
I don't think containment applies in a 1 to 1 relationship between the Cold War and the fight against Islamic fundamentalists, but even with that said, your questions make a lot of sense. However, since this is as much a conflic of ideas as a military conflict, containing the acceptance of radical Islamic ideas is the real goal. The Soviets pushed their ideas through their standing military, and as you point out, radical Islam has no such center of gravity. But even though the Soviets had a center of gravity, we never were directly engaged there. It was always on the periphery. In the case of radical Islam, I would argue that the periphery is on the street in societies where Muslims make up a substantial percentage of the population. Give those people an alternative to radicalism, and the core radicals will not be able to spread their message. As they die off, nobody will replace them.
The notion that containment could serve as a viable strategy in fighting radical Islamic terrorists makes sense to me and to a lot of people who are smarter than me, but it also has its critics. This piece argues that containment failed and it was really "rollback" that finished off the USSR, which would mean that containment would be innefectual in the current situation as well.
The best writing I've encountered on the subject is this article by John Lewis Gaddis which argues that we can learn much from the containment policy first laid out by George Kennan, but that we must be flexible and not attempt to simply apply the same template to the war against radical Islam.
I take your point, but to an outsider it often seems that violently militant Islamists are *obviously* in contravention of basic Islamic principles.
That's how I interpret it, but then again, my knowledge of Islam is limited to a college reading of the Koran and some basic overview reading since the 9/11 attacks. I heard an interesting discussion on the radio the other day, in relation to the story about North American Islamic clerics coming together to stridently repudiate the validity of terrorist acts.
What was interesting to me was how the commentator, a Muslim, described the structure in Sunni Islam. Basically, interpretation of the teachings of Muhammed is handled by clerics, who only after years of study can begin to build a congregation of followers. Their validity as clerics depends in large measure on their ability to attract followers, which means that Muslim clerics are inherently very political. This is not unlike other religions, but from what the commentator described, it seemed that the interpretations of individual clerics could be hugely influential. That is why getting so many of them together to issue a joint fatwa is so noteworthy.
I inferred from this that while there are only two main variants of Islam (Sunni and Shiite), there exist all kinds of variations within those groups. Because we're dealing with religion and interpretation of writings that are centuries old, something that seems basic (like an injunction against the use of fire as a weapon) is seen by some clerics as valid and invalid by others.
It is strange to be talking about Islam this way, as if we're Kremlinologists back in 1986, poring over photos from the May Day Parade and trying to determine what is going on in the Soviet power structure. There is no Iron Wall, but even though there are millions of Muslims in the developed world, there's this enormous communications gap.
It is still a one party state and the economy is still very heavily state controlled
True, of course. Your definition of China's ruling party as fascists is probably more accurate than calling them communists. The core of communist ideology always was collective ownership, and that is long gone in China. Now the apparatus of control is still there, but the ideology is gone and everyone knows it. So far the people in China seem to go along with the program because the trains are running on time, but I wonder how long it will take for the majority of them to get anxious for more political freedom.
You could also note the existence of Cuba and North Korea as communist states, and both of those examples are probably closer to the true ideal of communism, cults of personality aside. But Cuba's experiment likely won't outlive Castro, and North Korea is an obvious failure, unable to export its ideology anywhere.
The communists had their chance, but even though it seemed for a while that all the odds were working in their favor, the inability of socialist states to function in absence of ongoing revolution proved to be their downfall. I predict that if radical Islamists are similarly contained and restricted, the emptiness of their promises will unravel.
Can we stop calling these people zealots or extremists, that gives the impression that its only one or two believers of this "religion" that want to destroy America's and Western Europe's way of life. Get real, there are Muslims and there are reformed Muslims. The former, who are the majority, are a threat to any non believer.
Islam is a religion with millions of adherents who have never bombed anyone, killed anyone, threatened anyone, or attempted to take over the world and destroy Christianity in the process.
Islam is definitely engaged in an internal struggle right now, but those who condemn violence are starting to do so more forcefully, and the notion that the majority of Muslims want to do in America and Europe is to the best of my knowledge unsubstantiated.
The Christian Identity Movement espoused by the Aryan Nation purports to be a true interpretation of Christ's teachings. Because they call themselves Christians doesn't mean that they speak for the millions of other Christians, does it?
Sure the leaders are the same folks who run Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, etc... The Strategy is to take over the world, pretty simple to me.
Bin Laden hates the Saudi royal family and would love nothing better than to have it destroyed. That hardly puts them on the same side. The fact that Iran is a Shiite nation and most of the rest of the Middle East (save Iraq) is dominated by Sunnis is also a very important factor. Just as Catholics and Protestants clashed in Europe for generations, so it is with the Muslim Arabs. That doesn't mean they can't and haven't been cooperating, but they certainly don't all share the same vision of what is right for Islam, much less the entire world.
Remember that the world communist movement had a very clear ideological platform and a very clear plan. They even had two giant countries, the USSR and China, in their camp. But nope, the whole "take over the world" goal was just too difficult to obtain. Communism imploded specifically because the West successfully pursued a strategy of containment, which forced communism to slowly collapse under its own contradictions.
Because of course they haven't invaded other parts of our lives like air travel and public transportation?
They have attacked us and inflicted damage, absolutely. But the effectiveness of terrorists can be minimized, and they can be isolated and slowly choked off. Deterrence and patient police work are the key to this, as the British know.
Good points indeed. Thanks for the analysis. The part of me that dislikes both SBC and Comcast (the two big players in Silicon Valley) agrees with what you're saying.
Your point about Verizon not being part of the building of the POTS network is well taken, though of course AT&T built it and was then broken up by the government, which in turn led to the powerhouse we know as Verizon.
I also appreciate your point about flexiblity. Had I needed a static IP I would definitely have gone with Speakeasy rather than SBC.
Perhaps looking at the telephone network as an essential infrastructure component like roads or airspace (the concept of which entailed some ferocious legal battling) that should be accessible to a broad range of commercial entities. The fact that Verizon, et. al. didn't actually create the POTS network but inherited it may offer evidence that providing cheap access to the network allows competitors to focus on value added services, which as you mentioned provide more choices for competitors and could possibly spawn the next big thing in telecommunications.
