That's the "won't" part in the title. Really, "can't" would be a better word. Their economy is totally dependent on oil money. Perhaps they're assuming they can bet their own oil out in some other way.
Iran, I suspect, can block the strait, just as it says. Asymmetric power works. Ask the Vietnamese. Ask those upstart American colonists. Ask the Afghans. As another writer pointed out, Iran doesn't have to win, they just have to make the conflict too expensive to sustain. And we can't just nuke Iran. The Chinese and Russians might give us some trouble on that, you see, and they have real power, not bluster. We'd have to cut an expensive deal with them.
No good solution here.
I've watched both parents die...
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 1
And had friends die of cancer. I've had cancer for that matter. Believe me, you're doing nobody any favors by putting off the inevitable. In a sane world, you'd have access to all the hallucinogenics and morphine you wanted from the moment you were diagnosed as terminal. Unfortunately, crazies drive AND vote so we're forced into these excruciating situations in the name of "valuing human life" (or whatever the conservative politicians are pushing these days).
And what will Congress do about three hackers in Kazakhstan who decide to write something that gets around any restrictive laws and post the code to thousands of blogs, boards and so on? How much money canvthe USA expend on this? It's the equivalent of the Vietnam war in cyberspace, a guerrilla war where you *can't* win.
Which is the goal of the corporate oligarchy that passes for government these days. Frankly, most of the world's corporation-governments would be happiest if the internet was a restricted, monitored, toll-road. Of course, the flaw in this plan is the million geek army. Telling millions of technically savvy engineers what to do with their toys is very unlikely to be successful in the long run. It just means that the open source pirate internets arrive faster.
Not that this matters to a congresscritter. They just take their fee for passing the stupid law and move on down the road to retirement and the little secret Swiss bank accounts set up for them by the RIAA and friends as a reward.
They've got thousands of young unemployed engineers, recent advances in the design of hulls and they invest in um, the height of Ukranian technology (OK, maybe borrowed Russian technology). Surely they could have done much better starting from scratch.
Three gorges dam is another strange project. Yes, you can build ONE BIG DAM or 1 hundred little ones that are cheaper, achieve better flood control, yield as much or more power and are easier to dredge when they silt up. And if one of a hundred dams break, it's not as big a deal. If the three gorges dam breaks, we have a real problem.
What exactly did you expect? It's not just China, of course. We outsource to India, China, the Middle East and even Pakistan. We also educate foreigners here, and not in ethnomusicology or interpretive dance either. Do you think no theft will occur? No backdoors in hardware or software? No designs, models or code will be resold to competitors for a profit without your knowledge?
First we sold our security to the Arabs for cheap oil. Then we sold our minds to China and India for some cost savings. Our children will be selling their bodies, I expect.
I think there's some truth to this. When I was growing up, both girls and boys were exposed to primitive PCs. The girl usually asked "What can this do for me?" while the boy usually asked "What can I make this do?" This is a BIG difference. I think that in 6th grade, most girls see that her parents don't use math and ask "Why bother?" while more boys just ask "What can I make it do?"
The only uncontrolled content at the moment can be found on blogs. These will eventually be subverted too, but at the moment, many blogs are not. Zerohedge.com, for all it's sensationalism, does report on real economic events, as does nakedcapitalism.com. Yahoo and MSNBC, of course, are happy-talk propaganda rags designed only to keep consumers/voters distracted from real events and buying stocks and schlock.
Bottom line? The same people who own Goldman Sacks and the banks also own the major media outlets, and the messages are tightly controlled. Subtle propaganda is inserted into popular programs (e.g In a recent "House"episode, a man was determined to be mentally ill because he was preparing for social disorder. House calls him an idiot who thinks the world is going to end.) OWS protesters are subtly presented as fools, without ever showing a real discussion. The fact that ousting them from all encampments at the same time required coordination at a national scale is never mentioned. There are endless examples, if you can stop eating cheetos and ignore "Dancing with the stars."
The only idiots I see are people who believe anything they see on TV or mainstream media news, where truth is merely coincidental.
No language is perfect. The idiocy of language designs stem from the fact that few, if any programming languages were designed by anyone who had ever read a book on psychology, ergonomics or human factors.
There's a saying floating around the internet that "Languages should be easy to read and understand and incidentally be compilable by computers." That about sums it up.
THE COMPUTER DOES NOT MATTER. It is a means to an end. It's only purpose is to serve humans. The languages designed to provide a system level interface to that machine need to be designed around what a human understands, the way a human understands it. Slavish devotion to a hardware design, or even an object model is plain stupid if it makes your product nearly unusable (e.g. the WPF datagrid).
If you have difficulty enough protecting your data on a server in your closet if it's connected to the Internet, how do you expect this to change when that server lives in a building somewhere and is controlled by someone else? Do you think "Trust me, I'm a professional" ad material is going to keep your data safe? You can encrypt, for a start, but there's no real substitute for locally controlling what goes in and out of your server.
Not that any reality-based arguments will matter. Capitalism fails at the local interface level. Professional IT personnel who can actually assess risks and benefits accurately are overridden by bean counters and PHBs all the time. Let's hope this doesn't eventually end up with strategic military information being reviewed by Chinese or Pakistani generals.
