Commonly overlooked in this kind of c/c++/perl focused discussion, but delphi's component model has been in operation ever since Delphi 1 back in the 90's, and has produced a most successful mix of freeware, shareware and commercial components easily and simply plugged into the development environment. Torry.net gives a good flavour (http://www.torry.net/). Also the Project Jedi code (http://www.delphi-jedi.org/) is now an effective extension to Delphi itself.
Forget 1984, as everyone knows that novel was much more about mid-20th Century Stalinism than a prediction of the future (Orwell called it 1984 because he simply reversed the digits from 1948)
Huxley's Brave New World is far more interesting from a futurism point of view and looks more relevant every year. Huxley was way out of fashion for decades (and a more unfortunate day to die is difficult to imagine) but over the last 5 or 10 years his reputation has been on the rise again.
No, the water going uphill is an optical illusion. Look at the bbc's explanation - the bubbles rising make it look like the water flow is up, but in fact they're rising through water going in the opposite direction.
Not wishing to show-off, but I looked at the report on the bbc news - which included a few close ups - and immediatly thought that was an interesting use of the 'endless beer can' trick. It's clever, but I'm very suprised it's as highly thought of as it is.
Now, water flowing the wrong way up the waterfalls - that would be a site worth seeing
Didn't satellite surveillance captured Bin Laden?
on
Satellite Imagery
·
· Score: 1
Copy protection licencing is sufficiently expensive and a hassle to the producers that's it's only used on 'popular' artists. So take that as a hint and listen to 'unpopular' ones.
Spend your CD money on world, jazz, classical, flamenco, folk, blues, celtic, indie or anything else outside the mainstream - but just stay away from the popular artists. There's a vast world of great music out there to be discovered - help out the artists, broaden your horizons, and give the big music companies a kick in the pants. Furthermore if they see their cd sales drop, but cd sales in general rise they're not stupid enough that they won't draw conclusions.
"and can talk to all those other databases via ODBC."
My one experience of this was quite nasty in that we had a legasy app using foxpro back and front ends that we needed to convert so the data would run inside sqlserver (to integrate it with the rest of the business) and leave the front end in vfp. In theory just a case or ripping out the direct data accesses and replace it by odbc calls.
Now I'm not a vfp expert and wouldn't pretend tpo be, but I found this a nightmare, predomonantly because a modern rdbms like sqlserver is not compatible with the old vfp data/index file way of doing things. Much of the code inside the app used indexes to sort data views, process through datasets etc, all of which needed to be rewritten for an environment where indexes are not directly accessible.
We eventually did get it running, but it wasn't pretty.
Well taking the US figures are a bit misleading as so far the US is reporting no local transmission of SARS. Indeed the WHO is to date reporting no local transmission anywhere outside those countries where the disease was endemic before it was recognised as such. That's not to say it won't occur, but the fact that it's not been reported so far a month on from the WHO declaring the disease a global threat to health should tell you something. Excellent review article on the WHO site at http://www.who.int/csr/sarsarchive/2003_04_11/en/
The infection rate for any disease is a combination of how infectious it actually is and how effective isolation measures are. Of course SARS has a 'natural' infection rate of much greater than 1.0, but so far it seems to be being kept at a level around 1.0 by containment measures. Of course that's an average - that WHO report goes into considerable detail.
Obviously SARS is a major and serious problem with the potential to kill millions, but it's too early to call yet as to what the eventual situation will be and a global pandemic is by no means inevitable - or indeed I would suggest the most likely outcome at this stage.
SARS is has a mortality high enough that it's serious, and is infectious enough that while it can be controlled, it's a challenge to do so.
It therefore gives WHO, CDC etc. a dry run. Better to find out what's wrong with their epedemic control procedures now rather than if something really nasty pops up later.
Most of your comments are excellent, EXCEPT that SARS is nowhere near as virulent as flu.
If it was there would be several million cases by now. SARS is actually down the lower end of the spectrum for infectious diseases, which gives hope that it can be controlled.
By way of example take measles and smallpox. If a lecturer with measles walks into a lecture theatre with 100 students at then end of the lecture all 100 students will have measles. The virus is airborne and shed from the skin and is *that* infectious.