I'm just thinking out loud, trying to get a clear grasp of whose interests are at stake. I dislike strict "The Big Corporations vs. The Rest of Us" interpretations. I can see why the Baby Bells don't like having to subsidize their competitors, but I also see your point about the necessity of that competition.
From an economics point of view, communications networks are a fascinating subject.
It won't be so easy if all that's left is the local monoploy cable company and the local monopoly phone company.
I'm not sure either way on this one. The intent of the ruling is to allow differing technologies to compete with each other. It could be argued that by forcing Baby Bells to provide assistance to companies that compete with them in offering services, the Baby Bells have to assume an unfair burden.
But if DSL is just one technology. Already cable and DSL companies are locked in a heated battle over who will dominate residential broadband. Even if the local phone carrier and the local cable carrier are effectively monopolies, they're still in competition with each other, right?
DSL and cable aren't the only broadband technologies available now, and other players may try to come up with their own competing mechanisms.
I'm not saying that I know for sure that the ruling will enhance competition, or that the consumer will ultimately be best served by it. But I'm not sure that allowing the Baby Bells and cable companies to compete head to head in an unfettered fashion is such a bad thing.
If anything, I am more bothered by the fact that cable companies are provided local monopolies by municipal governments, which gives me no choice in cable access as a consumer. At least the Baby Bells are no longer truly "regional" in that they can all compete with each other for local and long distance services, as well as DSL and wireless.
Absolutely. But following that war moment, we were all told to get back to our shopping. Americans haven't been asked to sacrifice in any meaningful way, nor have we had to. Aside from a small segment of the population that is connected to the military in some fashion, there is no direct risk or danger, no rationing, no blackouts, nothing that impacts the flow of our daily lives.
There is an obvious pattern here a 5 year old can see. If you are on the wrong side of the U.S. the best policy you can pursue is to acquire nukes or at least say you acquired them and fake a good case to support it. If you do you're safe from American aggression. If you don't have nukes and you get on the wrong side of the U.S. chances are you get whacked. Therefor every enemy the U.S. has, has been incentivized to get nukes.
The most disturbing part of all this is not just that nation-states are getting nukes. The ability of rogue actors like bin Laden, et. al. to acquire them is very real. Pakistan, for example, is a known nuclear technology exporter. We all know how tight their borders and civilian control of the military are.
The fact that the Bush Administration just tacitly approved India's nuclear status, and already does so with Pakistan, doesn't make matters any easier. We have essentially opened the floodgates to nuclear arms development by letting the loopholes in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty remain open. We oppose the Comprensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and we've violated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Maybe someone ought to dust off the phrase, "No material. No bomb. No nuclear terrorism."
Yet you can't seem to point a single specific "stupid" thing you noticed.
My point wasn't to go into a treatise about why the war was misguided, but since you're asking, I believe that al Qaeda attacked America in 9/11, and we wisely attacked its base of operations in Afghanistan. However, there has never been any convincing proof that Iraq had any real connection to al Qaeda, or that diverting essential resources to invade and occupy Iraq has helped rather than hindered the fight against al Qaeda. We should have learned enough from the experiences Western European nations had in fighting terrorist cells in the 1970s and 80s to understand that successfully eliminating terrorists is a matter of long-term deterrence, and that the military is in most respects utterly ill-suited to the police work required to take down terrorists. As I mention in another post, there were a raft of preventable mistakes in the planning phase of the war, once it was decided upon.
Why not go with Vietnam? If you want to live in the past, you'd have more people there with you if you went with Vietnam. Everyone else is doing it.
I never directly compared the operational situation in Somalia to that of Iraq, and Vietnam is even further off the mark as any student of military history knows. My point in bringing up Somalia was that as a soldier there I felt let down by the civilian leadership, and I feel the soldiers in Iraq today are being let down by the current leadership.
Failure to imagine what? Failure to envision what? Ignorance of what specific lessons of history? Misunderstanding of what ground truth?
Failure to imagine options other than a ground invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Ignorance of any number of lessons about the limits of power, including those learned the hard way by the British when they ruled Iraq from 1918 to 1932. Misunderstanding of the ground truth that rather than being greeted with flowers in the streets of Iraq's towns and cities, Iraqi nationalism transcended Saddam. It is not a secret that in the run-up to the war that we were relying on intelligence sources that fed us what we wanted to hear.
From your post, you seem to know neither what to do, nor what not to do. You certainly haven't given an example of either. Your post is almost completely without substance, but it goes on for almost a page. You have no ideas to offer and no insight on any specific event. Just vague criticism.
My post was not intended to be a lengthy critique of the war, or an alternate plan for its prosecution. Its substance, for whatever it is worth, is my emotional response to reading Stross's comments about America's "deep trauma". I can understand why you don't like my response, but I think it is important to take it in context.
What political office are you running for?
Don't worry, I have no interest in running for office.
All wars always go badly. Things never work out the way you want them to. Regrets are unavoidable. Mistakes happen. The future is always largely unforseen.
I agree.
When the inevitable bad things happen, those things have to be overcome -- you can't let them overcome you -- or you fail. That'll be how the outcome of the war on terrorism is decided -- the allies will either choose to succeed or they'll lose heart and give up.
We are in absolute agreement on this point. I believe without a doubt that we will succeed. We will adapt and learn, but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't feel sorrow at what I perceive to be tragic and costly mistakes we have made thus far. The Bush Administration's failure to learn from its mistakes weakens our overall effort and means that it will take more lives, money, and time to wipe out the deranged militants who are trying hard to defeat us.
How do you think your complaining fits into that picture?
If enough people complain, and it forces the government to pursue more effective policies in the fight against terrorists, I see it as worthwhile.
If you read the comments on Slashdot, they mirror the attitudes of the cultural elite, which has completely failed to comprehend the existential threat to the United States, and remains mired in a tragically hip view of themselves as "cool outsiders."
