Your probably right. However, when I read his description of the impact on the installer, it appeared a bit unprecedented that the firmware for a network card could not be presumed to be in the kernel, and thus creating a new complication.
Saying "just include non-free" is fine for installed systems - but what about running network installations using that network card? Would you need to get a special "non-free bootdisk"? The different boot images are already a pain; a bootable ISO with all the drivers would be nice (AIUI the current ones are all 'unofficial'?) - but would this now have to fork into two versions, "free but incomplete" and "non-free complete"?
Perhaps giving a warning before loading any "non-free" drivers would be enough to satisfy the purists, without creating extra overhead for maintainers...
The US has been siphoning JOBS? You're saying, that instead of hiring people locally, overseas companies are hiring expensive Americans to do long distance telecommuting!?
Look at non-US companies using Windows, with Intel or AMD processors, maybe using Netware or Solaris servers and HP printers. None of those are locally developed - every one of them represents work being done in the US (and sometimes other countries), thus "siphoning jobs overseas". Call centres move jobs one direction, plenty of things move them in the other - and so far, the US has been on the receiving end of most of those jobs, overall.
I dont think that the additional income will spur discretionary spending. The govt will decide what they need, additional money will probably not cause them to say "hmm, lets buy a few more 'X'" ( whatever 'X' happens to be ). And for whatever item is under consideration, there is no guarantee that they will make there purchase from the US ( nor am I saying they should ).
The extra income will boost discretionary spending, if nothing else simply because it's one more job in the community - and because they're getting paid in USD, which are ultimately only usable to buy things from the US, directly or otherwise. Even if they choose to buy an Airbus rather than a Boeing with the money, that means they're essentially handing Airbus a pile of USD - which Airbus then either use to buy something from the US directly (such as the engines for that airliner), or trade to someone else who needs them to buy something from the US.
Already, as incomes rise, I'm told Indians are growing to like US imports: McDonalds food, Starbucks coffee - all representing another chunk of money heading towards the US. No, the US doesn't get back all the money it pays the Indians working for US companies - but it also gets some money from Indians not working for US companies, too.
But the bottom line for each salary that is shipped overseas, there will, on average, just as you say, be some amount coming back. On that amount coming back, some small percentage of that small amount, will be taxable income. What I was trying to get at was that there will be a drop in the taxes paid to the US govt. And those corporations making these decisions are already not paying a lot of taxes to begin with, so their additional income will probably not make up the shortfall.
Ultimately, when that salary is shipped overseas, it's giving India a supply of dollars - which are really only useful for buying things back from the US. If they have more USD coming in than they spend, either they'll trade them with some third party which needs a supply, or the local value of the dollar changes to correct this.
Having a big pile of USD lying around makes the Indians more likely to buy the Boeing aircraft rather than the Airbus, or whatever. As another poster here pointed out, since ultimately the US is a net exporter of services, trying to cut the international trade there would be a very foolish move indeed;-)
AFA getting a job ( I have one, thanks, just hypothetical... ), I am a darned good programmer. Not ready to challenge Donald Knuth just yet, but still pretty doggone good.:-) Most companies where I am located ( and I would assume elsewhere ) just dont value quality. Most would just as soon take a guy that can produce at 1/10th my level and pay him half what they pay me, cause they think it is a deal. Outsourcing is just another price point on that continuum, and it could make it more than just a little bit difficult.
Hm. There will always be short-sighted people choosing on price rather than value, but they tend to learn (albeit often the hard way). Conversely, of course, others tend to assume the more expensive product they produce is better value simply because they charge more for it...
Will be paid to which govt? Oh, over there. Yeah, OK. That will not flow back.
Actually, it does. Say that government goes out and buys some nice new military kit, like their new AWACS aircraft (Israeli built, in this particular case, but with some US radar components), or their airline goes out and buys a couple of new 747s. A small slice of US spending goes to India, a small slice of Indian spending goes to the US.
Ultimately, it's much the same situation a shop would be in. You have money coming in (customers, buying stuff). You have money going out (buying that stuff from suppliers, paying people to put it on the shelves and work the cash registers, paying your insurance, tax, rent/mortgage, Mafia protection money, whatever). The huge difference, of course, is that most of the country's "customers" are also "staff", often spending their entire salary within that shop.
Unlike shops, you do have the added complication of currency exchange rates. If US goods are too expensive and not selling well, the USD drops, making them cheaper - which pushes the balance back in the US's favor. This is why the US government is unhappy with China (and, to a smaller extent, Japan) disabling this by pushing the currency in the other direction again...
In the mean time, I guess I just declare bankrupcy, and go on the dole? That helps, thanks!
No, ultimately you need to get a job. If you're a programmer, you just need to be a good enough programmer to be the best place an employer could spend $X/yr (whatever salary level you're at) - Indian outsourcing just makes that a little bit more difficult, by offering rock-bottom prices for rock-bottom quality.
liquid helium isn't a good coolant, becuase it's heat capacity is very low. Liquid nitrogen is a much better coolant, and it's also much cheaper. Besides, that battery might not even work at 77k, much less at 4k.
If you just want to make/keep something "very cold", liquid nitrogen's much better: very cheap, and very effective. For some scientific applications though, you double-cool: put the subject in liquid nitrogen (which brings it down to 77k), then you cool the liquid nitrogen to 4k with liquid helium. (Used for direct cooling, the liquid nitrogen would be boiling, which screws up some experiments, including MRI scans IIRC; with liquid helium as well, the helium boils instead, keeping the nitrogen as a stable liquid.)
It just occured to me that they never explained where the "Doctor" did his graduate work.
One early episode - can't remember which one - has him claiming to have become a (medical) doctor in Scotland, studying under someone famous. (Probably the third; he did tend to go in for a great deal of name-dropping - note his Napoleon reference in Day of the Daleks!) He's also a graduate of the Academy on Gallifrey, although this may not have included a postgraduate qualification - presumably Time Lords don't quite have the same degree structure as humans do...
I thought in the US, either side could appeal (with the appropriate grounds) the same case to a higher court.
I thought Double Jeapordy meant that, if you charged with acrime, acquitted, and there are no appeals in the allotted time, THEN you can't be charged with the same crime again.
No - it means that as soon as you're acquitted, that's permanent. No appeals at all, barring extreme exceptions (perhaps if the judge had been taking bribes, something like that?)
If you're found guilty, you can appeal against that. Either side can also appeal the sentence - but if the court acquits you, it's permanent, no appeals ever.
(The concept - like much of the US legal system - was 'inherited' from English law. Unfortunately, there are now moves afoot to remove the Double Jeopardy protection there...)