By contrast to pass on smallpox he'd need direct skin contact. SARS is down the lower end of this spectrum too - less infectious than smallpox by the look of it and certainly much less infectious than flu (which is nearer the measles level).
Another helpful factor is that indications are that SARS is only infectious when symptoms are being displayed.
As WHO point out, since the infection was recognised there has been no cases of uncontrolled outbreaks in any country where it wasn't present beforehand. Vietnam has also effectively controlled it's outbreak and almost ended it (they though they had but one vector got through).
In all probability the HK and China outbreaks will be controlled and it's unlikely to cause an uncontrollable problem in the first world thereafter. The danger lies if it gets into a third world population and becomes endemic, which will result in permanant draconian measures in the first world to catch infections until a vaccine is developed,
I've posted a detailed comment under another thread about reinfection rates, but I don't think I'm disagreeing with you. SARS is not particularly infectious, and with a reasonably ordered society and health system then measures can be taken to reduce the infection rate to below 1.0 and the disease can be controlled.
My point is that it is sufficiently infectious that if it gets into a population where these are not available then infection rates will soar and we will have serious problems. For example imagine a superinfector walking around Baghdad at the moment.
What's remarkable about these is that the rate of increase is pretty constant. This implies that the disease is generally not that infectious and the average rate of infection (the number of people that an infected person infects) is currently hovering around 1.0
Obviously this is complicated by the discovery that there seems to be superinfectors (some people have been traced as infecting a dozen or more new people) whilst others don't seem to pass on the infection at all. However the critical number is the overall rate of infection. Obviously if this is greater than 1.0 the infection increases exponentially, at 1.0 it's linear and at less than 1.0 it just dies out.
The aim of any epidemic control task is to reduce the infection rate below 1.0. Humans are not fields of wheat and can modify their behaviour to do this. For example take the other scary outbreak disease Ebola. Experience shows that when an outbreak of this occurs initially infection rates are high - 5 or 6 or more - as tribal practises for cleaning dead bodies result in numerous infections. However once the outbreak is identified and people given correct instructions infection rates fall dramatically to well below 1.0 and the disease burns out.
Obviously the nature of how the disease is spread influences how effective behaviour modification can be. For Ebola it's stunningly effective as the disease only passes by direct blood contact. With SARS it's more difficult, but it's not going to be impossible. Diseases like flu and measles are so infectious that they cannot be effectively controlled.
eejit. If you look at the figures the rate of increase is pretty constant, and in fact has been dropping over the last few days. Also don't forget that the WHO's figures are culmulative. At the moment there's only about half the total actually sick (1333 as of today), the rest have recovered or are dead.
Actually the constant rate of increase is the *hopeful* sign in the stats. If it was flu or something similar then the increase would be exponential. As it is it continues to be health staff predominantly infected, which imples a slow rate of transmission
Jeez. It's not highly contagious in the same way flu or measles is, but it's pretty contagious and the only way to handle it is by an intensive response NOW.
Fortunatly at the moment it's *just* being contained. Indications are that carriers are only contagious when they visibly have the disease, so by intervention it can be controlled. But if it gets out into the teeming masses of India, Nigeria or the like within the next 6 months then expect to see hundreds of thousands infected, several tens of thousands of deaths and travel restrictions in the first world like you would not believe.
Also viruses like this that has just jumped the species barrier tend to be unstable. Fortunatly experience shows that the tendency is towards mutation to less lethal strains, but it ain't necessarily so and it's prudent no to give it hundreds of thousands of hosts in which to experiment with potential mutations.
Bottom line is that this is not the next Spanish Flu yet, but it has to be treated very seriously indeed. As WHO say it's unlikely now to go away completely and until there's a vaccine (read 3 to 5 years) the world will need to keep on top of it wherever it strikes or else there will be a lot of dead people and striken economies around the planet.
