This has already been done in Russia. Of course Russia no being a state of the US of A, most folks here would prefer to assume that they don't have modern technology, only bad 1970s hairdos and 1990s PCs....
No, I suggested you go and look it up. Look up what the word actually means. I'm not making a value judgement about fascism, just pointing something out. In that archaic left/right paradigm, the US has been leaning to the right since at least the 1980s compared to the international mean. Not being from the US, I don't easily fit into your narrow world view, but if you must try and fit me into this model which has outlived it's usefulness, you could perhaps call me a radical centrist.
And again, you have not really made any points or put forward any arguments. Not too bright are you?
I remember the days leading up to the Gulf War. I remember Hans Blix saying that Iraq had next to no chance of getting a weapon any time soon. I remember analysts who actually understood the region saying that invading Iraq will do more to aid terrorism than prevent it. I remember international law experts and many countries around the world warning that there was no valid U.N. mandate for an invasion. I remember being absolutely disgusted that our Prime Minister could join in with what was so obviously an act of armed robbery by a bunch of the most evil arse holes on the planet fronted by a buffoon and against the will of the majority of citizens.
That whole episode really brought it home to me that capitalist democracies are fucked. Because in capitalist democracies people like me are outnumbered by people like you who don't pay any attention to the news beyond what the evil pricks in with the major party of choice are telling them and vote to put said evil pricks in power. And for the evil pricks, well they are capitalists through and through, so it makes perfect sense to go into a war with a country that really can't defend itself. Especially against a proud people who are likely to resist in a region where any power vaccuum will quickly be filled by thugs like al Qaeda. The government will buy military hardware from the companies the evil pricks have substantial interests in, award oil contracts, wheat deals, etc etc to companies the evil pricks have interests in. And hey, the longer the whole thing goes on, the more money they make.
And you don't remember people predicting this before the invasion started? Amnesia, or do you only watch Fux News? Perhaps the people warning of this were all lefties or pinkos or liberals or something.
Again, Just from the fact that the American media eventually questioned the validity of Powell's UN presentation makes your point moot.
Tell that to every family member of every fatality caused by the illegal invasion of Iraq. Make sure you include your own countrymen, you know the poor trash that weren't worth nothin' anyway? By the time the news media grew some balls and started doing it's job, it was too late. At least in China you know that the whole thing is government spin. In the "free world" so many people actually do consume their entire news intact through Rupert's goggles.
What's this left/right bullshit all about anyway? He makes some good points. As an outsider, I can see that a lot of republicans are clearly fascist. The last Republican administration in the U.S. was clearly fascist. Look up up fascist, find out what is means.
If we are going to play with those archaic notions of "left" and "right", I would suggest that the current Obama administration is centre right and the Republicans are far right.
You are so far left that pointing out how you are wrong would do no good what so ever.
So do you have a point to make, or are you just abusing people? Only that's the kind of "argument" that the folks who vote fascist use.
I agree totally. I was only half fishing for +5 Funny. Absolutely no disrespect meant. I seriously think that high speed non-volatile memory is the only stumbling block to making multics really useful.
Was hoping to get at least one Insightful for my comment, but instead I get a bunch of Funnys and some neck-beard behaving like I just shot all his chickens.....
For those in Oceania there's Pioneer Computers. They let you build your own system, often with way more options than the likes of Dell give you, and you can choose to have Ubuntu pre-loaded, or even get them to set up multi boot with multiple partitions. You also get to see how much windows costs.
Sounds fair enough to me. Why should Israel even exist and why should it be in the middle East? Because a bunch of ex cock worshippers from central Asia who converted to Judaism and ended up in Europe thought that they could apply something written down in an African tribal religion's text to themselves by force?
Actually, the current US government is even more of a threat. And I don't mean the elected one. They are not only able to run the place as a police state, they are able to keep idiots like you believing you are freer than the Chinese....
Go on, throw a bunch of comparisons at me. For every evil thing you can sling about China, I will have no trouble finding an equivalent or worse thing about the good old USA.
Congratulations! You carefully selected a sentence that out of context misrepresents the argument it was taken from and made a rhetorical attack on it! A most commendable display of wilful ignorance! Bravo sir!
