Hardly. While it's true that Totalitarianism can be nominally both left and right wing, to think that the Nazi party was a left wing party just because it had the word 'Socialist' in it's name is, to say the least, somewhat niave.
After all, just because North Korea is officially the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" doesn't make Democratic, or much of a People's Republic either now does it?
Any Fascist party is by definition right wing. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist . A good clue in the case of the Nazis is the enthusiasm they showed for putting communists, trade unionist and others of similar mind into labour and later death camps.
However, as is usual, bringing up the Nazis just confuses the issue. The point I was arguing, which you appear to have implicity accepted, is that/. has natural leftish moderation bias as seen from the states because you don't have any significant political party of the left or centre-left.
Well of course europeans have an extreme right wing too, no disagreement there. You'll notice however that I didn't call Bush a fascist as he's simply an extreme right-wing conservative and doesn't have the totalitarian characteristics required by that brand of politics, although has to be said the some of the laws passed recently by congress in the 'war on terror' do give cause for concern.
However, the pertinent point is not Bush, but Kerry and the Democrats. By any non-USA standard this is also a conservative party running a conservative candidate for election. Really the kindest description you could possibly make of the Democrats on a good day is that they are a centre-right party.
Which leaves a big gaping political hole where the left wing should be. There is no socialist, social-democratic or similarly aligned party in the states.
So assume slashdot is say 50% american and 50% rest of the world, with political bias of it's readers distributed on a normal curve for each. As the usa curve is centred well to the right of the rest you'd expect, as observed, that from an American point of view comment moderation would display a mild left-wing bias.
The nice thing about this explanation of the perceived left'ish bias of/. is that it assumes that/. readers are a normal sampling of the general population. The alternative explanation would have to be that somehow an interest in technology is associated with a tendency to left-wing politics. Possible of course, but not the simplest explanation.
Er no, you just have to remember that the moderators are spread all over the world, and from an average global perspective Bush is a rabid right wing lunatic, indeed virtually all USA politicos from are well to the right of centre seen from just about anywhere outside the usa. You don't have any left wing at all in the states, only far right and extreme right. Indeed I find it a source of much amusement when Kerry is described as a Liberal - by any normal perspective he's alarmingly far to the right.
Reminds me of the old joke my (UK) economics lecturer started American Politics 101 with. "The USA has a two party system. There's the Republican party - which is roughly the equivalent of our Conservative party, and the Democratic party - which is roughly the equivalent of our Conservative party.:-)
Reasonable point, but the FX5200 was considerably worse than the FX5600 and wouldn't run in a lot cheaper - certainly nothing that would significantly hit the price point. Does seem a bit of an odd decision.
That microsoft couldn't be bothered to upgrade the drivers for it's earlier sidewinder joysticks and other such devices that run off a game port. Consequence is that if you've any, perfectly functional, devices like this then they're now just junk so far a microsoft is concerned if you wish to run them on XP on a computer less than a couple of years old.
Having been bitten with two joysticks and a wheel there's no way I'm ever going to buy a microsoft peripheral ever again.
I know the posting is meant to be funny, but it does raise an interesting question - would a jihad against hindu's take priority over that against christians? As I understand it (being a born-again athiest) islam regards the other 'people of the book' - jews, christians - to be preferred over anyone else, hence islam's long tradition of tolerance to enclaves of such people living in it's borders (although this would have appear to have declined with the rise of the fundies over the past 70 years).
Any muslims care to enlighten me - I know I've probably made a complete has of explaining, but is there any milage in the general idea?
Ah, that's easy. The Culture is a functioning liberterian communist utopia - although calling it 'communist' is probably casting it a bit to far to the right;-). At any rate, it's hardly a philosophy that is going to go down well with the american-focused/. audience.
However it's a bit of a shame that his new novel isn't a culture one, although if 'Look to Winward' is to go buy it's probably a good thing that he's giving it a rest. IMHO Excession and Use of Weapons were superb, but the grafting on of cyberpunk elements like uploading really didn't sit well with me in LTW when they hadn't been mentioned as available in The Culture before.
Does this match up with the proposed theory that humans went through a short period of being reduced to a very few individuals - the so called 'mitochondrial eve' hypothesis?
Er no. All that's being pointed out here is that the original poster assumed that as the tribe doesn't have any concept of numbers above 3 then they are automatically less intelligent - which is of course incorrect as the study says nothing about relative intelligence, only that language shapes thought. They may be less, more, or of equal intelligence to us - we simply don't know.