I'm surprised that you posted this as an AC. You obviously have thought this through quite a bit. Personally I don't agree with your broad characterization of Slashdot as a vehicle for the "cultural elites" (for one thing, a much larger than average chunk of the Slashdot population are died in the wool libertarians), but if you want to change the Slashdot dynamic, why not post under a member name?
You make a solid point about the failure of cultural elites to adapt to the end of the Cold War, but I think you take it a bit far. Clinton cut and ran in Somalia, but he also pushed NATO into action in Serbia and assisted Croatia in booting the Serbs from Krajina. The Fukuyama "end of history" argument lost credence as soon as the first aircraft hit the tower, and nobody in the mainstream American Left would argue that the 9/11 attacks didn't profoundly alter our reality as a nation.
I also agree with your statement about the stupidity of being post-modern and ironic in a world where there is a very real conflict of worldviews. Hell, anyone who joins the volunteer military understands that being tragically cool is a farce, and I support America's soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines for putting themselves on the line for a belief in their country.
But one of the persistent threads I've encountered in discussion after discussion is that supporters of the Bush approach to fighting terrorists can't seem to separate the desire and intention to fight terrorists from the techniques used to do so. The failure of cultural elites to recognize that war is sometimes necessary is matched by the failure of many of their detractors to see that just because war is necessary doesn't mean that it has to be fought in the particular manner our President has selected.
It is no secret that the top military brass were very reticent about going into Iraq, in part because they'd spent the entire decade of the 1990s policing the world. The Bosnia mission, still one of the American military's most underappreciated successes, had been ongoing since 1995. We had the lessons of the Somalia and Haiti missions behind us. Many of the generals had been on the ground as junior officers in Vietnam. These guys knew their jobs inside and out and were part of the most professional and experienced "peacetime" military we'd ever fielded. But when Gen. Shinseki told Congress we'd need several hundred thousand troops to secure Iraq, Rumsfeld at best ignored him, and at worst hastened his departure.
Beyond the notion of whether there was any meaningful linkage between Saddam and al Quaeda, the difficult issues of how to handle the reconstruction, security, and political reconstitution of Iraq didn't spring up unforseen after the invasion began. Most of them had been planned for by the Pentagon, by experienced NGOs, and by other well-informed and nonpartisan entitites. That the White House chose to ignore that wealth of expertise to me betrays something beyond "knowing yourself," something that strays into a very dangerous hubris.
The culture war analysis only takes you so far. Cultural elites may not understand Middle America, but that still doesn't really have anything to do with the essential recklessness and lack of sophistication displayed by the Administration in its post-9/11 response.
For example, President Bush referred to the 9/11 attacks as a new Pearl Harbor attack, when it patently was not even remotely like Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attack on Pearl was a purely military move designed to wipe out the US Pacific Fleet, while the 9/11 attacks were symbolic attacks designed to cripple us economically, cause panic, and serve as a propaganda tool for the cause of militant Islam.
We have done very little under the Bush Administration to t
I wish I could believe that the motives are as honest and clean as you claim.
I never claimed their motives were honest and clean. I actually pointed out that the 9/11 attacks have been used as a rationale for many things that have nothing to do with 9/11.
That said, I don't buy the argument that the Bush Administration came in from Day 1 with a plan to invade Afghanistan, invade Iraq, set up an enormous new domestic security apparatus, restrict domestic freedoms, and so on. I'll accept the idea that Iraq was in the reticle from the beginning, but the rest of it to me looks like a reflex response to fast-moving circumstances.
Social conservatives tend to trust strong centralized power as a more effective means of prevailing against an external threat. Hell, most Americans buy into the notion that only by putting our faith in One Strong Leader can we beat the terrorists.
Don't forget that the Department of Homeland Security was first proposed by the Democrats, and the Bush team was dead set against it. They then flipped 180 degrees and bashed anyone who didn't support it as unAmerican. Obviously the DHS wasn't part of some grand plan, as the beast is still wobbly at best.
The government has not taken even one action as the result of it's "anit-terrorism" policies that would render any of the decision makers (presumably the chief targets) even a bit uncomfortable.
people who call them the 7/7 attacks are branding them to promote fear
That sucks. Talk about a great way to help the terrorists play up their acts. It's like free advertising, over and over and over....
I truly hope the UK doesn't go down the road to stupidity that we here in the States did. I think the years of dealing with IRA attacks probably have helped you all maintain some perspective. Best of luck to you in holding off the fearmongers.
The bombings have changed nothing in my life so I don't see how/why Americans all freaked out over a couple of planes hitting some buildings when they're MUCH further then an hours drive away..
That's why the use of 9/11 as a rationale for everything from the USA Patriot Act to the War in Iraq is so absurd. The government stoked the flames of fear and continues to do so to this day.
But there is more to America's reaction that just that. First, being a Londoner, you're familiar with the notion of an enemy reaching out and bombing the crap out of your city. You recognize that taking a hit doesn't mean the end, and that democratic societies are quite resilient.
America's geographic isolation, and the fact that other than a few pesky U-Boats off the Eastern Seaboard and a random Japanese balloon bomb in World War II, we haven't been hit by a foreign enemy since the War of 1812, when you guys came over and torched D.C.
We've been so isolated for so long that we have come to internalize the notion that wars happen in other places, "over there." They certainly don't actually occur here on our soil. Plus, the 9/11 attacks simultaneously targeted the seat of our government, the nerve center of our defenses, and the core of our economic power all at once. From literally out of the blue, we went from a state of relative tranquility to being attacked with a decapitation strike. You must admit, that's not your garden-variety event.
So yes, Americans were a bit freaked out by this. But we're not really as freaked out as we seem, even though our government wants us to be.
It is when we are fat and happy that we are most distracted from the deep issues that make great literature.
It could also be argued that we are fat and happy even though we're at war. The volunteer military does all the fighting for us, and but for questions of policy, the only people who really feel the impact of the war itself are soldiers and their families. I'd argue that we're disturbed by what is happening, but it's not affecting our day to day lives to any great degree, unlike every other war in which America has been involved.
