No matter how many pixels you can display, no matter how cool looking the box or how fast the processor, what really matters is the games. Who will ship which games for which consoles?
BTW, my laser disc player is really great, and I enjoy watching movies on my Betamax as well...
This is pretty funny. In the processor wars, it's all about speed. The Intel/AMD battle for *clock speed* has provided ample fodder for Slashdot over the past several months.
Usability, however, has never really featured as a big item on Slashdot. For example, in coverage of Gnome and KDE, most of the articles seem to be more about the politics, personalities involved, and so on than the actual usability of the environments.
The overall usefulness of computer products is difficult to quantify, and is one of the reasons why companies like Apple have had a tough time. Issues of user-friendliness are thought of as the whinings of computer-illiterates.
Interestingly enough, now we arrive at the Transmeta speed reviews, and it appears that many of the same people who decry anything "pretty" are offering up excuses as to why their favorite chip doesn't run as fast as the others. "But it's more *useful*" they complain.
Hmm... usefulness rather than pure numbers as a benchmark. What an interesting concept.
Opt out - your time is too valuable!
on
Should You Vote?
·
· Score: 1
Think of all the work involved in voting. I mean, we're on the cusp of the 21st Century, people! Our time is important to us!
We've all heard the arguments - "It's the future of this country, of your locality and state, it's your duty as a citizen."
WhatEVER! Let's be serious. From what I hear, it takes about three minutes to register to vote at one of those bothersome street-corner registration booths. It takes *several hours* to go through the issues and decide how to vote. Then it takes a good 30 minutes to get to the polling station and vote. What an outrage!
I'm going to do the right thing and opt out of elections this year, so that I can use that valuable time to do something far more important to me, like playing a rip-snortin' game of Tomb Raider III.
In the 1980s, the US Army developed linked tank trainers in the United States and Germany, so that tankers in Germany could fight mock battles against tankers in the US. The reason for immersive video game-like tools such as this in a training environment is that it saves money, saves equipment, and often saves lives.
As for the use of video game-like technologies for things such as heads-up displays and the like, AC got it right. These tools offer essentially "tuned" sensory input which gets past the limitations of the human body and brain, and allows tank commanders, aircraft pilots and the like to view the battle with more scope and clarity.
Having been an infantry officer, I remember being someone disgusted by the image of PGMs hitting buildings in Iraq during Desert Storm. We all sat in front of our TVs and watched the flickering green camera image as the missile closed in on the building. It was just like a video game.
But it is important to remember that war is not just a video game. That little crosshair on your screen is targeting human beings, and even with the most precise weapons, war is messy and innocents get killed.
Cindy Hall and Gary Visgaitis, "PC Homes by Income", USA Today, Oct. 20, 1998, p. D.1
About 42% of adults overall say there is a personal computer in their home. 74% of these have a modem, 65% have Internet access. Homes with a PC by household income:
Katz has inadvertantly raised an issue with his statements about older people who are idiots, who don't get it, etc.
Technology is advancing at a tremendous rate across the globe, and no doubt, for many young people, this technology is quite natural and comfortable. He raises the valid point that access to this technology should be extended to all young people.
But just because young people are comfortable *using* technology does not necessarily mean that they should be the people making decisions about how technology is used.
I'm sure some people will take offense to this, but in almost every culture other than that of the US, there is a reverence for experience and wisdom. I'm not saying that Gore and Bush are wise, but they do have experience in the grey of the real world.
Often I get the feeling that Katz sees the world in black and white - there are the "smart" people who use technology extensively and grok it intuitively, and there are the "idiots" who are older and don't know how to use Napster (and therefore can't make decisions about technology).
Political policy in a pluralistic, democratic society is based on compromise. At the root level, it's about many people sitting together in a room and figuring out how to come up with solutions that everyone can live with, even if it doesn't make everyone completely happy.