This is simply an extreme case of the same type of thinking that your 19thC european imperialist would have used to justify empire building - "the indian nig-nogs are inferior to us because they havn't invented railways|democracy|monotheism". More worringly the same type of underestimation of different groups goes on today, aka the CIA underestimation of arabic terrorist until it was too late.
And don't give me that typical crap line of "I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so I'm not depriving them of a sale." If you don't really want it, or can't afford it, that doesn't justify copyright infringement.
Hmm, well, I have whole racks of CDs from artists who I first heard on mp3 then subsequently brought on CD. CDs are still the medium of choice for me because I like the 'package' and dislike the cutdown bitrate on music I really like. 90% of these artists I would never have found without random speculative p2p downloading. Score a major $ gain to the industry from me by that route.
OTOH I have several Gb of mp3s on my HD which I won't be buying the CDs for. Generally (80%) of these are albums I first heard on vinyl years ago that I sort of like but wouldn't buy now except for a few $ on a heavy sale promotion. Score a minor $ loss to the industry on that one. However this loss is increasing because most of the time I play CDs on the PC while I work and I'm heavily discouraged from buying popular albums because of copy protection. Probably about 20% of my mp3s fall into this category, but it's increasing.
Net effect in my case is a significant $ gain to the music industry from p2p etc. Only proviso is that is that much of the music I buy on CD as a result of downloading tends not to be RIAA artists, partly because of the exposure to the more obscure and party because of CD copy protection issues. Generally the RIAA strategy on all fronts is completely counter productive to my spending money on their products, and the net $ increase is despite them.
I heard that the RIAA already tried approaching the Russian authorities a couple of years back in an attempt to shut allofmp3 down and they were basically told where to get off.
I don't have a link for this, but I've seen it suggested that the RIAA now have a policy of never mentioning the Russian sites in an attempt to minimize publicity. On the face of it it's difficult to see why anyone would buy anything from Real, iTunes etc. if they knew about allofmp3.
"mathematical impossibility"? If that's your objection then you've fundementally misunderstood how mutation and natural selection works - there's no requirement to arrive at anything complex in one step at all, and hence no insurmountable probability mountain to climb. Anyway, reading Gould should clear that up for you - it's one of his favourite topics.
Horizontal gene transfer doesn't disprove conventional evolution. As I alluded to before the convincing thing about evolution is how much of a complete molecular mess life is - all sorts of competing mechanisms to drive variation end up producing biochemical spagetti. Beside simple classical point mutation there's neutral mutation, mutation of control genes, jumping genes, chromosome splits, introns doing odd things, possibly reverse transcription etc etc etc. A few cases of horizontal gene transfer just adds to the mix.
Besides 'species' as referred to bacteria is something of an a artificial construct. Personally I still have strong doubts whether the even really is such a thing, at least in anthing like the same sence as they exist for multicellular organisms.
One thing worth remembering though is that although Columbus discovered the new world in 1492, it was still a major challenge for countries such as Britain to establish colonies there two hundred years later (Virginia for example was touch and go for some time). The analogy may be worse than that - the Vikings got to the new world four hundred years before Columbus but failed to establish any sort of colony. Much like 1969, the technology they had, while capable of getting to the new world on a once-off basis, wasn't capable of a sustained effort.
My guess is real space colonization is on hold until we do get a cheap, reliable method of getting to orbit, be that the space elevator or some other technology - and it could well be a couple of hundred years from 1969 before it's available
Well, actually I wrote my Ph.D. thesis on the evolution of bacterial species. Not some theoretical exercise either but an in-depth analysis of the molecular biology at protein and DNA/RNA levels. Somewhat oddly in the light of the above is what we were mainly focusing on at the time was partially disproving conventional evolutionary theory by looking for examples of lateral gene transfer (The group I was in was having a bit of an argument with Woese over ribosomal RNA trees).
The point is basically I suppose that evolutionary theory works. Indeed one of the reasons why it's so compelling because live is such as mess at the molecular level and you can see the stamp of natural selection all over it. Indeed if there was a god of some sort using "intelligent design" than all I could say that he has all the characteristics of being in the advanced stage of alzheimers and tripping on some particularly potent acid!
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as 'bad luck' "
The religious right / creationists are the "right thinking people". If they are not resisted and argued against where necessary then people slip back into superstition and ignorance built on 'sacred' texts waved around by shamens, be they preachers, priests, rabbis, ayatollahs or whatever other brand of snake oil salesman offers an easy answer to difficult questions.
