The current relationship Taiwan vs. China is a little more complex.
Both say they China: the first is the Republic of China (yes that is the official name of Taiwan!, the second is the People's Republic of China.
This is giving problems with diplomatic recognition: if a country wants to set up diplomatic relations with China, should they choose the ROC or the PRC? Apparently both is not possible (I don't know really why that is - they probably don't allow it from each other).
So negotiations between these two governments are also problematic. They agree that there is only one China in this world, and that the mainland and Taiwan belong to that one China, and they agree that they disagree about who represents that one China.
The US may think they're global police, but they are not.
A proper police force is controlled by their government, and is enforcing laws and regulation stipulated by that government. If the US is the world police, then the UN is the world government. And it's not that the US seem to care too much of what the UN thinks.
Just 22 days of world peace I think is a pretty bad record. No matter the record before, it's a bad record. If something is improved, it's not necessarily good.
However the US has more of a history of going to the other side of the globe to fight a war. Vietnam, Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind. Europe and Japan a little longer ago. Even modern-day crazies like North Korea and Iran primarily target their neighbours.
I'd say Iraq and Afghanistan with their US installed governments are the odd ones out.
Russia following China is not that strange. Russia and China are major trade partners: Siberia with its huge amount of natural resources (wood, ores, etc) is just north of China. China needs the resources, Russia needs the money. So it makes sense that Russia follows China. And it goes against the US as bonus.
It is in a way interesting how these cables get so much more attention than the war records.
Sure there is funny stuff in it, diplomats speaking their heart instead of their mind, and so on. But nothing in those cables that I have seen so far comes as an absolute surprise, more as a confirmation of what we suspected already (like how countries think about each other).
Yet those war records I would expect are much more of a can of worms. Full of records of mistakes by the US army that were covered up, denied, lied about. Those mistakes may or may not be war crimes; the covering up surely should be a crime.
But has any official resigned because of it? Has any trial been opened? I may have missed something but I haven't read or heard anything about it. It is as if these war records are received by the world as "yawn, boring" and quickly forgotten about.
Maybe it's how we think about violence as something normal. Depicting it on TV all the time. Even children's cartoons tend to be pretty violent, with plentiful "collateral damage". I don't know. It just makes me think.
When intelligence and government appear in the same sentence, the word "intelligence" still doesn't mean what you think it means. So they can just as well stick to "intel". Shorter words make better headlines.
Apparently the government doesn't take security as seriously as game software companies do.
What you describe I would expect the Pentagon to have in place already, indeed.
I think the difference is that your game company is highly motivated because if it goes wrong, the people in charge lose their jobs and the owners of the company lose their investment. There is potentially a lot of money at stake - current investment and future earnings, so there is a lot of motivation to get this right.
Now compare that to the Pentagon. They don't have that motivation. The worst risk for the people in charge there is to be demoted to a less important, yet still very well paid position. Far less at stake.
GPS on a berry farm seems like overkill. Install a two or three local RF beacons. Triangulate off of them.
GPS is probably cheaper and more reliable. Saves you on installing those beacons, and saves you the required calibration. GPS receivers are dirt cheap these days and very accurate, and farms being out in the open tend to have excellent reception.
Depends on your locality, but in Hong Kong strawberries are luxury goods. Only available in winter (then it's cold enough for them to grow), and at really high prices due to limited space to grow them, and requirement of import from far away.
To save cost, some local farms (yes there are farms in Hong Kong) organise "pick your own" days, where the customer can come to the farm and pick the strawberries they want to buy themselves.
I know it's a hot item in the US now, but in the long run globalisation is good for all, it makes everyone richer. Look at the US for example: the richest country in the world, and largely thanks to the enormous international trade in goods and services.
In the short term these developments may cost jobs - in the long term they tend to gain jobs and improve the economy. After all with mechanisation it's the low-end jobs (where little money is made) that are cut, creating more higher-end jobs (where more money is made). Or to say it in a different way: mechanisation frees up people that were doing low-end, low value-added activities before.
