Slashdot Mirror

got some links now :

cia world factbook on christmas island

christmas island tourism authority - has some good pictures and good location map

cached google story showing maybe some competition from brazil

austrlain space research institute site currently showing top new story of some sort of formal agreement being jointly signed by russian and australian governments

This has been one of those Real Soon Now (tm) projects for years, for a simple reason - assuming your solar cells are made of silicon or something of similar density, the mass of an SPS (solar power satellite) big enough to generate useful amounts of power is prohibitive.

Here's my calculations:
Assuming a solar cell 1m to a side and 1mm thick, we get: 0.001m^3/cell * 2330 kg/m^3 (the density of silicon from Webelements ) = 2.33 kg per cell.

The solar irradiance at Earth's orbit is 1367.6 W/m^2 (from NASA National Space Science Data Center ). We currently have solar cells that can convert solar energy to electrical energy at about 30% efficiency in the labs. So, we'll assume that these can be made in bulk sometime in the near future. That yields 1367.6 * 0.3 = 410.28 W/m^2.

That seems like a lot, but consider - it four 100 watt light bulbs, or your computer (no monitor), if you have a system like mine. Lets say we aim for a generating capacity nearer to your average nuclear plant - 2 megawatts. Then we need 2,000,000 / 410.28 = 4,875 panels. At 2.33 kg each that's 11.4 metric tonnes. Not a huge amount, but then you have to add about that much in support structures, repair equipment, and the microwave emmitter, of course.

You will note that I have ignored losses in transmission, etc after the power is converted from solar to electrical. That is because these conversions are all very efficient, compared to the solar/electrical conversion, so they don't change any mass calculations by that much.

So how many SPS units would we need to power the world? From the CIA World FactBook , the US in 1998 used 3.365 trillion kWh, equivalent to a continous 384 million kW. We would therefore need about 200 thousand of the 2 megawatt stations considered above, for the US alone. If we wanted to be generous and extend this technology to the rest of the globe, we need over 2 million stations of this size.

Now, this is clearly not economical, not with launch costs in the neighborhood of $500/kg for the Shuttle (some dumb boosters can haul more for only $100/kg), but there is still hope. John S. Lewis, in his book Mining The Sky shows that building SPS units is economical, if you don't have to launch the mass of the solar cells. Instead, you bootstrap - launch a processing facility to a target Near Earth Object, set down and start making solar cells. The facility would have to be unmanned, but it would in a few years time produce enough cells to build a SPS.

One thing's for sure: You sure won't see any of this from NASA. They'd like it if you gave them the trillions of dollars it would take to build one of these, so they could fail miserably and call the whole idea impossible.

---------------

Besides all that, "US" in any form could mean "United States of Mexico," couldn't it?

So where does that leave your lame "USians"?

• Britain has a constitution, it's just not a written constitution. Trust me, it's perfectly possible for someone to be forbidden from doing something because it's unconstitutional, in the UK as with virtually every other governed place.
• US law has its roots in English common law. Need an authoritive reference? Ask the CIA.
• The appearance of a (written or otherwise) constitution has no bearing, in itself, on whether a religion is recognised or not. Only if the constitution actually mentions religion does it become an issue. In the US constitution, religion is relevent because of the 1st Ammendment, part of the bill of rights. In the British, the Queen is both the head of state and head of the Church of England. In British law, the concept of "recognised religions" is largely irrelevent, the government not formally recognising religions, nor granting any but the CofE special status, nor banning nor confering any other special rights upon them, but Britain does have several written bills of rights, varying from the Magna Carta to the European Declaration of Human Rights which was recently signed into British law.

I can't see how it over-reaches territory, if you deal with a foreign country then you must abide by their domestic laws, this has always been the case. As a US company, if you try and sell a product into the UK and it doesn't meet their safety requirements or whatever, it will be deemed illegal, despite the fact it may be legal under US law. This isn't imposing law on another country since you can still sell the (potentially) unsafe product to your US citizens legally.

Remember this only affects data concerning EU citizens, if you're an EU company then you cannot sell data on EU citizens to countries that have questionable data practices, if you're a US company dealing with EU people they you must do the same, obviously a US company can do whatever it likes with data on US citizens.

This does in fact does make some sense, if they didn't put restrictions on foreign countries then EU companies would just move their customer databases abroad and then do whatever they like with it, and because the country is outside EU law, citizens would have no legal control of their data, this would just undermine the whole purpose of the law.

If you've ever seen the "UK-Info" CD, which lets you find out in depth data about households by aggregates data from the British land registry, ordiance survery, electoral roll, company house records, acorn demographics, phone listings etc, they move this data to the Cayman Isles then process and cross reference it and sell it on a CD to the UK. If the CD was cross referenced in the UK it would break a number of data protection laws. Because the information can flow abroad then be sold back to the UK in an aggregated form, it's not illegal, which makes a mockery of the law, so they're trying to ensure citizens have rights on their data if its passed abroad (and choose if it even goes abroad).