Maybe another Lazarus quote (Heinlein had a nice way with words;-)
"History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it. "
Just posted on this elsewhere. The idiocy, and power, of the Religious Right in America is going to be one of the prime reasons for the decline of the USA.
The USA is now loosing heavily in stem cell and related areas of reseach. There's an increasing rate of migration of good life scientists out of the states and into Europe. Of course it's not absolute, but in this prime technology of the 21st century America is going to loose, and loose badly, in innovation to the EU.
And that's just at the top. Maybe more important the USA is loosing from below. With the spread of both the teaching of 'Creationism' and the lack of teaching of Evolution (where it's judged too controvesial to teach either) the USA is both loosing potential life scientists and producing a climate where life science research is regarded with suspicion and undervalued. Again of course it's not absolute, but it'll be enough to erode any advantage the US has and pass the torch to Europe.
Now who knows how important the biological sciences will eventually be in terms of society and economy? Maybe, as has been the case up to now, traditional engineering will continue to dominate and the relative decline of the USA will not be too great. On the other hand maybe the future is heavily dominated by molecular biology. Maybe we can treat aging, design babies to remove genetic defects and increase IQ, grow biological computers, use biological engineering rather than chemical engineering and much else.
Some of these may be desirable, other not, but one thing is certain - in Europe, when such innovations are researched and developed the decision to use them or not will be made on democratic, pragmatic, secular grounds. In the USA the decision will be made on the basis of a 2000+ year old text.
This is just another example of why the torch of civilization is being passed back from America to Europe, and particularly the EU.
Like the Muslim world after 1454, the USA is now sowing the seeds of it's own destruction. Sure it's armies, large relatively homogenious population, and enterprising culure will ensure that the decline is slow, but under the two-pronged attack from the Religious Right - stifling stem cell and biological research because of 'moral' considerations - and The Corporations - stifling technological innovation with excessive with excessive DRM measures - the engine of innovation which has fuelled America's acendancy is faltering.
Europe in contrast is slowly gaining confidence and cohesion. With a total population now considerably larger than the USA and increasing mobility of workforce (English as lingu franca and machine translation on the horizon will increasingly enable that) the old advantage of the size of the internal American market is negated and even reversed. An increasingly secular population places purerly pragmatic restrictions on biological research - hence the increasing migration of molecular biologists into the EU - and the Corporations, while powerful, are held to account by multiple levels of the democratic process.
It'll probably take a hundred years or more to play out in full, but it's now totally forseeable that the EU will be the superpower of the 22nd century.
For web browsing the trick is simply to set your browser to retrieve a lot of items in parallel rather than a smaller number serially. By default browsers are set to pull back only a few items at a time (IE and Firefox are both 4) but for a satellite connection this needs upping to 30 or so.
Because the satellite combines packets into larger frames then net effect is that web pages then come back in a similar time across satellite to DSL. The difference is that with a satellite the page will then tend to appear all at once with all items after a half to one second, whereas with DSL the page fills up over the same time frame with individual items as the browser goes through the fetch/display/fetch next loop.
"(4) The United States is the BEST and the LAST defense agaisnt tyranny. "
Senator Joseph McCarthy:-) Oh, and didn't you have some problems with civil rights in the southern states in the 60's ?
However generally I agree, except I'd include the western european democracies in there too. None are perfect, but all are not perfect in different ways so the sum of the whole is better than any single one.
For instance the UK hasn't been a full democracy for as long as the USA but it's enshrined demoncratic institutions since 1688 which have proven remarkably robust.
Or Germany, which of course had the trauma of Nazism, but as a result of which is probably more concious of civil rights and freedoms than the USA.
Or France, whos foreign policies I'm sure you don't agree with but who's independent attitude does act as a friendly counterweight to the USA and others and so forces them to justify themselves.
Or the Dutch, who's liberal, permissive, personal-freedom centered attitudes are usually 10 to 20 years ahead of the rest of us.
Or the Scandanavians, where personal freedoms are considered to include social support and equality to a degree you might profoundly disagree with - but do pose you questons.
I think the point about Moore is that he loves America too, and would like to have his country back from control by the Haliburtons and the House of Saud.
Slashdot Mirror
Hardly. While it's true that Totalitarianism can be nominally both left and right wing, to think that the Nazi party was a left wing party just because it had the word 'Socialist' in it's name is, to say the least, somewhat niave.
/. has natural leftish moderation bias as seen from the states because you don't have any significant political party of the left or centre-left.
After all, just because North Korea is officially the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" doesn't make Democratic, or much of a People's Republic either now does it?