There's a reason that 15 year olds don't have the right to vote. There's a reason Americans aren't electing 25 year olds to the Senate left and right. Experience in the world outside of technology can give valuable perspective. Let's not get so entranced by the latest technology that we forget it is just one part of the larger world.
If you were a painter and you spent months creating a painting, how would you feel if someone snuck into your studio, made a copy of the painting, then showed it to everyone?
Your strokes might be better than those of the copy, your colors might be a bit richer and brighter, but the value of your painting would be diminished by the fact that its novelty value had already been compromised.
What is the value of a book, when someone puts out the last three pages of an as yet unpublished novel? Though everyone may not go and visit the site to see the ending, the cat is already out of the bag and word of mouth will do its work.
The point is that the comments on Slashdot about Lucas being rich and greedy are beside the point. He may be rich and greedy, but he also has a right to protect his intellectual work. You can't Open Source everything, and even if you could, there are some people who want to maintain control over their artistic and intellectual property, which is THEIR CHOICE.
There's a bigger picture to look at here, beyond how managers deal with IT folks. Managers in general in this country are not given even a quarter of the necessary training they need to become effective leaders.
I admit right up front I have a bias in this matter because of my military background. First in ROTC, then as a junior officer in the Army, I went through thousands of hours of training designed to make me an effective leader.
How an organization develops leaders is a question that is seldom asked. There are plenty of large organizations that drill their managers in how to be a good member of the corporate team, but how many of them teach effective leadership techniques?
Leadership is a mixture of native ability and teaching - lots of teaching. It's not a formula. No leadership book is going to teach you everything you need to know about leadership. Going to some retreat where everyone goes kayaking or whatever, is not going to make better leaders.
Sustained, in-depth training and feedback is the only way for an organization to make effective leaders. When you have effective leaders, more often than not, people want to stay in the organization, whether they're IT workers, sales people, or truck drivers.
There's no magic bullet, but promoting people into management positions because they can write good memos or sell more widgets, or even program well is foolish. Leadership has to be cultivated - it doesn't just come with the territory.
My experience with Covad here in Santa Cruz has been uniformly good.
I contacted PacBell a few months ago and they told me I was too far from their switching station. I figured PacBell was the only game in town, so I gave up on DSL at home.
On a whim about a month ago, I checked out Covad. Turns out they use their own equipment in PacBell switching stations. It also turns out that I'm not too far from the switching station. PacBell is only involved in that they send someone out to verify the loop.
Two weeks after contacting the Covad sales guy and one of their partners (FastPoint Communications, in my case), I had DSL up and running quite consistently at about 600k downstream, 128k upstream. The guy who installed it did so in about an hour, and he obviously knew what he was doing.
Although I haven't dealt personally with PacBell's DSL people, the Covad guy told me that many of his team members were former PacBell employees who couldn't hack the forced overtime and lack of family time.
I know four people who have had DSL installed by PacBell locally. One had a couple of minor glitches, and the installation required two visits by PacBell. Another had about the same experience. A third had a nightmare experience that spanned two months and entailed literally six visits to his house. The fourth just got hers up and running after three months, five visits, and numerous headaches.
Most people in my neck of the woods don't realize that they have options other than PacBell, but they do.
I have to say it, though it pains me. It's not as thought nobody in Bungie's leadership had heard of Microsoft's Borg tactics. I'm sure "embrace and extinguish" is a term they were familiar with.
Nobody held a gun to their heads and declared: "You MUST arrange a deal wherein MS acquires you!"
They made a conscious business decision (oriented around profits, a motive all companies maintain) to sleep with Satan, and now they're starting to feel the heat from the flames.
I guess sometimes the price you pay for profits is too much.
Still.... I wouldn't wish that sort of Hell on anyone, particularly Bungie. They were an epic game company, with tons of talent and creativity. Now they're just an MS pawn.
Re:Two schools of thought
on
Think Unix
·
· Score: 1
I guess there's also a third school of thought, which is the "understand the complexity when and if you're ready to" school.