You might want to have a good hard look at yourself to figure out if you are pro-nuke purely because you think everyone who is anti-nuke is a hippy and you don't like hippies. If you find that to be the case, consider that by adopting that attitude, you are as bad as the knee jerk anti-nuke hippy types. Although based on your debating style, I don't actually have a lot of faith in your capacity for rational thought, so the result of any self assessment is probably a forgone conclusion.
The trouble with mining it is it disperses it. The tailings have to go somewhere, travelling dust. I get that what you're saying is tongue in cheek, but I personally feel that we (as humans) have gone as far down the fission path as is worth going for now.
Just like the way Americans adopted NTSC and had colour telly way before we adopted PAL, I think we're better off waiting for the superior tech. I agree nuclear power holds a lot of possibilities, but I lean towards fusion and I can't for the life of me figure out how burning the waste from a fission reactor would be a good idea.
I'll try to dig up the study I read, it was largely around the construction, transport and processing costs.
What I do know is that solar thermal power is way more efficient than anything that can be practically done on a large scale using current photovoltaic tech. It also offers much simpler short term (as in overnight) energy storage solutions.
We have so much land that has the sun beating down on it all year round that has been effected by salinity and over farming, why are we not putting that to use and stopping the brain drain of our solar experts moving to California and Europe? We also have the raw materials needed to build enough solar thermal that even running at 5% efficiency, we could power our own country for the next few centuries with no problem, and by then fusion may be more feasible.
Regarding Hastings, Kennet ripped all the rail infrastructure out of Post Melbourne then Bracks/Brumby went ahead with the dredging, so now larger ships carry more into a port where the only option to get freight to the South East is the Monash while the South East industry is growing and the traditional inner West is being converted to apartments and offices. Turning Western Port Highway into a Freeway, upgrading the Stony Point line and putting in a rail link from say Sommerville to Dandenong would definitely reduce traffic on the Monash. It would also make the coal exports from Victoria a lot simpler (and they will be happening for a while yet). Trouble is these things are guided by bureaucracy and self interest more than basic engineering.
Um, that all sounds overly complicated to me. This system appears to be cyclical. I have noticed that so is the whole day/night thing and generally night is cooler than day. So wouldn't it be easier to design it such that you use solar in the day to heat it up and then use the cool of night to increase the efficiency of whatever cooling system you use?
Sure, thorium's fun and all, but if you build a powerful enough solar furnace, surely that's all you really need. Why bother with building another completely different type of furnace to heat the thing at night when you need it to cool down at some point anyway? I hate obnoxious NIMBYism and eco-luddism almost as much as I hate over engineering for the sake of using a pet technology.
apparently, it's hard to actually do on a large scale and make it more attractive to investors than using fuel sources that involve mining or drilling, processing and destroying the fuel.
i've long thought that amoung "environmentalists", a further distinction needs to be made between the rational ones and the loonies, hippies, and people afraid of weasel-words like "chemicals" etc.
I am an environmentalist, in that I think only people who are so stupid as to be bordering on sub human could possibly think that what we do to our environment doesn't effect us. I feel, and this is a moral point, that people who disregard the ill effects of their actions on the lives of others don't really deserve their own. It's only fair.
I also can't stand idiots who do stupid things like argue against dredging Port Phillip Bay (something I didn't support) to let large ships in but then go and say we can't build a major port at Hastings (which already has deep see access and is closer to our major industries). Because the mangroves their are not found anywhere else? They are found right the way around Western Port!! Idiots!
you could almost split environmentalists down the middle along the lines of pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear and you'd get most of the reasonable ones on one side and the loons on the other.
This is where you lost me. I'm assuming you think anyone who is anti nuclear is a loon.
For my country, I am anti-nuclear and anyone who is pro nuclear for my country is a loon. Current technology only allows for fission, which is a dirty and inefficient power source. I have read estimates that for us to switch from the brown coal we currently burn to modern fission, our total CO2 output will rise over the life of the plants. And there is still the waste problem to consider, it's still not resolved, and no we don't want to bury it inland here and have to get into our ground water thank you very much.