If you can't get the guy down the hall to do it right, don't expect it come back right from India correctly either. Most software fails are due to poor planning, misunderstood or absent requirements, poor design with no input from customers, and so on. Yes, most of us who've worked with or managed foreign teams know that the coding from India (or Iowa, for that matter) may not always be top notch, but coding is the easiest part. Planning, useful documentation and management of a well conceived project is the difficult part.
I don't watch it. I use internet blogs for aggregated news. I watch movies seldom, but when I do, it's online. Books are still cheap, easy and work when the power is out. Mainstream media has been thoroughly captured by 6 corporations and the members who sit on their boards. Do I need more nonsense propaganda during my day?
I design automated testing systems. I find myself in the position of re-solving problems that were solved as much as 10 years ago in prior automated testing systems. There's an odd tendency of people to simply passively accept whatever the manufacturer of the new system gives us as somehow "better" or more advanced that what we had, even when the new solution is an obvious fail, or (ahem) undeveloped. So I fix things to make up for the shortcomings of the new software, more or less the same way I fixed them 7 to 10 years ago. Things start working again. Everybody is happy.
I seem to have discovered job security by re-inventing the same thing every 7 years or so in a slightly different form using a different programming language. Of course, that sort of describes the entire computer industry, more or less.
Or at least, I'm sure that's the theory. I think that governments/financial institutions (There's no difference now) are starting to fear the "million geek army." Engineering types typically don't take political control well, and have an annoying tendency to help the rebels (whoever the rebels might be). Impoverish IT engineeers and you make them more amenable to bribery and coercion.
Having worked in the publishing industry, I can tell you that a lot of the business is still dominated by middle aged to older women who *hate* technology, hate thinking about technology, and whose heads would explode if you asked them to think about adapting to evolving ecologies of technology. DRM is conceptually simple enough for them to wrap their minds around, so that's what happens.
Netflix, for $8.95 a month, made it not worth downloading content illegally. It's too easy and cheap to stream it. That kind of subscription model would work for books as well, but it's unlikely that Amazon or other DRM promoters will get it any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the "won't" part in the title. Really, "can't" would be a better word. Their economy is totally dependent on oil money. Perhaps they're assuming they can bet their own oil out in some other way.
Iran, I suspect, can block the strait, just as it says. Asymmetric power works. Ask the Vietnamese. Ask those upstart American colonists. Ask the Afghans. As another writer pointed out, Iran doesn't have to win, they just have to make the conflict too expensive to sustain. And we can't just nuke Iran. The Chinese and Russians might give us some trouble on that, you see, and they have real power, not bluster. We'd have to cut an expensive deal with them.
No good solution here.
And had friends die of cancer. I've had cancer for that matter. Believe me, you're doing nobody any favors by putting off the inevitable. In a sane world, you'd have access to all the hallucinogenics and morphine you wanted from the moment you were diagnosed as terminal. Unfortunately, crazies drive AND vote so we're forced into these excruciating situations in the name of "valuing human life" (or whatever the conservative politicians are pushing these days).
But not a bad way to accumulate a lot of lithium while it's still widely available.
A growth industry?
And what will Congress do about three hackers in Kazakhstan who decide to write something that gets around any restrictive laws and post the code to thousands of blogs, boards and so on? How much money canvthe USA expend on this? It's the equivalent of the Vietnam war in cyberspace, a guerrilla war where you *can't* win.
Guess who will win?
Now we can go back to eating raw monkey meat like god intended. Just don't forget that dipping sauce!
Which is the goal of the corporate oligarchy that passes for government these days. Frankly, most of the world's corporation-governments would be happiest if the internet was a restricted, monitored, toll-road. Of course, the flaw in this plan is the million geek army. Telling millions of technically savvy engineers what to do with their toys is very unlikely to be successful in the long run. It just means that the open source pirate internets arrive faster.
Not that this matters to a congresscritter. They just take their fee for passing the stupid law and move on down the road to retirement and the little secret Swiss bank accounts set up for them by the RIAA and friends as a reward.
"This little piggy went to market"
They've got thousands of young unemployed engineers, recent advances in the design of hulls and they invest in um, the height of Ukranian technology (OK, maybe borrowed Russian technology). Surely they could have done much better starting from scratch.
Three gorges dam is another strange project. Yes, you can build ONE BIG DAM or 1 hundred little ones that are cheaper, achieve better flood control, yield as much or more power and are easier to dredge when they silt up. And if one of a hundred dams break, it's not as big a deal. If the three gorges dam breaks, we have a real problem.
What exactly did you expect? It's not just China, of course. We outsource to India, China, the Middle East and even Pakistan. We also educate foreigners here, and not in ethnomusicology or interpretive dance either. Do you think no theft will occur? No backdoors in hardware or software? No designs, models or code will be resold to competitors for a profit without your knowledge?
First we sold our security to the Arabs for cheap oil. Then we sold our minds to China and India for some cost savings. Our children will be selling their bodies, I expect.