The requirements are for companies dealing with EU citizens not just companies within the EU.

I can't see any law solving this issue easily, there are too many loopholes to deal with. As with the UK Info disc, lots of disparate forms of innocuous information are obtained which in themselves aren't a problem, it's when they're cross-referenced and interlinked it becomes an issue, I can't see how the EU can stop foreign countries processing this information.

Enshrining privacy in the law is an honourable pursuit, but ultimately frivolous, if they don't get industry backing it will never work since companies will just hire lawyers to exploit any tiny loophole in the law. Therefore how do we get companies to respect our data? What is commercial incentive for a company to do so?

Details : (I probably forgot a few members, but the list is just from memory)
.de: 83
.fr: 59
.uk: 59
.it: 58
.sp: 40
.nl: 16
.gr: 11
.be: 10
.se: 9
.dk: 5

... sitting in British waters, so any salvage operations and such would be covered by British laws.

"The Principality of Sealand was there first"

However, there doesn't seeem to be indication that the UK has ever recognized Sealand as a soverign country, and neither has any other government that I know of.

"Soverignty" is something decided upon by other countries as they decide to recognize one government's claims as "legitimate" over another's. It's why Stalin only got one seat in the UN General Assembly instead of the 15 or so he wanted, one seat for each individual Soviet republic. (Well, that and the fact that somebody pointed out that the US should get 48 by the same logic)

Or, for an example more relevant, in the 1860's the UK and France did not acknowledge that the Confederate States of America was actually an independent country, so they did not get (directly) involved with aiding the CSA during the war.

"Also, it's not exacttly kosher for them to do that; territorial waters reach out to only three miles."

According to this reference, they were bringing themselves up-to-date to the most current language in the Law of the Sea treaty from 1982. Though it has yet to be officially ratified by the UN as international law (at least when this web page was written), most countries (like the US) follow its guidelines of a 12 nautical mile limit to territorial seas.

Have a look at the entries for maritime claims in the CIA's World Factbook. Most of them seem to say 12 nautical miles.

"There's another boundary that reaches out to 12 miles, but it isn't territorial waters"

According to the aforementioned links, the UK's claims to territorial waters is indeed 12 nautical miles.

"the UK is pulling something silly"

Silly or not, this is something that has been hammered out by three UN conferences on the subject.

"The world could use a few places where people can flee oppression, and the established countries just aren't cutting it."

The only solution is to change copyright and patent laws, not try to violate them. By thumbing their nose at copyright laws and international treaties, they're running the risk of being labelled as pirates (the REAL kind, not the software variety). Most civilized nations don't take kindly to pirates. Hell, the first military action seen by the US after the revolution was sending in the USMC to shoot up a bunch of Lybian pirates. And where will HavenCo's "principles" be when the Brits decide that their platform makes for good long-range artillery practice?

... sitting in British waters, so any salvage operations and such would be covered by British laws.

"The Principality of Sealand was there first"

However, there doesn't seeem to be indication that the UK has ever recognized Sealand as a soverign country, and neither has any other government that I know of.

"Soverignty" is something decided upon by other countries as they decide to recognize one government's claims as "legitimate" over another's. It's why Stalin only got one seat in the UN General Assembly instead of the 15 or so he wanted, one seat for each individual Soviet republic. (Well, that and the fact that somebody pointed out that the US should get 48 by the same logic)

Or, for an example more relevant, in the 1860's the UK and France did not acknowledge that the Confederate States of America was actually an independent country, so they did not get (directly) involved with aiding the CSA during the war.

"Also, it's not exacttly kosher for them to do that; territorial waters reach out to only three miles."

According to this reference, they were bringing themselves up-to-date to the most current language in the Law of the Sea treaty from 1982. Though it has yet to be officially ratified by the UN as international law (at least when this web page was written), most countries (like the US) follow its guidelines of a 12 nautical mile limit to territorial seas.

Have a look at the entries for maritime claims in the CIA's World Factbook. Most of them seem to say 12 nautical miles.

"There's another boundary that reaches out to 12 miles, but it isn't territorial waters"

According to the aforementioned links, the UK's claims to territorial waters is indeed 12 nautical miles.

"the UK is pulling something silly"

Silly or not, this is something that has been hammered out by three UN conferences on the subject.

"The world could use a few places where people can flee oppression, and the established countries just aren't cutting it."