That's all well and good, but if your job was the one making the product at $1, and they decided to outsource it to [insert country here] for production and you're now unemployed and have no income, does it matter that the item which used to cost $1 is now $0.50? You can't afford it because you're worrying about your [insert payment schedule here] bills.
The point is, you don't stay unemployed. In 1900, 40% of the US workforce worked on farms, just to produce enough food for the US (and much of the other 60% was involved indirectly - making and repairing farm equipment, etc). Now, the figure is something like 4%. Did that put US unemployment up by 36% permanently? No - the 36% went off and found other jobs.
US unemployment's actually pretty good now - lower than the average during Clinton's first term, for example, and much lower than it has been even within the last 20 years. The UK has 1.5m unemployed (which the UK government claims is 3% - which implies a workforce of 50m, which is quite impressive with a population of about 58m!), and Germany is above the 10% mark just in short-term unemployed (above 15% once you factor in other jobless categories IIRC). More importantly though, the US economy is now improving rapidly - about as fast as China, but with a much better starting point. It's Europe (the Eurozone) which really needs to worry now; the US and UK can use them as a sort of pit canary...
I am not a protectionist/communist/anti-freetrade person. I actually think capitolism is the way to go, but unless we get our act together and start inventing new technologies and exploiting them here, we are in for some rough times ahead.
Yes, more effort in R&D by US companies would be good, but it's managing OK so far. Those Indian programmers have PCs - probably using either Intel processors (designed in the US, IIRC, and made in the US and Ireland) or AMD (same, but Germany instead of Ireland). We may hate Rambus, but if their machine uses RIMMs they're putting more money into the US that way; even DDR SDRAM probably involves some US patents. Then of course outside the workplace they might go on vacation, in a Boeing airliner (made in the US), using GE (US), P&W (Canada) or Rolls Royce (UK) engines. Or maybe they'll just play on an X-box, or watch a Hollywood film.
There are lots of correctional factors involved. If India exports more than it imports, that forces the value of their currency up - making their exports more expensive. At worst, this would continue until that $0.50 item is back to costing $1, at which point it gets made in the US again; more likely, it becomes a $0.60 item instead, and Air India buys a new 747 with the extra money in the Indian economy - putting that money back into the US economy again.
This, incidentally, is why China and Japan manipulating their currency values is such a big deal: it's effectively a huge subsidy, aimed at blocking this correctional mechanism, forcing more jobs out of the US and into their countries.
-- Pour coffee in crotch, get rich quick? That court can bite my shiny metal ass!
The GOP must be really scared here. I think their big fear is that they know that Shrub's military career was phony.
Never hurt Clinton... and Clark was ultimately fired, by the Clinton administration, after the incident over Pristina airport (where he threatened to have his British counterpart relieved of command for refusing to obey insane orders; the two governments then overruled Clark and supported Gen. Jackson's objection - then removed Clark ahead of schedule.)
Clinton and Bush both dodged the draft. But Clinton did not then ponce arround aircraft carriers wearing a flight suit.
Wrong. Clinton did precisely the same thing (USS Theodore Roosevelt, 1993; again on the USS Independence, 1996) - and just like Bush, he flew in wearing a flight jacket then changed into a suit for the occasion. More here. In short, the complaints about Bush's visit to the Abraham Lincoln are all crap: Clinton did it, LBJ did it, and at least one Democrat Senator has a similar photo of himself; the only distinction is that AFAIK Clinton is the only one who spoke of his "loathing" of the military.
The point of this research is that people can HAVE them, basically the exact same car, exact same functionality...but it'll be safer and more fuel efficient, cost a hair more, and can be done RIGHT NOW with today's technologies.
Which certainly sounds good.
Why isn't it being done? Million dollar question right there.
Are you sure it isn't? The trouble may just be that instead of replacing, say, a 20mpg 200hp engine with a 25mpg 200hp engine, people will choose to go for the 20mpg 300hp engine instead. More efficient, but instead of lowering fuel consumption, the extra efficiency goes into producing more power from the same fuel.
"More bang for the same buck" instead of "same bang, less buck" seems to sell better, in general; presumably cars are the same. Just look at computer CPUs: even in laptops, instead of producing the same old CPU at half the power/heat, Intel and co crank up the clock speed until it's just as hot...
Sure, that's why the US use so many nuclear enhanced weapons, which have a detrimental efffect on surroundings and people for decades to come.
"Nuclear enhanced weapons"? Such as..? No, depleted uranium is not a nuclear weapon in any sense - it just uses the very heavy ore left over when you mine nuclear fuel. It isn't even the same kind of uranium (it's naturally occurring uranium, but with the form of uranium used in nuclear weapons removed - hence the "depleted"). Calling a DU tank shell "nuclear" is like calling a copper garotte an electrical weapon!
Large fuel-air bombs (like MOAB and the "daisycutters") create mushroom clouds, so they're sometimes mistaken for a small nuke going off - but it's exactly that: a mistake. There's nothing nuclear about them, either.
The only nuclear weapons the US has ever had are - surprise! - nuclear weapons. Apart from tests - conducted so as to avoid contamination, usually underground or in unoccupied desert - they've only been used twice: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nowhere else, ever - and those two were both extremely small. (Even compared to conventional attacks: the conventional weapons used against Tokyo, for example, killed ten times as many people as died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)
The parent post is either clueless or a troll - I'm not sure which. The reality is, the US has only ever used two nuclear ("enhanced" or otherwise) weapons - both of them over half a century ago - and is, AFAICS, determined not to be the first to use such weapons in any future conflict.
It's still extra software you need to install just for a DB. Would it be normal to expect apache or gcc to work via gui? Doubtful, especially in the unix world.
Unless you're talking about the need for a web browser, you don't need to install anything extra - just go to the right URL. As for Apache and gcc: Apache has a gui (indeed, that's how the status monitoring works: via web browser!) - and gcc's commercial rivals do too (MS Visual Studio, IBM's suite, Sun's). Considering Oracle's commercial success, if you're trying to argue they are wrong to do something, "the free stuff doesn't do it that way" isn't a very effective argument - especially when one of the most common complaints about OSS products is the primitive UI...
Wow, what a prejiduced look at things. Have you thought that maybe, just maybe, the poster didn't have any live X servers around? Oh that's right. All self righteous linux zealots have X running before they even have it installed on the HD making things a happy land, right?
WiredX/WeirdX. All you need's a Java-capable web browser, and WWW access (or the ability to download the app and run it locally). Or get VNC - trivial download, runs on almost anything. You only have a real problem if you have no access to any machine with a GUI - which is probably rare enough Oracle reckon they don't need to care about it.