You're using circular logic. If nobody will mess with the US military, it's because of those taxes. So those taxes are going to ensure that all you have to worry about is the shipping of products. Oh, wait! Those products get shipped in trucks that use gasoline. Isn't the price of gasoline in the US a lot lower than in Europe in part because our government vigorously supports US oil companies around the globe? And don't those trucks drive around on roads? Oh yeah, that's right, they do. Those roads aren't built by private enterprise, they're built with tax dollars. UPS and FedEx and the like are free to roam wherever they please because of taxpayer-supported state troopers, highway patrols, and the like. In places like Chechnya and Bosnia, they don't have state troopers - but they do have bandits who would gladly ambush your UPS trucks and take all those juicy goods. One more thing - remember, the Internet would never have got off the ground if it wasn't a government-supported effort.
1) Just because people can communicate more easily across national boundaries doesn't mean that everyone will agree. Witness Slashdot's forum;-)
2) "Most wars were started by nationalists seeking political or economic expansion." - That's ludicrous. Nationalism didn't even exist until the early 20th Century. There's this place called Jerusalem - people have been fighting over it for centuries because of religion. You honestly think that the Internet will erase the relevance of religion?
3) "But if cultural and influence and economic power is increasingly tied to cyberspace, and the ballooning business moving onto the Net and the Web, the rationale for most wars would evaporate." - So, if business is good, there won't be any wars? Hmm....
4) When the telegraph came into existence, many pundits predicted that it would mean the end of warfare, because rapid communication would mitigate arguments. Ironic that the speedy telegraph was used to set World War One in motion faster than the diplomats could act to prevent it.
The bottom line is that people start wars. Nation-states are collections of individual human beings. Think about the number of times in your own life when you've had a conflict of interest with another person. Did you always come to an equitable solution? Or did the conflict continue? Until we can govern ourselves as individuals, no amount of technology will help us mitigate conflicts among nation-states.
I spend much of my time at work developing interfaces for web sites. Part of the reason people pay me money to do this is that they want their site's interface to reflect their company and their content.
It has been argued that content and interface can be separated and then suddenly, miraculously brought together seamlessly in such a way that the content doesn't really matter in the implementation of the interface.
That is true in cases of what I call "commodity information". Slashdot is a prime example of a site that uses an interface built around commodity information. Although the people who put Slashdot together certainly are part of the draw of the site, the core content is threaded discussion. Threaded discussion is commodity information, because it is not branded, it doesn't represent any organization, and it is differentiated by the user, not by Slashdot (yes, it's moderated, but only after it is posted).
The reason why there are so many wannabe Slashdot sites is that the format they developed to display this commodity information is well-suited to a variety of applications. I could create SlashGolf, a site related to news and discussion about golf, and the interface could remain pretty much the same and still be effective.
Why is it then that well-regarded sites like (not trying to draw flames here - these sites have all been well-reviewed) Apple, Iomega, and Bungie haven't been ripped off left and right?
It's because the information in these sites is differentiated, not commodity. The structure of the site and the information the site contains are too closely linked to offer rip-off artists much to work with.
Note that the generic web layouts provided in many WYSIWYG web dev tools are almost universally disregarded by developers, simply because they were developed in a vacuum, completely outside the real world, where content needs to fit context.
How many of the people making offhand comments about laws like this are actually parents? My guess is that your attiude about such things gets radically altered when you become a parent and these questions go from the abstract to the real.
Re:Thoughts from a Somalia veteran
on
Virtual War
·
· Score: 1
Will to power works for individual leaders and small ruling cadres, but in states where power is more dissipated, it's often internal politics (having to do with things like the price of oil) rather than will to dominate another country, that dictates foreign affairs. One could even argue that will to power and economics are intertwined. Economic control is power.
Is the Anonymous Coward arguing that in all cases the will to power is the reason for wars? If so, is will to power the reason we got involved in Somalia? In World War II? I beg to differ.
