Stephen Hawking: I would not be alive without the NHS. This was his response to the amusing mistake by U.S. financial newspaper Investor's Business Daily, which claimed that Stephen Hawking was American, and that if Stephen Hawking were British, he would be dead.
The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof, are legendary," read a recent editorial from the paper. "The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror script...
"People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."
This graph is more interesting - it shows Co2 emissions per capita against population (so area of rectange = absolute emissions). Being able to compare the area visually gives a better indication as to the degree of the problem in each nation. This graph shows another interesting thing - responsibility for cumulative/historical co2 emissions. Since co2 stays in the air for 50 to 100 years, the vast majority of co2 that is in the air right now was actually put there by the nations that were industrialised throughout the last century - ie. the US and Western Europe.
btw. The author of that book also addresses the issue of China:
What about China, that naughty “out of control”
country? Yes, the area of China’s rectangle is about the same as the USA’s,
but the fact is that their per-capita emissions are below the world average.
India’s per-capita emissions are less than half the world average. Moreover,
it’s worth bearing in mind that much of the industrial emissions of China
and India are associated with the manufacture of stuff for rich countries.
So, assuming that “something needs to be done” to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions, who has a special responsibility to do something? As I
said, that’s an ethical question. But I find it hard to imagine any system
of ethics that denies that the responsibility falls especially on the countries to the left hand side of this diagram – the countries whose emissions are
two, three, or four times the world average. Countries that are most able
to pay. Countries like Britain and the USA, for example.
Whether "it is fair to share CO2 emission rights equally across the world's population" is an ethical question, as is the question of who should pay to clean up a problem like this, but it is hard to construct a moral argument that a Westerner should be entitled to emit more co2 than a person born in another nation. Why should we have this entitlement?
According to B'Tselem, of the 6,484 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of the Second Intifada, 3,036 did not take part in hostilities while 2,248 did so. The remainder (950 individuals) were either police officers killed at their police stations or otherwise uncertain as to whether they took part in the hostilities. 1,329 (20,5 percent) of those killed were minors. A further 53 Palestinians were killed by Israeli civilians.
B'Tselem is an Israeli non-governmental organization (NGO). It calls itself "The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories". The group was founded on February 3, 1989 by a group of prominent Israeli public figures, including lawyers, academics, journalists, and members of the Knesset.
B'Tselem is Israeli, it was founded by respected prominent Israelis, and it says 1329 Palestinian children were killed by Israelis in the second intifada, and that children were 20% of the total Palestinians killed. They also say that the majority of all Palestinians killed took no part in hostilities ie. most of the people killed by the Israeli military were civilians. Odd that you were moderated up to +5, when you offer no evidence for your personal opinion, and it is contrary to all the established evidence from both sides in the conflict.
Secondly, last I recall, citizens in other countries don't fear being blown up, shot, kidnapped, and tortured by Israelis.
Do citizens of Gaza and the West Bank count?
you do realize that the enemies of Israel such as Egypt actually receive more US aid.
Incorrect. Israel gets $3 billion per year. Egypt gets $1.3 billion. Israel has a population of 7.6 million. Egypt has 81 million. So per capita aid is many times higher for Israel.
The goal of terrorism is to effect geopolitical change by making people experience terror. If this hacker has geopolitical goals and the Israelis are terrified by his actions, then he is a terrorist. But it seems unlikely that having credit card details stolen would make a person feel terror.
And would Microsoft really want to spend the claimed $19 billion [businessinsider.com] on a division that has yet to prove that anybody wants to buy one of their Windows phones?
Just to add to this point: Microsoft paid $8.5 billion for Skype, a company that has never made a profit, and is not expected to any time soon. These kind of purchases are strategic, and aim to expand market share indirectly by forming synergies between different products; they don't have to be directly profitable in the short-term.
And would Microsoft really want to spend the claimed $19 billion [businessinsider.com] on a division that has yet to prove that anybody wants to buy one of their Windows phones?
Why not? How many billions do you think Microsoft spent on its Xbox division before it became profitable? Remember that originally they were going up against the established behemoths of the videogames industry: Sony and Nintendo. There was no guarantee that Xbox would ever be successful. It was estimated at the time that MS was absorbing $1 to $2 billion of losses in the first year alone just on subsidising Xbox console sales. There have been increasing calls from investors for MS to either put its cash into expansion, or start paying dividends. This would be an expansion. Don't forget that Nokia's patents will have value - MS has already paid billions for a patent war chest elsewhere, maybe they want more? They might even be able to nail Android manufacturers with increased patent fees.