Not sure about the parent, but with regards to the discussion in my JE, my feelings are that further abusing a broken market won't make it better. IOW, two wrongs don't make a right.
Agreed. The best approach is to end the market interference (the BBC's monopoly) ASAP, converting it into a functioning and competitive market with real services being offered, instead of a bureaucracy milking a captive public to fund whatever it wants! It worked brilliantly in telecomms and other utilities in the UK, and produced dramatic improvements in transport (even the rail network is far better now than under the mismanagement of British Rail, although it's deteriorated again since Byers stole it from the owners). Time to apply it to broadcasting.
The fact is that the BBC pushes the quality of the other producers way up. Have you seen the TV in Germany and France? Its nearly as bad as Sky.
Funny - in my book, "nearly as bad as Sky" implies "far ahead of the BBC". The BBC have managed to produce some good material, IMO - nearly all of it sci-fi - but nothing recently. So far this year, the only BBC broadcasts I've watched were 24 - which, of course, is produced by Sky's sister company Fox! Meanwhile, there's been at least one programme on Sky One I've watched every night.
I'm sure somebody thinks the BBC's current lineup is good, but that somebody certainly isn't me - and I very much begrudge being forced to pay the BBC more than I choose to pay Sky, despite getting (IMO) a far inferior service!
You may be right about free markets not producing perfect content - but where is there an economic theory claiming that a captive audience with no semblance of competition produces anything better?
Re:The organization has an obvious slant
on
Joining the ACLU?
·
· Score: 1
1. Out of gun deaths in the US each year, how many of them were committed by enraged/drunken husbands/wives/brothers/sisters of their spouses/siblings?
A fairly small minority, although I don't remember the exact figure.
2. How many of the deaths were accidental?
1,400 in 1990 (compared to 1,900 back in 1910, despite the far lower population!). Meanwhile, an estimated 2.45 million crimes are prevented using guns in civilian hands every year.
Incidentally, 11% of those shot by police were mistaken, compared to 2% of those shot by civilians. Perhaps gun "control" should be applied to the police rather than the public?
3. How many were by police in their line of duty?
A significant number - one in nine of which were of the wrong person. Wrongful shootings by police are actually a statistically significant cause of death - and, despite civilian shootings of criminals outnumbering such police shootings by about 3 to 1, the police shoot twice as many innocent people by mistake as civilians do. (11%, vs 2% of a larger number.)
4. How many of the deaths prevented other losses of life/property, or prevented rape?
Deaths, I don't know, but use (often without a shot fired) prevents over a million crimes per year (estimated at up to 2.45 million). Simply having a gun is enough to scare most burglars, for example: the UK has a far, far higher rate of "hot" burglaries than the US, thanks largely to the UK's gun ban (burglars can be virtually certain the victim is unarmed). Statistically speaking, resisting with a gun is safer than resisting with any other weapon, as well as safer than compliance.
5. Why do the Canadians have so few homocides? Why do the Japanese?
Japan has the highest homicide clearup rate in the world (97%): you are virtually certain to be caught. That must have a considerable deterrent effect! It also appears part of a broader trend: most crimes, gun-related or not, are far less common in Japan than in the US, Canada or Europe. Then, as the Canadian government put it: "Japan is one of the most disciplined nations on earth, with an authoritarian and conformist culture that precludes large scale law-breaking. There are few constraints on police powers, especially with respect to search and seizure. Rates of crimes not usually associated with firearms - rape, mugging and assault, are the lowest in the world and are trifling by European and North American standards. Japanese do not kill each other in large numbers because they are, in all respects, extremely law-abiding people. Interestingly, the current Japanese suicide rate of 21 per 100,000 is double the Canadian rate and almost double the rate in the United States."
In short: Japan's lower crime rate (gun-related and other) is unlikely to be related to gun bans. More likely it's a combination of their more law-abiding nature and a more ruthless and effective police force (no Fourth Amendment, for example).
Canada? Since several American states have lower homicide rates than Canada, answering why Canada's rate is lower would be impossible! (Minnesota is a little lower than Canada's average; North Dakota is less than half.) Indeed, North Dakota has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world, per capita. To quote the Canadian report: "It was concluded that the regulation of possession of personal arms by private citizens has little or no effect on homicide rates." Their figures certainly support that conclusion, and show that gun "control" is, as they put it, a "futile exercise": violent crime has its roots in culture and sociology, and guns are merely tools - violence lies in the criminal, not in the weapon. Arm a non-violent population, and you have an armed non-violent population; disarm a violent one, and you still have violent people - they'll just turn to other weapons.
Re:The organization has an obvious slant
on
Joining the ACLU?
·
· Score: 1
I don't think you read my message very carefully. If you had, you would see that nowhere within it did I suggest banning guns. Enforcing stricter gun controls != banning guns.
So what do you mean by "gun control"? The status quo, at least in TX, is that provided you have a clean criminal record, you're allowed a gun in your own home, provided it's a certain class of gun, and you're allowed to transport it to and from the gun shop and range - provided you do so in a locked container. Anything more requires a special state permit. What is your version of gun control - further limits on the kind of gun in your own home, or banning transporting guns?
This isn't Switzerland. There is obviously something about the Swiss psyche, or the Swiss human condition, that is very different from what we have here. I don't know what that something is: that is why I am agnostic regarding gun-control. I see the dead bodies, and those dead bodies have bullet-holes in them, so I come to the perhaps false conclusion that there is a connection between unrestricted gun ownership and those deaths.
A totally false conclusion, AFAICS. You started from the false assumption that "unrestricted gun ownership" existed in the US, added the false assumption that dead bodies from gunshot wounds are a bad thing (the majority of gun deaths are entirely legal) and reached the false conclusion that a problem is caused by something which doesn't exist in the first place.
Banning guns would require that we lived in a totalitarian state, and I definitely don't want that. However, something needs to be done to prevent those thousands of deaths, and I am willing to consider all options (excepting the imposition of a totalitarian state)
AFAICS, that's exactly what a lot of anti-gun zealots are aiming for: outlaw guns. What are you aiming for - some intermediate step, banning more guns than are currently banned but not quite all of them? This state, at least, already bans possession outside the home without a special permit - you want more restrictions than that? For that matter, DC currently does have a gun ban - and look how well that works!
Guns are already "controlled" - and even within the US, there is a clear correlation between the level of gun "control" and violent crime. The "gun control" advocates claim the answer is even more gun "control" - what more is there, between the status quo and an outright ban? AFAICS, the root problem is that there's already too much gun "control": the balance is tipped too far in favor of criminals.
Re:The organization has an obvious slant
on
Joining the ACLU?