I think there's some truth to this. When I was growing up, both girls and boys were exposed to primitive PCs. The girl usually asked "What can this do for me?" while the boy usually asked "What can I make this do?" This is a BIG difference. I think that in 6th grade, most girls see that her parents don't use math and ask "Why bother?" while more boys just ask "What can I make it do?"
uh, biology expressed phenotypically as described in any evolutionary psychology text?
Oh *rats.* Now I'm confused again. Where's Gloria Steinem's fact free views when you need them?
The only uncontrolled content at the moment can be found on blogs. These will eventually be subverted too, but at the moment, many blogs are not. Zerohedge.com, for all it's sensationalism, does report on real economic events, as does nakedcapitalism.com. Yahoo and MSNBC, of course, are happy-talk propaganda rags designed only to keep consumers/voters distracted from real events and buying stocks and schlock.
I suggest that anyone who doubts this review these two wiki entries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownership
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocking_directorate
Bottom line? The same people who own Goldman Sacks and the banks also own the major media outlets, and the messages are tightly controlled. Subtle propaganda is inserted into popular programs (e.g In a recent "House"episode, a man was determined to be mentally ill because he was preparing for social disorder. House calls him an idiot who thinks the world is going to end.) OWS protesters are subtly presented as fools, without ever showing a real discussion. The fact that ousting them from all encampments at the same time required coordination at a national scale is never mentioned. There are endless examples, if you can stop eating cheetos and ignore "Dancing with the stars."
The only idiots I see are people who believe anything they see on TV or mainstream media news, where truth is merely coincidental.
No language is perfect. The idiocy of language designs stem from the fact that few, if any programming languages were designed by anyone who had ever read a book on psychology, ergonomics or human factors.
There's a saying floating around the internet that "Languages should be easy to read and understand and incidentally be compilable by computers." That about sums it up.
THE COMPUTER DOES NOT MATTER. It is a means to an end. It's only purpose is to serve humans. The languages designed to provide a system level interface to that machine need to be designed around what a human understands, the way a human understands it. Slavish devotion to a hardware design, or even an object model is plain stupid if it makes your product nearly unusable (e.g. the WPF datagrid).
If you have difficulty enough protecting your data on a server in your closet if it's connected to the Internet, how do you expect this to change when that server lives in a building somewhere and is controlled by someone else? Do you think "Trust me, I'm a professional" ad material is going to keep your data safe? You can encrypt, for a start, but there's no real substitute for locally controlling what goes in and out of your server.
Not that any reality-based arguments will matter. Capitalism fails at the local interface level. Professional IT personnel who can actually assess risks and benefits accurately are overridden by bean counters and PHBs all the time. Let's hope this doesn't eventually end up with strategic military information being reviewed by Chinese or Pakistani generals.
And why is it not as good as plutonium or depleted uranium?
If you can't get the guy down the hall to do it right, don't expect it come back right from India correctly either. Most software fails are due to poor planning, misunderstood or absent requirements, poor design with no input from customers, and so on. Yes, most of us who've worked with or managed foreign teams know that the coding from India (or Iowa, for that matter) may not always be top notch, but coding is the easiest part. Planning, useful documentation and management of a well conceived project is the difficult part.
I don't watch it. I use internet blogs for aggregated news. I watch movies seldom, but when I do, it's online. Books are still cheap, easy and work when the power is out. Mainstream media has been thoroughly captured by 6 corporations and the members who sit on their boards. Do I need more nonsense propaganda during my day?
...clearly underestimates how tediously boring people and their "secrets" actually are.
Sorry, straight software. Data comparison (spreadsheets, strings, bitmaps, binaries, numbers, database content) makes up the bulk of test cases.
I design automated testing systems. I find myself in the position of re-solving problems that were solved as much as 10 years ago in prior automated testing systems. There's an odd tendency of people to simply passively accept whatever the manufacturer of the new system gives us as somehow "better" or more advanced that what we had, even when the new solution is an obvious fail, or (ahem) undeveloped. So I fix things to make up for the shortcomings of the new software, more or less the same way I fixed them 7 to 10 years ago. Things start working again. Everybody is happy.
I seem to have discovered job security by re-inventing the same thing every 7 years or so in a slightly different form using a different programming language. Of course, that sort of describes the entire computer industry, more or less.
Or at least, I'm sure that's the theory. I think that governments/financial institutions (There's no difference now) are starting to fear the "million geek army." Engineering types typically don't take political control well, and have an annoying tendency to help the rebels (whoever the rebels might be). Impoverish IT engineeers and you make them more amenable to bribery and coercion.
Having worked in the publishing industry, I can tell you that a lot of the business is still dominated by middle aged to older women who *hate* technology, hate thinking about technology, and whose heads would explode if you asked them to think about adapting to evolving ecologies of technology. DRM is conceptually simple enough for them to wrap their minds around, so that's what happens.
Netflix, for $8.95 a month, made it not worth downloading content illegally. It's too easy and cheap to stream it. That kind of subscription model would work for books as well, but it's unlikely that Amazon or other DRM promoters will get it any time soon.