Thoughts from a Somalia veteran
on
Virtual War
·
· Score: 5
I was a rifle company XO in the 3-14 INF, 10th Mountain Division, and was deployed in the Lower Jubba Valley of Somalia from December of '91 to late March of '92.
I can't hope to compete intellectually with those of you who have seen all the Star Trek episodes, ready all the political science books, and figured it all out. However, I can offer a few observations based on my experience.
1) Anyone who tells you, based on watching television and reading the newspaper, that they really know what's going on in a war zone is totally full of shit. Usually the people on the ground don't even know exactly what's going on.
2) If you carry that analogy to the air, do you think the guys in their fast-movers really know what they're dropping their bombs on, or whether they were successful? After the USAF claimed to have knocked out scores of Scud launchers (in the desert, perhaps the most benign environment possible for air warfare), the GAO did a review and determined that in actuality, they had knocked out ZERO Scuds on the ground.
3) In order to prevail over the long haul in any kind of sustained military or military/humanitarian mission, you need to commit to a sustained presence on the ground. So-called precision warfare from the air can be quite helpful (note that the North Vietnamese returned to the discussion table after the US unleashed the B-52s), but it is part of a mix of capabilities necessary to achieve the long-term POLITICAL goals of the operation.
4) As a guy named Clausewitz has mentioned before, war is an extension of politics. Politics and economics are in most cases joined at the hip, not because economics is an evil that infects politics, but because economics is an essential component of human existence. We all want, but there is only a finite supply.
5) If the political will isn't there, it ain't gonna happen. To those of you who were around during the Vietnam era, this will sound familiar, but we really were making good progress in Somalia. The failed Mogadishu raid was in military terms, a great success. A difficult, extremely grueling mission where men lost their lives, but in persuit of a difficult goal, it was a big success. People back home saw the bodies being carried through the streets, and decided it was not worth losing American lives to save Somalis from themselves. Note that there were stupendously stupid battles during WWII, with casualties well over 50%. Had any of these battles occurred today, those in charge would be sacked, condemned, and punished. It's economics - saving Europe was important then. Saving Europe is kind of important now, but most Americans would just rather let the Europeans figure out how to do it themselves.
Sounds extreme, but if you're serious about passwords, you need to create one that you won't be able to easily remember. At work I've got several servers and various admin passwords to keep track of, so I write them in a small notebook which I then place in a lock-box. I've got one of two keys to the lock-box, and my boss has the other key.
An excellent analysis of the technical differences and business maneuverings behind FireWire and USB 2.0 can be found at http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/USB20.html. The upshot is this: FireWire is here now, USB 2.0 is just not going to be nearly as fast, and the rationale that Apple is acting arrogantly by charging licensing is essentially a spurious argument. +++
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, my laser disc player is really great, and I enjoy watching movies on my Betamax as well...
Usability, however, has never really featured as a big item on Slashdot. For example, in coverage of Gnome and KDE, most of the articles seem to be more about the politics, personalities involved, and so on than the actual usability of the environments.
The overall usefulness of computer products is difficult to quantify, and is one of the reasons why companies like Apple have had a tough time. Issues of user-friendliness are thought of as the whinings of computer-illiterates.
Interestingly enough, now we arrive at the Transmeta speed reviews, and it appears that many of the same people who decry anything "pretty" are offering up excuses as to why their favorite chip doesn't run as fast as the others. "But it's more *useful*" they complain.
Hmm... usefulness rather than pure numbers as a benchmark. What an interesting concept.
We've all heard the arguments - "It's the future of this country, of your locality and state, it's your duty as a citizen."
WhatEVER! Let's be serious. From what I hear, it takes about three minutes to register to vote at one of those bothersome street-corner registration booths. It takes *several hours* to go through the issues and decide how to vote. Then it takes a good 30 minutes to get to the polling station and vote. What an outrage!
I'm going to do the right thing and opt out of elections this year, so that I can use that valuable time to do something far more important to me, like playing a rip-snortin' game of Tomb Raider III.
Now THAT is something important!