·
· Score: 1
The ACLU argument which I quote above was merely trying to demonstrate that we already accept some restrictions on our possession of arms. As the acceptability of some restrictions is thus established, the area of contention becomes where the borders of such restrictions can be drawn.
Just as we do with speech: this no more invalidates the NRA's position on guns than it does the ACLU's on speech.
To me, the thousands and thousands of dead bodies generated every year by loose gun control builds a good argument for tighter restrictions. I can be convinced otherwise, but not by anyone who is screaming hysterically as they are trying to persuade me.
I'd count the "thousands and thousands of dead bodies" as pretty close to hysterical screaming itself, especially the claim they're caused by "loose gun control". Once you remove entirely legitimate deaths - the police shooting people and self-defense, for example - and those which wouldn't be affected (or would be exacerbated) by gun "control", such as drug dealers (when they manage to import thousands of tonnes a week of illegal drugs, they'd have to be pretty incompetent to be unable to import a few guns at the same time - and most of the guns they use are illegal anyway) I doubt you're left with many. Even they wouldn't necessarily be affected: in Bowling for Columbine, for example, at least one of the shootings Moore describes involved a kid who stole the gun from a drug den. The drugs are already illegal - do you really believe banning the gun would have removed it from that drug den?
First, guns themselves aren't a problem. Look at Switzerland: higher gun ownership than the US (almost literally everybody has their own gun, thanks to national service). Second, would banning them really remove guns from the "bad guys", or just disarm the "good guys", leaving them defenseless? Experience in other countries where gun "control" has been attempted suggests the latter: after banning guns, the UK experienced a sharp increase in violent crimes: the drug dealers, bank robbers etc were completely unaffected, except their lives were safer (less chance of their victims being able to defend themselves). In short: gun "control" doesn't solve any problems - it just creates its own, as experience in other countries shows.
Worst of all for the ACLU: again, I could make exactly the same argument for "speech control" - banning "hate speech", racist propoganda, pornography - indeed, much the same argument is used to support censorship of adult material, based on claims it causes rape and other sexual violence. I consider that argument slightly stronger than the equivalent in favor of gun "control", since there is at least some correlation involved there.
Re:The organization has an obvious slant
on
Joining the ACLU?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Unfortunately, that argument works equally well against their own stance on the First Amendment:
"If indeed the First Amendment provides an absolute, constitutional protection for the right to free speech, then it must allow individuals to possess child pornography and to shout 'fire' in a crowded theater, for they, like letters to the Editor, are speech. Yet few, if any, would argue that the First Amendment gives individuals the unlimited right to any speech they please. But as soon as we allow government regulation of any speech, we have broken the dam of Constitutional protection. Once that dam is broken, we are not talking about whether the government can constitutionally restrict speech, but rather what constitutes a reasonable restriction."
For that matter, of course, we can apply something similar to many of the other amendments; the Fourth Amendment even mentions the last concept itself, protecting only from "unreasonable" search and seizure... The ACLU applies a logical tool of "reducit ad absurdum" to the obvious interpretation of the Second Amendment, to make it seem unreasonable, without applying the same rigour to their own position on the First. I don't believe the Second guarantees the right to nuclear weapons - nor do I believe the First guarantees a right to child pornography or sending death threats. If they want to ignore the Second entirely, they can, but they should not attack it like that when their own position falls to the same logic: people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones...
I would advocate solar cells and solar water heating systems mandated for all public buildings, and make a tax incentive to home owners to install them on new or existing properties.
Already done (the tax incentive bit) - you get (depending on the state) part of the cost paid by a grant, a break on property tax, and any excess electricity is often bought back by the utility at retail price (i.e. if you generate a total of X units/month, and use X units/month, you pay $0 - effectively getting to use the utility as a free giant battery). There's a major problem with increased solar cell sales, though: current solar cells use waste silicon wafers from semiconductor manufacture. Once you exhaust that supply - there are only a finite number of substandard wafers produced - you have to start paying the full price, putting solar cell prices up dramatically.
Add to that fuel cells in the basement to store excess power for use at night or in cloudy weather. (It should be noted that, contrary to common belief, solar roof systems do work in cloudy weather.)
They don't work too well at night, though - and trying to store power is very inefficient and expensive. (Someone linked to suitable batteries; one which could deliver a little over 100W through the night was $399. Painful.)
Every house should be able to coast for a few days on stored power during a blackout.
You want to store a few days worth of power?! Even the hardened, 100% self-sufficient solar/wind junkies don't attempt that. I'd also worry about what kind of problem you're planning for which would prevent the sun appearing for a couple of days;-)
I'm surprised Mr. Bush did not announce a package of tax incentives to make these things a reality. But, I suppose that he takes a corporate, big oil point of view; simply swap hydrogen for petroleum and keep the existing infrastructure.
More accurately, he takes a pragmatic view: current batteries cost far, far more than the equivalent power station per kW, and that's just to store power rather than produce it!
A tax incentive for hybrid gas-electric cars would be nice, too. Cut oil consumption and solve so many other problems: dependence on nasty Arab dictators, greenhouse pollution, etc.
Again, already done. I'd prefer a strong move away from fossil-fuel power stations; if you scrapped them all, the only countries the US would be importing oil from outside North America would be the UK and Norway, without removing a single SUV or selling a single extra hybrid car. Or you feed America's agricultural waste (which is currently a pollution issue itself) into this - and make America the biggest oil producer on earth, making it entirely self-sufficient for oil at current consumption levels. No more oil imports from Canada, let alone the Middle East! Combine the two, and...
It's there so The People can take their BB guns and firecrackers and defeat the smart bombs, MOABs, tanks, fighter jets, and nukes of the army, navy, and air force should that ever become necessary.
Yes, just look how easy it was for the Coalition to get rid of the remaining Hussein supporters. Or how easy it was for Hussein to oppress the Shi'a in the south of Iraq, or the Kurds in the North: despite his vast army, with tanks, artillery etc (no match for the US or Britain, but easily a match for any civilian) he only kept any control over the Shi'a by slaughtering more than 200,000 in one go - and lost control of the Kurdish areas entirely.
Invading a country, even if every single civilian is armed to the teeth, is pretty easy once you defeat the regular army. Occupying it, against the will of those people, is virtually impossible if they're well armed: you can invade from inside a tank, but you can't occupy without getting out and interacting with people - at which point, you can start getting picked off, one by one. MOABs, B-52s, F-18s and Tomahawks are all completely useless for suppressing a civilian uprising: short of eliminating the population with a massive nuclear bombardment, you just can't do it.
The core part of Wichita is that way; there are water towers out in the suburbs. The pumps do have auxiliary power, though, so I've never experienced a power-related water outage.
