craig writes:
"... The basic premise of having an army is to defend your territory. ..."
um, depends on who you are. perhaps that was the intent of those who founded this country, but armies are used for all sorts of things.
also:
"... it's time to put the toy soldiers away."
nope, not yet, they're kind of in the middle of something. but i get his meaning, in the context of longer term policies. even then, if you look at what happened in the non-standing-army periods, that's not exactly a safe proposition either. not to mention, geography has far less meaning in today's world in terms of distance as protection. so some sort of established military needs maintaining, including forward deployed force projection.
now, the extent to which that is done can be varied dramatically, along with how to provision quick build-ups on an ad-hoc basis. the us's force transformation initiative in a sense does lean on the citizen militia in the form of calling up national guard & reserve units; which is the fall back short of requiring (not simply permitting) an armed populace combined with a "draft".
israel has (had?) a good model for this, where everyone is required to serve a couple of years in the military. that training needs to be in place, as well as the arms.
and nope, americans will not allow any of this. this goes back to what was wrong about the civil rights movements of the 60s, where, along with the good stuff, people also started to get some warped ideas about entitlements and the "coddle-me" attitudes necessary to the formation of a nanny state, such as we have underway now.
*sigh*. these sorts of things have a habit of self-correcting, usually in not so pleasant ways, and almost certainly with permanent damage.
so, sure, loosen up the arsenal (and i mean everything, up to and including carriers), garrison the entire country. it's not all good, but then, nothing ever is.
also, "founders": sure, it helps to have the political dialogue in this country on the correct footing (things as they were, not as people want to re-interpret them for their own purposes), but that's just it: invoking the founding fathers as if they were gods just isn't responsible, and they likely wouldn't have wanted things that way either, for exactly these reasons of reinterpretive wrangling. so, yes, the enlightenment had good ideas, still does, and so do some more modern movements. we are supposed (?) to be adapting as we move along, not shutting down in reactionary bunker mentalities (neo-con, fundamentalism, etc.). that isn't even a real possibility, regardless of the illusions so many seem to harbor, here and elsewhere. "supposed to": hell, we have no choice. but backsliding and forgetting / corrupting valuable historic lessons - shame on us.
spending some quality time with the xo lately:
- yumex ("yum install yumex", ~500kb) is a graphical yum front-end which is helpful digging through the repositories, already installed items, and available updates. still have to do something about logging my installs, though.
- yumex helped me discover that rdesktop was already installed, works like a charm accessing my windows boxes from the xo. best with the full screen option (-f). still need to set up the tools to do this sort of access in reverse.
- does this thing form mesh connections with itself sometimes ? i'm pretty sure there's no other xo around here, but it hooked up with essid "olpc-mesh", 100% connection quality. that's better than with my ap twenty feet away. i need to get this thing to do that again & share an app, see what's what.
- networking: a tip i saw - "iwconfig eth0 rate 54MB" will speed things up, assuming you have 802.11g. out of the box, xo is configured for 1MB, apparently a power saving move.
- correction to an earlier posted figure: xo is delivered with a bit over 300mb of space used, not the 200mb or so i originally thought (where'd i get that ?). so i've added a bit more than 100mb through installs & just everyday usage (logs, files, etc.).
- i posted about determining system imaging options, came across this stuff: How to (hack) customize a built for XO. there's lots more info on the olpc wiki: customizing nand images (also some info here on removing journal history and other initialization / cleaning tasks); and some more through googling for "save-nand". caveats and potential future directions in this thread: any drawbacks to using copy-nand and save-nand to install XO images. more: Backing upthe XO?
- i finally got around to getting a developer key for the box; just insurance for now.