First, do not mix up nationalism and desire to protect own national interests. Please understand that the Russian people/government has no obligation to enrich Europe or America; whatever it has to enrich is Russia. Second, since NATO is an anti-Russian organisation [by this I mean that the purpose of maintaining NATO is to have a military power applicable against Russia], I don't see Russia joining NATO anytime soon. Third, integration of Russia into Europe spells death to the Russian economy - ask any decent economist why. Tip: it's cold here, and our production cannot possibly be as cheap as in Europe. Fourth, what planet are you from? Japan is no fond of Russia, nor Europe and the US are. And we're quite comfortable making friends with both India and China separately, leaving their mutual quarrels alone.
I'm from Russia actually. Yes, you are absolutely right in what you said. Let me clarify my point however: the working class is more or less patriotic and feels no sympathy towards the US; the elite isn't amused by the West either; but the middle class - the blue collars, company managers - who are mostly concentrated in large cities and have a significant influence in toto are pro-West. The reason is simple: most of them have very intimate ties with Western banks, and they will struggle against change in Russian-Western relations any way they can, including yelling in foul voices about inhumane Putin regime, horrible violation of human rights, crimes against democracy, return to Stalinism and God knows what else.
Regarding your attitude to the Litvinenko story - well, why such a timing then? Why today and not any other time? If the WTO talks will be prolonged (instead of banning Russia from WTO right now), I would consider a proof of my point of view if another scandal would surface - like Russia selling something nuclear to Iran.
Keep in mind that Russia is currently in talks regarding joining the WTO. And don't listen to the sweet words - joining WTO is a serious blow, if not instant death for Russian industry and agriculture, and Putin knows it. He can't just plainly refuse - that would be very ill-conceived by both the West and pro-West population in Russia (actually, a significant part of it, if not the majority). That's why he's got to do something disgusting so there is at least one WTO member with a veto right which will have no other way but to block Russia's entry. I believe this was the same reason behind the sudden scandal in Russian-Georgian relations two months ago, since Georgia IIRC is a WTO member with a veto right (again, IIRC, all WTO members have a veto right on such decisions). If everything is as I pictured, this is a very smart move, since Mr.Blair look strange if he didn't veto the decision to accept Russia.
Seriously, you deal with terrorism by NOT being afraid. No, you deal with terrorism by overthrowing the government that created terrorist organisations in the first place and uses them to keep the people terrified ("Steamer!") and cheap to manipulate.
Sorry, but you are wrong. Looks like there are no 10^20eV events because of the GZK cutoff at 3*10^19. The cutoff takes place because at such energies accelerated protons interact with photons of the relict microwave background, producing pions and losing energy at great rates. There have been experiments [AGASA and Yakutsk stations] that reported existence of events of energies up to 10^21; however the Yakutsk team recently withdrew their statements, claiming that there has been an error in interpretation of results, and AGASA results can be neglected as well, since the Pierre Auger Observatory has already obtained such an amount of data, that should have been there 10^20 events at the rate registered by AGASA, it would have registered several of them already.
Theorists of the world must be crying with happiness now: if the GZK-cutoff wouldn't be detected, they would have to scrap either Big Bang, or the Standard Model, or both.
It's as easy as that. Many but not all people are less than likely to purchase a new gadget if the previous one is still considered cool and is operating properly. And this is a way to make the new purchase more probable.
I can tell something about the country where I live: the harshness of Russian laws is compensated by the fact that they aren't obligatory to comply. I.e. nothing works properly here, never has [well, except for Peter I and Stalin's rule], and hopefully [seeing what more organized societies are turning into] never will.
0) So, do blazar jets qualify? Or nebulae?
1) Since you've done such a great job defining planet, would you please help the scientific community and give definitions to the following objects as well: thing_in_space, moon, star, comet, black_hole, white_dwarf, satellite, garbage, deathstar. Thank you!
Rather than trying to stop the approaching at full speed express train with your own body, wouldn't it be smarter just to get the hell out of its way, such as migrate to GNU/Linux?
Sure, there is lots of extremely expensive software that requires Windows to run, and is impossible/too expensive to replace. Now tell me, how much critical software there is that requires Windows Vista to run? Besides, I can't help but wonder why so many people flaming Google for 'controlling all of your private email, search logs and documents', but so few of them notice that Microsoft is doing [and has been doing that for many years] basically the same.
