From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Tue Jan 28 2003 - 18:58:37 MST
Max M wrote:
> But perhaps a dictator like him, by nature have difficulties in
> imagening distributed systems being efficient.
What many societies describe as "good" can often be explained as just a
complicated form of "has a better grip on reality". Consider the
present war, cast not as, "democracy vs. dictatorship," or, "the West
vs. terrorists," but instead as, "people who are willing to try whatever
works vs. people who follow one leader no matter what the cost," where
what works is stuff like debating issues in the open, preferring
scenarios where everyone lives to scenarios where your enemies die but
so do you, and perhaps beating down foreign governments sitting on a lot
of oil.
At least to me, this adequately explains why "terrorists" are usually
unable to effectively use high-tech weapons, even when they manage to
purchase them. Sure, just about anyone on this list could probably set
up something like what was suggested here if we were in Saddam's shoes,
with all the resources available to him. But then, if we were in
Saddam's shoes, we'd be doing a bunch of other things differently, to
the point that we probably wouldn't have drawn the ire of heavily armed
nations in the first place - whether or not we explicitly tried to avoid
it.
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