Considering Baghdad had backup generators for their water plants, I'd be surprised if anywhere in the West didn't. (OTOH, the power's rather more reliable; perhaps Western power plants are more likely to take reliable power for granted...)
Weird coincidence: the kitchen (fluorescent) light here refused to light for a moment. No connection, I'm sure (dodgy starter, I suspect - it's old) - just weird timing!
But if MS don't want you reverse engineer word, all they have to do is encrypt it, and decrypt it on the fly. You are not allowed to break the encryption, so you are not able to reverse engineer it (even though you are allowed to).
Nope. You aren't allowed to break access control measures used to enforce copyright - i.e. CSS, cable/satellite scrambled channels, console games. Reverse engineering the APIs used by Word doesn't come under that heading.
Next step will be for Intel/AMD to move the decryption step to INSIDE THE PROCESSOR, where noone can get at the clear text.
Done (X-box), except MS screwed up part of the design so it can be circumvented with an external modchip.
The Berne Convention is about copyright, not patents.
Correct: the patent treaty was signed in Geneva (but not named after Geneva, for obvious reasons!)
And patent laws are national laws, IMHO there no international rules.
The delegates who met in Geneva on June 1, 2000 to sign the Patent Law Treaty would be surprised to learn that. (There are various other, prior treaties referred to by that treaty, but this seems to be the most recent.)
So: patent law is indeed provided for by international treaties, as with copyright.
Believe it or not, the American laws, the DMCA included, and the American Courts interpretation of those laws does not apply to the rest of world yet. Bush may eventually change that with his army, but for the time being, as Allan says, "reverse engineering for interoperability" is legal is most civilised countries (and even in some not-so-civilised ones).
Including the US, as it happens, which is how Compaq created the first clone of the PC BIOS. The DMCA bars breaking access control systems, not reverse-engineering software. In some cases (software DVD players) the two overlap, but usually it's clear: reverse-engineering Office to make it work properly under Wine is fine, cracking CSS to make a DVD player isn't (you need to license the relevant algorithm, not just copy it from someone who has). The one caveat is that reverse-engineering a patented system doesn't give you any right to copy it: you still need a patent license. That's not US law, though, it's international law (Berne convention?)
Slashdot Mirror
Saying "just include non-free" is fine for installed systems - but what about running network installations using that network card? Would you need to get a special "non-free bootdisk"? The different boot images are already a pain; a bootable ISO with all the drivers would be nice (AIUI the current ones are all 'unofficial'?) - but would this now have to fork into two versions, "free but incomplete" and "non-free complete"?
Perhaps giving a warning before loading any "non-free" drivers would be enough to satisfy the purists, without creating extra overhead for maintainers...
Look at non-US companies using Windows, with Intel or AMD processors, maybe using Netware or Solaris servers and HP printers. None of those are locally developed - every one of them represents work being done in the US (and sometimes other countries), thus "siphoning jobs overseas". Call centres move jobs one direction, plenty of things move them in the other - and so far, the US has been on the receiving end of most of those jobs, overall.
The extra income will boost discretionary spending, if nothing else simply because it's one more job in the community - and because they're getting paid in USD, which are ultimately only usable to buy things from the US, directly or otherwise. Even if they choose to buy an Airbus rather than a Boeing with the money, that means they're essentially handing Airbus a pile of USD - which Airbus then either use to buy something from the US directly (such as the engines for that airliner), or trade to someone else who needs them to buy something from the US.
Already, as incomes rise, I'm told Indians are growing to like US imports: McDonalds food, Starbucks coffee - all representing another chunk of money heading towards the US. No, the US doesn't get back all the money it pays the Indians working for US companies - but it also gets some money from Indians not working for US companies, too.
But the bottom line for each salary that is shipped overseas, there will, on average, just as you say, be some amount coming back. On that amount coming back, some small percentage of that small amount, will be taxable income. What I was trying to get at was that there will be a drop in the taxes paid to the US govt. And those corporations making these decisions are already not paying a lot of taxes to begin with, so their additional income will probably not make up the shortfall.
Ultimately, when that salary is shipped overseas, it's giving India a supply of dollars - which are really only useful for buying things back from the US. If they have more USD coming in than they spend, either they'll trade them with some third party which needs a supply, or the local value of the dollar changes to correct this.
Having a big pile of USD lying around makes the Indians more likely to buy the Boeing aircraft rather than the Airbus, or whatever. As another poster here pointed out, since ultimately the US is a net exporter of services, trying to cut the international trade there would be a very foolish move indeed ;-)
AFA getting a job ( I have one, thanks, just hypothetical... ), I am a darned good programmer. Not ready to challenge Donald Knuth just yet, but still pretty doggone good. :-) Most companies where I am located ( and I would assume elsewhere ) just dont value quality. Most would just as soon take a guy that can produce at 1/10th my level and pay him half what they pay me, cause they think it is a deal. Outsourcing is just another price point on that continuum, and it could make it more than just a little bit difficult.
Hm. There will always be short-sighted people choosing on price rather than value, but they tend to learn (albeit often the hard way). Conversely, of course, others tend to assume the more expensive product they produce is better value simply because they charge more for it...
Actually, it does. Say that government goes out and buys some nice new military kit, like their new AWACS aircraft (Israeli built, in this particular case, but with some US radar components), or their airline goes out and buys a couple of new 747s. A small slice of US spending goes to India, a small slice of Indian spending goes to the US.
Ultimately, it's much the same situation a shop would be in. You have money coming in (customers, buying stuff). You have money going out (buying that stuff from suppliers, paying people to put it on the shelves and work the cash registers, paying your insurance, tax, rent/mortgage, Mafia protection money, whatever). The huge difference, of course, is that most of the country's "customers" are also "staff", often spending their entire salary within that shop.
Unlike shops, you do have the added complication of currency exchange rates. If US goods are too expensive and not selling well, the USD drops, making them cheaper - which pushes the balance back in the US's favor. This is why the US government is unhappy with China (and, to a smaller extent, Japan) disabling this by pushing the currency in the other direction again...
In the mean time, I guess I just declare bankrupcy, and go on the dole? That helps, thanks!
No, ultimately you need to get a job. If you're a programmer, you just need to be a good enough programmer to be the best place an employer could spend $X/yr (whatever salary level you're at) - Indian outsourcing just makes that a little bit more difficult, by offering rock-bottom prices for rock-bottom quality.
If you just want to make/keep something "very cold", liquid nitrogen's much better: very cheap, and very effective. For some scientific applications though, you double-cool: put the subject in liquid nitrogen (which brings it down to 77k), then you cool the liquid nitrogen to 4k with liquid helium. (Used for direct cooling, the liquid nitrogen would be boiling, which screws up some experiments, including MRI scans IIRC; with liquid helium as well, the helium boils instead, keeping the nitrogen as a stable liquid.)