Just introduce a restriction according to which a valid URL can only contain symbols from one alphabet. I believe it's not too hard to determine http://www.unicode.org/charts/ which character set does a UTF-8 code belong to, and if the URL uses more than one.
You see, what people 'think' they/others fight for matters not. Because most soldiers fight in order not to be shot by the court martial, and for other similar reasons.
You cannot be free. Even if the powerful don't know what you're doing. And imprisonment is not nearly the worst fate that awaits you should you be happen to be in their way.
All wars are set to fight tyranny, that's true. I mean, all wars are in fact one tyranny trying to destroy another.
Again, there's no point in privacy ['police can\'t read my mail' type] when I can get arrested and tortured as a terrorist suspect anyday, and fished out all the info they need with hot nails. For many small people, it would be a comforting thought; for those who never forget about biology and physics, so to say, it's another thing...
The Revolutionary war was, in part, to protect ou privacy from English soldiers entering our homes and taking what they wanted.
Wrong. It was solely to ensure that one group of people would collect taxes and rule the land, and not another one. That's a lot of hard work: I'm pretty sure that many people lost their lives even to provocations to start with; if the masses weren't angry with the English, how would the revolution succeed?
World War II saw the deaths of millions of Americans to protect our rights and privacy from the Third Reich.
Wrong again. They died so one group of people would seize control over as large a portion of world production and trade as possible, at the expense of other groups. And in general, privacy doesn't matter when you are fighting an enemy. If you don't violate people's privacy, how can you know which of them are the KGB/GRU/etc agents?
I, for one, don't really care. I know there is no place on Earth where I could keep my private affairs private, and I see no need for that. I cannot be a politician, a ruler, a lord, a billionaire; nor I want to [or at least so I tell myself]. I'm just a single hard working bee. Even my life doesn't matter - except to me of course. But whoever owns my life - it's not me for sure. There is no such thing as 'freedom' in this Universe, and will never be. Dixi.
About ignorance. When I speak of ignorance, I do not mean not knowing how the stuff works - I mean not knowing how to use the stuff. To my greatest displeasure, most of the 300+ people I am in charge of supporting [which certainly are brighter than most - I work for a nuclear physics institute; before you ask - no, I'm not from Korea nor from Iran;)] don't. I mean, they panic and feel lost as soon as something unexpected happens [like Windows suggests them to reboot in order to install the updates]. And I could tell you tons of 'where is this any key' stories.
You like choice. Oh. Do you like choice of operating systems as well, or choice starts for you where Windows ends?
No, I'm using Debian. But my home PC is a 4 years old 32bit machine, and my servers aren't quad Opterons either, and the specialized software platforms I develop [Wi-Fi hotspots, surveillance cameras] run 2.4 [although pretty recent revisions], etc. Why fix something that isn't broken?
You're not god fearing and not particularly law abiding? Then we're not discussing your type here, period. My phrase was related to the 'GFLAC' class, and not to every happy Microsoft customer, so your comment was irrelevant.
Do you really believe that companies should be expected to put out only one release of their software that is absolutely perfect and has every feature their users could ever want for the next 80 years?
No I don't. But I believe that software produced shouldn't contain flaws and drawbacks specifically designed to promote the sales of the next version. So it's either Microsoft cannot develop software properly, and it isn't worth buying, or they can develop properly but intentionally do not - and it isn't worth buying as well.
The part about free of charge bugfixes was absolutely brilliant! You see, the moment a large software vendor declares that bugfixes will be available at cost, the top brass will be shot. That's why Microsoft has to invent moves like the one in question to disguise their wish to charge for bugfixes. Remember, a bug is a company's undoing - you have supposedly paid for the version without it, and surely you'll be disappointed if the software doesn't live up to your expectations. A bugfix is how software vendors return their debt to you, not an extra feature to pay for.
*Ironic* Yes, and most of all I'm critisizing Linux for pumping out a new kernel revision every month or so. Actually, I do recommend unskilled users I have to support to use Mac OS X or Ubuntu powered machines whenever such possibility exists.
You've misunderstood, again. The unethical approach is making user experience of those who didn't wish to buy this new version significantly more difficult, if not unbearable. The unethical approach is luring and forcing people to upgrade. After all, if this new software is so good that it's definitely worth upgrading, why should MS *force* anyone into buying it, when lots of reasonable people [and the absolute majority of the unreasonable ones] would upgrade anyway? The conclusion is that the upgrade is not worth it, and additional measures are needed to make sure Vista doesn't go down the drain right away.