Japan has a worse problem than the US - an aging, rather rich population, that is not willing to do boring jobs like picking fruit. In many countries the harvest of crops is a big problem: it needs a lot of temporary, low-paid, hard-working labour.
That means first of all you need sufficient unemployment to have people available in the first place. OK the US has them now, but that's not the point here. Many of those unemployed are far from the farms, or don't want to work there in the first place. Many countries now import labour for the harvest, like Thai people traveling to Sweden late summer for the berries harvest. Or indeed Mexicans in the US, and Poles to the western EU (Netherlands, Germany at least).
Japan is quite closed a society, import of labour is not so easy. Taiwan is another point in case: they have a lot of agriculture but also a problem finding the labourers to harvest the crops. So just for their farms to survive they need all the help they can get - and mechanical hands can be a very useful help indeed.
These robots may be a great development. Not just for delicacies like strawberries, but also for other fruits, like apples, oranges, plums, whatever.
I suppose strawberries are a nice starting point because they grow on small plants, are easy to recognise when ripe (bright colour - apples are less distinct), and are a high-margin product so there is money available for this kind of research.
2002 was when the dust had settled on the browser wars. Before FF was useful (or however it was called back then). Before Safari was a serious contender. Before Google even thought of building their own browser.
But Microsoft also very much knew that the web browser was going to be the platform of the future - not the operating system. The underlying OS they knew would become irrelevant. And by allowing the browser to develop faster they would only help to make that happen.
In 2002 it was definitely not in MS's interest to really develop the web client as a platform. Now it's 2010, times have changed a lot, now they have to.
The browser is quickly becoming the platform they feared it would be. Nothing needs to be on the client any more. MS Office can be replaced by Google Docs. Media Player by Youtube. MSN messenger by Facebook. And so on. And on the desktop itself they also have serious competition from OpenOffice, Firefox, and other often FOSS software. There is no need to use MS software (other maybe for backwards compatibility with your old data and people that have not switched yet). The OS is rapidly becoming irrelevant. MS finally is forced to innovate again, better late than never, and I hope for them they haven't forgotten on how to do it. But the lock-in they used to have, that's gone forever.
I don't think your argument has much to do with html5 as such. Yes hover and so are an issue for touch screen devices; this is a problem that may have to be solved another way. It's tricky: a mouse-based interface and a touch-based interface simply both have their issues. Like multi-touch gestures that have no mouse equivalent.
Then the presentation point: yes that's a problem, I'm experiencing that myself. The problem lies with the web developers: they want to control the presentation, That the web site looks pixel-perfect. Just browse through related discussions on/., on the merits of CSS, the incompatibilities of various browsers, the different interpretations in browsers of certain CSS directives, where one browser puts an element a pixel further to the left than another browser, and that must be fixed. Complaints that a client may have different fonts, adn thus that you have to limit yourself to "safe" fonts so at least it all looks alike.
So the problem lies with web developers wanting the web page to look exactly like they intend to. They will do their best that the web page looks the same to the last pixel in 20 different browsers. And that of course leaves little to no room for a browser to become creative with a page and render it differently.
And actually you have the same mind set when it comes to web pages: asking for a page that's formatted for your specific screen size, whatever that may be. Then you're making it worse, because screen size - and pixel size, dictating number of pixels to get a certain size and readability - varies per device. The various iPhone incarnations have roughly the same screen size, however their pixel sizes vary a lot. So if say a 10px letter would be the minimum readable size on the first iPhone, it's probably not readable at all on the latest iPhone model.
The only solution lies in proper use of html and css, and allowing the browser on client side to take care of the presentation. Then it also works fine when the browser is not set to full-screen for example.
Aether was coined by just those PhD's or whatever they were called at the time. It is not that they were fully correct there either.