I read this story right after finally allowing myself to rent Gunner Palace from Netflix. I don't watch TV news, because I feel it insults my intelligence, but as a result I don't see much footage of the war in Iraq. I knew about Gunner Palace for some time, but I never rented it until now probably because I wasn't ready for it.
It's not that I'm not ready to see the soldiers doing their thing in Iraq. I was a soldier myself, so I appreciate watching soldiers going about their business without any "analysis" from those doing the filming. Rather, I avoided the film until now because I was so angry at the monumentally stupid way in which the war was approached, from its rationale and build up to the invasion, to the beginnings of the occupation stage, to the large-scale operations in Fallujah and elsewhere.
It is supremely frustrating to see American soldiers doing their jobs with as much humor and professionalism as they can, all the while knowing that the civilian leadership at the top of the pyramid has let them down in a monumental fashion. I experienced something like that on a much smaller scale myself, when my unit left Somalia after not quite three months in country. A few months later, all American forces left Somalia. We had done our job very well, but because the American government had no real plan of action beyond immediate food security operations, a few casualties was all it took to send the global superpower packing.
So every time I see video footage of Americans in Iraq, I think back to Somalia and the way in which our leaders profoundly misunderstood the situation there before, during and after my deployment. I'm not suggesting that we stay in Iraq indefinitely to "make all those sacrifices worth something." I do, however, think that the monumental planning failures at the top of the food chain have done a tremendous disservice to the men and women of the US armed forces.
What does all this have to do with Charlie Stross's comment about the "deep trauma" of America? I think that in different ways Americans have been avoiding complex issues in our movies, our fiction, and our music specifically because we have been more deeply affected by the string of events (9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq) than we care to admit even to ourselves. For me, that means avoiding footage of the war. For others the reaction might be keeping minute track of every skirmish and ambush. Some might prefer to ignore the war entirely and pretend it isn't happening.
Those of us who believe wholeheartedly in the manner in which we are fighting Islamic militants don't want to see anything that will shake our convictions. Subversion in the cultural sphere could easily spread to the political.
Those of us who are profoundly disappointed by our leaders' lack of imagination, failure of vision, ignorance of history, and misunderstanding of the ground truth don't want to see more of the same in our entertainments. We want to be comforted that somewhere, even if only in fictional worlds, people with power are capable of making the right choice.
For the majority of the American population, who sit somewhere in the middle, the constant bickering between those who know what to do but can't do it, and those who know what not to do but can't figure out what *to* do is infuriating. We're at a watershed in American history, and people know it, even if they don't articulate it. Decisive, capable heroes, preferably unrelated to the current reality, fit the bill.
A friend of mine once said that everyone remembers the cultural achievements of Athens, but not of Sparta. Why? Because Sparta was a completely militarized society, while Athens was not. Perhaps yet another part of the bill America must pay for our hamfisted approach is that as we become more militarized, the creative and free-thinking aspects of our society become isolated and minimized.
Lets be fair and honest about this. Here is a company that single handedly created the market for Personal Computers....
Oh man, what a great day to start my weekend. I was going to go see Wedding Crashers at the theater, but I think I've already had enough laughs to last a few days.
There's nothing critical, insightful, or useful in this piece of pure opinion, divorced from the facts.
My favorite line:
t has given us Windows, sure, it was buggy earlier and a lot of things didn't work like they were supposed to (plug and play springs to mind) but it was a pioneering effort. No one was even close to the ease of use that Windows offered.
I personally think the subscription model is superior.
I dislike subscription services because they amount to extortion. Keep your subscription, or the music is effectively gone (rendered unusable). Assuming that I don't want to break the law, all the music I downloaded is useless to me if I decide to stop using the subscription service. Of course, iTMS files utilize DRM, but I can play tunes on five CPUs and unlimited iPods, as well as rip CDs. So although I don't have unlimited rights to do whatever I like with iTMS files, for my forseeable uses I feel like I'm getting a fair deal.
Beyond my general reticence toward subscription services, Yahoo's Music Unlimited doesn't work for me because:
1) I use an iPod. I don't think I'm alone in this.
2) I use a Mac. Y! Music Unlimited doesn't support the Mac.
For instance, one cost of keeping the facts about the rape of underage Iraqi girls at Abu Ghraib bottled up, is that many people place an erroneous trust in the U.S. Army that its soldiers will not rape underage girls. This erroneous cost is a social evil caused by information being kept unfree.
Or alternately, the cost of keeping the Abu Grahib operation shrouded in secrecy is that people will begin to believe all manner of accusations about said operation, regardless of their factual basis.
There is evidence that Apple may use DRM in their production Intel-based Macs. There is evedence that Apple will not use DRM in their production Intel-based Macs.
So far, the sum of these stories is: "There's a 50% chance that Apple will use DRM!" vs. "There's a 50% chance that Apple won't use DRM!"
Perhaps the best part of Graham's missive is this: If you could measure how much work people did, many companies wouldn't need any fixed workday. You could just say: this is what you have to do. Do it whenever you like, wherever you like. If your work requires you to talk to other people in the company, then you may need to be here a certain amount. Otherwise we don't care.
A lot of people seem to be getting hung up on the amateur vs. professional distinction, but the message I pull from the article is that artificial constraints like fixed hours and fixed work locations restrict the creativity and productivity of professionals. Amateurs do not suffer from the same constraints.
Graham is simply pointing out that far too many companies put up barriers which make it more difficult to create excellent software. If these companies allowed their employees' natural enthusiasm and creativity some freedom, the companies would enjoy better returns on their labor investment.
This isn't ivory tower nonsense. If you hold people accountable for results but let them manage the process by which they achieve those results, you can increase efficiency. This gives power to employees at the implementation level, and eliminates many of the Dilbertesque barriers so common in the corporate world.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you ever find that there were things the Muslim kids said or did that offended you? I'm curious if it was a one-way thing (implying that the culture of the Islamic kids was some how more restrictive or intolerant) or if you felt like they sometimes tread on things that triggered reactions in you. I only ask because where I grew up it was essentially about as white bread as you can get.