While you are right about MS-netscape that is a seperate issue from a decade ago
I don't see anything changed for a more ethical approach, although I'd love to.
your accusations that they are doing something sinister
Oh no, I'm not accusing them of anything sinister. I understand their desire to make as much money as possible - that's what they are supposed to do, after all. I'm only complaining about their lack of ethics.
XP wasnt designed to support this kind of thing at all
Of course it wasn't! And rest assured that Vista will also have a zillion drawbacks [or at least a dozen major ones], so when the time comes for the next upgrade, people will readily buy that next version to get the better OS. Please, try to understand: Microsoft's goal is not to produce the best operating system ever; its goal is to make money in short and long term. If they produced something amazing and satisfying everybody for a decade or two, they would lose shareholders to more profitable and faster growing businesses.
And amont that all, I would like to point your attention to a rumour that MS is going to drop the 'develop-release-patch' cycle one day, and switch to a subscription-based revenue stream [software as service]. Many and a lot of Microsoft's sins will be forgiven shall they take this step and reform their whole development process.
What matters is ignorance of 90% Windows users. What matters is nobody knows about alternatives, and nobody cares. What matters is that every single one of them who has the money will sooner or later switch to Vista to keep up with the Johns. What matters is that too many people will do what they think every "law obedient, god fearing taxpayer" should - buy Vista, that is. And finally, what matters is that very soon most software vendors, especially bigger ones, will be 'convinced' by Microsoft to develop Vista-only stuff. And so on and so forth...
An even better analogy would sound like I intentionally design that 'feature' to be incompatible with your house/garage/whatever. So I can always get away with it saying "I couldn't do anything about it; that's how things work!". That's what Microsoft kept telling during the MS-Netscape war. Surprisingly enough, they did get away with it; why shouldn't they apply working tactics again?
How nice. It's like I come and replace your old rusty garage door with a brand new one, with all the bells and whistles, some heavy armor and even an electronic keypad to open it. However, I will not allow you to change the password to open the door from the factory default "1234". Unless you pay me, that is.
Why nVidia or ATI should bother? The Linux gaming sector is plain dead when compared to its Windows counterpart, back since the days of Loki's demise; there is no need for most Linux users to purchase expensive modern video cards unless game developers all of a sudden target their mainstream production to Linux. On the other hand, there is a tendency to beautify the plain old desktop with all the fancy things around - Vista's Aero, Novell's xgl - and to make use of all this stuff one needs at least basic 3d acceleration. So here's where VIA/S3 might join Intel with their S25 thing, because it's S25 that targets this same market of eye candy desktop. And since S25 is a stripped down version of S27, afaik, that's the power video card I expect to become Linux friendly in the near future, not any of those Radeons or GeForces.
Because otherwise it would be easier a lot to pirate the system. Look, you install Wind0ze, you wait until it validates with WGA and says "okay okay I'm leaving you alone now", after which you either try to seek out the flags etc that have been set in the registry [or whatever] and write a utility that patches not yet validated systems to this status, or you create a distribution that installs images of this already satisfied copy. That's not to say that WGA is going to work, however.
we're being fed with prophecies like "Google will become a monopoly and will behave so very evil; ph34r." for already two or three years. Yet, I fail to see what's so evil about them. Lots of people are accusing Google of trying to steal their private data via GMail - but they seem to be quite content using Outlook Express, produced by a company famous for deceiving its partners, customers and generally behaving evil. I don't quite catch the logic here.
