I hardly think the US has "failed miserably"! It won WW2, invented nuclear power, put a man on the moon, destroyed the Empire, outlasted the USSR, and so on.
I take some of your other points, especially about public schools and the war in Iraq.
I also think, though, that the world has changed and that China isn't out to lord it over the west. Indeed, none of its advances would have been possible wihtout international trade and co-operation.
The question is, can America live with other Great Powers around (China now, then India, then Brazil, then the rest of SE Asia, then maybe Africa) or will it drive itself to destruction in an attempt to "win", as did the USSR?
Remember, China has had golden age after golden age, each followed by dreadful cataclysms - war, pestilence and famine. Will America go through these cycles? The difference now, of course, is that the stakes are higher - any "proper" war starting now would go nuclear within months.
That was a long time ago. Out of a billion and a bit people, there are always going to be a thousand world-class geniuses born every year, it's just a question of finding and educating them.
OK, Gavin Menzies aside (I actually rather enjoyed 1421 - I didn't take too much of it seriously but it was a fun romp, unlike the arse-gravy that is the Da Vinci code), the Chinese were massively ahead of the West until the late Ming Dynasty (16th Century, maybe?)
Without launching into an enormous list of Chinese inventions (ok one - flush toilets!), their real contribution throughout history was to pure research - just by himself, the Song dynasty polymath Shen Kuo observed a moon in orbit around Jupiter using a primitive telescope and described the effects of climate change and geological processes around 1000AD, several hundred years before those concepts existed in the West.
In addition, they formed a civil society way before the Romans did (also way before the formation, by Qin Shi Huangdi, of China per se), with a civil service, a standing army, division of labour, written histories and so on. Don't confuse that with something like Egypt or Greece at the time, great as their own achievements were.
On the point where they fell behind, your view is reminiscent of Orientalism - the more modern view is that they were pretty much keeping up until the intervention of foreign powers. Yes, the Ming dynasty fell into disrepair, but that's how China works - every few hundred years it reinvents itself by burning the lot and starting again. Even the late Qing dynasty had a kind of industrial revolution in progress at the start of the Opium Wars, with full scale textile factories springing up in Guagzhou. It was a chilling feat of British strategic genius that really begain the slide into the anarchy that replaced imperial rule. Not much has changed really - despite the adoption of Western diplomatic systems, you can still view China as a dynasty. The Qing slid into disaster, anarchy took hold and another dynasty (Maoism) sprang up to take it's place. The dragon throne may be empty, but real power is still held in very few hands. The rise will continue, the Chinese will have another golden age lasting decades or centuries and then begin the inevitable slide once again.
My point is that a spot of casual armchair history as you have engaged in is all well and good, but it's a gross simplification. There's absolutely nothing in Chinese culture that disadvantages them against us, Confucianism just means that they tend to be a little more slow and steady, as opposed to our pell-mell, hell-for-leather approach.
Exactly right. The big flaw in how we are right now is that the global economy has got much, much too complicated for anyone to administer. That means the market rules all, with some minor (in theory) tweaks made by politicians. All those goods, all that money flying around in weird, abstract ways between billions of people, you can't imagine how complicated it is. Perhaps that's why democracy and a healthy market economy tend to go hand-in-hand; a dictator is a control freak and won't let markets do their thing.
However the whole thing hinges directly on whether the market has the right information - to my mind it doesn't because it can't include the value of the planet and therefore the costs arising from resource consumption or damage to the ecosystem. It can never, ever do this because nobody knows how much the planet is worth and how much it costs to fix the damage. It seems trivial but you need these figures to make any of the equations work.
It's human nature to press on and see how far we can take the current system because radically changing it is too risky - a lot of politics is just 'protecting the system'. Obviously if it does all end in Easter Island-style collapse into fiery death, then the survivors (if any) will eventually come up with a better system. But nobody has any sort of alternative to the market economy as yet and that's what's causing us all to get fat, spend time worrying about global warming and have wars over oily liquids.