And Nokia have the connections with the carriers that is required to get the phones into the retail system.
Obviously not, or else Lumia sales would be higher than 0.17%.
HTC, LG, and Samsung would feel happy about Microsoft moving into their territory.
WP7 is selling terribly, and those manufacturers don't appear really committed since they are hedging their bets by selling Android devices - HTC and Samsung being two of the most popular Android brands. The fact that they are selling tens of millions of Android devices per annum and very few WP7 devices can't have failed to attract Microsoft's attention.
is an expensive risk, and provides no benefit considering that Nokia are already committed to selling Microsoft's platform now.
It's only expensive if they fail. The risk is there, but given that WP7 hasn't broken single digits of market share yet, and sales rate has actually been reported to be decreasing, they don't really seem to have very many options. Quitting on the smartphone market is unacceptable, struggling along with single digit market share is ridiculous, they need some new strategy to compete with iPhone and Android. And I think they still want to be a hardware/software company, so they would prefer to try and emulate Apple and its large profits than to give away the bulk of their software for free and rely on secondary income like Google. This is very similar to the Xbox model, which MS has already made successful - if, in an alternative universe, MS had only produced an Xbox OS for multiple manufacturers of hardware platforms to integrate, do you think it would have done as well? There is a synergy. Obviously the two markets are not the same, so MS may still fail now, but if Balmer thinks the Xbox model works, then why wouldn't he go for it?
Yes, and it's more that that - it's a philosophical argument about what exactly the "internet" is. Is it the people? Is it the web sites? Is it free (as in speech) communications? Is it unfiltered? Is it the technology - routers and cables? Is it a composite of all of these things? What is the internet?
Perhaps we can define it by the effect of parts disappearing: if every web site disappeared overnight, or if the human species were wiped out overnight, then "the internet" as most people understand it would have gone. If every router magically disappeared, then the "internet" would have gone. If people in different cities could no longer communicate, then the "internet" would be gone.
If routers and cables and computers and LCD displays were replaced with wireless feeds direct to our brains, and web pages became some Matrix style AI experience, then would it still be the internet? Or something else?
You are assuming that this is a religious issue. In fact, it is entirely logical for the Iranian government to want nuclear weapons. Look at it from their point of view: You have regional enemies, several of which already have nuclear weapons, and some of which have called for attacks on your country. An aggressive and powerful foreign government is allied with these enemies, and has recently invaded and occupied two of your neighbors, rounding up and executing the leaders. Wouldn't you want nuclear weapons under those circumstances? Of course you would.
On your eastern border, the United States has 100,000 troops serving in Afghanistan. On your western border, the US has been occupying Iraq since 2003 and plans to retain a small force of military contractors and CIA operatives even after its official withdrawal next month. Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation, is to the south-east; Turkey, America's Nato ally, to the north-west; Turkmenistan, which has acted as a refuelling base for US military transport planes since 2002, to the north-east. To the south, across the Persian Gulf, you see a cluster of US client states: Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet; Qatar, host to a forward headquarters of US Central Command; Saudi Arabia, whose king has exhorted America to "attack Iran" and "cut off the head of the snake".
Then, of course, less than a thousand miles to the west, there is Israel, your mortal enemy, in possession of over a hundred nuclear warheads and with a history of pre-emptive aggression against its opponents. The map makes it clear: Iran is, literally, encircled by the United States and its allies.
Israel doesn't even consider Iran to be an existential threat:
Tamir Pardo says Israel using various means to foil Iran's nuclear program, but if Iran actually obtained nuclear weapons, it would not mean destruction of Israel.
However, when he starts brandishing the weapons around and threatening your family you call the cops and have him dealt with.
1. Does a nuclear Iran really pose any threat to the US? The idea that one small country could challenge the world's lone superpower seems absurd. Any nuclear attack on the US would result in the destruction of Iran. Everyone knows this, plus Iran doesn't even have weapons that could deliver a nuclear warhead to north America.
2. If someone invaded the houses of two of your neighbors and had them killed, and you said some bad things about this person, would the police really take away your guns and authorize your aggressive new neighbor to attack you? I was under the impression that the Second Amendment would prevent the police from doing this. And if the police would do this, then isn't that even more justification to want some weapons to protect against your violent new neighbor?
