Quotulatiousness

August 20, 2010

A different (but not completely wrong) way to view Europe in 1914

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Humour, Russia, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 21:33

Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me this link while I was on vacation (and generally unable to stay connected to the internet for more than minutes at a time). If you’ve already seen this, my apologies for being late:

The First World War, explained as a pub fight…

    Germany, Austria and Italy are stood together in the middle of the pub, when Serbia bumps into Austria, and spills Austria’s pint.

    Austria demands Serbia buy it a complete new suit, because there are splashes on its trouser leg.

    Germany expresses its support for Austria’s point of view

    Britain recommends that everyone calm down a bit.

    Serbia points out that it can’t afford a whole suit, but offers to pay for cleaning Austria’s trousers.

    Russia and Serbia look at Austria.

    Austria asks Serbia who it’s looking at.

    Russia suggests that Austria should leave its little brother alone.

    Austria inquires as to whose army will assist Russia in compelling it to do so.

As Jon pointed out, the key comment is “And when Germany wakes up, it goes out to its car, gets the gun out of the glovebox and heads back inside…”

“C will not only let you shoot yourself in the foot, it will hand you a new magazine when you run out of bullets”

Filed under: History, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 21:28

Charles Stross enumerates some of the ways “we went wrong” in the rush to today’s computing world:

According to one estimate pushed by the FBI in 2006, computer crime costs US businesses $67 billion a year. And identity fraud in the US allegedly hit $52.6Bn in 2004.

Even allowing for self-serving reporting (the FBI would obviously find it useful to inflate the threat of crime, if only to justify their budget requests), that’s a lot of money being pumped down a rat-hole. Extrapolate it worldwide and the figures are horrendous — probably nearer to $300Bn a year. To put it in perspective, it’s like the combined revenue (not profits; gross turnover) of Intel, Microsoft, Apple, and IBM — and probably a few left-overs like HP and Dell — being lost due to deliberate criminal activity.

Where does this parasitic drag come from? Where did we go wrong?

I’m compiling a little list, of architectural sins of the founders (between 1945 and 1990, more or less) that have bequeathed us the current mess. They’re fundamental design errors in our computing architectures; their emergent side-effects have permitted the current wave of computer crime to happen . . .

I make it a rule never to believe the order of magnitude claimed by a self-interested party about how much money is “lost” because of their current hobby-horse mopery and dopery. Even if the amount claimed by the FBI is off by an order of magnitude, that’s still serious money.

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