I live in a country with the highest levels of solar radiation on the planet that also has an enormous coastline. Parts of it sit in some very reliable low altitude wind currents. We have large reserves of natural gas. Those of us who think solar thermal, wind and tidal power supplemented by natural gas are the way to go are a hell of a lot more rational, from both an environmental and economic point of view.
You have obviously wed yourself to old school Java, and you prefer writing loads of boiler plate code rather than jsp? Wow! I haven't been doing that web stuff for a few years, but I did it solidly in the late 90's and into the first half of this decade and for a lot of things my productivity and the maintainability of my work shot up when jsp came along.
You do know that jsp compiles to Servlets anyway, right? That they are just an easy way of turning some static mark up into a dynamic page. For example, I've used them to write dynamic svg because it was quicker doing the layout in inkscape and converting that than stuffing around in batik or doing the whole thing by hand.
Sure, you can use a swiss army knife to cut firewood, but who, other than a total maniac, would really want to? Use the right tool for the job. jsp will end up in that dustbin at about the time that Servlets do.
If it can only be implemented by a single company and is a "standard" that only exists through what could reasonably be called corruption of a standards body, it's not really a standard.
The ISO standard is much stronger because it is supported well across the entire range of office suites available. None fully support it.
No, this is a myopic piece of crap from people who are either corrupt, inept or both. I have nothing against proprietary software, I work for a company that makes proprietary software and doesn't share source code. In the highly specialised market we are in, I see that as entirely fine. All the data our software transmits, receives or stores is freely accessible using tools from any number of sources.
I do have a problem with my federal government, the people I pay to maintain the security and standard of living I enjoy, mandating that all documents must be in a format that can only be handled correctly using software that must be bought from a foreign company. Especially when excellent alternatives exist.
In practice no. It just formalises a crappy situation. They could have mandated PDF and ODF. Sure it would mean rolling out plugins to all of the word installations, but it would level the playing field a bit and buy better long term data security.
I'd argue that greater openness isn't what we should be striving to achieve. Openness stunts development because no one is trying to one-up each other and that having private, closed environments can be healthy in the development of new technologies.
That may be true for product development, but it is a load of unadulterated steaming dog shit when it comes to standards.
For example, and here's where I get to use a car analogy, would you argue that there should be special roads for Toyota that Ford can't use at all and Mercedes Benz has only figured out how to drive backwards on? Perhaps Mercedes could require mandatory 6-monthly servicing to ensure that all other cars attempting to drive on their roads crash by frequently changing the way the roads are built?
How about a different type wall outlet for each appliance in your house, including different pin size, shape and arrangement as well as different voltages and frequencies? Some AC and some DC?
Sounds abso-fucking-lutely tremendous to me! So much opportunity to get rich!!! BRILLANT!
Or didn't you read the bit about this being about carriage and storage of information across a large group of often disparate organisations, much like roads are for the carriage and storage of cars?
A format is not a product. Software that reads and writes a format is and if a commercial company can compete on quality without having to resort to creating false "standards" good on them. If an information storage format is so dependant on kludges and proprietary code, then it clearly has no place in public service.
I know that tablet technology is rapidly changing, but once you have a big enough screen to capably handle windowing, you've basically got a laptop without a keyboard, not a tablet. And who wants that for business use?
While I agree that a plain tablet is not much good for real world business use, I think concepts along the line of what Asus is doing with the Eee Pad Transformer might take off. There you have the best of both worlds in that you can use it as a normal lightweight tablet for product demos and basic communication/browsing, but you can also use it as a laptop by docking it to a hinged keyboard. I can also see a market for raised docks with separate keyboard and pointing device for ergonomic desktop use.
In terms of the interface, providing they start coming out with bigger screens, that's starting to look pretty good.
Then if you consider that a lot of corporate networks deploy thousands of full blown PCs with say 200-300W power supplies and separate monitors that effectively function as glorified thin clients for most day to day operations, tablets start to look like a much better investment. You get to replace the PC with something that is cheaper than a full blown laptop (give it a year or so), provides excellent portability and slashes power bills.