Since the very dawn of life on Earth might has meant right - it's a law of nature, and there's little to be done about it. Since the very dawn of the human history there have been tribes, and the guy with the largest club or the sharpest spear has been the chieftain (that said, you cannot kill a hamster and eat it alone; you have to share with him. And you cannot have a woman he wants - his club is heavier) - right until someone else figured out how to build a shortbow. After that, most tribes rapidly changed their priorities. Those who didn't were eaten by those who did. One more note: someone was smart enough to claim the position of shaman, but that's a little different story - suffice to say that in most modern countries 'shamans' and 'chieftains' are allies, and there are cases when the shaman and the chieftain are the same person. Fast forward. Human population, despite constant wars of chieftains, each trying to capture as much land (=food and resources) as possible, is growing exponentially; technology is also constantly improving (there was an especially smart guy among the Dorians who somehow learned how to work with steel, downed the chieftain, and wiped out other chieftains along with their tribes because they all had bronze armor and weapons), ways of controlling masses of people are constantly improving, too (the first thing most rebels usually try to do is ensure that no further rebellions are possible), as well as personal security of the monarchs (another guy overthrew a local king by paying all of his gold to a large army of mercenaries, and after he took the throne, he made sure that none of his vassals had enough gold to pay for another army and do the same to him - that is, emptied their coffers in favour of his own treasury). And what about the people - well, they know only hard work so they can hope to live a little longer, constant pillages by their neighbour countries (many of them were becoming captive slaves and starting enjoying their lives even less, if it only could be possible), military drafts and overall a pretty inhumane treating. Nobody cared about the little peasants, workers and the rest, since if you're the leader and you want to see the next day - you must be alarm and powerful at all costs. After all, what is your population for you? Guys that you have conquered. And what are the rest? Guys that have been, alas, conquered by someone else. You goal? Command what is yours, conquer what is not (C). No need to care about the people, because they don't really have a choice (to be robbed by one lord or another - who cares?), and because they constantly breed. Fast forward. 21st century. The smartest chieftain around (it doesn't matter if it is one person or a small group) has figured out that the best way to achieve the above-mentioned goal is: a) Level 0. Pretend that you're not around - tell everyone that they're free, and allow them enjoy their lives enough to believe it. b) Level 1. For those who didn't believe in Level 0: put a puppet on the throne to get arrows in the chest and anything worse for you. c) Level 2. Hide yourself so even those weren't affected by Level 1 cannot easily find you among other seemingly powerful chieftains d) Level 3. Continue kicking out rivals - the strongest one first, by telling his people that your people are rich (which is mostly true) and free (which is not), and that they can have the same if they join you (which is not true again). They believe you - and voila, you're the world's major superpower. e) Level 4. Continue kicking out rivals - the richest in resources ones first, so you can keep your population relatively happy while you're building a force to wipe out everyone else and a security system to have maximum control over the said population. Meanwhile, frighten your population with stories about imaginary opponent who want to kill them, so they pay less attention to your wars against real opponents who bug you. And surely soon there will be f) Level 5. After you're done with opponents, determine the size of popu
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First, do not mix up nationalism and desire to protect own national interests. Please understand that the Russian people/government has no obligation to enrich Europe or America; whatever it has to enrich is Russia. Second, since NATO is an anti-Russian organisation [by this I mean that the purpose of maintaining NATO is to have a military power applicable against Russia], I don't see Russia joining NATO anytime soon. Third, integration of Russia into Europe spells death to the Russian economy - ask any decent economist why. Tip: it's cold here, and our production cannot possibly be as cheap as in Europe. Fourth, what planet are you from? Japan is no fond of Russia, nor Europe and the US are. And we're quite comfortable making friends with both India and China separately, leaving their mutual quarrels alone.
... what's up with lasers and sharks on Slashdot? I must have missed something some time.
I'm from Russia actually. Yes, you are absolutely right in what you said. Let me clarify my point however: the working class is more or less patriotic and feels no sympathy towards the US; the elite isn't amused by the West either; but the middle class - the blue collars, company managers - who are mostly concentrated in large cities and have a significant influence in toto are pro-West. The reason is simple: most of them have very intimate ties with Western banks, and they will struggle against change in Russian-Western relations any way they can, including yelling in foul voices about inhumane Putin regime, horrible violation of human rights, crimes against democracy, return to Stalinism and God knows what else.
Regarding your attitude to the Litvinenko story - well, why such a timing then? Why today and not any other time? If the WTO talks will be prolonged (instead of banning Russia from WTO right now), I would consider a proof of my point of view if another scandal would surface - like Russia selling something nuclear to Iran.
Keep in mind that Russia is currently in talks regarding joining the WTO. And don't listen to the sweet words - joining WTO is a serious blow, if not instant death for Russian industry and agriculture, and Putin knows it. He can't just plainly refuse - that would be very ill-conceived by both the West and pro-West population in Russia (actually, a significant part of it, if not the majority). That's why he's got to do something disgusting so there is at least one WTO member with a veto right which will have no other way but to block Russia's entry. I believe this was the same reason behind the sudden scandal in Russian-Georgian relations two months ago, since Georgia IIRC is a WTO member with a veto right (again, IIRC, all WTO members have a veto right on such decisions). If everything is as I pictured, this is a very smart move, since Mr.Blair look strange if he didn't veto the decision to accept Russia.