Are running a series of trials, one in Crieff - a small town about 20 miles from where I sit. Given British Telecom's ridiculous criteria for only installing ADSL where there is 'sufficient demand'* there's been a great deal of interest in the Scottish Highlands and Borders for alternative suppliers. Scottish Enterprise have some info at http://www.scottish-enterprise.com/sedotcom_home/s ervices-to-business/broadband/broadband-news_event s/broadband-projects/broadband-power_line_trial.ht m
*British Telecom regularly seem to leave something to be desired when it comes to 'public service'. A friend of mine has this story about how he recently installed an ADSL modem for a business in the centre of Glasgow - a city of nearly two million people. Naturally he assumed that ADSL would be available so neglected to explicitly check, and he was consequently scunnered when BT told him that it wasn't available due to 'insufficient demand'. Apparently the local exchange serviced quite a small area, and one where there was a disproportionate number of warehouses and areas under redevelopment, so despite being right in the middle of the city it had not met BT's criteria. Fortunatly given where they were the embaressment factor was sufficiently high that BT upgraded the exchange anyway, but it just demonstrates what we're up against.
I don't disagree with this completely, but, to be honest, sometimes war isn't political, at least for one side anyway. I think there's definatly a situation where it could be self defence and survival, not political.
I think Clausewitz would say that self defense and survival *is* politics. However the pertinant point in this war is that the Baathists are fighting for survival, America is not, so in the final analysis America's will can be broken before the Baathists if the war can be extended sufficiently long.
I see your point, but I still disagree. I don't belive the Vietcong "forced" anything like it. I think our leaders were simply morons who didn't really care and didn't listen to the military as to how to go about it.
You make the error of seeing the war in purerly military terms. Clausewitz's assertion highlights that war must be seen as part of a wider political process. It really doesn't matter if the Vietcong won because they defeated America militarily, or because they made the cost of America winning politically unacceptable. The result is the same
Militarily? Not really. His troops are really no match for the US/British toops. Yeah, the troops will take casulties, maybe more maybe less, but they'll still win.... ...US troops look bad for shooting civilians that are being forced to shoot at them, and thereby try and sway public opinion against this conflict. But, that's not a military strategy, it's a political one.
There is no difference. The political is military and vica versa. Not that this simple truth seems to have been grasped by the truly dreadful Donald Rumsfeld - a man who seems to posses the dialectic sophistication of Lenny Osborne.
Following the bomb in the Baghdad Market this evening, and the consequent achievement by America in uniting all Arab opinion against it, I am now firmly of the conclusion that the Baathists will most probably win. Of sure, they'll be a battle and the republican guard will be defeated, but America will not be able to take and hold Baghdad in the long term without unacceptable political consequences.
I'm not at all sure however this will apply to the whole country. The British experience in Northern Ireland may well stand them in sufficiently good stead that in Basra and the Shi'ite south a viable peace could be achieved. Similarly in the Kurdish north.
To paraphraise Mr Banks...
All the usual rules of uprising realpolitik will still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated - dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the military and political mind.
As Clausewitz said "war is politics by other means". Vietnam was won by the Vietcong because they forced the Anericans into a position whereby they couldn't win without taking politically unacceptable actions.
There's a good chance Saddam could, by skillful political and military manouvering, manipulate the situation to the same effect.
Mod this up. Assuming the poster is being ironic it's very perceptive - DEM and Sat data for europe is very hard to get hold of for free because of the mercinary attutude of our National Mapping agencies.
For example, the UK Ordnance Survey recently 'withdrew' it's 50 metre DEM data and replaced it by a more complex product at 14 times the price (yes 14!).
The major stumbling block with generating this kind of stuff is the vast amount of real-world knowledge that has to be incorporated into the system AI.
We've been developing a couple of similar products for several years now. GenesisII attempts to create photorealistic images based on GIS data, and Landscape Explorer is a more traditional 'Image Overlay' product (there's also an online embedded ActiveX version). Site is at www.geomantics.com
Both these programs are intended to take a 'feed the data in and get the image' type of approach rather than the 'build your world from blocks' approach you'd get with a 3D modeller application.
With the 'Image Overlay' program this is relatively straightforward because the data is not that complex, but when you go for something more detailed and 'photorealistic' like GenesisII then complexity of the solution seems to increase exponentially with the degree of detail needed. For example modelling a mid to far distance mid-western US landscape is actually quite easy, doing it in Europe is vastly more complex because of something as apparently simple as the hedgerow and field pattern. Similarly really high mountains (Rockies, Himalaya) are easy, Mid range stuff with confirers is not too bad, but the real challenge is the English Cotswalds because of the shear complexity of a 3,000 year old mixed deciduous forest/farmed/grazed landscape.