Any Fascist party is by definition right wing. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist . A good clue in the case of the Nazis is the enthusiasm they showed for putting communists, trade unionist and others of similar mind into labour and later death camps.
However, as is usual, bringing up the Nazis just confuses the issue. The point I was arguing, which you appear to have implicity accepted, is that
Well of course europeans have an extreme right wing too, no disagreement there. You'll notice however that I didn't call Bush a fascist as he's simply an extreme right-wing conservative and doesn't have the totalitarian characteristics required by that brand of politics, although has to be said the some of the laws passed recently by congress in the 'war on terror' do give cause for concern.
/. is that it assumes that /. readers are a normal sampling of the general population. The alternative explanation would have to be that somehow an interest in technology is associated with a tendency to left-wing politics. Possible of course, but not the simplest explanation.
However, the pertinent point is not Bush, but Kerry and the Democrats. By any non-USA standard this is also a conservative party running a conservative candidate for election. Really the kindest description you could possibly make of the Democrats on a good day is that they are a centre-right party.
Which leaves a big gaping political hole where the left wing should be. There is no socialist, social-democratic or similarly aligned party in the states.
So assume slashdot is say 50% american and 50% rest of the world, with political bias of it's readers distributed on a normal curve for each. As the usa curve is centred well to the right of the rest you'd expect, as observed, that from an American point of view comment moderation would display a mild left-wing bias.
The nice thing about this explanation of the perceived left'ish bias of
Er no, you just have to remember that the moderators are spread all over the world, and from an average global perspective Bush is a rabid right wing lunatic, indeed virtually all USA politicos from are well to the right of centre seen from just about anywhere outside the usa. You don't have any left wing at all in the states, only far right and extreme right. Indeed I find it a source of much amusement when Kerry is described as a Liberal - by any normal perspective he's alarmingly far to the right.
:-)
Reminds me of the old joke my (UK) economics lecturer started American Politics 101 with. "The USA has a two party system. There's the Republican party - which is roughly the equivalent of our Conservative party, and the Democratic party - which is roughly the equivalent of our Conservative party.
Reasonable point, but the FX5200 was considerably worse than the FX5600 and wouldn't run in a lot cheaper - certainly nothing that would significantly hit the price point. Does seem a bit of an odd decision.
That microsoft couldn't be bothered to upgrade the drivers for it's earlier sidewinder joysticks and other such devices that run off a game port. Consequence is that if you've any, perfectly functional, devices like this then they're now just junk so far a microsoft is concerned if you wish to run them on XP on a computer less than a couple of years old.
Having been bitten with two joysticks and a wheel there's no way I'm ever going to buy a microsoft peripheral ever again.
I know the posting is meant to be funny, but it does raise an interesting question - would a jihad against hindu's take priority over that against christians? As I understand it (being a born-again athiest) islam regards the other 'people of the book' - jews, christians - to be preferred over anyone else, hence islam's long tradition of tolerance to enclaves of such people living in it's borders (although this would have appear to have declined with the rise of the fundies over the past 70 years).
Any muslims care to enlighten me - I know I've probably made a complete has of explaining, but is there any milage in the general idea?
Ah, that's easy. The Culture is a functioning liberterian communist utopia - although calling it 'communist' is probably casting it a bit to far to the right ;-). At any rate, it's hardly a philosophy that is going to go down well with the american-focused /. audience.
However it's a bit of a shame that his new novel isn't a culture one, although if 'Look to Winward' is to go buy it's probably a good thing that he's giving it a rest. IMHO Excession and Use of Weapons were superb, but the grafting on of cyberpunk elements like uploading really didn't sit well with me in LTW when they hadn't been mentioned as available in The Culture before.
Does this match up with the proposed theory that humans went through a short period of being reduced to a very few individuals - the so called 'mitochondrial eve' hypothesis?
Er no. All that's being pointed out here is that the original poster assumed that as the tribe doesn't have any concept of numbers above 3 then they are automatically less intelligent - which is of course incorrect as the study says nothing about relative intelligence, only that language shapes thought. They may be less, more, or of equal intelligence to us - we simply don't know.
This is simply an extreme case of the same type of thinking that your 19thC european imperialist would have used to justify empire building - "the indian nig-nogs are inferior to us because they havn't invented railways|democracy|monotheism". More worringly the same type of underestimation of different groups goes on today, aka the CIA underestimation of arabic terrorist until it was too late.