On a lighter note, AFAIK all the little mini-civs that have gone boobs-up due to chronic resource scarcity have been small and isolated, on a small island or on some sort of remote mountain plateau. That's mainly because it happened too quickly for the rather lumbering minds of the inhabitants to work out a way around it. It could happen to us, for we are equally lumbering, but it will take hundreds and hundreds of years to happen and we SHOULD be able to come up with something by then. Maybe a rocket ship to Gliese!:_)
Unlikely. You'd still need a large amount of radioactive crap and that ain't easy to come by. Also the nature of bombs are that they blast stuff upwards, so most of it would dissipate very widely. Do the maths, the overall increase in background levels would be tiny.
The US and UK military have both run tests on it and declared it useless - you'd overall do more damage by spending more money on extra explosives.
Even nerve gas isn't as scarya s it sounds - remember Aum Shinrikyo's Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway? 5,000 people injured but the death toll amounted to 12 - compare that to the 7/7 London Tube bombings - 50 dead there from conventional explosives.
Basically, I don't think the public would worry about it, except that the government and the media bang on about it so much - what are their motives here except to instill fear?
The prospect of a dirty bomb going off are zero, because dirty bombs don't exist. Uranium, Plutonium and the other radioactive materials are very toxic when there's a big lump in one place, or when ingested or inhaled in smaller quantities, but as far as concentration goes, they're no more toxic than any number of other deadly poisons. The idea that getting a piece of plutonium and spreading it out over the 4,000 square mile area covered by a city would kill thousands is laughable and has been debunked a number of times - it'd just spread much too thinly to do any damage. You'd need tons and tons of the crap. If you were determined to poison a city, it'd make more sense to get a crop-dusting plane and spray with DDT. Or put it in the drinking water.
Yes - almost as if it were that way.. on... purpose? It's intriguing - one of those that you'll never have an answer to, so you're free to assign to it any meaning you like - so here goes. Is it just a coincidence? If you ask me, it SEEMS bloody long odds on us being the only planet in the cosmic neighbourhood (AFAWK) that's the right size, with a magnetic field, the right chemistry, the right distance from the Sun, enough water, a couple of big gas-giants to soak up most of the asteroids and comets, but that is all vulnerable to the anthropic principle. But to have all that AND a Moon exactly the right size to give us the perfect, diamond-ring eclipses? Smells kind of fishy to me. Totally unscientific, of course, but I've always thought that it almost looked as if it were placed there as some sort of marker. Actually it's not totally unscientific, because my absurd conjecture happens to make a testable prediction - if we find another planet somewhere with life on it, I'm betting it'll also have a moon at exactly the right distance to the planet to produce the same perfect eclipse. When you think about it, if you were a very clever alien with a big power source looking to mark a planet out as special, so that anyone looking for it would be able to find it from a great distance (I'm assuming they'd have cracking telescopes), that might be how you would go about it.
Whose to say it hasn't already?
I mean, if I were to know you're a 5'11'' male with brown eyes, slight astigmatism and dandruff, who's to say where it's got to?
Agree with all this, China IS an empire, which is what I was getting at.
Since the Korean War tho (they were admittedly the villains there), and aside from the smaller maneuvers you point out, they're more or less benevolent towards overseas powers, which is what the parent seemed worried about. Overall, they'd be delighted if nothing falls off over the next 50 years. That also means they've probably got no intention of kicking off with a big power. Also worth pointing out that they've always assimilated neighboring cultures, at least for the last 2 millennia and probably longer - check the Miao ethnic group!
OTOH, also look at some of the ethnic groups who have survived and prospered within China. Especially in Taiwan, there are even Animist hill tribes, relatively unharrassed for thousands of years. Contrast to the fate of Amerinds in North and South America - many of them have had it a lot worse.
Han chauvinism/Sinocentrism is something a lot in the West just don't get or have never heard of, in fact most people don't realise that there's more than one sort of Chinese. It is extremely important in understanding their motives and worthy of study.
I'm not really defending the Chinese government as such, but the whole story of their history is so fascinatingly long and complex I don't like to see it oversimplified, which a lot of internet discussions do.
Historically, China IS an empire, it just hasn't got any bigger for a few centuries and has managed to Sinicize more or less everyone in it. Okay, more recently there's Tibet, but that's it.