The cultural aspect of it does seem to muddle things, doesn't it? For example, my understanding is that much of what happens in the Arab Muslim world has as much to do with ancient Arab traditions as with Islam per se. Treatment of women springs to mind. In Somalia we had been briefed before arrival not to talk to the women, especially if they didn't have a man present. But although the Somalis are Muslims, the women were often our best source of intel. They would come up to us and volunteer information and ask questions, and if the men had serious objections to this, they certainly would have let us know.
The new Iraqi constitution may ban women from voting, but Benazir Bhutto was the Prime Minister of Pakistan and Indonesia, the largest Islamic nation on earth, elected a woman president.
For me that makes it very difficult to filter the relegion from the region, probably akin to what it's like for a Russian Orthodox worshipper to understand the differences between the Anglican Church and the Southern Baptist Convention.
That's why the whole "monolithic militant Islam" argument just doesn't make sense to me. In practice, people, particularly True Believers, tend to have competing interests, and those get in the way of realizing world-altering goals.
That's a really good point. I probably applied too broad a brush there. I've heard many good things about Cuba. Basically it seems that if you go with the program and don't speak out, life there isn't bad. The standard of living hasn't moved much in recent decades, but as you mention, being shut out by the US hasn't helped that.
It may be a useless chicken and egg question, but I wonder if Cuba would have been able to survive as long as it has if it hadn't been isolated by the United States. The Soviets propped up Cuba for decades, so the tourism bucks were perhaps offset. Then again, when have communist states ever been tourist destinations? Would Cuba have remained voluntarily open to tourism, given its treatment of political prisoners? Would it really have wanted foreigners poking around and spreading capitalist ideas to the people? I don't know the answer to these questions, but I do think the US embargo has been a useful political tool not just for the US government, but also for Castro.
The larger question you raised about the viability of socialism on an island nation brings us right back to one of the central tenets of communist ideology, which is that world revolution is necessary. The Soviets plumped for detente only because they realized the worldwide revolution wasn't going to happen. By then they were already just a totalitarian state with not even the most remote connection to the original ideal of the Bolsheviks.
I hope that when Castro dies, Cuba is able to make a peaceful transition into some sort of situation that preserves what gains they have made, rids them of the political prisons, and keeps them in control of their own destiny. My guess is there's going to be an awful lot of money from Florida being pumped into Cuba as soon as the socialist government falls. Not all of that will be bad, but if Cuba turns into a giant island version of Las Vegas, that would be really sad.
I don't think containment applies in a 1 to 1 relationship between the Cold War and the fight against Islamic fundamentalists, but even with that said, your questions make a lot of sense. However, since this is as much a conflic of ideas as a military conflict, containing the acceptance of radical Islamic ideas is the real goal. The Soviets pushed their ideas through their standing military, and as you point out, radical Islam has no such center of gravity. But even though the Soviets had a center of gravity, we never were directly engaged there. It was always on the periphery. In the case of radical Islam, I would argue that the periphery is on the street in societies where Muslims make up a substantial percentage of the population. Give those people an alternative to radicalism, and the core radicals will not be able to spread their message. As they die off, nobody will replace them.
The notion that containment could serve as a viable strategy in fighting radical Islamic terrorists makes sense to me and to a lot of people who are smarter than me, but it also has its critics. This piece argues that containment failed and it was really "rollback" that finished off the USSR, which would mean that containment would be innefectual in the current situation as well.
The best writing I've encountered on the subject is this article by John Lewis Gaddis which argues that we can learn much from the containment policy first laid out by George Kennan, but that we must be flexible and not attempt to simply apply the same template to the war against radical Islam.
That's how I interpret it, but then again, my knowledge of Islam is limited to a college reading of the Koran and some basic overview reading since the 9/11 attacks. I heard an interesting discussion on the radio the other day, in relation to the story about North American Islamic clerics coming together to stridently repudiate the validity of terrorist acts.
What was interesting to me was how the commentator, a Muslim, described the structure in Sunni Islam. Basically, interpretation of the teachings of Muhammed is handled by clerics, who only after years of study can begin to build a congregation of followers. Their validity as clerics depends in large measure on their ability to attract followers, which means that Muslim clerics are inherently very political. This is not unlike other religions, but from what the commentator described, it seemed that the interpretations of individual clerics could be hugely influential. That is why getting so many of them together to issue a joint fatwa is so noteworthy.
I inferred from this that while there are only two main variants of Islam (Sunni and Shiite), there exist all kinds of variations within those groups. Because we're dealing with religion and interpretation of writings that are centuries old, something that seems basic (like an injunction against the use of fire as a weapon) is seen by some clerics as valid and invalid by others.
It is strange to be talking about Islam this way, as if we're Kremlinologists back in 1986, poring over photos from the May Day Parade and trying to determine what is going on in the Soviet power structure. There is no Iron Wall, but even though there are millions of Muslims in the developed world, there's this enormous communications gap.
True, of course. Your definition of China's ruling party as fascists is probably more accurate than calling them communists. The core of communist ideology always was collective ownership, and that is long gone in China. Now the apparatus of control is still there, but the ideology is gone and everyone knows it. So far the people in China seem to go along with the program because the trains are running on time, but I wonder how long it will take for the majority of them to get anxious for more political freedom.
You could also note the existence of Cuba and North Korea as communist states, and both of those examples are probably closer to the true ideal of communism, cults of personality aside. But Cuba's experiment likely won't outlive Castro, and North Korea is an obvious failure, unable to export its ideology anywhere.
The communists had their chance, but even though it seemed for a while that all the odds were working in their favor, the inability of socialist states to function in absence of ongoing revolution proved to be their downfall. I predict that if radical Islamists are similarly contained and restricted, the emptiness of their promises will unravel.
Islam is a religion with millions of adherents who have never bombed anyone, killed anyone, threatened anyone, or attempted to take over the world and destroy Christianity in the process.
Islam is definitely engaged in an internal struggle right now, but those who condemn violence are starting to do so more forcefully, and the notion that the majority of Muslims want to do in America and Europe is to the best of my knowledge unsubstantiated.