One early episode - can't remember which one - has him claiming to have become a (medical) doctor in Scotland, studying under someone famous. (Probably the third; he did tend to go in for a great deal of name-dropping - note his Napoleon reference in Day of the Daleks!) He's also a graduate of the Academy on Gallifrey, although this may not have included a postgraduate qualification - presumably Time Lords don't quite have the same degree structure as humans do...
No - it means that as soon as you're acquitted, that's permanent. No appeals at all, barring extreme exceptions (perhaps if the judge had been taking bribes, something like that?)
If you're found guilty, you can appeal against that. Either side can also appeal the sentence - but if the court acquits you, it's permanent, no appeals ever.
(The concept - like much of the US legal system - was 'inherited' from English law. Unfortunately, there are now moves afoot to remove the Double Jeopardy protection there...)
The point is, you don't stay unemployed. In 1900, 40% of the US workforce worked on farms, just to produce enough food for the US (and much of the other 60% was involved indirectly - making and repairing farm equipment, etc). Now, the figure is something like 4%. Did that put US unemployment up by 36% permanently? No - the 36% went off and found other jobs.
US unemployment's actually pretty good now - lower than the average during Clinton's first term, for example, and much lower than it has been even within the last 20 years. The UK has 1.5m unemployed (which the UK government claims is 3% - which implies a workforce of 50m, which is quite impressive with a population of about 58m!), and Germany is above the 10% mark just in short-term unemployed (above 15% once you factor in other jobless categories IIRC). More importantly though, the US economy is now improving rapidly - about as fast as China, but with a much better starting point. It's Europe (the Eurozone) which really needs to worry now; the US and UK can use them as a sort of pit canary...
I am not a protectionist/communist/anti-freetrade person. I actually think capitolism is the way to go, but unless we get our act together and start inventing new technologies and exploiting them here, we are in for some rough times ahead.
Yes, more effort in R&D by US companies would be good, but it's managing OK so far. Those Indian programmers have PCs - probably using either Intel processors (designed in the US, IIRC, and made in the US and Ireland) or AMD (same, but Germany instead of Ireland). We may hate Rambus, but if their machine uses RIMMs they're putting more money into the US that way; even DDR SDRAM probably involves some US patents. Then of course outside the workplace they might go on vacation, in a Boeing airliner (made in the US), using GE (US), P&W (Canada) or Rolls Royce (UK) engines. Or maybe they'll just play on an X-box, or watch a Hollywood film.
There are lots of correctional factors involved. If India exports more than it imports, that forces the value of their currency up - making their exports more expensive. At worst, this would continue until that $0.50 item is back to costing $1, at which point it gets made in the US again; more likely, it becomes a $0.60 item instead, and Air India buys a new 747 with the extra money in the Indian economy - putting that money back into the US economy again.
This, incidentally, is why China and Japan manipulating their currency values is such a big deal: it's effectively a huge subsidy, aimed at blocking this correctional mechanism, forcing more jobs out of the US and into their countries.
--
Pour coffee in crotch, get rich quick? That court can bite my shiny metal ass!
Never hurt Clinton... and Clark was ultimately fired, by the Clinton administration, after the incident over Pristina airport (where he threatened to have his British counterpart relieved of command for refusing to obey insane orders; the two governments then overruled Clark and supported Gen. Jackson's objection - then removed Clark ahead of schedule.)
Clinton and Bush both dodged the draft. But Clinton did not then ponce arround aircraft carriers wearing a flight suit.
Wrong. Clinton did precisely the same thing (USS Theodore Roosevelt, 1993; again on the USS Independence, 1996) - and just like Bush, he flew in wearing a flight jacket then changed into a suit for the occasion. More here. In short, the complaints about Bush's visit to the Abraham Lincoln are all crap: Clinton did it, LBJ did it, and at least one Democrat Senator has a similar photo of himself; the only distinction is that AFAIK Clinton is the only one who spoke of his "loathing" of the military.
Which certainly sounds good.
Why isn't it being done? Million dollar question right there.
Are you sure it isn't? The trouble may just be that instead of replacing, say, a 20mpg 200hp engine with a 25mpg 200hp engine, people will choose to go for the 20mpg 300hp engine instead. More efficient, but instead of lowering fuel consumption, the extra efficiency goes into producing more power from the same fuel.
"More bang for the same buck" instead of "same bang, less buck" seems to sell better, in general; presumably cars are the same. Just look at computer CPUs: even in laptops, instead of producing the same old CPU at half the power/heat, Intel and co crank up the clock speed until it's just as hot...
"Nuclear enhanced weapons"? Such as..? No, depleted uranium is not a nuclear weapon in any sense - it just uses the very heavy ore left over when you mine nuclear fuel. It isn't even the same kind of uranium (it's naturally occurring uranium, but with the form of uranium used in nuclear weapons removed - hence the "depleted"). Calling a DU tank shell "nuclear" is like calling a copper garotte an electrical weapon!
Large fuel-air bombs (like MOAB and the "daisycutters") create mushroom clouds, so they're sometimes mistaken for a small nuke going off - but it's exactly that: a mistake. There's nothing nuclear about them, either.
The only nuclear weapons the US has ever had are - surprise! - nuclear weapons. Apart from tests - conducted so as to avoid contamination, usually underground or in unoccupied desert - they've only been used twice: Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nowhere else, ever - and those two were both extremely small. (Even compared to conventional attacks: the conventional weapons used against Tokyo, for example, killed ten times as many people as died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)
The parent post is either clueless or a troll - I'm not sure which. The reality is, the US has only ever used two nuclear ("enhanced" or otherwise) weapons - both of them over half a century ago - and is, AFAICS, determined not to be the first to use such weapons in any future conflict.
Unless you're talking about the need for a web browser, you don't need to install anything extra - just go to the right URL. As for Apache and gcc: Apache has a gui (indeed, that's how the status monitoring works: via web browser!) - and gcc's commercial rivals do too (MS Visual Studio, IBM's suite, Sun's). Considering Oracle's commercial success, if you're trying to argue they are wrong to do something, "the free stuff doesn't do it that way" isn't a very effective argument - especially when one of the most common complaints about OSS products is the primitive UI...
WiredX/WeirdX. All you need's a Java-capable web browser, and WWW access (or the ability to download the app and run it locally). Or get VNC - trivial download, runs on almost anything. You only have a real problem if you have no access to any machine with a GUI - which is probably rare enough Oracle reckon they don't need to care about it.