Even with Satellite data the problems on landscape are complex. Sure I can tell it's a forest, but is it Oak or Birch? It may not matter if I'm viewing from a long shot, but closer up it does. How do I tell? get better data? (available, expense), guess (ok for games maybe, but it's not reality), or use an algorithm (you have an tree/soil/landscape distribution algorithm to hand?)
And that's before we've even considered villages and towns
This is an excellent example of how our 'American allies' sold us down the river in their haste to break up the British empire and curry favour with the Egyptians.
There's been much talk over recent months of the Americans comming to 'help' the British in 1943. America's lack of loyalty over Suez is never mentioned.
I believe the oldest know house still standing is 6,000 years old, which predates the pyramids by quite a bit.
Some information on the Kap o' Howar here
http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/knaphowar.htm I've personally seen this. It's in amazing condition - looks like it could have been abandoned only a few decades ago.
For real durability stone is the only way to go, but recognise that just because the external structure will survive hundreds or even thousands of years, the interior won't. The house I'm in at the moment is about 250 years old with nice 3 ft thick stone walls. However about 15 years ago it was a complete shell missing a roof in parts and used as a cow shelter. It was redeveloped by completely gutting it and building a 'new' house within the walls. So the house I 'effectively' live in is 15 years old, even though the shell is over 10 times that.
So true. The kind of 'skilled' job being complained about here is in reality semi-skilled at best. Being able to do a bit of design and throw around some script hardly counts as the apex of development.
Joel on Software has a wonderful article on what constitutes real skill (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalmer ston.html). What we have here isn't in the same league
This has to have exceeded all expectations. Nearly 6,000 years old and the basic building is still in reasonable condition. http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/knaphowar.htm
Occam's Razor has very little to do with this. What William of Occam actually said was (roughly translated from the Latin)..
"It is vain to do with more that can be done with less"
That is, the best explanation for an observation is the simplest one that fully explains the facts given. But in this case we just have a set of observations about the environment around the Moon's orbit, and to extend these to support or contradict an indirect hypothesis is unjustified.
And you have to question if your co-worker is worth having in the first place. Every good developer I've ever know has always jumped at a chance to learn a new language/environment. Of course you don't become truly competent in an environment until you've used it for quite some time, but any degree of exposure to anything new invariably impoves your general coding abilities - and good coders know that.
Slashdot Mirror
Commonly overlooked in this kind of c/c++/perl focused discussion, but delphi's component model has been in operation ever since Delphi 1 back in the 90's, and has produced a most successful mix of freeware, shareware and commercial components easily and simply plugged into the development environment. Torry.net gives a good flavour (http://www.torry.net/). Also the Project Jedi code (http://www.delphi-jedi.org/) is now an effective extension to Delphi itself.
Forget 1984, as everyone knows that novel was much more about mid-20th Century Stalinism than a prediction of the future (Orwell called it 1984 because he simply reversed the digits from 1948)
Huxley's Brave New World is far more interesting from a futurism point of view and looks more relevant every year. Huxley was way out of fashion for decades (and a more unfortunate day to die is difficult to imagine) but over the last 5 or 10 years his reputation has been on the rise again.
No, the water going uphill is an optical illusion. Look at the bbc's explanation - the bubbles rising make it look like the water flow is up, but in fact they're rising through water going in the opposite direction.
Not wishing to show-off, but I looked at the report on the bbc news - which included a few close ups - and immediatly thought that was an interesting use of the 'endless beer can' trick. It's clever, but I'm very suprised it's as highly thought of as it is.
Now, water flowing the wrong way up the waterfalls - that would be a site worth seeing
It's *that* good.
Copy protection licencing is sufficiently expensive and a hassle to the producers that's it's only used on 'popular' artists. So take that as a hint and listen to 'unpopular' ones.