The Christian Identity Movement espoused by the Aryan Nation purports to be a true interpretation of Christ's teachings. Because they call themselves Christians doesn't mean that they speak for the millions of other Christians, does it?
Sure the leaders are the same folks who run Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, etc... The Strategy is to take over the world, pretty simple to me.
Bin Laden hates the Saudi royal family and would love nothing better than to have it destroyed. That hardly puts them on the same side. The fact that Iran is a Shiite nation and most of the rest of the Middle East (save Iraq) is dominated by Sunnis is also a very important factor. Just as Catholics and Protestants clashed in Europe for generations, so it is with the Muslim Arabs. That doesn't mean they can't and haven't been cooperating, but they certainly don't all share the same vision of what is right for Islam, much less the entire world.
Remember that the world communist movement had a very clear ideological platform and a very clear plan. They even had two giant countries, the USSR and China, in their camp. But nope, the whole "take over the world" goal was just too difficult to obtain. Communism imploded specifically because the West successfully pursued a strategy of containment, which forced communism to slowly collapse under its own contradictions.
Because of course they haven't invaded other parts of our lives like air travel and public transportation?
They have attacked us and inflicted damage, absolutely. But the effectiveness of terrorists can be minimized, and they can be isolated and slowly choked off. Deterrence and patient police work are the key to this, as the British know.
Your point about Verizon not being part of the building of the POTS network is well taken, though of course AT&T built it and was then broken up by the government, which in turn led to the powerhouse we know as Verizon.
I also appreciate your point about flexiblity. Had I needed a static IP I would definitely have gone with Speakeasy rather than SBC.
Perhaps looking at the telephone network as an essential infrastructure component like roads or airspace (the concept of which entailed some ferocious legal battling) that should be accessible to a broad range of commercial entities. The fact that Verizon, et. al. didn't actually create the POTS network but inherited it may offer evidence that providing cheap access to the network allows competitors to focus on value added services, which as you mentioned provide more choices for competitors and could possibly spawn the next big thing in telecommunications.
I'm just thinking out loud, trying to get a clear grasp of whose interests are at stake. I dislike strict "The Big Corporations vs. The Rest of Us" interpretations. I can see why the Baby Bells don't like having to subsidize their competitors, but I also see your point about the necessity of that competition.
From an economics point of view, communications networks are a fascinating subject.
I'm not sure either way on this one. The intent of the ruling is to allow differing technologies to compete with each other. It could be argued that by forcing Baby Bells to provide assistance to companies that compete with them in offering services, the Baby Bells have to assume an unfair burden.
But if DSL is just one technology. Already cable and DSL companies are locked in a heated battle over who will dominate residential broadband. Even if the local phone carrier and the local cable carrier are effectively monopolies, they're still in competition with each other, right?
DSL and cable aren't the only broadband technologies available now, and other players may try to come up with their own competing mechanisms.
I'm not saying that I know for sure that the ruling will enhance competition, or that the consumer will ultimately be best served by it. But I'm not sure that allowing the Baby Bells and cable companies to compete head to head in an unfettered fashion is such a bad thing.
If anything, I am more bothered by the fact that cable companies are provided local monopolies by municipal governments, which gives me no choice in cable access as a consumer. At least the Baby Bells are no longer truly "regional" in that they can all compete with each other for local and long distance services, as well as DSL and wireless.
Ol' C. Everett just didn't know what he was getting into.
Absolutely. But following that war moment, we were all told to get back to our shopping. Americans haven't been asked to sacrifice in any meaningful way, nor have we had to. Aside from a small segment of the population that is connected to the military in some fashion, there is no direct risk or danger, no rationing, no blackouts, nothing that impacts the flow of our daily lives.
The most disturbing part of all this is not just that nation-states are getting nukes. The ability of rogue actors like bin Laden, et. al. to acquire them is very real. Pakistan, for example, is a known nuclear technology exporter. We all know how tight their borders and civilian control of the military are.
The fact that the Bush Administration just tacitly approved India's nuclear status, and already does so with Pakistan, doesn't make matters any easier. We have essentially opened the floodgates to nuclear arms development by letting the loopholes in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty remain open. We oppose the Comprensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and we've violated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.
Maybe someone ought to dust off the phrase, "No material. No bomb. No nuclear terrorism."
My point wasn't to go into a treatise about why the war was misguided, but since you're asking, I believe that al Qaeda attacked America in 9/11, and we wisely attacked its base of operations in Afghanistan. However, there has never been any convincing proof that Iraq had any real connection to al Qaeda, or that diverting essential resources to invade and occupy Iraq has helped rather than hindered the fight against al Qaeda. We should have learned enough from the experiences Western European nations had in fighting terrorist cells in the 1970s and 80s to understand that successfully eliminating terrorists is a matter of long-term deterrence, and that the military is in most respects utterly ill-suited to the police work required to take down terrorists. As I mention in another post, there were a raft of preventable mistakes in the planning phase of the war, once it was decided upon.
Why not go with Vietnam? If you want to live in the past, you'd have more people there with you if you went with Vietnam. Everyone else is doing it.
I never directly compared the operational situation in Somalia to that of Iraq, and Vietnam is even further off the mark as any student of military history knows. My point in bringing up Somalia was that as a soldier there I felt let down by the civilian leadership, and I feel the soldiers in Iraq today are being let down by the current leadership.
Failure to imagine what? Failure to envision what? Ignorance of what specific lessons of history? Misunderstanding of what ground truth?
Failure to imagine options other than a ground invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Ignorance of any number of lessons about the limits of power, including those learned the hard way by the British when they ruled Iraq from 1918 to 1932. Misunderstanding of the ground truth that rather than being greeted with flowers in the streets of Iraq's towns and cities, Iraqi nationalism transcended Saddam. It is not a secret that in the run-up to the war that we were relying on intelligence sources that fed us what we wanted to hear.
From your post, you seem to know neither what to do, nor what not to do. You certainly haven't given an example of either. Your post is almost completely without substance, but it goes on for almost a page. You have no ideas to offer and no insight on any specific event. Just vague criticism.