The only solution is to change copyright and patent laws, not try to violate them. By thumbing their nose at copyright laws and international treaties, they're running the risk of being labelled as pirates (the REAL kind, not the software variety). Most civilized nations don't take kindly to pirates. Hell, the first military action seen by the US after the revolution was sending in the USMC to shoot up a bunch of Lybian pirates. And where will HavenCo's "principles" be when the Brits decide that their platform makes for good long-range artillery practice?

At last take the population of people between 15-64 is about 853,191,410 so 15% makes about 127,978,712 people. Accounting for the capital city bit and large age spread in those numbers, I'll divide by a third to 42,232,975. [source]

That's A LOT of page impressions!

note to self: must learn Chinese and make some Chinese p0rn sites

This is appearantly true for all the countries they have listed. The People's Daily entry on Japan is copied from the CIA's version.

The REAL clincher, though, is the entry for Taiwan. The People's Republic consider Taiwan to actually be a province of their country, but if you compare the entry in the People's Daily here, and compare the "Location" and "Climate" entries to the same entries in the World Factbook's version, you'll notice that they were practically cut-and-pasted. At least they didn't use the CIA's map...

It's nice to know that American tax dollars are being spent on China's intelligence-gathering efforts. :)

This is appearantly true for all the countries they have listed. The People's Daily entry on Japan is copied from the CIA's version.

The REAL clincher, though, is the entry for Taiwan. The People's Republic consider Taiwan to actually be a province of their country, but if you compare the entry in the People's Daily here, and compare the "Location" and "Climate" entries to the same entries in the World Factbook's version, you'll notice that they were practically cut-and-pasted. At least they didn't use the CIA's map...

It's nice to know that American tax dollars are being spent on China's intelligence-gathering efforts. :)

This is appearantly true for all the countries they have listed. The People's Daily entry on Japan is copied from the CIA's version.

The REAL clincher, though, is the entry for Taiwan. The People's Republic consider Taiwan to actually be a province of their country, but if you compare the entry in the People's Daily here, and compare the "Location" and "Climate" entries to the same entries in the World Factbook's version, you'll notice that they were practically cut-and-pasted. At least they didn't use the CIA's map...

It's nice to know that American tax dollars are being spent on China's intelligence-gathering efforts. :)

This is appearantly true for all the countries they have listed. The People's Daily entry on Japan is copied from the CIA's version.

The REAL clincher, though, is the entry for Taiwan. The People's Republic consider Taiwan to actually be a province of their country, but if you compare the entry in the People's Daily here, and compare the "Location" and "Climate" entries to the same entries in the World Factbook's version, you'll notice that they were practically cut-and-pasted. At least they didn't use the CIA's map...

It's nice to know that American tax dollars are being spent on China's intelligence-gathering efforts. :)

Scroll to the bottom of this page for more information on the complexities of this corner of the world.

Watch this:

Independence: 221 BC (unification under the Qin or Ch'in Dynasty 221 BC; Qing or Ch'ing Dynasty replaced by the Republic on 12 February 1912; People's Republic established 1 October 1949)

Wow!

221 years ***BEFORE*** Jesus H. Fucking Christ (yeah, the dude who got nailed 1968 years ago) !

Beats the shit outta 1776!!!!

--

They [the Chinese] probably don't even have all those nukes they keep whispering about. Have we ever seen them detonate one? Well have we? NO! They don't exist.
Ah, that would explain the newspaper articles about the non-existent explosion of china's imaginary nuclear weapons, for example here is one from cnn. And here is a link from greenpeace (not my favorite people) that contains a history of Chinese nuclear testing. How about a CIA paper on ICBM threats to the US that covers China's ICBMs. If you thing we've never seen China set off a nuclear weapon then you just haven't been paying attention!

"Second to none when it comes to macho military posturing, the U.S. can't say it's sorry for the accident and bring everybody home. Various grim-faced U.S. officials, from the President and Vice-President to the Secretary of State, have been rushing around in their big black limos, and issued guarded expressions of concern and sadness, but nobody can quite bring himself to say the magic words. "

Being macho may or may not have something to do with it, but it is not the sole reason, nor even the main reason. If the U. S. were to apologize in the manner that the P. R. C. wants, not only will we be saying "I'm sorry I hit your plane," but also "I'm sorry we flew flights over your water." After all, there shouldn't be any problem in flying such flights through international water.

If the South China Sea isn't international water (which the P. R. C. has been claiming for decades), this leaves a lot of other people wide open to be "collectivized" or "assimilated" or whatever you want to call it. "You see? The U. S. even admits that it's our water, so then they also agree we own the Spratley Islands." (For those that don't know, the Spratleys are a resource-rich area of the world that's been claimed by at least five nations). This could worsen the water disputes between the P. R. C. and Vietnam (two nations that have already been to war once). This could even affect islands as far away from China as the Philippines.

Scroll to the bottom of this page for more information on the complexities of this corner of the world.