Can you name a single EU country that is self-sufficient in oil?
the UK
The UK is a net oil importer, and has been since around 2004. Output peaked in 1999 and has been declining since. ("The rate of decline has ranged from 6% to 17%, year-on-year.... The UK produced an average of 2.72 million barrels a day (mbpd) in 1999, hitting a high of 3.1 mbpd in August. But by June 2005 this had fallen to 1.7 mbpd, a drop of 34%.") Is UK oil output running on empty? )
Norway
Norway is not in the EU. It is a net oil exporter but exports have been declining since 1993. see Oil_production_Norwegian_North_Sea.png and oil-production-norway.gif. They hit peak oil in 2001, so reversal of this decline seems unlikely unless they can discover and bring big new fields online. (They will undoubtedly bring more small fields online, the issue is whether this will be enough to compensate for decline in the existing fields) Only 12% of European oil comes from Norway, and they do not have the production capacity to increase this significantly.
You are correct: if the supply of buyers can be restricted enough, then (from the Iranian perspective) there is a situation of decreased demand but level supply, which will cause short term effects of decreased exports and decreased purchase price. But in the longer term, an increased supply of cheap oil will benefit those nations that are willing to trade with Iran, leading to structural changes within those nations (larger ports, pipelines where possible etc.) Look at this graph of oil use per capita - clearly there is plenty of room for nations like China to consume more oil if their purchasing price falls, so they can then produce cheaper goods and sell them to us. (Obviously, we are happy to buy things made from the Iranian oil, just not buy it directly). There is also the issue of oil being fungible, it can just be routed and resold via other nations, although there will be some fall in efficiency.
So, as a long term strategy for debilitating Iran, this one does not seem so useful. Unless the actual goal is really something else (increase the oil price? increase politician's votes?).
Also never mind that lot of these countries are actually self-sufficient in oil needs too.
Can you name a single EU country that is self-sufficient in oil? EU is a net importer, it has to buy on the world market, restricting supply by refusing to buy from one country means that the price goes up (unless other suppliers have the motivation and resources to increase supply at no cost, which seems doubtful in this case).
OpenSource works for some, eg Redhat, but on the whole Open Source is devastating the software development and sell model.
Name a single software company that has been "devastated" by Open Source? As opposed to, say, failing to adapt their business model to a changing world, and increased competition from others? I can see the argument that companies like Sun lost out to Linux in the operating system market, but Sun was a hardware vendor (same with all of the Unix vendors really). There is an important difference between "competing in the market" and being "devastated". Competition is a reality, and perhaps these companies would've fared just as bad against a non-open source competitor?
Since 2000 the wages of the software industry as a developer have been driven down due to Open Source, and due to out sourcing.
You are cherry picking the single data point with the highest salary - the 2000 was the peak of the.com bubble, and y2k migration projects. Open source didn't cause the.com bubble/crash or y2k migration issues. Correlation is not causation - maybe the rise in open source usage was driven by companies looking for savings following the crash, rather than the crash being caused by open source, or perhaps there were more important factors at play?
Yes, some flawed statistics here. Mr. Nichols doesn't actually say how many paying customers he got, but then talks about a "rate" of under 20 asking for help. Without knowing what the total figure was this is impossible to evaluate. It also appears that he was charging for things that offered little extra benefit - a higher resolution image of the Santa letter. He concludes by saying he will switch the site to pay only - good luck with that.
Seamless experiences win out in the long term. We saw this when gaming moved from PCs to consoles in the 2000s, and it's happening now in the transition to the post-PC era.
Seamless experiences always win out over time. We saw it when gaming shifted from PCs to consoles, and now the industry is shifting from desktops to mobile devices.
These were both first posts in each respective story.
Agreed, and it is blatant. Here is one example. From the above "bonch" post:
Seamless experiences win out in the long term. We saw this when gaming moved from PCs to consoles in the 2000s, and it's happening now in the transition to the post-PC era.
Seamless experiences always win out over time. We saw it when gaming shifted from PCs to consoles, and now the industry is shifting from desktops to mobile devices. Fragmentation is a huge for users.