My post was not intended to be a lengthy critique of the war, or an alternate plan for its prosecution. Its substance, for whatever it is worth, is my emotional response to reading Stross's comments about America's "deep trauma". I can understand why you don't like my response, but I think it is important to take it in context.
What political office are you running for?
Don't worry, I have no interest in running for office.
All wars always go badly. Things never work out the way you want them to. Regrets are unavoidable. Mistakes happen. The future is always largely unforseen.
I agree.
When the inevitable bad things happen, those things have to be overcome -- you can't let them overcome you -- or you fail. That'll be how the outcome of the war on terrorism is decided -- the allies will either choose to succeed or they'll lose heart and give up.
We are in absolute agreement on this point. I believe without a doubt that we will succeed. We will adapt and learn, but that doesn't mean that I shouldn't feel sorrow at what I perceive to be tragic and costly mistakes we have made thus far. The Bush Administration's failure to learn from its mistakes weakens our overall effort and means that it will take more lives, money, and time to wipe out the deranged militants who are trying hard to defeat us.
How do you think your complaining fits into that picture?
If enough people complain, and it forces the government to pursue more effective policies in the fight against terrorists, I see it as worthwhile.
I'm surprised that you posted this as an AC. You obviously have thought this through quite a bit. Personally I don't agree with your broad characterization of Slashdot as a vehicle for the "cultural elites" (for one thing, a much larger than average chunk of the Slashdot population are died in the wool libertarians), but if you want to change the Slashdot dynamic, why not post under a member name?
You make a solid point about the failure of cultural elites to adapt to the end of the Cold War, but I think you take it a bit far. Clinton cut and ran in Somalia, but he also pushed NATO into action in Serbia and assisted Croatia in booting the Serbs from Krajina. The Fukuyama "end of history" argument lost credence as soon as the first aircraft hit the tower, and nobody in the mainstream American Left would argue that the 9/11 attacks didn't profoundly alter our reality as a nation.
I also agree with your statement about the stupidity of being post-modern and ironic in a world where there is a very real conflict of worldviews. Hell, anyone who joins the volunteer military understands that being tragically cool is a farce, and I support America's soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines for putting themselves on the line for a belief in their country.
But one of the persistent threads I've encountered in discussion after discussion is that supporters of the Bush approach to fighting terrorists can't seem to separate the desire and intention to fight terrorists from the techniques used to do so. The failure of cultural elites to recognize that war is sometimes necessary is matched by the failure of many of their detractors to see that just because war is necessary doesn't mean that it has to be fought in the particular manner our President has selected.
It is no secret that the top military brass were very reticent about going into Iraq, in part because they'd spent the entire decade of the 1990s policing the world. The Bosnia mission, still one of the American military's most underappreciated successes, had been ongoing since 1995. We had the lessons of the Somalia and Haiti missions behind us. Many of the generals had been on the ground as junior officers in Vietnam. These guys knew their jobs inside and out and were part of the most professional and experienced "peacetime" military we'd ever fielded. But when Gen. Shinseki told Congress we'd need several hundred thousand troops to secure Iraq, Rumsfeld at best ignored him, and at worst hastened his departure.
Beyond the notion of whether there was any meaningful linkage between Saddam and al Quaeda, the difficult issues of how to handle the reconstruction, security, and political reconstitution of Iraq didn't spring up unforseen after the invasion began. Most of them had been planned for by the Pentagon, by experienced NGOs, and by other well-informed and nonpartisan entitites. That the White House chose to ignore that wealth of expertise to me betrays something beyond "knowing yourself," something that strays into a very dangerous hubris.
The culture war analysis only takes you so far. Cultural elites may not understand Middle America, but that still doesn't really have anything to do with the essential recklessness and lack of sophistication displayed by the Administration in its post-9/11 response.
For example, President Bush referred to the 9/11 attacks as a new Pearl Harbor attack, when it patently was not even remotely like Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attack on Pearl was a purely military move designed to wipe out the US Pacific Fleet, while the 9/11 attacks were symbolic attacks designed to cripple us economically, cause panic, and serve as a propaganda tool for the cause of militant Islam.
We have done very little under the Bush Administration to t
I never claimed their motives were honest and clean. I actually pointed out that the 9/11 attacks have been used as a rationale for many things that have nothing to do with 9/11.
That said, I don't buy the argument that the Bush Administration came in from Day 1 with a plan to invade Afghanistan, invade Iraq, set up an enormous new domestic security apparatus, restrict domestic freedoms, and so on. I'll accept the idea that Iraq was in the reticle from the beginning, but the rest of it to me looks like a reflex response to fast-moving circumstances.
Social conservatives tend to trust strong centralized power as a more effective means of prevailing against an external threat. Hell, most Americans buy into the notion that only by putting our faith in One Strong Leader can we beat the terrorists.
Don't forget that the Department of Homeland Security was first proposed by the Democrats, and the Bush team was dead set against it. They then flipped 180 degrees and bashed anyone who didn't support it as unAmerican. Obviously the DHS wasn't part of some grand plan, as the beast is still wobbly at best.
The government has not taken even one action as the result of it's "anit-terrorism" policies that would render any of the decision makers (presumably the chief targets) even a bit uncomfortable.
I'm not really sure what you mean by that. Senators and Congressmen don't all have private jets. In fact, Senator Ted Kennedy was on the no fly list for a while, which caused a big stink.
That sucks. Talk about a great way to help the terrorists play up their acts. It's like free advertising, over and over and over... .
I truly hope the UK doesn't go down the road to stupidity that we here in the States did. I think the years of dealing with IRA attacks probably have helped you all maintain some perspective. Best of luck to you in holding off the fearmongers.
That's why the use of 9/11 as a rationale for everything from the USA Patriot Act to the War in Iraq is so absurd. The government stoked the flames of fear and continues to do so to this day.
But there is more to America's reaction that just that. First, being a Londoner, you're familiar with the notion of an enemy reaching out and bombing the crap out of your city. You recognize that taking a hit doesn't mean the end, and that democratic societies are quite resilient.