Stating that this year's CES marks the end of Wintel's dominance is a bit premature, but it's fair to say that we are witnessing the beginning of the end. IMHO
I just changed mine to Suite 300, 156 University Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301 and +1 650.543.4800. If facebook wants advertisers to contact me directly, they can field the calls and forward the mail to Australia.
Slashdot Mirror
This has already been done in Russia. Of course Russia no being a state of the US of A, most folks here would prefer to assume that they don't have modern technology, only bad 1970s hairdos and 1990s PCs....
No, I suggested you go and look it up. Look up what the word actually means. I'm not making a value judgement about fascism, just pointing something out. In that archaic left/right paradigm, the US has been leaning to the right since at least the 1980s compared to the international mean. Not being from the US, I don't easily fit into your narrow world view, but if you must try and fit me into this model which has outlived it's usefulness, you could perhaps call me a radical centrist.
And again, you have not really made any points or put forward any arguments. Not too bright are you?
I remember the days leading up to the Gulf War. I remember Hans Blix saying that Iraq had next to no chance of getting a weapon any time soon. I remember analysts who actually understood the region saying that invading Iraq will do more to aid terrorism than prevent it. I remember international law experts and many countries around the world warning that there was no valid U.N. mandate for an invasion. I remember being absolutely disgusted that our Prime Minister could join in with what was so obviously an act of armed robbery by a bunch of the most evil arse holes on the planet fronted by a buffoon and against the will of the majority of citizens.
That whole episode really brought it home to me that capitalist democracies are fucked. Because in capitalist democracies people like me are outnumbered by people like you who don't pay any attention to the news beyond what the evil pricks in with the major party of choice are telling them and vote to put said evil pricks in power. And for the evil pricks, well they are capitalists through and through, so it makes perfect sense to go into a war with a country that really can't defend itself. Especially against a proud people who are likely to resist in a region where any power vaccuum will quickly be filled by thugs like al Qaeda. The government will buy military hardware from the companies the evil pricks have substantial interests in, award oil contracts, wheat deals, etc etc to companies the evil pricks have interests in. And hey, the longer the whole thing goes on, the more money they make.
And you don't remember people predicting this before the invasion started? Amnesia, or do you only watch Fux News? Perhaps the people warning of this were all lefties or pinkos or liberals or something.
Tell that to every family member of every fatality caused by the illegal invasion of Iraq. Make sure you include your own countrymen, you know the poor trash that weren't worth nothin' anyway? By the time the news media grew some balls and started doing it's job, it was too late. At least in China you know that the whole thing is government spin. In the "free world" so many people actually do consume their entire news intact through Rupert's goggles.
What's this left/right bullshit all about anyway? He makes some good points. As an outsider, I can see that a lot of republicans are clearly fascist. The last Republican administration in the U.S. was clearly fascist. Look up up fascist, find out what is means.
If we are going to play with those archaic notions of "left" and "right", I would suggest that the current Obama administration is centre right and the Republicans are far right.
So do you have a point to make, or are you just abusing people? Only that's the kind of "argument" that the folks who vote fascist use.
I would call one of the streams "input" and the other one "send"
Otherwise it just gets too confusing.
I agree totally. I was only half fishing for +5 Funny. Absolutely no disrespect meant. I seriously think that high speed non-volatile memory is the only stumbling block to making multics really useful.
Was hoping to get at least one Insightful for my comment, but instead I get a bunch of Funnys and some neck-beard behaving like I just shot all his chickens.....
Whatever year it it comes to market, you can be sure of one thing....
That will be the year of Multics on the desktop.
or this
For those in Oceania there's Pioneer Computers. They let you build your own system, often with way more options than the likes of Dell give you, and you can choose to have Ubuntu pre-loaded, or even get them to set up multi boot with multiple partitions. You also get to see how much windows costs.
Funnily enough, when I read TFA, there was an ad at the bottom for these.
Needless to say I was instantly dubious.
Sounds fair enough to me. Why should Israel even exist and why should it be in the middle East? Because a bunch of ex cock worshippers from central Asia who converted to Judaism and ended up in Europe thought that they could apply something written down in an African tribal religion's text to themselves by force?
Puleeaze.
In some counties like China for example.