Afaik theatres actually earn more profit from selling popcorn and drinks than movie tickets. So if they have 500 people then profitable income is much higher than the ticket value alone would suggest. Also variable pricing is a win if you can maximise sales*ticket price+extras. Even if you have a fixed cost per unit (eg the actual value of ground coffee in a Starbucks cup) there should still be a little room for price variance. Whether it is worth the trouble to try and exploit that is another matter.
Funny yes, but having seen the activities of a real marketing department, nothing would surprise me. Fake "insider" blogs, fake customers web pages and blogs, using dodgy "seo" companies who spam random web sites with positive text about your products to try and increase page rank. It really does happen, and there are people who are making a good income from it.
It was known at the time amongst the intelligence community that the available material was being manipulated to make the case for war, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_Dossier
Major General Michael Laurie, one of those involved in producing the dossier wrote to the Chilcot inquiry in 2011 saying "the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care."[2] On 26 June 2011, The Guardian reported on a memo from John Scarlett to Blair's foreign affairs adviser, released under the Freedom of Information Act, which referred to "the benefit of obscuring the fact that in terms of WMD Iraq is not that exceptional". The memo has been described as one of the most significant documents on the September dossier yet published as it is considered a proposal to mislead the public.[3]
... a senior British official - had told him that the September Dossier had been "sexed up", and that the intelligence agencies were concerned about some "dubious" information contained within it - specifically the claim that Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of an order to use them.
A blockade may ordinarily be illegal under international law, but there are various exemptions and arguments that will be made both ways - arguments similar to those used during the Gaza blockade (or even legality of the Iraq war). It can also be argued that the US sanctions are themselves also illegal under international law (Ron Paul: Sanctions Against Iran Are an ‘Act of War’) as would a preemptive strike (which the US has threatened in the past).
In practice it isn't a problem. If your app is internationalised, then you email your English file to a translator and get back the translation strings, time depends on size obviously but typically a simple app translation is less than 20 minutes work. The cost and time of translators is insignificant compared to cost and time of programmers. Some companies use students for translations, paying minimum wage.
I'm not sure of your point in the first paragraph - are you suggesting that missile boats, fast attack craft etc. don't exist, or are ineffective for some reason? As for the rest, are you assuming that the US air force can identify and sink the majority of a 1000+ strong small boat fleet spread around the Strait (and probably elsewhere in the Gulf)? These boats may be hidden amongst tens of thousands of fishing boats, trade ships, and other legitimate vessels, and some of these shipping lanes are the most heavily trafficked in the world. The Strait is very narrow and exposed to a long Iranian coastline, making it difficult to guard. And with missiles that have a range of 100+km Iran could probably hit any vessel in the Strait even from land. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Hormuz
The stories of nukes in Iraq were lies at best, and a huge failure of US intelligence at worst.
Presented to U.S. officials by the Iraqi National Congress, a London-based exile group pushing for an American attack on Iraq, the defector says Saddam is close to finishing a long-range ballistic missile that could hit Cairo; Ankara; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Nicosia, Cyprus, or Tehran. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/658542/posts
That was what we were told in 2002. A decade on, we now know that those "intelligence" reports of WMDs from the INC were actually supplied by a double agent working for Iranian intelligence.
According to a US intelligence official, the CIA has hard evidence that Mr Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, passed US secrets to Tehran, and that Mr Habib has been a paid Iranian agent for several years, involved in passing intelligence in both directions. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/may/25/usa.iraq10
Oops. And what about those mobile bioweapon labs? It turned out that intelligence came from another unreliable source:
Despite warnings from the German Federal Intelligence Service questioning the authenticity of the claims, the US Government utilized them to build a rationale for military action in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, including in the 2003 State of the Union address, where President Bush said "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs", and Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council, which contained a computer generated image of a mobile biological weapons laboratory.[1][4] On November 4, 2007, 60 Minutes revealed Curveball's real identity.[5] Former CIA official Tyler Drumheller summed up Curveball as "a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)
The whole story was made up by one guy who wanted his immigration card, and yet - without any verification - it was used by the Bush administration to justify a war.
And since you brought it up, alll of the intelligence that linked Iraq to 911 was lies as well.... There was no Iraq Islamist link (well, at least until the coalition invaded and plunged the country into a bloody sectarian civil war)
Slashdot Mirror
The controlling of medical costs in countries such as Britain through rationing, and the health consequences thereof, are legendary," read a recent editorial from the paper. "The stories of people dying on a waiting list or being denied altogether read like a horror script...