Spend your CD money on world, jazz, classical, flamenco, folk, blues, celtic, indie or anything else outside the mainstream - but just stay away from the popular artists. There's a vast world of great music out there to be discovered - help out the artists, broaden your horizons, and give the big music companies a kick in the pants. Furthermore if they see their cd sales drop, but cd sales in general rise they're not stupid enough that they won't draw conclusions.
"and can talk to all those other databases via ODBC."
My one experience of this was quite nasty in that we had a legasy app using foxpro back and front ends that we needed to convert so the data would run inside sqlserver (to integrate it with the rest of the business) and leave the front end in vfp. In theory just a case or ripping out the direct data accesses and replace it by odbc calls.
Now I'm not a vfp expert and wouldn't pretend tpo be, but I found this a nightmare, predomonantly because a modern rdbms like sqlserver is not compatible with the old vfp data/index file way of doing things. Much of the code inside the app used indexes to sort data views, process through datasets etc, all of which needed to be rewritten for an environment where indexes are not directly accessible.
We eventually did get it running, but it wasn't pretty.
Well taking the US figures are a bit misleading as so far the US is reporting no local transmission of SARS. Indeed the WHO is to date reporting no local transmission anywhere outside those countries where the disease was endemic before it was recognised as such. That's not to say it won't occur, but the fact that it's not been reported so far a month on from the WHO declaring the disease a global threat to health should tell you something. Excellent review article on the WHO site at http://www.who.int/csr/sarsarchive/2003_04_11/en/
The infection rate for any disease is a combination of how infectious it actually is and how effective isolation measures are. Of course SARS has a 'natural' infection rate of much greater than 1.0, but so far it seems to be being kept at a level around 1.0 by containment measures. Of course that's an average - that WHO report goes into considerable detail.
Obviously SARS is a major and serious problem with the potential to kill millions, but it's too early to call yet as to what the eventual situation will be and a global pandemic is by no means inevitable - or indeed I would suggest the most likely outcome at this stage.
There is a good side to this.
SARS is has a mortality high enough that it's serious, and is infectious enough that while it can be controlled, it's a challenge to do so.
It therefore gives WHO, CDC etc. a dry run. Better to find out what's wrong with their epedemic control procedures now rather than if something really nasty pops up later.
Most of your comments are excellent, EXCEPT that SARS is nowhere near as virulent as flu.
If it was there would be several million cases by now. SARS is actually down the lower end of the spectrum for infectious diseases, which gives hope that it can be controlled.
By way of example take measles and smallpox. If a lecturer with measles walks into a lecture theatre with 100 students at then end of the lecture all 100 students will have measles. The virus is airborne and shed from the skin and is *that* infectious.
By contrast to pass on smallpox he'd need direct skin contact. SARS is down the lower end of this spectrum too - less infectious than smallpox by the look of it and certainly much less infectious than flu (which is nearer the measles level).
Another helpful factor is that indications are that SARS is only infectious when symptoms are being displayed.
As WHO point out, since the infection was recognised there has been no cases of uncontrolled outbreaks in any country where it wasn't present beforehand. Vietnam has also effectively controlled it's outbreak and almost ended it (they though they had but one vector got through).
In all probability the HK and China outbreaks will be controlled and it's unlikely to cause an uncontrollable problem in the first world thereafter. The danger lies if it gets into a third world population and becomes endemic, which will result in permanant draconian measures in the first world to catch infections until a vaccine is developed,
I've posted a detailed comment under another thread about reinfection rates, but I don't think I'm disagreeing with you. SARS is not particularly infectious, and with a reasonably ordered society and health system then measures can be taken to reduce the infection rate to below 1.0 and the disease can be controlled.
My point is that it is sufficiently infectious that if it gets into a population where these are not available then infection rates will soar and we will have serious problems. For example imagine a superinfector walking around Baghdad at the moment.