Sorry, but you are wrong. Looks like there are no 10^20eV events because of the GZK cutoff at 3*10^19. The cutoff takes place because at such energies accelerated protons interact with photons of the relict microwave background, producing pions and losing energy at great rates. There have been experiments [AGASA and Yakutsk stations] that reported existence of events of energies up to 10^21; however the Yakutsk team recently withdrew their statements, claiming that there has been an error in interpretation of results, and AGASA results can be neglected as well, since the Pierre Auger Observatory has already obtained such an amount of data, that should have been there 10^20 events at the rate registered by AGASA, it would have registered several of them already.
Theorists of the world must be crying with happiness now: if the GZK-cutoff wouldn't be detected, they would have to scrap either Big Bang, or the Standard Model, or both.
It's as easy as that. Many but not all people are less than likely to purchase a new gadget if the previous one is still considered cool and is operating properly. And this is a way to make the new purchase more probable.
I can tell something about the country where I live: the harshness of Russian laws is compensated by the fact that they aren't obligatory to comply. I.e. nothing works properly here, never has [well, except for Peter I and Stalin's rule], and hopefully [seeing what more organized societies are turning into] never will.
0) So, do blazar jets qualify? Or nebulae? 1) Since you've done such a great job defining planet, would you please help the scientific community and give definitions to the following objects as well: thing_in_space, moon, star, comet, black_hole, white_dwarf, satellite, garbage, deathstar. Thank you!
pluplussoon.
Rather than trying to stop the approaching at full speed express train with your own body, wouldn't it be smarter just to get the hell out of its way, such as migrate to GNU/Linux?
Sure, there is lots of extremely expensive software that requires Windows to run, and is impossible/too expensive to replace. Now tell me, how much critical software there is that requires Windows Vista to run? Besides, I can't help but wonder why so many people flaming Google for 'controlling all of your private email, search logs and documents', but so few of them notice that Microsoft is doing [and has been doing that for many years] basically the same.
Just introduce a restriction according to which a valid URL can only contain symbols from one alphabet. I believe it's not too hard to determine http://www.unicode.org/charts/ which character set does a UTF-8 code belong to, and if the URL uses more than one.
Wrong. It was solely to ensure that one group of people would collect taxes and rule the land, and not another one. That's a lot of hard work: I'm pretty sure that many people lost their lives even to provocations to start with; if the masses weren't angry with the English, how would the revolution succeed?
Wrong again. They died so one group of people would seize control over as large a portion of world production and trade as possible, at the expense of other groups. And in general, privacy doesn't matter when you are fighting an enemy. If you don't violate people's privacy, how can you know which of them are the KGB/GRU/etc agents?
I, for one, don't really care. I know there is no place on Earth where I could keep my private affairs private, and I see no need for that. I cannot be a politician, a ruler, a lord, a billionaire; nor I want to [or at least so I tell myself]. I'm just a single hard working bee. Even my life doesn't matter - except to me of course. But whoever owns my life - it's not me for sure. There is no such thing as 'freedom' in this Universe, and will never be. Dixi.
What matters is ignorance of 90% Windows users. What matters is nobody knows about alternatives, and nobody cares. What matters is that every single one of them who has the money will sooner or later switch to Vista to keep up with the Johns. What matters is that too many people will do what they think every "law obedient, god fearing taxpayer" should - buy Vista, that is. And finally, what matters is that very soon most software vendors, especially bigger ones, will be 'convinced' by Microsoft to develop Vista-only stuff. And so on and so forth...
An even better analogy would sound like I intentionally design that 'feature' to be incompatible with your house/garage/whatever. So I can always get away with it saying "I couldn't do anything about it; that's how things work!". That's what Microsoft kept telling during the MS-Netscape war. Surprisingly enough, they did get away with it; why shouldn't they apply working tactics again?
How nice. It's like I come and replace your old rusty garage door with a brand new one, with all the bells and whistles, some heavy armor and even an electronic keypad to open it. However, I will not allow you to change the password to open the door from the factory default "1234". Unless you pay me, that is.