The news is focusing on the crew of the airplane, and maybe on the airplane's technology, but the big issue between the politicians is really the water the plane was flying over. If this were in the Yellow Sea (between the Korean penninsula and mainland China), this wouldn't be anywhere near as big an issue.

If you feel that we should say those "magic words" and more or less abandon that part of the world to a known oppressive and expansionist government (who's to say that they'll stop at the South China Sea? They haven't stopped with Nepal, Kashmir, Taiwan, Vietnam, and it took the Soviet nuclear arsenal to convince them not to spread north as well), then you can go ahead and play the isolationlist game. Just remember that that's exactly what the U. S. was doing at the beginning of both world wars.

I'm updating the country to Kuwait. The CIA World Factbook's entry on Kuwait says "Suffrage: adult males who have been naturalized for 30 years," etc. Interesting that after five minutes of looking through dozens of countries to try to find one that denies the vote specifically to women, the only one I could find was one whose government my country went to war to defend.

Jamie McCarthy

Sod the shoe phone.. look at THESE!

Hubba Hubba!

(Yes, I know I'm sad!)

Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems

Look at this...
It's the original Get Smart phone. And why the heck is it on the CIA's site????

Less well known is their Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, for which generations of linguists have listened to the hype output of governments worldwide. (FBIS refers to this as "open source" material.)

They've been hoping for years to automate some of this stuff, and apparently they've succeeded. It doesn't require particularly good speech recognition, since the basic goal is to pull out the interesting stuff from the endless drivel.

This sort of info is used to answer questions like "Is country X changing their policy on Y", and "Who is speaking for country X on subject Y?" This is basic political intelligence information.

Privacy concerns, and governments addresses over these concerns, are like water and oil. Current events should point out the true factors when thinking about these two, although many never take the time to delve deeper into the situation, often overlooking many important factors that would normally be an outrage after the occurance, but seldom questioned until it is too late.

Politicians are often older people who will never utilize computers in the same fashions as us, and often do not understand what is going on. Law enforcement often uses scare tactics by injecting some outrageous scenarios into the minds of these politicians using cryptic terms themselves in hoping these politicians will pass these laws without incident, which will benefit law enforcement, and cripple the people.

Breakdown of questionable issues:

HR46 was an attempt to sneak a fast one.

Carnivore was used dozens of times and the FBI claims it was mostly on hackers. Note: Its been found that the Carnivore snoops everything on a segment what about your traffic? Were you on that network, was your traffic snooped?

makes me wonder...

FBI claims Castro is a hacker. In a country where they have close to nothing, do you really believe Cuba is a threat to the US, or is this just an attempt to step on Cuba when their down?

Bin Laden using technology to hide activities. Note: this isn't new news and judging from experiences in history, we've always needed an enemy for the sake of remaining a super power by enforcing authority. So if Osama is such a huge threat why isn't he stopped cold? Because the government can't or because they don't want to for the purpose of having an enemy?

Take a quick look at some of the stuff posted by Louis Tenet this week and do some rational thinking about how situations arise which can be handled by government, but are often purposely misconstrued for the sake of promoting other hidden agendas. Government will try to take as much privacy away as they can, any government so don't be fooled.

And it goes on and on with no end in site.

shhh... the world is out to get me

The US is on a role to censor all that it can nowadays presenting the notion that things which are not under direct control of government are somehow threatening to the well being of the US.

The CIA posted a speech by Louis Tenet, their director about one of the threates facing the US' superpower status, which went like this:

Mr. Chairman, we are in a race with technology itself. We are creating relations with the private sector and academia to help us keep pace with ever-changing technology. Last year I established the Information Operations Center within CIA to bring together our best and brightest to ensure that we had a strategy for dealing with the cyber threat.

This is part of the same government the is getting its servers defaced every other month, and not because their clueless, but rather because they use these istances to push for more power and funding.

Along with partners in the Departments of Justice, Energy, and Defense we will work diligently to protect critical US information assets. Let me also say that we must view our space systems and capabilities as part of the same critical infrastructure that needs protection.

Speech can be found here

Here's a solution for this threat, DON'T POST CLASSIFIED MATERIALS ONLINE, which they don't so what exactly is this threat? Someone DDoS'ing a webserver? 15 years ago when they only had the SIPRNET amongst themselves this wasn't an issue, they still use SIPRNET but now its an issue?

Violence will always be violence and will always exist and whether video games, movies, music promotes it is never truly known, all we hear about are studies, and polls which claim this is the case, violence is fueled by games, music, etc. I never took any polls asking me questions, have you? Where are they getting their information from? has anyone took a quick look to think about this, who exactly is it thats answering these questions, and who gave them the right to decide for the majority of the people?