I know I'm not smarter than them; I acknowledge that there are problems with the current models, but this "dark matter" sounds simply like a something made up just to make things add up. It's not even sure whether there is indeed more matter out there, or that the theories are simply plain wrong. Or both.
Just because someone has PhD in front of his name doesn't mean they're always right, or that we should just believe them without further thought.
Some 25 GB is my e-mail archive - about 8 years of mails, lots and lots of attachments. Some 5 GB personal photos. A little bit of software that I wrote. And the rest is my documentation (invoices, contracts, finances, etc).
Oh and a bit for my ldap database with all my customer's and supplier's contact information, the/etc tree, and some other system bits to make re-install easier.
I was more thinking of taking that stick back home, have four of them or so, and rotate. Losing office and home (about 10 km apart) at the same time is not likely.
I understand what you do there. Two problems I have with it:
1) Data that is stored "out there" is to be encrypted, before it's sent out. Do updates work that way in the first place? You can not decrypt data while it's out - storing your decryption key out there with your data pretty much beats the purpose.
2) Archiving. I prefer to keep at least four monthly backups. So if one backup is broken likely the other three are still OK, and against accidental deletion that is found out about only much later.
The primary show stopper for me is the upload speed. It's just too long. I had a quick look at it; Amazon is looking at the TB range for storage and the GB range for transfers. Most of the charges are for transfers, not for storage.
When you have a 100 Mb pipe to the Internet, yes then it's getting interesting. 1 GB then takes you 1 1/2 minutes, instead of over an hour it takes for me. For your average home connection it's worse, for those people it's simply not an option. To me it seems mainly targeting mid sized companies: large enough to produce a lot of data that they want to keep archived really well, not big enough to want to invest in special equipment like tapes, drives, and safe storage facilities (tape safe; preferably off-site increasing cost even more due to physical transport).
Amazon et. al. while cheap and off-site and probably pretty secure would require encryption at least. I don't want unencrypted data there. Makes it a bit more cumbersome.
The killer is going to be the upload. I've 2 Mbit up, uploading my data set to Amazon would saturate my pipe for about 55 hours straight. And that's a show stopper.
I'm slowly looking for 64GB USB drives. They exist but the local shop has only 32 GB, so have to look further. That's a much easier solution than Amazon.
If you have to set up your own network from scratch, good luck entering the market as newcomer without heaps of cash. Which is why many countries, especially in Europe, have legislated that the cables are open to anyone.
As a result a few big and numerous small players offering ADSL connections - all over the cables of the (former) monopoly telephone provider, who is obliged to rent them out at pre-set prices. Keeps service quality up, and prices down.
Same can be done with mobile networks (telephone and data). I know of the existence of "virtual network" mobile companies, using another company's network. Not sure about legislation in that field though. The big difference of course is that in the old days the telephone networks were built with huge government subsidies given to a state-appointed monopolist, which is now usually privatised. Not so with (most) mobile networks which were privately developed.
Now if only the US government would implement some of such legislation, then the US could escape from the backwaters of both mobile phone technology and broadband Internet services.
Do you remember the early days of the ISP? The days of dial-up only? Mobile data is in that stage now.
Those days you would routinely see plans of "five hours a month, extra fee per hour of usage". When it comes to Internet use, data and time are related measures. Now they measure data; with dial-up they measured time. And it's not that no-one was using the Internet! It was growing really fast, many people buying computers and modems just to be able to go on-line.
Then the unlimited plans came: fixed price for unlimited access time. At first it caused great problems by overloading the phone networks, requiring upgrades there. Took a few years to fix, then all was fine.
Mobile data will go the same way. Sooner or later unlimited will be the norm. Now they have capacity problems, when that's out of the way the unlimited plans will come.
Slashdot Mirror
The current relationship Taiwan vs. China is a little more complex.
Both say they China: the first is the Republic of China (yes that is the official name of Taiwan!, the second is the People's Republic of China.
This is giving problems with diplomatic recognition: if a country wants to set up diplomatic relations with China, should they choose the ROC or the PRC? Apparently both is not possible (I don't know really why that is - they probably don't allow it from each other).