"People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."
Stephen Hawking both British and not dead.
This graph is more interesting - it shows Co2 emissions per capita against population (so area of rectange = absolute emissions). Being able to compare the area visually gives a better indication as to the degree of the problem in each nation. This graph shows another interesting thing - responsibility for cumulative/historical co2 emissions. Since co2 stays in the air for 50 to 100 years, the vast majority of co2 that is in the air right now was actually put there by the nations that were industrialised throughout the last century - ie. the US and Western Europe.
btw. The author of that book also addresses the issue of China:
What about China, that naughty “out of control” country? Yes, the area of China’s rectangle is about the same as the USA’s, but the fact is that their per-capita emissions are below the world average. India’s per-capita emissions are less than half the world average. Moreover, it’s worth bearing in mind that much of the industrial emissions of China and India are associated with the manufacture of stuff for rich countries.
So, assuming that “something needs to be done” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, who has a special responsibility to do something? As I said, that’s an ethical question. But I find it hard to imagine any system of ethics that denies that the responsibility falls especially on the countries to the left hand side of this diagram – the countries whose emissions are two, three, or four times the world average. Countries that are most able to pay. Countries like Britain and the USA, for example.
Whether "it is fair to share CO2 emission rights equally across the world's population" is an ethical question, as is the question of who should pay to clean up a problem like this, but it is hard to construct a moral argument that a Westerner should be entitled to emit more co2 than a person born in another nation. Why should we have this entitlement?
the supposed civilian statistics thrown up by the palestinians are weighted EXTREMELY heavily towards males over the age of 14 and under 40.
And how do you account for the civilian statistics thrown up by the Israelis? Palestinian civilian casualities in the second intifada:
According to B'Tselem, of the 6,484 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of the Second Intifada, 3,036 did not take part in hostilities while 2,248 did so. The remainder (950 individuals) were either police officers killed at their police stations or otherwise uncertain as to whether they took part in the hostilities. 1,329 (20,5 percent) of those killed were minors. A further 53 Palestinians were killed by Israeli civilians.
B'Tselem is an Israeli non-governmental organization (NGO). It calls itself "The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories". The group was founded on February 3, 1989 by a group of prominent Israeli public figures, including lawyers, academics, journalists, and members of the Knesset.
B'Tselem is Israeli, it was founded by respected prominent Israelis, and it says 1329 Palestinian children were killed by Israelis in the second intifada, and that children were 20% of the total Palestinians killed. They also say that the majority of all Palestinians killed took no part in hostilities ie. most of the people killed by the Israeli military were civilians. Odd that you were moderated up to +5, when you offer no evidence for your personal opinion, and it is contrary to all the established evidence from both sides in the conflict.
Secondly, last I recall, citizens in other countries don't fear being blown up, shot, kidnapped, and tortured by Israelis.
Do citizens of Gaza and the West Bank count?
you do realize that the enemies of Israel such as Egypt actually receive more US aid.
Incorrect. Israel gets $3 billion per year. Egypt gets $1.3 billion. Israel has a population of 7.6 million. Egypt has 81 million. So per capita aid is many times higher for Israel.
The goal of terrorism is to effect geopolitical change by making people experience terror. If this hacker has geopolitical goals and the Israelis are terrified by his actions, then he is a terrorist. But it seems unlikely that having credit card details stolen would make a person feel terror.
And would Microsoft really want to spend the claimed $19 billion [businessinsider.com] on a division that has yet to prove that anybody wants to buy one of their Windows phones?
Just to add to this point: Microsoft paid $8.5 billion for Skype, a company that has never made a profit, and is not expected to any time soon. These kind of purchases are strategic, and aim to expand market share indirectly by forming synergies between different products; they don't have to be directly profitable in the short-term.
And would Microsoft really want to spend the claimed $19 billion [businessinsider.com] on a division that has yet to prove that anybody wants to buy one of their Windows phones?
Why not? How many billions do you think Microsoft spent on its Xbox division before it became profitable? Remember that originally they were going up against the established behemoths of the videogames industry: Sony and Nintendo. There was no guarantee that Xbox would ever be successful. It was estimated at the time that MS was absorbing $1 to $2 billion of losses in the first year alone just on subsidising Xbox console sales. There have been increasing calls from investors for MS to either put its cash into expansion, or start paying dividends. This would be an expansion. Don't forget that Nokia's patents will have value - MS has already paid billions for a patent war chest elsewhere, maybe they want more? They might even be able to nail Android manufacturers with increased patent fees.