Lacking the control they would love to have, the government will attempt to control as much as they can while they'll turn around and their explanation will be "Its for your own good", well to be honest I'm more concerned about getting better funding for schools, building housing for those in need, drug rehabilitation vs. incarceration. Not for my tax dollars to be spent by political bigwigs chasing the people at Bonsai Kitten because they think its immoral. Why haven't they done anything to sites like Defacation Vacation which posts pictures of women getting raped, killed, etc? Surely a life of a human would supercede a kitten?

The same government is claiming that Cuba is our worse enemy, are you serious? Cuba? Give me a break Uncle Scam, Cuba is so crippled the only threat they could pose is if they stopped smuggling Cigars to those in Politics under the table.

We can't forget the Osama Bin Laden incident where he's using crypto and stenography. Whats next are they going to go after Spam Mimmic for jumbling up words?

anyways enough rambling I have better things to do

The US is on a role to censor all that it can nowadays presenting the notion that things which are not under direct control of government are somehow threatening to the well being of the US.

The CIA posted a speech by Louis Tenet, their director about one of the threates facing the US' superpower status, which went like this:

Mr. Chairman, we are in a race with technology itself. We are creating relations with the private sector and academia to help us keep pace with ever-changing technology. Last year I established the Information Operations Center within CIA to bring together our best and brightest to ensure that we had a strategy for dealing with the cyber threat.

This is part of the same government the is getting its servers defaced every other month, and not because their clueless, but rather because they use these istances to push for more power and funding.

Along with partners in the Departments of Justice, Energy, and Defense we will work diligently to protect critical US information assets. Let me also say that we must view our space systems and capabilities as part of the same critical infrastructure that needs protection.

Speech can be found here

Here's a solution for this threat, DON'T POST CLASSIFIED MATERIALS ONLINE, which they don't so what exactly is this threat? Someone DDoS'ing a webserver? 15 years ago when they only had the SIPRNET amongst themselves this wasn't an issue, they still use SIPRNET but now its an issue?

Violence will always be violence and will always exist and whether video games, movies, music promotes it is never truly known, all we hear about are studies, and polls which claim this is the case, violence is fueled by games, music, etc. I never took any polls asking me questions, have you? Where are they getting their information from? has anyone took a quick look to think about this, who exactly is it thats answering these questions, and who gave them the right to decide for the majority of the people?

Lacking the control they would love to have, the government will attempt to control as much as they can while they'll turn around and their explanation will be "Its for your own good", well to be honest I'm more concerned about getting better funding for schools, building housing for those in need, drug rehabilitation vs. incarceration. Not for my tax dollars to be spent by political bigwigs chasing the people at Bonsai Kitten because they think its immoral. Why haven't they done anything to sites like Defacation Vacation which posts pictures of women getting raped, killed, etc? Surely a life of a human would supercede a kitten?

The same government is claiming that Cuba is our worse enemy, are you serious? Cuba? Give me a break Uncle Scam, Cuba is so crippled the only threat they could pose is if they stopped smuggling Cigars to those in Politics under the table.

We can't forget the Osama Bin Laden incident where he's using crypto and stenography. Whats next are they going to go after Spam Mimmic for jumbling up words?

anyways enough rambling I have better things to do

Country name:
conventional long form: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
conventional short form: United Kingdom
abbreviation: UK

Note that it is Great Britain and Northern Ireland. NI is not part of Britain, but is part of the UK. The two are often mistaken as interchangeable, when they are not.

link

In Myanmar, formerly Burma, access to the web is banned. To enforce this, the country's military regime imposes jail terms of up to 15 years for unauthorised use of a modem.

Anyone in Myanmar care to comment on this? But seriously, I can't believe this. 41 million people are living in this country under a military regime. 30% of the population is under 15 years of age. They have adequate and wide spread communications including long distance communications. Neighbouring India, do these folks a favour, invade and give em some net access!

...another comment from Michael Tandy.

...another comment from Michael Tandy.

You seem to have a bit of trouble with your statments. Basically they're crap and unfounded. Well guess what... In India (Where Hindi is spoken!) The universal language of trade, in all provinces is you guessed it, ENGLISH. Look it up, but even the Hindi speakers of the world realize that the language of global business is alwaysthe language of the man with the $$$.

You seem to be suggesting that english is spoken in india because they all reckon that english is the language of choice because The U.S. is the most powerful nation in the world, with the strongest economy(Thus the man with the $$$).
Erm, bullshit?!
First, india is a nation of over 1billion.
You take any area containing 1 billion people and there will be several languages there to get all those people speaking they'll all need one language.
i.e, Hindi is the National language of India, but there are 24 other regional languages there, accounting for the primary languages of 70% of the population.
The reason English is spoken in india is because it was ruled from 1858 - 1947 by the British Crown. Hence all the official institutions were undertaken in ENGLISH. In order to get anything done, the people in india had to speak english to their British authorities
It's not because the population of india sat down and thought learning english would be a good way to earn some money from all those rich nations.
In addition, india's earning money fine at the moment;
Modern India
Fastest developing Economy. Seventh Largest Country in the World. Largest Democratic Society in the World Till recently adopted Mixed Economic policy. One of the world's top 10 industrial powers. Approximately 6% per annum economic growth. Acquired break-through in all major fields. New reforms speeding up the economic progress.