As for the use of video game-like technologies for things such as heads-up displays and the like, AC got it right. These tools offer essentially "tuned" sensory input which gets past the limitations of the human body and brain, and allows tank commanders, aircraft pilots and the like to view the battle with more scope and clarity.
Having been an infantry officer, I remember being someone disgusted by the image of PGMs hitting buildings in Iraq during Desert Storm. We all sat in front of our TVs and watched the flickering green camera image as the missile closed in on the building. It was just like a video game.
But it is important to remember that war is not just a video game. That little crosshair on your screen is targeting human beings, and even with the most precise weapons, war is messy and innocents get killed.
Cindy Hall and Gary Visgaitis, "PC Homes by Income", USA Today, Oct. 20, 1998, p. D.1
About 42% of adults overall say there is a personal computer in their home. 74% of these have a modem, 65% have Internet access. Homes with a PC by household income:
Under $10,000: 5%
$10,000 - $14,999: 20%
$15,000 - $24,999: 26%
$25,000 - $34,999: 40%
$35,000 - $49,999: 55%
$50,000 - $74,999: 57%
$75,000 and up: 75%
Technology is advancing at a tremendous rate across the globe, and no doubt, for many young people, this technology is quite natural and comfortable. He raises the valid point that access to this technology should be extended to all young people.
But just because young people are comfortable *using* technology does not necessarily mean that they should be the people making decisions about how technology is used.
I'm sure some people will take offense to this, but in almost every culture other than that of the US, there is a reverence for experience and wisdom. I'm not saying that Gore and Bush are wise, but they do have experience in the grey of the real world.
Often I get the feeling that Katz sees the world in black and white - there are the "smart" people who use technology extensively and grok it intuitively, and there are the "idiots" who are older and don't know how to use Napster (and therefore can't make decisions about technology).
Political policy in a pluralistic, democratic society is based on compromise. At the root level, it's about many people sitting together in a room and figuring out how to come up with solutions that everyone can live with, even if it doesn't make everyone completely happy.
There's a reason that 15 year olds don't have the right to vote. There's a reason Americans aren't electing 25 year olds to the Senate left and right. Experience in the world outside of technology can give valuable perspective. Let's not get so entranced by the latest technology that we forget it is just one part of the larger world.
Your strokes might be better than those of the copy, your colors might be a bit richer and brighter, but the value of your painting would be diminished by the fact that its novelty value had already been compromised.
What is the value of a book, when someone puts out the last three pages of an as yet unpublished novel? Though everyone may not go and visit the site to see the ending, the cat is already out of the bag and word of mouth will do its work.
The point is that the comments on Slashdot about Lucas being rich and greedy are beside the point. He may be rich and greedy, but he also has a right to protect his intellectual work. You can't Open Source everything, and even if you could, there are some people who want to maintain control over their artistic and intellectual property, which is THEIR CHOICE.
I admit right up front I have a bias in this matter because of my military background. First in ROTC, then as a junior officer in the Army, I went through thousands of hours of training designed to make me an effective leader.
How an organization develops leaders is a question that is seldom asked. There are plenty of large organizations that drill their managers in how to be a good member of the corporate team, but how many of them teach effective leadership techniques?
Leadership is a mixture of native ability and teaching - lots of teaching. It's not a formula. No leadership book is going to teach you everything you need to know about leadership. Going to some retreat where everyone goes kayaking or whatever, is not going to make better leaders.
Sustained, in-depth training and feedback is the only way for an organization to make effective leaders. When you have effective leaders, more often than not, people want to stay in the organization, whether they're IT workers, sales people, or truck drivers.
There's no magic bullet, but promoting people into management positions because they can write good memos or sell more widgets, or even program well is foolish. Leadership has to be cultivated - it doesn't just come with the territory.
I contacted PacBell a few months ago and they told me I was too far from their switching station. I figured PacBell was the only game in town, so I gave up on DSL at home.