In Western democracies, the governments are answerable to companies.
You'd be an idiot to think it were otherwise.
Actually, the current US government is even more of a threat. And I don't mean the elected one. They are not only able to run the place as a police state, they are able to keep idiots like you believing you are freer than the Chinese....
Go on, throw a bunch of comparisons at me. For every evil thing you can sling about China, I will have no trouble finding an equivalent or worse thing about the good old USA.
Where did I say burning coal is a good idea?
Congratulations! You carefully selected a sentence that out of context misrepresents the argument it was taken from and made a rhetorical attack on it! A most commendable display of wilful ignorance! Bravo sir!
You might want to have a good hard look at yourself to figure out if you are pro-nuke purely because you think everyone who is anti-nuke is a hippy and you don't like hippies. If you find that to be the case, consider that by adopting that attitude, you are as bad as the knee jerk anti-nuke hippy types. Although based on your debating style, I don't actually have a lot of faith in your capacity for rational thought, so the result of any self assessment is probably a forgone conclusion.
Good luck
The trouble with mining it is it disperses it. The tailings have to go somewhere, travelling dust. I get that what you're saying is tongue in cheek, but I personally feel that we (as humans) have gone as far down the fission path as is worth going for now.
Just like the way Americans adopted NTSC and had colour telly way before we adopted PAL, I think we're better off waiting for the superior tech. I agree nuclear power holds a lot of possibilities, but I lean towards fusion and I can't for the life of me figure out how burning the waste from a fission reactor would be a good idea.
I'll try to dig up the study I read, it was largely around the construction, transport and processing costs.
What I do know is that solar thermal power is way more efficient than anything that can be practically done on a large scale using current photovoltaic tech. It also offers much simpler short term (as in overnight) energy storage solutions.
We have so much land that has the sun beating down on it all year round that has been effected by salinity and over farming, why are we not putting that to use and stopping the brain drain of our solar experts moving to California and Europe? We also have the raw materials needed to build enough solar thermal that even running at 5% efficiency, we could power our own country for the next few centuries with no problem, and by then fusion may be more feasible.
Regarding Hastings, Kennet ripped all the rail infrastructure out of Post Melbourne then Bracks/Brumby went ahead with the dredging, so now larger ships carry more into a port where the only option to get freight to the South East is the Monash while the South East industry is growing and the traditional inner West is being converted to apartments and offices. Turning Western Port Highway into a Freeway, upgrading the Stony Point line and putting in a rail link from say Sommerville to Dandenong would definitely reduce traffic on the Monash. It would also make the coal exports from Victoria a lot simpler (and they will be happening for a while yet). Trouble is these things are guided by bureaucracy and self interest more than basic engineering.
Sure, thorium's fun and all, but if you build a powerful enough solar furnace, surely that's all you really need. Why bother with building another completely different type of furnace to heat the thing at night when you need it to cool down at some point anyway? I hate obnoxious NIMBYism and eco-luddism almost as much as I hate over engineering for the sake of using a pet technology.
There. Fixed that for you.
I am an environmentalist, in that I think only people who are so stupid as to be bordering on sub human could possibly think that what we do to our environment doesn't effect us. I feel, and this is a moral point, that people who disregard the ill effects of their actions on the lives of others don't really deserve their own. It's only fair.
I also can't stand idiots who do stupid things like argue against dredging Port Phillip Bay (something I didn't support) to let large ships in but then go and say we can't build a major port at Hastings (which already has deep see access and is closer to our major industries). Because the mangroves their are not found anywhere else? They are found right the way around Western Port!! Idiots!
This is where you lost me. I'm assuming you think anyone who is anti nuclear is a loon.
For my country, I am anti-nuclear and anyone who is pro nuclear for my country is a loon. Current technology only allows for fission, which is a dirty and inefficient power source. I have read estimates that for us to switch from the brown coal we currently burn to modern fission, our total CO2 output will rise over the life of the plants. And there is still the waste problem to consider, it's still not resolved, and no we don't want to bury it inland here and have to get into our ground water thank you very much.