And as for that very cheeky reference to How many of those Mandrin people do you think are still living in huts, with no electricity or running water?
I take it you mean the chinese, because mandarin is just a language.
Well, china has the second largest GDP in the world, with only 10% below the poverty line., as opposed to india with 37% and america with 12.7% below the poverty line. And these are all the CIA's offical statistics, so allow for US ballet stuffing and figure adjustment.

Next time don't let your bigoted preconceptions get the better of your reasoning and opinion.

ref: CIA WORLD FACTBOOK 2000

It is easy to see the early colonial powers have a strong influence on the language with French being taught in quite a few central African countries and English in the southern African countries. While Chinese will undoubtedly have a large impact on the internet if and when a bulk of China comes online, the basic fact that a sizeable portion of the Chinese population live without electricity, we cannot count their entire population as netizens.

Also, according to the factbook, English remains one of the most used languages in India while the official language is only spoken by 30% of the population.

While English will always be dominant in one form or another, I don't think anyone will actively allow it to become the only language of the net. At least I hope not. There are just some things that need to be in the original language. French euphemisms need to be in French. A Russian novelist is better when read in Russian.

Ideally, the globalization of languages on the net will mean more Americans are exposed to different languages and while not necessarily being able to speak and write in them, but be able to comprehend them to some degree.

Languages: English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication, Hindi the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people, Bengali (official), Telugu (official), Marathi (official), Tamil (official), Urdu (official), Gujarati (official), Malayalam (official), Kannada (official), Oriya (official), Punjabi (official), Assamese (official), Kashmiri (official), Sindhi (official), Sanskrit (official), Hindustani (a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India) note: 24 languages each spoken by a million or more persons; numerous other languages and dialects, for the most part mutually unintelligible.

This isn't meant to be an 'I told you so' but to highlight the fact in countries that have a lot of different languages (South Africa is included in this category) English tends to crawl to the top as a unifier.

Remember the some of the early student uprisings in South Africa were over the fact that English wasn't allowed to be taught in the tribal schools. It was one of the ways Apartheid worked...keeping the different tribes from organizing together.

How, oh, how will we explain this to our (non-script-)kiddies?

The CIA for Kids Homepage!

Doesn't it make you feel like expatriating?

[snip]

c.) You are a christian (just TRY being agnostic/athiest/anything else)."

Note: Joseph Lieberman, currently Senator from Connecticut, is an Orthodox Jew. True, he's still part of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but he's not a Christian.

My sister and a few friends and I were arguing yesterday about whether to count the deist Founding Fathers as "Christian" or what. I maintain that, while their culture was Christian, the actual religion of such as Ben Franklin WAS NOT.

A Salon article a few days ago proposed, somewhat in jest, that our next non-Christian higher-up federal official will be a Muslim secretary of state, since Muslims, like Jews and Christians, have connections to the Judeo-Christian heritage, have one holy scripture, etc. I could see a strict Sunni Muslim as Secretary of -- well, not State anytime soon, but maybe something like Transportation (blanked out for a moment -- thanks, Google!).

[sarcasm] But a black man? Heavens, no! [/sarcasm] Except for Colin Powell, who makes up for being black by being a hawk. Rednecks just don't know what to do!

Speaking of race and power -- wasn't it an Indian-American judge, one Marilyn Patel or something, who made one of the recent Napster rulings? Go, Indians!

http://www.cia.gov/cia/ciakids/index.html

Well aside from the conspiracy theories, there is the fact that there are many a vast number of persons in this country that do not have web access. Leaps in technology have a tendecy to widen the gap between rich and poor or increasingly tech haves and have nots, which according to the CIA factbook is the largest problem in this country. I agree with the concerns, and anything that makes advertisers happy makes me very nervous. But I can see some of the benefit in a society that is connected to the standard means of communication. Granted that printing out e.mail at the post office may suck but it is better than not being able to participate. The last thing technology should do is disenfranchise large segments of the population. There are obvious kinks to work out but this could be a good thing.

Furthermore, gasoline (or diesel) is not necessarily a lifestyle choice. How do you think farmers plow their fields? With teams of oxen or horses? Generally, (with exceptions for the Amish and others) the answer is no. They do so with tractors - which use FUEL. How would you provide for the planting, tending, and harvesting of America's farm land, which not only provides crops for us, but for the world as well? (When crops aren't rotting in silos - but that's another issue.)