Xinjiang doesn't really have much to do with China, it was conquered. Even Guagdong (where Hong Kong is) was invaded about 2,000 years ago (IIRC) and then Sinicized by Qin Shi Huangdi, by sending hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese to assimilate their culture. Even today you can notice significant differences in the way people look between Shanghai and HK, because in the South they're mostly of Vietnamese stock.
So you're missing something - it isn't because it can't or doesn't want to build an empire, it just already has one of colossal dimensions. A continuous land empire, to boot - not like the slightly fragile British sea empire.
I forgive you, it's a common mistake:)
They aren't all that secretive either, it's well known by the population (at least the urbanites) that they're utterly paranoid about China disintegrating like the USSR did and almost totally unconcerned about the hinterlands that surround their borders. Given their well-known Sinocentrism, can you really imagine them being so bothered about Tajikistan that they'd jeopardize all they've achieved in the last 20 years?
Taiwan of course is an exception, but even there they seem content with the status quo. Japan and the Aussies have nothing to worry about for a long while yet and they always have got on well with Korea. I believe they don't like India so much, preferring Pakistan, but then there's a feckin' great mountain range along that border, plus an awfully large army (& nukes!) on the other side, so an invasion of there is a big no way.
Did I forget anyone?
A good point on Fascism, however an indispensable component of it (at least as most people understand it) is extreme central control of individuals, effectively making any sort of political discussion or dissent illegal. During the 60's and 70's, this was large in evidence in China, especially during the Cultural Revolution where widespread cultural and political purges closely mirrored the Fascists of Germany and Italy, however this is long since dead.
So no, I don't accept that it's Fascism as we know it. In fact, last time I was there, I was sat in a restaurant somewhere in Jiangsu province having a long and interesting discussion with some locals about Mao and the merits and failings of the current government. Many people there still love Mao (plenty hate his guts, I should add), even though they know all about his crimes and his failings. Why? Because they love his power and his ability to make them feel big and important, a feeling they had long since gone without. The methods are of secondary importance. I got a strong impression that the way the Chinese think about this sort of thing is very different to us (they still revere Genghis Khan, for heaven's sake!) and so I get a bit touchy when discussions like this fail to account for the sort of psychological difference they have from us. The Chinese today are quite unlike any other countries our great Anglospheric civilisation has had to deal with before, or at least, since the Opium war. Oh hell, they're still mad about that!
Just a point on Deng Xiaoping - AFAIK he was considered one of the moderates within the Party, a true communist (as opposed to the decidedly un-communist Mao) and an excellent civil administrator.
He was actually sidelined by Mao for years, kept around to sort out the problems Mao caused and keep the country running - the importance of which Mao learned very well when he nearly lost power during his "Great Leap Forward" (or, more accurately, "Terrible Famine caused by Incompetence").
He seemed to be close to Zhou Enlai, who was for a long time considered a paragon of Confucianist ethics, supple as a reed and is a fascinating character well worth study, but that's another story.
Back on Deng, I heard an amusing recollection of his negotiations with one Margaret Thatcher over the future of Hong Kong - they say as soon as she opened her mouth he raised a hand and said,
"Dear lady, if you do not agree with me now to return this city to me in 1997 as stated in the lease, I shall invade this afternoon!"
The thought of a million Chinese pouring over the hills was enough to convince her.
Anybody who can shit up Maggie gets my vote. If you were allowed to vote, that is.
I think that's a false analogy. China today works inside the dreaded "global economy" - all of their wealth (and hence everything skimmed off the top) depends on exports. Also, a difference between China and Germany is the people in charge - ok, it may or may not satisfy a definition of fascism, but the fact is that the people at the top really are extremely competent. As someone else pointed out, the Wehrmacht was run by a bunch of complete tools. In fact, it's one of the most interesting facets of the Chinese resurgence that they seem to have come up with a genuine meritocracy. Witness the Bush administration's attempts at "diplomacy" in North Korea and the Middle East - Condi's megaphone treatment seems not to work too well, whereas the Chinese have delivered excellent result with Kimmy. For a start, the Chinese Communist Party seems to have abandoned any sort of ideology whatsoever, reverting to a sort of base pragmatism. Also notice how the Chinese are exploiting their position vs. the USA when it comes to the dollar situation, the Iraq war and so on.