On a whim about a month ago, I checked out Covad. Turns out they use their own equipment in PacBell switching stations. It also turns out that I'm not too far from the switching station. PacBell is only involved in that they send someone out to verify the loop.
Two weeks after contacting the Covad sales guy and one of their partners (FastPoint Communications, in my case), I had DSL up and running quite consistently at about 600k downstream, 128k upstream. The guy who installed it did so in about an hour, and he obviously knew what he was doing.
Although I haven't dealt personally with PacBell's DSL people, the Covad guy told me that many of his team members were former PacBell employees who couldn't hack the forced overtime and lack of family time.
I know four people who have had DSL installed by PacBell locally. One had a couple of minor glitches, and the installation required two visits by PacBell. Another had about the same experience. A third had a nightmare experience that spanned two months and entailed literally six visits to his house. The fourth just got hers up and running after three months, five visits, and numerous headaches.
Most people in my neck of the woods don't realize that they have options other than PacBell, but they do.
Nobody held a gun to their heads and declared: "You MUST arrange a deal wherein MS acquires you!"
They made a conscious business decision (oriented around profits, a motive all companies maintain) to sleep with Satan, and now they're starting to feel the heat from the flames.
I guess sometimes the price you pay for profits is too much.
Still.... I wouldn't wish that sort of Hell on anyone, particularly Bungie. They were an epic game company, with tons of talent and creativity. Now they're just an MS pawn.
You can see it at work in OS X and Eazel.
September mailing arrived - Reference Library CD was in there. Looks like the October mailing in a couple of weeks will have the beta.
You're using circular logic. If nobody will mess with the US military, it's because of those taxes. So those taxes are going to ensure that all you have to worry about is the shipping of products. Oh, wait! Those products get shipped in trucks that use gasoline. Isn't the price of gasoline in the US a lot lower than in Europe in part because our government vigorously supports US oil companies around the globe? And don't those trucks drive around on roads? Oh yeah, that's right, they do. Those roads aren't built by private enterprise, they're built with tax dollars. UPS and FedEx and the like are free to roam wherever they please because of taxpayer-supported state troopers, highway patrols, and the like. In places like Chechnya and Bosnia, they don't have state troopers - but they do have bandits who would gladly ambush your UPS trucks and take all those juicy goods. One more thing - remember, the Internet would never have got off the ground if it wasn't a government-supported effort.
1) Just because people can communicate more easily across national boundaries doesn't mean that everyone will agree. Witness Slashdot's forum ;-)
2) "Most wars were started by nationalists seeking political or economic expansion." - That's ludicrous. Nationalism didn't even exist until the early 20th Century. There's this place called Jerusalem - people have been fighting over it for centuries because of religion. You honestly think that the Internet will erase the relevance of religion?
3) "But if cultural and influence and economic power is increasingly tied to cyberspace, and the ballooning business moving onto the Net and the Web, the rationale for most wars would evaporate." - So, if business is good, there won't be any wars? Hmm....
4) When the telegraph came into existence, many pundits predicted that it would mean the end of warfare, because rapid communication would mitigate arguments. Ironic that the speedy telegraph was used to set World War One in motion faster than the diplomats could act to prevent it.
The bottom line is that people start wars. Nation-states are collections of individual human beings. Think about the number of times in your own life when you've had a conflict of interest with another person. Did you always come to an equitable solution? Or did the conflict continue? Until we can govern ourselves as individuals, no amount of technology will help us mitigate conflicts among nation-states.
It has been argued that content and interface can be separated and then suddenly, miraculously brought together seamlessly in such a way that the content doesn't really matter in the implementation of the interface.
That is true in cases of what I call "commodity information". Slashdot is a prime example of a site that uses an interface built around commodity information. Although the people who put Slashdot together certainly are part of the draw of the site, the core content is threaded discussion. Threaded discussion is commodity information, because it is not branded, it doesn't represent any organization, and it is differentiated by the user, not by Slashdot (yes, it's moderated, but only after it is posted).