And, on a semi-separate note, why should I be forced to live in areas that have mass transit? I like the fields and the forests around me. I like being able to actually see the Milky Way at night. I loved the small, agricultural community I grew up in, and I would not choose to abandon it, but then again, unlike many of my farmer neighbors, I can afford that luxury even in the face of fuel costs.

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>> "Also, the Japanese do not have an army, national defense is provided, at a fee, by the United States."
>Semantics aside, the JDF (Japanese Defense Force) is an army/navy/airforce.

• Military branches: Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (Army), Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (Navy), Japan Air Self-Defense Force (Air Force)
• Military expenditures-dollar figure: $42.9 billion (FY98/99)
• Military expenditures-percent of GDP: 0.9% (FY98/99)

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Given that:

• [ A ] HavenCo is explicitly designed for regulatory arbitrage
• [ B ] Sealand was chosen by HavenCo specifically for :
  • [ i ] theoretical sovreignty
  • [ ii ] relative advantages for physical security
• [ C ] HavenCo is a commercial venture
• [ D ] HavenCo is also a political statement
• [ E ] Many countries (including USA, UK, France, Russia, and China) have all acted aggressively to prevent regulatory arbitrage (ie, double tax treaties, etc)

Then:

• [ 1 ] What precautions have been taken to ensure that HavenCo physical assets and human resources will be protected from predatory legal and/or physical assault?
• [ 2 ] Have any "pro-active" plans to co-opt national intelligence agencies, to prevent possible destruction of HavenCo physical and human assets (ie, developing a relationship with the CIA so that the NSA doesn't call "national defense" and activate SEAL teams to neutralize a potential "national security risk")?
• [ 3 ] In the event that physical security is breached, and it becomes necessary to incinerate the Data Vault, have "live tests" been done to verify that, indeed, the data is unrecoverable (uncompromisable)?

Literacy:
definition: age 15 and over can read and write
total population: 100%
male: 100%
female: 100% (1980 est.)

Click here to see it for yourself, I know this is not the case, so does this mean anything?

Also it's using 1980 data??

Several years ago Coca-Cola was in the process of doing a major land purchase in the small Central American country of Belize (which borders Mexico and Guatamala). When they were thorugh with the initial proposal, Coke would have owned approximately 60%-75% of all of the land in the country. This effect was something similar to somebody purchasing 60%-70% of a company's stock in the stock market.

From what I last heard, Coca-Cola backed down on the project because of the PR reprecusions from "owning" their own country in a very literal sense. If there were a company who didn't care so much about PR perception, especially if they were principally an industrial supplier, they probabally could get away with doing something that bold. At least it is an idea to consider... or at least a good plotline for a science fiction novel.

In terms of more local poltical juristictions, this already happens. At the beginning of the 20th Century, coal mining companies routinely established "company towns" where the mining company literally owned everything, from the schools, police, fire departments, banks, grocery stores, and homes. (For a non-confrontational view of this, watch the movie "October Sky", which uses the coal town as a story background to a surpurbly geeky moive)

This was probabally best described by Tennessee Ernie Ford in the song Sixteen Tons where he sings about life in a coal town. (BTW, the link has the lyrics and a real-audio recording of the song.)

Most people in Australia live on the coat. With 16,000 miles of coast line where would you live?

The population and size of Victoria (where I live now) is very close to that of Missouri (where I lived before). Victoria has one major city (Melbourne) and three minor ones. Missouri has two major cities (Stl, KC) and 2 minor ones.

Outside of Victoria things tend to get quite sparse. Western Australia is mostly empty and the Northern Territory is so big with so few people it out sources some of its government. It has a population density about 1/3 of Alaska and is about 5/6 of the size.

The population is 18,783,551 (if you trust the CIA fact book) which puts in about the same as New York. New South Wales (where Sydney is) has more people than the state of Washington in 4 times as much area but only 1/4 of that is used.

Melbourne is one of the worlds largest cities as far as area. My map of the greater Melbourne area covers about 100x100 km (60x60 miles). Its spread out like much Tulsa and Indianapolis are but with unexplained over priced land but a useful public transport system.

English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication, Hindi the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people, Bengali (official), Telugu (official), Marathi (official), Tamil (official), Urdu (official), Gujarati (official), Malayalam (official), Kannada (official), Oriya (official), Punjabi (official), Assamese (official), Kashmiri (official), Sindhi (official), Sanskrit (official), Hindustani (a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India)
note: 24 languages each spoken by a million or more persons; numerous other languages and dialects, for the most part mutually unintelligible

Think about that. Twenty-four mutually-unintelligible languages in common use. English has become the standard language for all but local purposes in India, because there are far too many local tounges to try to translate between them.