1. Locate sub-average intelligent slashdot poster
2. Leave aformentioned slashdot poster in amazonian jungle with same level of technology as amazonian tribe s/he ridiculed.
3. Wait for slashdot poster to die in hostile environment which ridiculed tribe thrives in
4. Collect his/her life insurance
5. Profit!!
And don't give me that typical crap line of "I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so I'm not depriving them of a sale." If you don't really want it, or can't afford it, that doesn't justify copyright infringement.
Hmm, well, I have whole racks of CDs from artists who I first heard on mp3 then subsequently brought on CD. CDs are still the medium of choice for me because I like the 'package' and dislike the cutdown bitrate on music I really like. 90% of these artists I would never have found without random speculative p2p downloading. Score a major $ gain to the industry from me by that route.
OTOH I have several Gb of mp3s on my HD which I won't be buying the CDs for. Generally (80%) of these are albums I first heard on vinyl years ago that I sort of like but wouldn't buy now except for a few $ on a heavy sale promotion. Score a minor $ loss to the industry on that one. However this loss is increasing because most of the time I play CDs on the PC while I work and I'm heavily discouraged from buying popular albums because of copy protection. Probably about 20% of my mp3s fall into this category, but it's increasing.
Net effect in my case is a significant $ gain to the music industry from p2p etc. Only proviso is that is that much of the music I buy on CD as a result of downloading tends not to be RIAA artists, partly because of the exposure to the more obscure and party because of CD copy protection issues. Generally the RIAA strategy on all fronts is completely counter productive to my spending money on their products, and the net $ increase is despite them.
I heard that the RIAA already tried approaching the Russian authorities a couple of years back in an attempt to shut allofmp3 down and they were basically told where to get off.
I don't have a link for this, but I've seen it suggested that the RIAA now have a policy of never mentioning the Russian sites in an attempt to minimize publicity. On the face of it it's difficult to see why anyone would buy anything from Real, iTunes etc. if they knew about allofmp3.
They also take payment by paypal, which makes the risk of a payment problem even more remote.
You are Darl McBride and I claim my £100.
For anyone in the UK this is a Prescott
s tm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2968074.
From which I can only conclude that the chip fat (runs hot), lazy (slow) and prone to gaffs (full of bugs)
"mathematical impossibility"? If that's your objection then you've fundementally misunderstood how mutation and natural selection works - there's no requirement to arrive at anything complex in one step at all, and hence no insurmountable probability mountain to climb. Anyway, reading Gould should clear that up for you - it's one of his favourite topics.
Horizontal gene transfer doesn't disprove conventional evolution. As I alluded to before the convincing thing about evolution is how much of a complete molecular mess life is - all sorts of competing mechanisms to drive variation end up producing biochemical spagetti. Beside simple classical point mutation there's neutral mutation, mutation of control genes, jumping genes, chromosome splits, introns doing odd things, possibly reverse transcription etc etc etc. A few cases of horizontal gene transfer just adds to the mix.
Besides 'species' as referred to bacteria is something of an a artificial construct. Personally I still have strong doubts whether the even really is such a thing, at least in anthing like the same sence as they exist for multicellular organisms.
One thing worth remembering though is that although Columbus discovered the new world in 1492, it was still a major challenge for countries such as Britain to establish colonies there two hundred years later (Virginia for example was touch and go for some time). The analogy may be worse than that - the Vikings got to the new world four hundred years before Columbus but failed to establish any sort of colony. Much like 1969, the technology they had, while capable of getting to the new world on a once-off basis, wasn't capable of a sustained effort.
My guess is real space colonization is on hold until we do get a cheap, reliable method of getting to orbit, be that the space elevator or some other technology - and it could well be a couple of hundred years from 1969 before it's available
Well, actually I wrote my Ph.D. thesis on the evolution of bacterial species. Not some theoretical exercise either but an in-depth analysis of the molecular biology at protein and DNA/RNA levels. Somewhat oddly in the light of the above is what we were mainly focusing on at the time was partially disproving conventional evolutionary theory by looking for examples of lateral gene transfer (The group I was in was having a bit of an argument with Woese over ribosomal RNA trees).
The point is basically I suppose that evolutionary theory works. Indeed one of the reasons why it's so compelling because live is such as mess at the molecular level and you can see the stamp of natural selection all over it. Indeed if there was a god of some sort using "intelligent design" than all I could say that he has all the characteristics of being in the advanced stage of alzheimers and tripping on some particularly potent acid!