Why nVidia or ATI should bother? The Linux gaming sector is plain dead when compared to its Windows counterpart, back since the days of Loki's demise; there is no need for most Linux users to purchase expensive modern video cards unless game developers all of a sudden target their mainstream production to Linux. On the other hand, there is a tendency to beautify the plain old desktop with all the fancy things around - Vista's Aero, Novell's xgl - and to make use of all this stuff one needs at least basic 3d acceleration. So here's where VIA/S3 might join Intel with their S25 thing, because it's S25 that targets this same market of eye candy desktop. And since S25 is a stripped down version of S27, afaik, that's the power video card I expect to become Linux friendly in the near future, not any of those Radeons or GeForces.
Because otherwise it would be easier a lot to pirate the system. Look, you install Wind0ze, you wait until it validates with WGA and says "okay okay I'm leaving you alone now", after which you either try to seek out the flags etc that have been set in the registry [or whatever] and write a utility that patches not yet validated systems to this status, or you create a distribution that installs images of this already satisfied copy. That's not to say that WGA is going to work, however.
we're being fed with prophecies like "Google will become a monopoly and will behave so very evil; ph34r." for already two or three years. Yet, I fail to see what's so evil about them. Lots of people are accusing Google of trying to steal their private data via GMail - but they seem to be quite content using Outlook Express, produced by a company famous for deceiving its partners, customers and generally behaving evil. I don't quite catch the logic here.
Since the very dawn of life on Earth might has meant right - it's a law of nature, and there's little to be done about it. Since the very dawn of the human history there have been tribes, and the guy with the largest club or the sharpest spear has been the chieftain (that said, you cannot kill a hamster and eat it alone; you have to share with him. And you cannot have a woman he wants - his club is heavier) - right until someone else figured out how to build a shortbow. After that, most tribes rapidly changed their priorities. Those who didn't were eaten by those who did. One more note: someone was smart enough to claim the position of shaman, but that's a little different story - suffice to say that in most modern countries 'shamans' and 'chieftains' are allies, and there are cases when the shaman and the chieftain are the same person.
Fast forward. Human population, despite constant wars of chieftains, each trying to capture as much land (=food and resources) as possible, is growing exponentially; technology is also constantly improving (there was an especially smart guy among the Dorians who somehow learned how to work with steel, downed the chieftain, and wiped out other chieftains along with their tribes because they all had bronze armor and weapons), ways of controlling masses of people are constantly improving, too (the first thing most rebels usually try to do is ensure that no further rebellions are possible), as well as personal security of the monarchs (another guy overthrew a local king by paying all of his gold to a large army of mercenaries, and after he took the throne, he made sure that none of his vassals had enough gold to pay for another army and do the same to him - that is, emptied their coffers in favour of his own treasury). And what about the people - well, they know only hard work so they can hope to live a little longer, constant pillages by their neighbour countries (many of them were becoming captive slaves and starting enjoying their lives even less, if it only could be possible), military drafts and overall a pretty inhumane treating. Nobody cared about the little peasants, workers and the rest, since if you're the leader and you want to see the next day - you must be alarm and powerful at all costs. After all, what is your population for you? Guys that you have conquered. And what are the rest? Guys that have been, alas, conquered by someone else. You goal? Command what is yours, conquer what is not (C). No need to care about the people, because they don't really have a choice (to be robbed by one lord or another - who cares?), and because they constantly breed.
Fast forward. 21st century. The smartest chieftain around (it doesn't matter if it is one person or a small group) has figured out that the best way to achieve the above-mentioned goal is:
a) Level 0. Pretend that you're not around - tell everyone that they're free, and allow them enjoy their lives enough to believe it.
b) Level 1. For those who didn't believe in Level 0: put a puppet on the throne to get arrows in the chest and anything worse for you.
c) Level 2. Hide yourself so even those weren't affected by Level 1 cannot easily find you among other seemingly powerful chieftains
d) Level 3. Continue kicking out rivals - the strongest one first, by telling his people that your people are rich (which is mostly true) and free (which is not), and that they can have the same if they join you (which is not true again). They believe you - and voila, you're the world's major superpower.
e) Level 4. Continue kicking out rivals - the richest in resources ones first, so you can keep your population relatively happy while you're building a force to wipe out everyone else and a security system to have maximum control over the said population. Meanwhile, frighten your population with stories about imaginary opponent who want to kill them, so they pay less attention to your wars against real opponents who bug you.
And surely soon there will be
f) Level 5. After you're done with opponents, determine the size of popu