Agreed. The best approach is to end the market interference (the BBC's monopoly) ASAP, converting it into a functioning and competitive market with real services being offered, instead of a bureaucracy milking a captive public to fund whatever it wants! It worked brilliantly in telecomms and other utilities in the UK, and produced dramatic improvements in transport (even the rail network is far better now than under the mismanagement of British Rail, although it's deteriorated again since Byers stole it from the owners). Time to apply it to broadcasting.
Funny - in my book, "nearly as bad as Sky" implies "far ahead of the BBC". The BBC have managed to produce some good material, IMO - nearly all of it sci-fi - but nothing recently. So far this year, the only BBC broadcasts I've watched were 24 - which, of course, is produced by Sky's sister company Fox! Meanwhile, there's been at least one programme on Sky One I've watched every night.
I'm sure somebody thinks the BBC's current lineup is good, but that somebody certainly isn't me - and I very much begrudge being forced to pay the BBC more than I choose to pay Sky, despite getting (IMO) a far inferior service!
You may be right about free markets not producing perfect content - but where is there an economic theory claiming that a captive audience with no semblance of competition produces anything better?
A fairly small minority, although I don't remember the exact figure.
2. How many of the deaths were accidental?
1,400 in 1990 (compared to 1,900 back in 1910, despite the far lower population!). Meanwhile, an estimated 2.45 million crimes are prevented using guns in civilian hands every year.
Incidentally, 11% of those shot by police were mistaken, compared to 2% of those shot by civilians. Perhaps gun "control" should be applied to the police rather than the public?
3. How many were by police in their line of duty?
A significant number - one in nine of which were of the wrong person. Wrongful shootings by police are actually a statistically significant cause of death - and, despite civilian shootings of criminals outnumbering such police shootings by about 3 to 1, the police shoot twice as many innocent people by mistake as civilians do. (11%, vs 2% of a larger number.)
4. How many of the deaths prevented other losses of life/property, or prevented rape?
Deaths, I don't know, but use (often without a shot fired) prevents over a million crimes per year (estimated at up to 2.45 million). Simply having a gun is enough to scare most burglars, for example: the UK has a far, far higher rate of "hot" burglaries than the US, thanks largely to the UK's gun ban (burglars can be virtually certain the victim is unarmed). Statistically speaking, resisting with a gun is safer than resisting with any other weapon, as well as safer than compliance.
5. Why do the Canadians have so few homocides? Why do the Japanese?
Japan has the highest homicide clearup rate in the world (97%): you are virtually certain to be caught. That must have a considerable deterrent effect! It also appears part of a broader trend: most crimes, gun-related or not, are far less common in Japan than in the US, Canada or Europe. Then, as the Canadian government put it: "Japan is one of the most disciplined nations on earth, with an authoritarian and conformist culture that precludes large scale law-breaking. There are few constraints on police powers, especially with respect to search and seizure. Rates of crimes not usually associated with firearms - rape, mugging and assault, are the lowest in the world and are trifling by European and North American standards. Japanese do not kill each other in large numbers because they are, in all respects, extremely law-abiding people. Interestingly, the current Japanese suicide rate of 21 per 100,000 is double the Canadian rate and almost double the rate in the United States."
In short: Japan's lower crime rate (gun-related and other) is unlikely to be related to gun bans. More likely it's a combination of their more law-abiding nature and a more ruthless and effective police force (no Fourth Amendment, for example).
Canada? Since several American states have lower homicide rates than Canada, answering why Canada's rate is lower would be impossible! (Minnesota is a little lower than Canada's average; North Dakota is less than half.) Indeed, North Dakota has one of the lowest homicide rates in the world, per capita. To quote the Canadian report: "It was concluded that the regulation of possession of personal arms by private citizens has little or no effect on homicide rates." Their figures certainly support that conclusion, and show that gun "control" is, as they put it, a "futile exercise": violent crime has its roots in culture and sociology, and guns are merely tools - violence lies in the criminal, not in the weapon. Arm a non-violent population, and you have an armed non-violent population; disarm a violent one, and you still have violent people - they'll just turn to other weapons.
So what do you mean by "gun control"? The status quo, at least in TX, is that provided you have a clean criminal record, you're allowed a gun in your own home, provided it's a certain class of gun, and you're allowed to transport it to and from the gun shop and range - provided you do so in a locked container. Anything more requires a special state permit. What is your version of gun control - further limits on the kind of gun in your own home, or banning transporting guns?
This isn't Switzerland. There is obviously something about the Swiss psyche, or the Swiss human condition, that is very different from what we have here. I don't know what that something is: that is why I am agnostic regarding gun-control. I see the dead bodies, and those dead bodies have bullet-holes in them, so I come to the perhaps false conclusion that there is a connection between unrestricted gun ownership and those deaths.
A totally false conclusion, AFAICS. You started from the false assumption that "unrestricted gun ownership" existed in the US, added the false assumption that dead bodies from gunshot wounds are a bad thing (the majority of gun deaths are entirely legal) and reached the false conclusion that a problem is caused by something which doesn't exist in the first place.
Banning guns would require that we lived in a totalitarian state, and I definitely don't want that. However, something needs to be done to prevent those thousands of deaths, and I am willing to consider all options (excepting the imposition of a totalitarian state)
AFAICS, that's exactly what a lot of anti-gun zealots are aiming for: outlaw guns. What are you aiming for - some intermediate step, banning more guns than are currently banned but not quite all of them? This state, at least, already bans possession outside the home without a special permit - you want more restrictions than that? For that matter, DC currently does have a gun ban - and look how well that works!
Guns are already "controlled" - and even within the US, there is a clear correlation between the level of gun "control" and violent crime. The "gun control" advocates claim the answer is even more gun "control" - what more is there, between the status quo and an outright ban? AFAICS, the root problem is that there's already too much gun "control": the balance is tipped too far in favor of criminals.
Just as we do with speech: this no more invalidates the NRA's position on guns than it does the ACLU's on speech.
To me, the thousands and thousands of dead bodies generated every year by loose gun control builds a good argument for tighter restrictions. I can be convinced otherwise, but not by anyone who is screaming hysterically as they are trying to persuade me.
I'd count the "thousands and thousands of dead bodies" as pretty close to hysterical screaming itself, especially the claim they're caused by "loose gun control". Once you remove entirely legitimate deaths - the police shooting people and self-defense, for example - and those which wouldn't be affected (or would be exacerbated) by gun "control", such as drug dealers (when they manage to import thousands of tonnes a week of illegal drugs, they'd have to be pretty incompetent to be unable to import a few guns at the same time - and most of the guns they use are illegal anyway) I doubt you're left with many. Even they wouldn't necessarily be affected: in Bowling for Columbine, for example, at least one of the shootings Moore describes involved a kid who stole the gun from a drug den. The drugs are already illegal - do you really believe banning the gun would have removed it from that drug den?