And Nokia have the connections with the carriers that is required to get the phones into the retail system.
Obviously not, or else Lumia sales would be higher than 0.17%.
HTC, LG, and Samsung would feel happy about Microsoft moving into their territory.
WP7 is selling terribly, and those manufacturers don't appear really committed since they are hedging their bets by selling Android devices - HTC and Samsung being two of the most popular Android brands. The fact that they are selling tens of millions of Android devices per annum and very few WP7 devices can't have failed to attract Microsoft's attention.
is an expensive risk, and provides no benefit considering that Nokia are already committed to selling Microsoft's platform now.
It's only expensive if they fail. The risk is there, but given that WP7 hasn't broken single digits of market share yet, and sales rate has actually been reported to be decreasing, they don't really seem to have very many options. Quitting on the smartphone market is unacceptable, struggling along with single digit market share is ridiculous, they need some new strategy to compete with iPhone and Android. And I think they still want to be a hardware/software company, so they would prefer to try and emulate Apple and its large profits than to give away the bulk of their software for free and rely on secondary income like Google. This is very similar to the Xbox model, which MS has already made successful - if, in an alternative universe, MS had only produced an Xbox OS for multiple manufacturers of hardware platforms to integrate, do you think it would have done as well? There is a synergy. Obviously the two markets are not the same, so MS may still fail now, but if Balmer thinks the Xbox model works, then why wouldn't he go for it?
Yes, and it's more that that - it's a philosophical argument about what exactly the "internet" is. Is it the people? Is it the web sites? Is it free (as in speech) communications? Is it unfiltered? Is it the technology - routers and cables? Is it a composite of all of these things? What is the internet?
Perhaps we can define it by the effect of parts disappearing: if every web site disappeared overnight, or if the human species were wiped out overnight, then "the internet" as most people understand it would have gone. If every router magically disappeared, then the "internet" would have gone. If people in different cities could no longer communicate, then the "internet" would be gone.
If routers and cables and computers and LCD displays were replaced with wireless feeds direct to our brains, and web pages became some Matrix style AI experience, then would it still be the internet? Or something else?
You are assuming that this is a religious issue. In fact, it is entirely logical for the Iranian government to want nuclear weapons. Look at it from their point of view: You have regional enemies, several of which already have nuclear weapons, and some of which have called for attacks on your country. An aggressive and powerful foreign government is allied with these enemies, and has recently invaded and occupied two of your neighbors, rounding up and executing the leaders. Wouldn't you want nuclear weapons under those circumstances? Of course you would.
On your eastern border, the United States has 100,000 troops serving in Afghanistan. On your western border, the US has been occupying Iraq since 2003 and plans to retain a small force of military contractors and CIA operatives even after its official withdrawal next month. Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation, is to the south-east; Turkey, America's Nato ally, to the north-west; Turkmenistan, which has acted as a refuelling base for US military transport planes since 2002, to the north-east. To the south, across the Persian Gulf, you see a cluster of US client states: Bahrain, home to the US Fifth Fleet; Qatar, host to a forward headquarters of US Central Command; Saudi Arabia, whose king has exhorted America to "attack Iran" and "cut off the head of the snake".
Then, of course, less than a thousand miles to the west, there is Israel, your mortal enemy, in possession of over a hundred nuclear warheads and with a history of pre-emptive aggression against its opponents. The map makes it clear: Iran is, literally, encircled by the United States and its allies.
If you lived in Iran, wouldn't you want the nuclear bomb?
Israel doesn't even consider Iran to be an existential threat:
Tamir Pardo says Israel using various means to foil Iran's nuclear program, but if Iran actually obtained nuclear weapons, it would not mean destruction of Israel.
Mossad chief: Nuclear Iran not necessarily existential threat to Israel
However, when he starts brandishing the weapons around and threatening your family you call the cops and have him dealt with.
1. Does a nuclear Iran really pose any threat to the US? The idea that one small country could challenge the world's lone superpower seems absurd. Any nuclear attack on the US would result in the destruction of Iran. Everyone knows this, plus Iran doesn't even have weapons that could deliver a nuclear warhead to north America.