FTA:
"...then beamed toward a reference signal on the Earth at intensities approximately 1/6th of noon sunlight."
Seems like they're intending to beam the energy back in a coherent, but rather diffuse beam to a large rectenna, rather than a tight, high intensity laser blast as is often assumed.
Does this make sense? If the beam sent down to Earth is only 1/6th of the intensity of sunlight, what's the point?
If this is true though, then the bird-slaughtering potential of SBSP is a misunderstanding. It'd also reduce concerns about it being used as an Akira-style orbital laser cannon.
One of the major considerations of designing a CPU is skew - the time it takes for a pulse of electricity to get from one bit of the CPU to another and back again. If the two bits are too far apart, you have to wait for the signal to return before you can carry on.
You can make a chip that big but maximum clock speed would be very low.
I can't believe that this parent got modded +4 insightful - anyone who has done even a basic architecture course would know that clock speed is inversely proportional to the chip size.
Hmm, you seem to be confused. Please go and actually check what the US government does around the world, before ranting about how dreadfully ungrateful everyone else is towards you.
So you give billions away as food aid, do you? Perhaps you're thinking of the export subsidies that you "give away" to your own farming interests. For example, if you were to fly over to Nigeria and go to a regular food store to buy a sack of rice and find that the rice was grown in the US, I suppose that's an example of your precious food aid, right?
WRONG. You pay your farmers subsidies so that the 3rd world has no choice but to buy your crap, keeping the local farmers (who would otherwise be able to produce the cheapest rice due to their low cost of labour) out of business.
Just an example of the wonderful gifts the US gives to the rest of the world. Thanks a lot!
Now please stop, before I start listing the people that the CIA have killed, the countries your incompetent foreign policy has reduced to ruins and the children blown to bits by your bombs, either dropped by yourselves or sold to your little Israeli chums.
Yeah I've always felt that solar panels are similar enough to ICs that the same thing should happen to costs - once the initial investment is there to set up a large fab, the marginal costs should be minuscule. OK, it's not exactly the same since solar panels are physically large and ICs are tiny, but it's not like the materials are particularly expensive, AFAIK.
CCDs are probably closer since they both use the pv effect, and how much did a 10Mp image sensor cost only 10 years ago? Sh1tloads, if they were even making them at all. Now they only cost a few dollars.
The basic idea is that once you have done the research so the design and the process are set up, you just churn out the same thing again and again. Contrast this to, say, a car, where there are thousands of parts, of all sizes, made out of all sorts of materials then assembled either by hand or by robot.
They had Sharepoint at one of my old firms and it was shit (might have been a previous version, mind). Perhaps it was being abused by the fools they got to maintain it but it seemed to be little more than a big hole in which to chuck.docs, with pointless categories that took too long to find anything in. There was a search box but it only did OR searching, which made it even more difficult to find stuff.
Even when you did find something useful, you just had to download the.doc and open it, at which point you were treated to lots of green and red lines under everything. OK, so Word opened it within the browser, but big deal.
Absolutely. Last time I checked, OO.o didn't have much in the way of macro support.
Please don't hate me, but at work I do use VBA to process tons of custom Excel spreadsheets, which then get uploaded to our intranet for doozens of managers to look at.
Before you call me a script-kiddie or something. I am a 'proper' C programmer but I got offered the project to look after and I thought it might get me some kudos with the managers in our firm, since they've never had proper productivity stats before. Also, since the Excel macro that does all the work is slower than a nailed-down snail and I have to run it on my laptop, that means I get to surf for most of Monday morning! Bonus.
As the project expands we're coming to the limit of what you can do with Office, but it has served us well so far.