So negotiations between these two governments are also problematic. They agree that there is only one China in this world, and that the mainland and Taiwan belong to that one China, and they agree that they disagree about who represents that one China.
The US may think they're global police, but they are not.
A proper police force is controlled by their government, and is enforcing laws and regulation stipulated by that government. If the US is the world police, then the UN is the world government. And it's not that the US seem to care too much of what the UN thinks.
Just 22 days of world peace I think is a pretty bad record. No matter the record before, it's a bad record. If something is improved, it's not necessarily good.
Definitely; not going to deny that.
However the US has more of a history of going to the other side of the globe to fight a war. Vietnam, Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan come to mind. Europe and Japan a little longer ago. Even modern-day crazies like North Korea and Iran primarily target their neighbours.
I'd say Iraq and Afghanistan with their US installed governments are the odd ones out.
Russia following China is not that strange. Russia and China are major trade partners: Siberia with its huge amount of natural resources (wood, ores, etc) is just north of China. China needs the resources, Russia needs the money. So it makes sense that Russia follows China. And it goes against the US as bonus.
It is in a way interesting how these cables get so much more attention than the war records.
Sure there is funny stuff in it, diplomats speaking their heart instead of their mind, and so on. But nothing in those cables that I have seen so far comes as an absolute surprise, more as a confirmation of what we suspected already (like how countries think about each other).
Yet those war records I would expect are much more of a can of worms. Full of records of mistakes by the US army that were covered up, denied, lied about. Those mistakes may or may not be war crimes; the covering up surely should be a crime.
But has any official resigned because of it? Has any trial been opened? I may have missed something but I haven't read or heard anything about it. It is as if these war records are received by the world as "yawn, boring" and quickly forgotten about.
Maybe it's how we think about violence as something normal. Depicting it on TV all the time. Even children's cartoons tend to be pretty violent, with plentiful "collateral damage". I don't know. It just makes me think.
When intelligence and government appear in the same sentence, the word "intelligence" still doesn't mean what you think it means. So they can just as well stick to "intel". Shorter words make better headlines.
Apparently the government doesn't take security as seriously as game software companies do.
What you describe I would expect the Pentagon to have in place already, indeed.
I think the difference is that your game company is highly motivated because if it goes wrong, the people in charge lose their jobs and the owners of the company lose their investment. There is potentially a lot of money at stake - current investment and future earnings, so there is a lot of motivation to get this right.
Now compare that to the Pentagon. They don't have that motivation. The worst risk for the people in charge there is to be demoted to a less important, yet still very well paid position. Far less at stake.
Yes indeed the automation we have seen over the last 150 years or so has put us all out of work and made us all really poor, right?
I'd say it's thanks to automation that people have the money and the time to use web sites like this one to begin with.
GPS on a berry farm seems like overkill. Install a two or three local RF beacons. Triangulate off of them.
GPS is probably cheaper and more reliable. Saves you on installing those beacons, and saves you the required calibration. GPS receivers are dirt cheap these days and very accurate, and farms being out in the open tend to have excellent reception.
Depends on your locality, but in Hong Kong strawberries are luxury goods. Only available in winter (then it's cold enough for them to grow), and at really high prices due to limited space to grow them, and requirement of import from far away.
To save cost, some local farms (yes there are farms in Hong Kong) organise "pick your own" days, where the customer can come to the farm and pick the strawberries they want to buy themselves.
I know it's a hot item in the US now, but in the long run globalisation is good for all, it makes everyone richer. Look at the US for example: the richest country in the world, and largely thanks to the enormous international trade in goods and services.
In the short term these developments may cost jobs - in the long term they tend to gain jobs and improve the economy. After all with mechanisation it's the low-end jobs (where little money is made) that are cut, creating more higher-end jobs (where more money is made). Or to say it in a different way: mechanisation frees up people that were doing low-end, low value-added activities before.