America's geographic isolation, and the fact that other than a few pesky U-Boats off the Eastern Seaboard and a random Japanese balloon bomb in World War II, we haven't been hit by a foreign enemy since the War of 1812, when you guys came over and torched D.C.
We've been so isolated for so long that we have come to internalize the notion that wars happen in other places, "over there." They certainly don't actually occur here on our soil. Plus, the 9/11 attacks simultaneously targeted the seat of our government, the nerve center of our defenses, and the core of our economic power all at once. From literally out of the blue, we went from a state of relative tranquility to being attacked with a decapitation strike. You must admit, that's not your garden-variety event.
So yes, Americans were a bit freaked out by this. But we're not really as freaked out as we seem, even though our government wants us to be.
It could also be argued that we are fat and happy even though we're at war. The volunteer military does all the fighting for us, and but for questions of policy, the only people who really feel the impact of the war itself are soldiers and their families. I'd argue that we're disturbed by what is happening, but it's not affecting our day to day lives to any great degree, unlike every other war in which America has been involved.
It's not that I'm not ready to see the soldiers doing their thing in Iraq. I was a soldier myself, so I appreciate watching soldiers going about their business without any "analysis" from those doing the filming. Rather, I avoided the film until now because I was so angry at the monumentally stupid way in which the war was approached, from its rationale and build up to the invasion, to the beginnings of the occupation stage, to the large-scale operations in Fallujah and elsewhere.
It is supremely frustrating to see American soldiers doing their jobs with as much humor and professionalism as they can, all the while knowing that the civilian leadership at the top of the pyramid has let them down in a monumental fashion. I experienced something like that on a much smaller scale myself, when my unit left Somalia after not quite three months in country. A few months later, all American forces left Somalia. We had done our job very well, but because the American government had no real plan of action beyond immediate food security operations, a few casualties was all it took to send the global superpower packing.
So every time I see video footage of Americans in Iraq, I think back to Somalia and the way in which our leaders profoundly misunderstood the situation there before, during and after my deployment. I'm not suggesting that we stay in Iraq indefinitely to "make all those sacrifices worth something." I do, however, think that the monumental planning failures at the top of the food chain have done a tremendous disservice to the men and women of the US armed forces.
What does all this have to do with Charlie Stross's comment about the "deep trauma" of America? I think that in different ways Americans have been avoiding complex issues in our movies, our fiction, and our music specifically because we have been more deeply affected by the string of events (9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq) than we care to admit even to ourselves. For me, that means avoiding footage of the war. For others the reaction might be keeping minute track of every skirmish and ambush. Some might prefer to ignore the war entirely and pretend it isn't happening.
Those of us who believe wholeheartedly in the manner in which we are fighting Islamic militants don't want to see anything that will shake our convictions. Subversion in the cultural sphere could easily spread to the political.
Those of us who are profoundly disappointed by our leaders' lack of imagination, failure of vision, ignorance of history, and misunderstanding of the ground truth don't want to see more of the same in our entertainments. We want to be comforted that somewhere, even if only in fictional worlds, people with power are capable of making the right choice.
For the majority of the American population, who sit somewhere in the middle, the constant bickering between those who know what to do but can't do it, and those who know what not to do but can't figure out what *to* do is infuriating. We're at a watershed in American history, and people know it, even if they don't articulate it. Decisive, capable heroes, preferably unrelated to the current reality, fit the bill.
A friend of mine once said that everyone remembers the cultural achievements of Athens, but not of Sparta. Why? Because Sparta was a completely militarized society, while Athens was not. Perhaps yet another part of the bill America must pay for our hamfisted approach is that as we become more militarized, the creative and free-thinking aspects of our society become isolated and minimized.
Oh man, what a great day to start my weekend. I was going to go see Wedding Crashers at the theater, but I think I've already had enough laughs to last a few days.
There's nothing critical, insightful, or useful in this piece of pure opinion, divorced from the facts.
My favorite line:
t has given us Windows, sure, it was buggy earlier and a lot of things didn't work like they were supposed to (plug and play springs to mind) but it was a pioneering effort. No one was even close to the ease of use that Windows offered.
What are you talking about?
I dislike subscription services because they amount to extortion. Keep your subscription, or the music is effectively gone (rendered unusable). Assuming that I don't want to break the law, all the music I downloaded is useless to me if I decide to stop using the subscription service. Of course, iTMS files utilize DRM, but I can play tunes on five CPUs and unlimited iPods, as well as rip CDs. So although I don't have unlimited rights to do whatever I like with iTMS files, for my forseeable uses I feel like I'm getting a fair deal.
Beyond my general reticence toward subscription services, Yahoo's Music Unlimited doesn't work for me because:
1) I use an iPod. I don't think I'm alone in this.
2) I use a Mac. Y! Music Unlimited doesn't support the Mac.
Or alternately, the cost of keeping the Abu Grahib operation shrouded in secrecy is that people will begin to believe all manner of accusations about said operation, regardless of their factual basis.
So far, the sum of these stories is: "There's a 50% chance that Apple will use DRM!" vs. "There's a 50% chance that Apple won't use DRM!"
This would be a perfect topic for a pundit tracker.
A lot of people seem to be getting hung up on the amateur vs. professional distinction, but the message I pull from the article is that artificial constraints like fixed hours and fixed work locations restrict the creativity and productivity of professionals. Amateurs do not suffer from the same constraints.
Graham is simply pointing out that far too many companies put up barriers which make it more difficult to create excellent software. If these companies allowed their employees' natural enthusiasm and creativity some freedom, the companies would enjoy better returns on their labor investment.
This isn't ivory tower nonsense. If you hold people accountable for results but let them manage the process by which they achieve those results, you can increase efficiency. This gives power to employees at the implementation level, and eliminates many of the Dilbertesque barriers so common in the corporate world.
It does, but unfortunately the name "eDonkey" immediately invalidates any utility the service might provide.
Personal foul, hideous name. Loss of down and a 15 yard penalty.