2. If someone invaded the houses of two of your neighbors and had them killed, and you said some bad things about this person, would the police really take away your guns and authorize your aggressive new neighbor to attack you? I was under the impression that the Second Amendment would prevent the police from doing this. And if the police would do this, then isn't that even more justification to want some weapons to protect against your violent new neighbor?
Can you name a single EU country that is self-sufficient in oil?
the UK
The UK is a net oil importer, and has been since around 2004. Output peaked in 1999 and has been declining since. ("The rate of decline has ranged from 6% to 17%, year-on-year.... The UK produced an average of 2.72 million barrels a day (mbpd) in 1999, hitting a high of 3.1 mbpd in August. But by June 2005 this had fallen to 1.7 mbpd, a drop of 34%.") Is UK oil output running on empty? )
Norway
Norway is not in the EU. It is a net oil exporter but exports have been declining since 1993. see Oil_production_Norwegian_North_Sea.png and oil-production-norway.gif. They hit peak oil in 2001, so reversal of this decline seems unlikely unless they can discover and bring big new fields online. (They will undoubtedly bring more small fields online, the issue is whether this will be enough to compensate for decline in the existing fields) Only 12% of European oil comes from Norway, and they do not have the production capacity to increase this significantly.
You are correct: if the supply of buyers can be restricted enough, then (from the Iranian perspective) there is a situation of decreased demand but level supply, which will cause short term effects of decreased exports and decreased purchase price. But in the longer term, an increased supply of cheap oil will benefit those nations that are willing to trade with Iran, leading to structural changes within those nations (larger ports, pipelines where possible etc.) Look at this graph of oil use per capita - clearly there is plenty of room for nations like China to consume more oil if their purchasing price falls, so they can then produce cheaper goods and sell them to us. (Obviously, we are happy to buy things made from the Iranian oil, just not buy it directly). There is also the issue of oil being fungible, it can just be routed and resold via other nations, although there will be some fall in efficiency.
So, as a long term strategy for debilitating Iran, this one does not seem so useful. Unless the actual goal is really something else (increase the oil price? increase politician's votes?).
There is not that much demand for oil,
Oh really? world oil demand 1996-2012.png
Also never mind that lot of these countries are actually self-sufficient in oil needs too.
Can you name a single EU country that is self-sufficient in oil? EU is a net importer, it has to buy on the world market, restricting supply by refusing to buy from one country means that the price goes up (unless other suppliers have the motivation and resources to increase supply at no cost, which seems doubtful in this case).
OpenSource works for some, eg Redhat, but on the whole Open Source is devastating the software development and sell model.
Name a single software company that has been "devastated" by Open Source? As opposed to, say, failing to adapt their business model to a changing world, and increased competition from others? I can see the argument that companies like Sun lost out to Linux in the operating system market, but Sun was a hardware vendor (same with all of the Unix vendors really). There is an important difference between "competing in the market" and being "devastated". Competition is a reality, and perhaps these companies would've fared just as bad against a non-open source competitor?
Since 2000 the wages of the software industry as a developer have been driven down due to Open Source, and due to out sourcing.
You are cherry picking the single data point with the highest salary - the 2000 was the peak of the .com bubble, and y2k migration projects. Open source didn't cause the .com bubble/crash or y2k migration issues. Correlation is not causation - maybe the rise in open source usage was driven by companies looking for savings following the crash, rather than the crash being caused by open source, or perhaps there were more important factors at play?
Yes, some flawed statistics here. Mr. Nichols doesn't actually say how many paying customers he got, but then talks about a "rate" of under 20 asking for help. Without knowing what the total figure was this is impossible to evaluate. It also appears that he was charging for things that offered little extra benefit - a higher resolution image of the Santa letter. He concludes by saying he will switch the site to pay only - good luck with that.
Seamless experiences win out in the long term. We saw this when gaming moved from PCs to consoles in the 2000s, and it's happening now in the transition to the post-PC era.
It's the business model, +5 Informative by Overly Critical Guy:
Seamless experiences always win out over time. We saw it when gaming shifted from PCs to consoles, and now the industry is shifting from desktops to mobile devices.
These were both first posts in each respective story.
Seamless experiences win out in the long term. We saw this when gaming moved from PCs to consoles in the 2000s, and it's happening now in the transition to the post-PC era.