Japan has a worse problem than the US - an aging, rather rich population, that is not willing to do boring jobs like picking fruit. In many countries the harvest of crops is a big problem: it needs a lot of temporary, low-paid, hard-working labour.
That means first of all you need sufficient unemployment to have people available in the first place. OK the US has them now, but that's not the point here. Many of those unemployed are far from the farms, or don't want to work there in the first place. Many countries now import labour for the harvest, like Thai people traveling to Sweden late summer for the berries harvest. Or indeed Mexicans in the US, and Poles to the western EU (Netherlands, Germany at least).
Japan is quite closed a society, import of labour is not so easy. Taiwan is another point in case: they have a lot of agriculture but also a problem finding the labourers to harvest the crops. So just for their farms to survive they need all the help they can get - and mechanical hands can be a very useful help indeed.
These robots may be a great development. Not just for delicacies like strawberries, but also for other fruits, like apples, oranges, plums, whatever.
I suppose strawberries are a nice starting point because they grow on small plants, are easy to recognise when ripe (bright colour - apples are less distinct), and are a high-margin product so there is money available for this kind of research.
2002 was when the dust had settled on the browser wars. Before FF was useful (or however it was called back then). Before Safari was a serious contender. Before Google even thought of building their own browser.
But Microsoft also very much knew that the web browser was going to be the platform of the future - not the operating system. The underlying OS they knew would become irrelevant. And by allowing the browser to develop faster they would only help to make that happen.
In 2002 it was definitely not in MS's interest to really develop the web client as a platform. Now it's 2010, times have changed a lot, now they have to.
The browser is quickly becoming the platform they feared it would be. Nothing needs to be on the client any more. MS Office can be replaced by Google Docs. Media Player by Youtube. MSN messenger by Facebook. And so on. And on the desktop itself they also have serious competition from OpenOffice, Firefox, and other often FOSS software. There is no need to use MS software (other maybe for backwards compatibility with your old data and people that have not switched yet). The OS is rapidly becoming irrelevant. MS finally is forced to innovate again, better late than never, and I hope for them they haven't forgotten on how to do it. But the lock-in they used to have, that's gone forever.
I don't think your argument has much to do with html5 as such. Yes hover and so are an issue for touch screen devices; this is a problem that may have to be solved another way. It's tricky: a mouse-based interface and a touch-based interface simply both have their issues. Like multi-touch gestures that have no mouse equivalent.
Then the presentation point: yes that's a problem, I'm experiencing that myself. The problem lies with the web developers: they want to control the presentation, That the web site looks pixel-perfect. Just browse through related discussions on /., on the merits of CSS, the incompatibilities of various browsers, the different interpretations in browsers of certain CSS directives, where one browser puts an element a pixel further to the left than another browser, and that must be fixed. Complaints that a client may have different fonts, adn thus that you have to limit yourself to "safe" fonts so at least it all looks alike.
So the problem lies with web developers wanting the web page to look exactly like they intend to. They will do their best that the web page looks the same to the last pixel in 20 different browsers. And that of course leaves little to no room for a browser to become creative with a page and render it differently.
And actually you have the same mind set when it comes to web pages: asking for a page that's formatted for your specific screen size, whatever that may be. Then you're making it worse, because screen size - and pixel size, dictating number of pixels to get a certain size and readability - varies per device. The various iPhone incarnations have roughly the same screen size, however their pixel sizes vary a lot. So if say a 10px letter would be the minimum readable size on the first iPhone, it's probably not readable at all on the latest iPhone model.
The only solution lies in proper use of html and css, and allowing the browser on client side to take care of the presentation. Then it also works fine when the browser is not set to full-screen for example.
Aether was coined by just those PhD's or whatever they were called at the time. It is not that they were fully correct there either.
I know I'm not smarter than them; I acknowledge that there are problems with the current models, but this "dark matter" sounds simply like a something made up just to make things add up. It's not even sure whether there is indeed more matter out there, or that the theories are simply plain wrong. Or both.