Slashdot Mirror
I hardly think the US has "failed miserably"! It won WW2, invented nuclear power, put a man on the moon, destroyed the Empire, outlasted the USSR, and so on. I take some of your other points, especially about public schools and the war in Iraq. I also think, though, that the world has changed and that China isn't out to lord it over the west. Indeed, none of its advances would have been possible wihtout international trade and co-operation. The question is, can America live with other Great Powers around (China now, then India, then Brazil, then the rest of SE Asia, then maybe Africa) or will it drive itself to destruction in an attempt to "win", as did the USSR? Remember, China has had golden age after golden age, each followed by dreadful cataclysms - war, pestilence and famine. Will America go through these cycles? The difference now, of course, is that the stakes are higher - any "proper" war starting now would go nuclear within months.
That was a long time ago. Out of a billion and a bit people, there are always going to be a thousand world-class geniuses born every year, it's just a question of finding and educating them.
OK, Gavin Menzies aside (I actually rather enjoyed 1421 - I didn't take too much of it seriously but it was a fun romp, unlike the arse-gravy that is the Da Vinci code), the Chinese were massively ahead of the West until the late Ming Dynasty (16th Century, maybe?) Without launching into an enormous list of Chinese inventions (ok one - flush toilets!), their real contribution throughout history was to pure research - just by himself, the Song dynasty polymath Shen Kuo observed a moon in orbit around Jupiter using a primitive telescope and described the effects of climate change and geological processes around 1000AD, several hundred years before those concepts existed in the West. In addition, they formed a civil society way before the Romans did (also way before the formation, by Qin Shi Huangdi, of China per se), with a civil service, a standing army, division of labour, written histories and so on. Don't confuse that with something like Egypt or Greece at the time, great as their own achievements were. On the point where they fell behind, your view is reminiscent of Orientalism - the more modern view is that they were pretty much keeping up until the intervention of foreign powers. Yes, the Ming dynasty fell into disrepair, but that's how China works - every few hundred years it reinvents itself by burning the lot and starting again. Even the late Qing dynasty had a kind of industrial revolution in progress at the start of the Opium Wars, with full scale textile factories springing up in Guagzhou. It was a chilling feat of British strategic genius that really begain the slide into the anarchy that replaced imperial rule. Not much has changed really - despite the adoption of Western diplomatic systems, you can still view China as a dynasty. The Qing slid into disaster, anarchy took hold and another dynasty (Maoism) sprang up to take it's place. The dragon throne may be empty, but real power is still held in very few hands. The rise will continue, the Chinese will have another golden age lasting decades or centuries and then begin the inevitable slide once again. My point is that a spot of casual armchair history as you have engaged in is all well and good, but it's a gross simplification. There's absolutely nothing in Chinese culture that disadvantages them against us, Confucianism just means that they tend to be a little more slow and steady, as opposed to our pell-mell, hell-for-leather approach.
Great - excellent plan. Except lie detectors don't work. Never have.
Exactly right. The big flaw in how we are right now is that the global economy has got much, much too complicated for anyone to administer. That means the market rules all, with some minor (in theory) tweaks made by politicians. All those goods, all that money flying around in weird, abstract ways between billions of people, you can't imagine how complicated it is. Perhaps that's why democracy and a healthy market economy tend to go hand-in-hand; a dictator is a control freak and won't let markets do their thing.
:_)
However the whole thing hinges directly on whether the market has the right information - to my mind it doesn't because it can't include the value of the planet and therefore the costs arising from resource consumption or damage to the ecosystem. It can never, ever do this because nobody knows how much the planet is worth and how much it costs to fix the damage. It seems trivial but you need these figures to make any of the equations work.
It's human nature to press on and see how far we can take the current system because radically changing it is too risky - a lot of politics is just 'protecting the system'. Obviously if it does all end in Easter Island-style collapse into fiery death, then the survivors (if any) will eventually come up with a better system. But nobody has any sort of alternative to the market economy as yet and that's what's causing us all to get fat, spend time worrying about global warming and have wars over oily liquids.
On a lighter note, AFAIK all the little mini-civs that have gone boobs-up due to chronic resource scarcity have been small and isolated, on a small island or on some sort of remote mountain plateau. That's mainly because it happened too quickly for the rather lumbering minds of the inhabitants to work out a way around it. It could happen to us, for we are equally lumbering, but it will take hundreds and hundreds of years to happen and we SHOULD be able to come up with something by then. Maybe a rocket ship to Gliese!