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people slip back into abject poverty. This is known as 'bad luck' "
The religious right / creationists are the "right thinking people". If they are not resisted and argued against where necessary then people slip back into superstition and ignorance built on 'sacred' texts waved around by shamens, be they preachers, priests, rabbis, ayatollahs or whatever other brand of snake oil salesman offers an easy answer to difficult questions.
Maybe another Lazarus quote (Heinlein had a nice way with words ;-)
"History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it. "
Just posted on this elsewhere. The idiocy, and power, of the Religious Right in America is going to be one of the prime reasons for the decline of the USA.
The USA is now loosing heavily in stem cell and related areas of reseach. There's an increasing rate of migration of good life scientists out of the states and into Europe. Of course it's not absolute, but in this prime technology of the 21st century America is going to loose, and loose badly, in innovation to the EU.
And that's just at the top. Maybe more important the USA is loosing from below. With the spread of both the teaching of 'Creationism' and the lack of teaching of Evolution (where it's judged too controvesial to teach either) the USA is both loosing potential life scientists and producing a climate where life science research is regarded with suspicion and undervalued. Again of course it's not absolute, but it'll be enough to erode any advantage the US has and pass the torch to Europe.
Now who knows how important the biological sciences will eventually be in terms of society and economy? Maybe, as has been the case up to now, traditional engineering will continue to dominate and the relative decline of the USA will not be too great. On the other hand maybe the future is heavily dominated by molecular biology. Maybe we can treat aging, design babies to remove genetic defects and increase IQ, grow biological computers, use biological engineering rather than chemical engineering and much else.
Some of these may be desirable, other not, but one thing is certain - in Europe, when such innovations are researched and developed the decision to use them or not will be made on democratic, pragmatic, secular grounds. In the USA the decision will be made on the basis of a 2000+ year old text.
This is just another example of why the torch of civilization is being passed back from America to Europe, and particularly the EU.
Like the Muslim world after 1454, the USA is now sowing the seeds of it's own destruction. Sure it's armies, large relatively homogenious population, and enterprising culure will ensure that the decline is slow, but under the two-pronged attack from the Religious Right - stifling stem cell and biological research because of 'moral' considerations - and The Corporations - stifling technological innovation with excessive with excessive DRM measures - the engine of innovation which has fuelled America's acendancy is faltering.
Europe in contrast is slowly gaining confidence and cohesion. With a total population now considerably larger than the USA and increasing mobility of workforce (English as lingu franca and machine translation on the horizon will increasingly enable that) the old advantage of the size of the internal American market is negated and even reversed. An increasingly secular population places purerly pragmatic restrictions on biological research - hence the increasing migration of molecular biologists into the EU - and the Corporations, while powerful, are held to account by multiple levels of the democratic process.
It'll probably take a hundred years or more to play out in full, but it's now totally forseeable that the EU will be the superpower of the 22nd century.
For web browsing the trick is simply to set your browser to retrieve a lot of items in parallel rather than a smaller number serially. By default browsers are set to pull back only a few items at a time (IE and Firefox are both 4) but for a satellite connection this needs upping to 30 or so.
Because the satellite combines packets into larger frames then net effect is that web pages then come back in a similar time across satellite to DSL. The difference is that with a satellite the page will then tend to appear all at once with all items after a half to one second, whereas with DSL the page fills up over the same time frame with individual items as the browser goes through the fetch/display/fetch next loop.
Well, they could hardly use the shuttle could they? Now there's a pretty useless piece of junk.
"(4) The United States is the BEST and the LAST defense agaisnt tyranny. "
:-) Oh, and didn't you have some problems with civil rights in the southern states in the 60's ?
Senator Joseph McCarthy
However generally I agree, except I'd include the western european democracies in there too. None are perfect, but all are not perfect in different ways so the sum of the whole is better than any single one.
For instance the UK hasn't been a full democracy for as long as the USA but it's enshrined demoncratic institutions since 1688 which have proven remarkably robust.
Or Germany, which of course had the trauma of Nazism, but as a result of which is probably more concious of civil rights and freedoms than the USA.
Or France, whos foreign policies I'm sure you don't agree with but who's independent attitude does act as a friendly counterweight to the USA and others and so forces them to justify themselves.
Or the Dutch, who's liberal, permissive, personal-freedom centered attitudes are usually 10 to 20 years ahead of the rest of us.
Or the Scandanavians, where personal freedoms are considered to include social support and equality to a degree you might profoundly disagree with - but do pose you questons.
I think the point about Moore is that he loves America too, and would like to have his country back from control by the Haliburtons and the House of Saud.