Professor Hariharan's article states that only 10% of Indians speak English. According to the factbook, only 52% of Indians are literate, in any language. Assuming that the English speakers are a subset of the literate people, that means that roughly 20% of the literate population can understand English. That's the same as the percentage of Indians who speak the most common non-English language, Hindi.

It seems to me that what India needs is more literacy, and more English speakers. English has, for better or worse, become the most common language in international trade. (And, in India's case, intranational trade.)

I would certainly applaud the efforts of any people who choose to localize Linux, or any other software, to Indian languages. I do not think, however, that placing Indian computer users into a localized ghetto, separate from the rest of India and the rest of the world, will prove to be the means that the "digital revolution" will be brought to that country.

This is especially the case if, as Professor Hariharan implies, an Indian-localized system would remove such commonly-used concepts as "files" and "folders". Does he envision a system based on "mud huts" and "clay slabs"? (And would any intelligent Indian react with anything other than offense to such a translation which assumes he is not intelligent enough to understand the original system?) Or does he rather imagine replacing the entire concept of a hierarchical directory structure with something else? If the latter, what possible purpose is served by making the systems used by Indians radically different than those used by the remainder of the world?

While this article makes a valid point in that more localized versions of Linux (or any software!) is a good thing, I feel that it far overstates its case and misses the point.

-Damien

English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication, Hindi the national language and primary tongue of 30% of the people, Bengali (official), Telugu (official), Marathi (official), Tamil (official), Urdu (official), Gujarati (official), Malayalam (official), Kannada (official), Oriya (official), Punjabi (official), Assamese (official), Kashmiri (official), Sindhi (official), Sanskrit (official), Hindustani (a popular variant of Hindi/Urdu spoken widely throughout northern India)
note: 24 languages each spoken by a million or more persons; numerous other languages and dialects, for the most part mutually unintelligible

Think about that. Twenty-four mutually-unintelligible languages in common use. English has become the standard language for all but local purposes in India, because there are far too many local tounges to try to translate between them.

Professor Hariharan's article states that only 10% of Indians speak English. According to the factbook, only 52% of Indians are literate, in any language. Assuming that the English speakers are a subset of the literate people, that means that roughly 20% of the literate population can understand English. That's the same as the percentage of Indians who speak the most common non-English language, Hindi.

It seems to me that what India needs is more literacy, and more English speakers. English has, for better or worse, become the most common language in international trade. (And, in India's case, intranational trade.)

I would certainly applaud the efforts of any people who choose to localize Linux, or any other software, to Indian languages. I do not think, however, that placing Indian computer users into a localized ghetto, separate from the rest of India and the rest of the world, will prove to be the means that the "digital revolution" will be brought to that country.

This is especially the case if, as Professor Hariharan implies, an Indian-localized system would remove such commonly-used concepts as "files" and "folders". Does he envision a system based on "mud huts" and "clay slabs"? (And would any intelligent Indian react with anything other than offense to such a translation which assumes he is not intelligent enough to understand the original system?) Or does he rather imagine replacing the entire concept of a hierarchical directory structure with something else? If the latter, what possible purpose is served by making the systems used by Indians radically different than those used by the remainder of the world?

While this article makes a valid point in that more localized versions of Linux (or any software!) is a good thing, I feel that it far overstates its case and misses the point.

-Damien

For example, at a recent college recruiting convention, the CIA was passing out fliers on their CITO (Clandestine Information Technology Office). The flier stated that CITO's mission was to exploit foreign information technology. They even advertise for these types of positions on their employment web site at:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/employment/ci aeindex.htm

Can be found in this report

I think your statement that "There is nothing we can do to prevent a determined individual or group from commiting an act of terrorism" is pretty close to the truth.

What we need to realise (as the army often does when evaluating war) is that there _will_ be casualties. After realising that, we decide where the minimal point is; do we need to add full display body scanners? Well, do they prevent said determined persons? No. Will they prevent drug smugglers? Maybe. Are there other ways to prevent drug smuggling? Yes. Do we need the scanners? No. (Hypothetically speaking).

What we also need is more universal use of known terrorist face shots being forced on customs / security officials for recognition. Its not like the CIA/CSIS/FBI/etc. doesn't have a good list of desciptions with photos. Sure, its not complete, but this would help a lot.

Languages: English, Spanish (spoken by a sizable minority)

Click Here for CIA homepage.

How many licks does it take to get to the center on a tootsie roll pop?

If we're lucky some guy in a Panda suit will follow around the fed's new anti-hacking mascot around to all the gradeschools.

If we're really lucky he'll pick a fight with the anti-hack gerbil as he tries get converts for the CIA kids program. "No kids, snitching is bad, take that you filthy gerbil!"