It's the business model, +5 Informative by Overly Critical Guy:
Seamless experiences always win out over time. We saw it when gaming shifted from PCs to consoles, and now the industry is shifting from desktops to mobile devices. Fragmentation is a huge for users.
Such devices already exist, eg. the SolarMonkey.Supposedly it works okay.
Afaik theatres actually earn more profit from selling popcorn and drinks than movie tickets. So if they have 500 people then profitable income is much higher than the ticket value alone would suggest. Also variable pricing is a win if you can maximise sales*ticket price+extras. Even if you have a fixed cost per unit (eg the actual value of ground coffee in a Starbucks cup) there should still be a little room for price variance. Whether it is worth the trouble to try and exploit that is another matter.
Funny yes, but having seen the activities of a real marketing department, nothing would surprise me. Fake "insider" blogs, fake customers web pages and blogs, using dodgy "seo" companies who spam random web sites with positive text about your products to try and increase page rank. It really does happen, and there are people who are making a good income from it.
Major General Michael Laurie, one of those involved in producing the dossier wrote to the Chilcot inquiry in 2011 saying "the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care."[2] On 26 June 2011, The Guardian reported on a memo from John Scarlett to Blair's foreign affairs adviser, released under the Freedom of Information Act, which referred to "the benefit of obscuring the fact that in terms of WMD Iraq is not that exceptional". The memo has been described as one of the most significant documents on the September dossier yet published as it is considered a proposal to mislead the public.[3]
... a senior British official - had told him that the September Dossier had been "sexed up", and that the intelligence agencies were concerned about some "dubious" information contained within it - specifically the claim that Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of an order to use them.
A blockade may ordinarily be illegal under international law, but there are various exemptions and arguments that will be made both ways - arguments similar to those used during the Gaza blockade (or even legality of the Iraq war). It can also be argued that the US sanctions are themselves also illegal under international law (Ron Paul: Sanctions Against Iran Are an ‘Act of War’) as would a preemptive strike (which the US has threatened in the past).
In practice it isn't a problem. If your app is internationalised, then you email your English file to a translator and get back the translation strings, time depends on size obviously but typically a simple app translation is less than 20 minutes work. The cost and time of translators is insignificant compared to cost and time of programmers. Some companies use students for translations, paying minimum wage.
I'm not sure of your point in the first paragraph - are you suggesting that missile boats, fast attack craft etc. don't exist, or are ineffective for some reason? As for the rest, are you assuming that the US air force can identify and sink the majority of a 1000+ strong small boat fleet spread around the Strait (and probably elsewhere in the Gulf)? These boats may be hidden amongst tens of thousands of fishing boats, trade ships, and other legitimate vessels, and some of these shipping lanes are the most heavily trafficked in the world. The Strait is very narrow and exposed to a long Iranian coastline, making it difficult to guard. And with missiles that have a range of 100+km Iran could probably hit any vessel in the Strait even from land. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_of_Hormuz
Presented to U.S. officials by the Iraqi National Congress, a London-based exile group pushing for an American attack on Iraq, the defector says Saddam is close to finishing a long-range ballistic missile that could hit Cairo; Ankara; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Nicosia, Cyprus, or Tehran. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/658542/posts
That was what we were told in 2002. A decade on, we now know that those "intelligence" reports of WMDs from the INC were actually supplied by a double agent working for Iranian intelligence.
According to a US intelligence official, the CIA has hard evidence that Mr Chalabi and his intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib, passed US secrets to Tehran, and that Mr Habib has been a paid Iranian agent for several years, involved in passing intelligence in both directions. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/may/25/usa.iraq10
Oops. And what about those mobile bioweapon labs? It turned out that intelligence came from another unreliable source:
Despite warnings from the German Federal Intelligence Service questioning the authenticity of the claims, the US Government utilized them to build a rationale for military action in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, including in the 2003 State of the Union address, where President Bush said "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs", and Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council, which contained a computer generated image of a mobile biological weapons laboratory.[1][4] On November 4, 2007, 60 Minutes revealed Curveball's real identity.[5] Former CIA official Tyler Drumheller summed up Curveball as "a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)
The whole story was made up by one guy who wanted his immigration card, and yet - without any verification - it was used by the Bush administration to justify a war.
And since you brought it up, alll of the intelligence that linked Iraq to 911 was lies as well.... There was no Iraq Islamist link (well, at least until the coalition invaded and plunged the country into a bloody sectarian civil war)