The reason why there are so many wannabe Slashdot sites is that the format they developed to display this commodity information is well-suited to a variety of applications. I could create SlashGolf, a site related to news and discussion about golf, and the interface could remain pretty much the same and still be effective.
Why is it then that well-regarded sites like (not trying to draw flames here - these sites have all been well-reviewed) Apple, Iomega, and Bungie haven't been ripped off left and right?
It's because the information in these sites is differentiated, not commodity. The structure of the site and the information the site contains are too closely linked to offer rip-off artists much to work with.
Note that the generic web layouts provided in many WYSIWYG web dev tools are almost universally disregarded by developers, simply because they were developed in a vacuum, completely outside the real world, where content needs to fit context.
How many of the people making offhand comments about laws like this are actually parents? My guess is that your attiude about such things gets radically altered when you become a parent and these questions go from the abstract to the real.
Will to power works for individual leaders and small ruling cadres, but in states where power is more dissipated, it's often internal politics (having to do with things like the price of oil) rather than will to dominate another country, that dictates foreign affairs. One could even argue that will to power and economics are intertwined. Economic control is power.
Is the Anonymous Coward arguing that in all cases the will to power is the reason for wars? If so, is will to power the reason we got involved in Somalia? In World War II? I beg to differ.
I was a rifle company XO in the 3-14 INF, 10th Mountain Division, and was deployed in the Lower Jubba Valley of Somalia from December of '91 to late March of '92.
I can't hope to compete intellectually with those of you who have seen all the Star Trek episodes, ready all the political science books, and figured it all out. However, I can offer a few observations based on my experience.
1) Anyone who tells you, based on watching television and reading the newspaper, that they really know what's going on in a war zone is totally full of shit. Usually the people on the ground don't even know exactly what's going on.
2) If you carry that analogy to the air, do you think the guys in their fast-movers really know what they're dropping their bombs on, or whether they were successful? After the USAF claimed to have knocked out scores of Scud launchers (in the desert, perhaps the most benign environment possible for air warfare), the GAO did a review and determined that in actuality, they had knocked out ZERO Scuds on the ground.
3) In order to prevail over the long haul in any kind of sustained military or military/humanitarian mission, you need to commit to a sustained presence on the ground. So-called precision warfare from the air can be quite helpful (note that the North Vietnamese returned to the discussion table after the US unleashed the B-52s), but it is part of a mix of capabilities necessary to achieve the long-term POLITICAL goals of the operation.
4) As a guy named Clausewitz has mentioned before, war is an extension of politics. Politics and economics are in most cases joined at the hip, not because economics is an evil that infects politics, but because economics is an essential component of human existence. We all want, but there is only a finite supply.
5) If the political will isn't there, it ain't gonna happen. To those of you who were around during the Vietnam era, this will sound familiar, but we really were making good progress in Somalia. The failed Mogadishu raid was in military terms, a great success. A difficult, extremely grueling mission where men lost their lives, but in persuit of a difficult goal, it was a big success. People back home saw the bodies being carried through the streets, and decided it was not worth losing American lives to save Somalis from themselves. Note that there were stupendously stupid battles during WWII, with casualties well over 50%. Had any of these battles occurred today, those in charge would be sacked, condemned, and punished. It's economics - saving Europe was important then. Saving Europe is kind of important now, but most Americans would just rather let the Europeans figure out how to do it themselves.
Sounds extreme, but if you're serious about passwords, you need to create one that you won't be able to easily remember. At work I've got several servers and various admin passwords to keep track of, so I write them in a small notebook which I then place in a lock-box. I've got one of two keys to the lock-box, and my boss has the other key.
An excellent analysis of the technical differences and business maneuverings behind FireWire and USB 2.0 can be found at
http://www.mackido.com/Hardware/USB20.html. The upshot is this: FireWire is here now, USB 2.0 is just not going to be nearly as fast, and the rationale that Apple is acting arrogantly by charging licensing is essentially a spurious argument.
+++