Unlikely. You'd still need a large amount of radioactive crap and that ain't easy to come by. Also the nature of bombs are that they blast stuff upwards, so most of it would dissipate very widely. Do the maths, the overall increase in background levels would be tiny. The US and UK military have both run tests on it and declared it useless - you'd overall do more damage by spending more money on extra explosives. Even nerve gas isn't as scarya s it sounds - remember Aum Shinrikyo's Sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway? 5,000 people injured but the death toll amounted to 12 - compare that to the 7/7 London Tube bombings - 50 dead there from conventional explosives. Basically, I don't think the public would worry about it, except that the government and the media bang on about it so much - what are their motives here except to instill fear?
The prospect of a dirty bomb going off are zero, because dirty bombs don't exist. Uranium, Plutonium and the other radioactive materials are very toxic when there's a big lump in one place, or when ingested or inhaled in smaller quantities, but as far as concentration goes, they're no more toxic than any number of other deadly poisons. The idea that getting a piece of plutonium and spreading it out over the 4,000 square mile area covered by a city would kill thousands is laughable and has been debunked a number of times - it'd just spread much too thinly to do any damage. You'd need tons and tons of the crap. If you were determined to poison a city, it'd make more sense to get a crop-dusting plane and spray with DDT. Or put it in the drinking water.
Yes - almost as if it were that way.. on... purpose? It's intriguing - one of those that you'll never have an answer to, so you're free to assign to it any meaning you like - so here goes. Is it just a coincidence? If you ask me, it SEEMS bloody long odds on us being the only planet in the cosmic neighbourhood (AFAWK) that's the right size, with a magnetic field, the right chemistry, the right distance from the Sun, enough water, a couple of big gas-giants to soak up most of the asteroids and comets, but that is all vulnerable to the anthropic principle. But to have all that AND a Moon exactly the right size to give us the perfect, diamond-ring eclipses? Smells kind of fishy to me. Totally unscientific, of course, but I've always thought that it almost looked as if it were placed there as some sort of marker. Actually it's not totally unscientific, because my absurd conjecture happens to make a testable prediction - if we find another planet somewhere with life on it, I'm betting it'll also have a moon at exactly the right distance to the planet to produce the same perfect eclipse. When you think about it, if you were a very clever alien with a big power source looking to mark a planet out as special, so that anyone looking for it would be able to find it from a great distance (I'm assuming they'd have cracking telescopes), that might be how you would go about it.
Oh great, now what am I going to do with all those dead babies?
No, you did not just mention RP! Where do you think you are, man? DIGG?
Whose to say it hasn't already? I mean, if I were to know you're a 5'11'' male with brown eyes, slight astigmatism and dandruff, who's to say where it's got to?
At least he did the decent thing - unlike a certain cretinous Chief Constable.
Agree with all this, China IS an empire, which is what I was getting at. Since the Korean War tho (they were admittedly the villains there), and aside from the smaller maneuvers you point out, they're more or less benevolent towards overseas powers, which is what the parent seemed worried about. Overall, they'd be delighted if nothing falls off over the next 50 years. That also means they've probably got no intention of kicking off with a big power. Also worth pointing out that they've always assimilated neighboring cultures, at least for the last 2 millennia and probably longer - check the Miao ethnic group! OTOH, also look at some of the ethnic groups who have survived and prospered within China. Especially in Taiwan, there are even Animist hill tribes, relatively unharrassed for thousands of years. Contrast to the fate of Amerinds in North and South America - many of them have had it a lot worse. Han chauvinism/Sinocentrism is something a lot in the West just don't get or have never heard of, in fact most people don't realise that there's more than one sort of Chinese. It is extremely important in understanding their motives and worthy of study. I'm not really defending the Chinese government as such, but the whole story of their history is so fascinatingly long and complex I don't like to see it oversimplified, which a lot of internet discussions do.