Just because someone has PhD in front of his name doesn't mean they're always right, or that we should just believe them without further thought.
Yes that is important data.
Some 25 GB is my e-mail archive - about 8 years of mails, lots and lots of attachments. Some 5 GB personal photos. A little bit of software that I wrote. And the rest is my documentation (invoices, contracts, finances, etc).
Oh and a bit for my ldap database with all my customer's and supplier's contact information, the /etc tree, and some other system bits to make re-install easier.
Exactly, my idea too.
I was more thinking of taking that stick back home, have four of them or so, and rotate. Losing office and home (about 10 km apart) at the same time is not likely.
I understand what you do there. Two problems I have with it:
1) Data that is stored "out there" is to be encrypted, before it's sent out. Do updates work that way in the first place? You can not decrypt data while it's out - storing your decryption key out there with your data pretty much beats the purpose.
2) Archiving. I prefer to keep at least four monthly backups. So if one backup is broken likely the other three are still OK, and against accidental deletion that is found out about only much later.
The primary show stopper for me is the upload speed. It's just too long. I had a quick look at it; Amazon is looking at the TB range for storage and the GB range for transfers. Most of the charges are for transfers, not for storage.
When you have a 100 Mb pipe to the Internet, yes then it's getting interesting. 1 GB then takes you 1 1/2 minutes, instead of over an hour it takes for me. For your average home connection it's worse, for those people it's simply not an option. To me it seems mainly targeting mid sized companies: large enough to produce a lot of data that they want to keep archived really well, not big enough to want to invest in special equipment like tapes, drives, and safe storage facilities (tape safe; preferably off-site increasing cost even more due to physical transport).
How are you going to make a payment to Somalia?
I doubt they have a working banking system.
Making overseas payments of such small amounts is anyway an issue: bank charges can literally make half that amount disappear en route.
Amazon et. al. while cheap and off-site and probably pretty secure would require encryption at least. I don't want unencrypted data there. Makes it a bit more cumbersome.
The killer is going to be the upload. I've 2 Mbit up, uploading my data set to Amazon would saturate my pipe for about 55 hours straight. And that's a show stopper.
I'm slowly looking for 64GB USB drives. They exist but the local shop has only 32 GB, so have to look further. That's a much easier solution than Amazon.
Exactly.
It makes me wonder how come this kind of scams still work, I mean everyone is backing up their data on off-line media, right? Right? Oh, wait...
If you have to set up your own network from scratch, good luck entering the market as newcomer without heaps of cash. Which is why many countries, especially in Europe, have legislated that the cables are open to anyone.
As a result a few big and numerous small players offering ADSL connections - all over the cables of the (former) monopoly telephone provider, who is obliged to rent them out at pre-set prices. Keeps service quality up, and prices down.
Same can be done with mobile networks (telephone and data). I know of the existence of "virtual network" mobile companies, using another company's network. Not sure about legislation in that field though. The big difference of course is that in the old days the telephone networks were built with huge government subsidies given to a state-appointed monopolist, which is now usually privatised. Not so with (most) mobile networks which were privately developed.
Now if only the US government would implement some of such legislation, then the US could escape from the backwaters of both mobile phone technology and broadband Internet services.
Do you remember the early days of the ISP? The days of dial-up only? Mobile data is in that stage now.
Those days you would routinely see plans of "five hours a month, extra fee per hour of usage". When it comes to Internet use, data and time are related measures. Now they measure data; with dial-up they measured time. And it's not that no-one was using the Internet! It was growing really fast, many people buying computers and modems just to be able to go on-line.
Then the unlimited plans came: fixed price for unlimited access time. At first it caused great problems by overloading the phone networks, requiring upgrades there. Took a few years to fix, then all was fine.
Mobile data will go the same way. Sooner or later unlimited will be the norm. Now they have capacity problems, when that's out of the way the unlimited plans will come.