I live in a country with the highest levels of solar radiation on the planet that also has an enormous coastline. Parts of it sit in some very reliable low altitude wind currents. We have large reserves of natural gas. Those of us who think solar thermal, wind and tidal power supplemented by natural gas are the way to go are a hell of a lot more rational, from both an environmental and economic point of view.
Hahahahahaha! That's priceless!
You have obviously wed yourself to old school Java, and you prefer writing loads of boiler plate code rather than jsp? Wow! I haven't been doing that web stuff for a few years, but I did it solidly in the late 90's and into the first half of this decade and for a lot of things my productivity and the maintainability of my work shot up when jsp came along.
You do know that jsp compiles to Servlets anyway, right? That they are just an easy way of turning some static mark up into a dynamic page. For example, I've used them to write dynamic svg because it was quicker doing the layout in inkscape and converting that than stuffing around in batik or doing the whole thing by hand.
Sure, you can use a swiss army knife to cut firewood, but who, other than a total maniac, would really want to? Use the right tool for the job. jsp will end up in that dustbin at about the time that Servlets do.
If it can only be implemented by a single company and is a "standard" that only exists through what could reasonably be called corruption of a standards body, it's not really a standard.
The ISO standard is much stronger because it is supported well across the entire range of office suites available. None fully support it.
No, this is a myopic piece of crap from people who are either corrupt, inept or both. I have nothing against proprietary software, I work for a company that makes proprietary software and doesn't share source code. In the highly specialised market we are in, I see that as entirely fine. All the data our software transmits, receives or stores is freely accessible using tools from any number of sources.
I do have a problem with my federal government, the people I pay to maintain the security and standard of living I enjoy, mandating that all documents must be in a format that can only be handled correctly using software that must be bought from a foreign company. Especially when excellent alternatives exist.
In practice no. It just formalises a crappy situation. They could have mandated PDF and ODF. Sure it would mean rolling out plugins to all of the word installations, but it would level the playing field a bit and buy better long term data security.
That may be true for product development, but it is a load of unadulterated steaming dog shit when it comes to standards.
For example, and here's where I get to use a car analogy, would you argue that there should be special roads for Toyota that Ford can't use at all and Mercedes Benz has only figured out how to drive backwards on? Perhaps Mercedes could require mandatory 6-monthly servicing to ensure that all other cars attempting to drive on their roads crash by frequently changing the way the roads are built?
How about a different type wall outlet for each appliance in your house, including different pin size, shape and arrangement as well as different voltages and frequencies? Some AC and some DC?
Sounds abso-fucking-lutely tremendous to me! So much opportunity to get rich!!! BRILLANT!
Or didn't you read the bit about this being about carriage and storage of information across a large group of often disparate organisations, much like roads are for the carriage and storage of cars?
A format is not a product. Software that reads and writes a format is and if a commercial company can compete on quality without having to resort to creating false "standards" good on them. If an information storage format is so dependant on kludges and proprietary code, then it clearly has no place in public service.
Actually just the ECMA standard. Nobody, not even Microsoft supports the ISO standard. So yep, effectively locked in.
While I agree that a plain tablet is not much good for real world business use, I think concepts along the line of what Asus is doing with the Eee Pad Transformer might take off. There you have the best of both worlds in that you can use it as a normal lightweight tablet for product demos and basic communication/browsing, but you can also use it as a laptop by docking it to a hinged keyboard. I can also see a market for raised docks with separate keyboard and pointing device for ergonomic desktop use.
In terms of the interface, providing they start coming out with bigger screens, that's starting to look pretty good.
Then if you consider that a lot of corporate networks deploy thousands of full blown PCs with say 200-300W power supplies and separate monitors that effectively function as glorified thin clients for most day to day operations, tablets start to look like a much better investment. You get to replace the PC with something that is cheaper than a full blown laptop (give it a year or so), provides excellent portability and slashes power bills.
Stating that this year's CES marks the end of Wintel's dominance is a bit premature, but it's fair to say that we are witnessing the beginning of the end. IMHO
I just changed mine to Suite 300, 156 University Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301 and +1 650.543.4800. If facebook wants advertisers to contact me directly, they can field the calls and forward the mail to Australia.
I also passed these details on.