First, guns themselves aren't a problem. Look at Switzerland: higher gun ownership than the US (almost literally everybody has their own gun, thanks to national service). Second, would banning them really remove guns from the "bad guys", or just disarm the "good guys", leaving them defenseless? Experience in other countries where gun "control" has been attempted suggests the latter: after banning guns, the UK experienced a sharp increase in violent crimes: the drug dealers, bank robbers etc were completely unaffected, except their lives were safer (less chance of their victims being able to defend themselves). In short: gun "control" doesn't solve any problems - it just creates its own, as experience in other countries shows.
Worst of all for the ACLU: again, I could make exactly the same argument for "speech control" - banning "hate speech", racist propoganda, pornography - indeed, much the same argument is used to support censorship of adult material, based on claims it causes rape and other sexual violence. I consider that argument slightly stronger than the equivalent in favor of gun "control", since there is at least some correlation involved there.
"If indeed the First Amendment provides an absolute, constitutional protection for the right to free speech, then it must allow individuals to possess child pornography and to shout 'fire' in a crowded theater, for they, like letters to the Editor, are speech. Yet few, if any, would argue that the First Amendment gives individuals the unlimited right to any speech they please. But as soon as we allow government regulation of any speech, we have broken the dam of Constitutional protection. Once that dam is broken, we are not talking about whether the government can constitutionally restrict speech, but rather what constitutes a reasonable restriction."
For that matter, of course, we can apply something similar to many of the other amendments; the Fourth Amendment even mentions the last concept itself, protecting only from "unreasonable" search and seizure... The ACLU applies a logical tool of "reducit ad absurdum" to the obvious interpretation of the Second Amendment, to make it seem unreasonable, without applying the same rigour to their own position on the First. I don't believe the Second guarantees the right to nuclear weapons - nor do I believe the First guarantees a right to child pornography or sending death threats. If they want to ignore the Second entirely, they can, but they should not attack it like that when their own position falls to the same logic: people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones...
Already done (the tax incentive bit) - you get (depending on the state) part of the cost paid by a grant, a break on property tax, and any excess electricity is often bought back by the utility at retail price (i.e. if you generate a total of X units/month, and use X units/month, you pay $0 - effectively getting to use the utility as a free giant battery). There's a major problem with increased solar cell sales, though: current solar cells use waste silicon wafers from semiconductor manufacture. Once you exhaust that supply - there are only a finite number of substandard wafers produced - you have to start paying the full price, putting solar cell prices up dramatically.
Add to that fuel cells in the basement to store excess power for use at night or in cloudy weather. (It should be noted that, contrary to common belief, solar roof systems do work in cloudy weather.)
They don't work too well at night, though - and trying to store power is very inefficient and expensive. (Someone linked to suitable batteries; one which could deliver a little over 100W through the night was $399. Painful.)
Every house should be able to coast for a few days on stored power during a blackout.
You want to store a few days worth of power?! Even the hardened, 100% self-sufficient solar/wind junkies don't attempt that. I'd also worry about what kind of problem you're planning for which would prevent the sun appearing for a couple of days ;-)
I'm surprised Mr. Bush did not announce a package of tax incentives to make these things a reality. But, I suppose that he takes a corporate, big oil point of view; simply swap hydrogen for petroleum and keep the existing infrastructure.
More accurately, he takes a pragmatic view: current batteries cost far, far more than the equivalent power station per kW, and that's just to store power rather than produce it!
A tax incentive for hybrid gas-electric cars would be nice, too. Cut oil consumption and solve so many other problems: dependence on nasty Arab dictators, greenhouse pollution, etc.
Again, already done. I'd prefer a strong move away from fossil-fuel power stations; if you scrapped them all, the only countries the US would be importing oil from outside North America would be the UK and Norway, without removing a single SUV or selling a single extra hybrid car. Or you feed America's agricultural waste (which is currently a pollution issue itself) into this - and make America the biggest oil producer on earth, making it entirely self-sufficient for oil at current consumption levels. No more oil imports from Canada, let alone the Middle East! Combine the two, and...
Yes, just look how easy it was for the Coalition to get rid of the remaining Hussein supporters. Or how easy it was for Hussein to oppress the Shi'a in the south of Iraq, or the Kurds in the North: despite his vast army, with tanks, artillery etc (no match for the US or Britain, but easily a match for any civilian) he only kept any control over the Shi'a by slaughtering more than 200,000 in one go - and lost control of the Kurdish areas entirely.
Invading a country, even if every single civilian is armed to the teeth, is pretty easy once you defeat the regular army. Occupying it, against the will of those people, is virtually impossible if they're well armed: you can invade from inside a tank, but you can't occupy without getting out and interacting with people - at which point, you can start getting picked off, one by one. MOABs, B-52s, F-18s and Tomahawks are all completely useless for suppressing a civilian uprising: short of eliminating the population with a massive nuclear bombardment, you just can't do it.
Considering Baghdad had backup generators for their water plants, I'd be surprised if anywhere in the West didn't. (OTOH, the power's rather more reliable; perhaps Western power plants are more likely to take reliable power for granted...)
Weird coincidence: the kitchen (fluorescent) light here refused to light for a moment. No connection, I'm sure (dodgy starter, I suspect - it's old) - just weird timing!
Nope. You aren't allowed to break access control measures used to enforce copyright - i.e. CSS, cable/satellite scrambled channels, console games. Reverse engineering the APIs used by Word doesn't come under that heading.
Next step will be for Intel/AMD to move the decryption step to INSIDE THE PROCESSOR, where noone can get at the clear text.
Done (X-box), except MS screwed up part of the design so it can be circumvented with an external modchip.
Correct: the patent treaty was signed in Geneva (but not named after Geneva, for obvious reasons!)
And patent laws are national laws, IMHO there no international rules.
The delegates who met in Geneva on June 1, 2000 to sign the Patent Law Treaty would be surprised to learn that. (There are various other, prior treaties referred to by that treaty, but this seems to be the most recent.)
So: patent law is indeed provided for by international treaties, as with copyright.
Including the US, as it happens, which is how Compaq created the first clone of the PC BIOS. The DMCA bars breaking access control systems, not reverse-engineering software. In some cases (software DVD players) the two overlap, but usually it's clear: reverse-engineering Office to make it work properly under Wine is fine, cracking CSS to make a DVD player isn't (you need to license the relevant algorithm, not just copy it from someone who has). The one caveat is that reverse-engineering a patented system doesn't give you any right to copy it: you still need a patent license. That's not US law, though, it's international law (Berne convention?)