Historically, China IS an empire, it just hasn't got any bigger for a few centuries and has managed to Sinicize more or less everyone in it. Okay, more recently there's Tibet, but that's it. Xinjiang doesn't really have much to do with China, it was conquered. Even Guagdong (where Hong Kong is) was invaded about 2,000 years ago (IIRC) and then Sinicized by Qin Shi Huangdi, by sending hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese to assimilate their culture. Even today you can notice significant differences in the way people look between Shanghai and HK, because in the South they're mostly of Vietnamese stock. So you're missing something - it isn't because it can't or doesn't want to build an empire, it just already has one of colossal dimensions. A continuous land empire, to boot - not like the slightly fragile British sea empire. I forgive you, it's a common mistake :)
They aren't all that secretive either, it's well known by the population (at least the urbanites) that they're utterly paranoid about China disintegrating like the USSR did and almost totally unconcerned about the hinterlands that surround their borders. Given their well-known Sinocentrism, can you really imagine them being so bothered about Tajikistan that they'd jeopardize all they've achieved in the last 20 years?
Taiwan of course is an exception, but even there they seem content with the status quo. Japan and the Aussies have nothing to worry about for a long while yet and they always have got on well with Korea. I believe they don't like India so much, preferring Pakistan, but then there's a feckin' great mountain range along that border, plus an awfully large army (& nukes!) on the other side, so an invasion of there is a big no way.
Did I forget anyone?
A good point on Fascism, however an indispensable component of it (at least as most people understand it) is extreme central control of individuals, effectively making any sort of political discussion or dissent illegal. During the 60's and 70's, this was large in evidence in China, especially during the Cultural Revolution where widespread cultural and political purges closely mirrored the Fascists of Germany and Italy, however this is long since dead. So no, I don't accept that it's Fascism as we know it. In fact, last time I was there, I was sat in a restaurant somewhere in Jiangsu province having a long and interesting discussion with some locals about Mao and the merits and failings of the current government. Many people there still love Mao (plenty hate his guts, I should add), even though they know all about his crimes and his failings. Why? Because they love his power and his ability to make them feel big and important, a feeling they had long since gone without. The methods are of secondary importance. I got a strong impression that the way the Chinese think about this sort of thing is very different to us (they still revere Genghis Khan, for heaven's sake!) and so I get a bit touchy when discussions like this fail to account for the sort of psychological difference they have from us. The Chinese today are quite unlike any other countries our great Anglospheric civilisation has had to deal with before, or at least, since the Opium war. Oh hell, they're still mad about that!
Just a point on Deng Xiaoping - AFAIK he was considered one of the moderates within the Party, a true communist (as opposed to the decidedly un-communist Mao) and an excellent civil administrator. He was actually sidelined by Mao for years, kept around to sort out the problems Mao caused and keep the country running - the importance of which Mao learned very well when he nearly lost power during his "Great Leap Forward" (or, more accurately, "Terrible Famine caused by Incompetence"). He seemed to be close to Zhou Enlai, who was for a long time considered a paragon of Confucianist ethics, supple as a reed and is a fascinating character well worth study, but that's another story. Back on Deng, I heard an amusing recollection of his negotiations with one Margaret Thatcher over the future of Hong Kong - they say as soon as she opened her mouth he raised a hand and said, "Dear lady, if you do not agree with me now to return this city to me in 1997 as stated in the lease, I shall invade this afternoon!" The thought of a million Chinese pouring over the hills was enough to convince her. Anybody who can shit up Maggie gets my vote. If you were allowed to vote, that is.
I think that's a false analogy. China today works inside the dreaded "global economy" - all of their wealth (and hence everything skimmed off the top) depends on exports.
Also, a difference between China and Germany is the people in charge - ok, it may or may not satisfy a definition of fascism, but the fact is that the people at the top really are extremely competent. As someone else pointed out, the Wehrmacht was run by a bunch of complete tools. In fact, it's one of the most interesting facets of the Chinese resurgence that they seem to have come up with a genuine meritocracy. Witness the Bush administration's attempts at "diplomacy" in North Korea and the Middle East - Condi's megaphone treatment seems not to work too well, whereas the Chinese have delivered excellent result with Kimmy. For a start, the Chinese Communist Party seems to have abandoned any sort of ideology whatsoever, reverting to a sort of base pragmatism. Also notice how the Chinese are exploiting their position vs. the USA when it comes to the dollar situation, the Iraq war and so on.
FTA: "...then beamed toward a reference signal on the Earth at intensities approximately 1/6th of noon sunlight." Seems like they're intending to beam the energy back in a coherent, but rather diffuse beam to a large rectenna, rather than a tight, high intensity laser blast as is often assumed. Does this make sense? If the beam sent down to Earth is only 1/6th of the intensity of sunlight, what's the point? If this is true though, then the bird-slaughtering potential of SBSP is a misunderstanding. It'd also reduce concerns about it being used as an Akira-style orbital laser cannon.
FTFA:
"Conflict prevention is of particular interest to securityproviding institutions such as the U.S. Department of Defense."
Hmmmm - not on recent evidence!
10cm x 10cm? No chance. Not in a million years.
One of the major considerations of designing a CPU is skew - the time it takes for a pulse of electricity to get from one bit of the CPU to another and back again. If the two bits are too far apart, you have to wait for the signal to return before you can carry on.
You can make a chip that big but maximum clock speed would be very low.
I can't believe that this parent got modded +4 insightful - anyone who has done even a basic architecture course would know that clock speed is inversely proportional to the chip size.
Dude, quality may be irrelevant for sugar, but it is NOT irrelevant for toilet paper!
You've gone and reminded me of the bog roll they used to use back at school.....ouch, my eyes are watering.
Hmm, you seem to be confused. Please go and actually check what the US government does around the world, before ranting about how dreadfully ungrateful everyone else is towards you.
So you give billions away as food aid, do you? Perhaps you're thinking of the export subsidies that you "give away" to your own farming interests. For example, if you were to fly over to Nigeria and go to a regular food store to buy a sack of rice and find that the rice was grown in the US, I suppose that's an example of your precious food aid, right?
WRONG. You pay your farmers subsidies so that the 3rd world has no choice but to buy your crap, keeping the local farmers (who would otherwise be able to produce the cheapest rice due to their low cost of labour) out of business.
Just an example of the wonderful gifts the US gives to the rest of the world. Thanks a lot!
Now please stop, before I start listing the people that the CIA have killed, the countries your incompetent foreign policy has reduced to ruins and the children blown to bits by your bombs, either dropped by yourselves or sold to your little Israeli chums.
Yeah I've always felt that solar panels are similar enough to ICs that the same thing should happen to costs - once the initial investment is there to set up a large fab, the marginal costs should be minuscule. OK, it's not exactly the same since solar panels are physically large and ICs are tiny, but it's not like the materials are particularly expensive, AFAIK.
CCDs are probably closer since they both use the pv effect, and how much did a 10Mp image sensor cost only 10 years ago? Sh1tloads, if they were even making them at all. Now they only cost a few dollars.
The basic idea is that once you have done the research so the design and the process are set up, you just churn out the same thing again and again. Contrast this to, say, a car, where there are thousands of parts, of all sizes, made out of all sorts of materials then assembled either by hand or by robot.
I call for government subsidies! Discuss.
They had Sharepoint at one of my old firms and it was shit (might have been a previous version, mind). Perhaps it was being abused by the fools they got to maintain it but it seemed to be little more than a big hole in which to chuck .docs, with pointless categories that took too long to find anything in. There was a search box but it only did OR searching, which made it even more difficult to find stuff.
.doc and open it, at which point you were treated to lots of green and red lines under everything. OK, so Word opened it within the browser, but big deal.
Even when you did find something useful, you just had to download the
Give me a wiki any day of the week.
Absolutely. Last time I checked, OO.o didn't have much in the way of macro support.
Please don't hate me, but at work I do use VBA to process tons of custom Excel spreadsheets, which then get uploaded to our intranet for doozens of managers to look at.
Before you call me a script-kiddie or something. I am a 'proper' C programmer but I got offered the project to look after and I thought it might get me some kudos with the managers in our firm, since they've never had proper productivity stats before. Also, since the Excel macro that does all the work is slower than a nailed-down snail and I have to run it on my laptop, that means I get to surf for most of Monday morning! Bonus.
As the project expands we're coming to the limit of what you can do with Office, but it has served us well so far.