Using the WHO figures and knocking out those from China (which were unreliable and up to now somewhat sporadic)
Date Reported Infected Increase per day
17/03/2003 0
18/03/2003 52
19/03/2003 45
20/03/2003 42
21/03/2003 44
22/03/2003 36
24/03/2003 35
25/03/2003 31
26/03/2003 44
27/03/2003 71
28/03/2003 77
29/03/2003 65
31/03/2003 36
01/04/2003 182
02/04/2003 35
03/04/2003 47
04/04/2003 52
05/04/2003 64
07/04/2003 68
08/04/2003 59
09/04/2003 50
10/04/2003 49
What's remarkable about these is that the rate of increase is pretty constant. This implies that the disease is generally not that infectious and the average rate of infection (the number of people that an infected person infects) is currently hovering around 1.0
Obviously this is complicated by the discovery that there seems to be superinfectors (some people have been traced as infecting a dozen or more new people) whilst others don't seem to pass on the infection at all. However the critical number is the overall rate of infection. Obviously if this is greater than 1.0 the infection increases exponentially, at 1.0 it's linear and at less than 1.0 it just dies out.
The aim of any epidemic control task is to reduce the infection rate below 1.0. Humans are not fields of wheat and can modify their behaviour to do this. For example take the other scary outbreak disease Ebola. Experience shows that when an outbreak of this occurs initially infection rates are high - 5 or 6 or more - as tribal practises for cleaning dead bodies result in numerous infections. However once the outbreak is identified and people given correct instructions infection rates fall dramatically to well below 1.0 and the disease burns out.
Obviously the nature of how the disease is spread influences how effective behaviour modification can be. For Ebola it's stunningly effective as the disease only passes by direct blood contact. With SARS it's more difficult, but it's not going to be impossible. Diseases like flu and measles are so infectious that they cannot be effectively controlled.
"double every 7-8 days"
eejit. If you look at the figures the rate of increase is pretty constant, and in fact has been dropping over the last few days. Also don't forget that the WHO's figures are culmulative. At the moment there's only about half the total actually sick (1333 as of today), the rest have recovered or are dead.
Actually the constant rate of increase is the *hopeful* sign in the stats. If it was flu or something similar then the increase would be exponential. As it is it continues to be health staff predominantly infected, which imples a slow rate of transmission
Jeez. It's not highly contagious in the same way flu or measles is, but it's pretty contagious and the only way to handle it is by an intensive response NOW.
Fortunatly at the moment it's *just* being contained. Indications are that carriers are only contagious when they visibly have the disease, so by intervention it can be controlled. But if it gets out into the teeming masses of India, Nigeria or the like within the next 6 months then expect to see hundreds of thousands infected, several tens of thousands of deaths and travel restrictions in the first world like you would not believe.
Also viruses like this that has just jumped the species barrier tend to be unstable. Fortunatly experience shows that the tendency is towards mutation to less lethal strains, but it ain't necessarily so and it's prudent no to give it hundreds of thousands of hosts in which to experiment with potential mutations.
Bottom line is that this is not the next Spanish Flu yet, but it has to be treated very seriously indeed. As WHO say it's unlikely now to go away completely and until there's a vaccine (read 3 to 5 years) the world will need to keep on top of it wherever it strikes or else there will be a lot of dead people and striken economies around the planet.
Are running a series of trials, one in Crieff - a small town about 20 miles from where I sit. Given British Telecom's ridiculous criteria for only installing ADSL where there is 'sufficient demand'* there's been a great deal of interest in the Scottish Highlands and Borders for alternative suppliers. Scottish Enterprise have some info at http://www.scottish-enterprise.com/sedotcom_home/s ervices-to-business/broadband/broadband-news_event s/broadband-projects/broadband-power_line_trial.ht m
*British Telecom regularly seem to leave something to be desired when it comes to 'public service'. A friend of mine has this story about how he recently installed an ADSL modem for a business in the centre of Glasgow - a city of nearly two million people. Naturally he assumed that ADSL would be available so neglected to explicitly check, and he was consequently scunnered when BT told him that it wasn't available due to 'insufficient demand'. Apparently the local exchange serviced quite a small area, and one where there was a disproportionate number of warehouses and areas under redevelopment, so despite being right in the middle of the city it had not met BT's criteria. Fortunatly given where they were the embaressment factor was sufficiently high that BT upgraded the exchange anyway, but it just demonstrates what we're up against.
I think Clausewitz would say that self defense and survival *is* politics. However the pertinant point in this war is that the Baathists are fighting for survival, America is not, so in the final analysis America's will can be broken before the Baathists if the war can be extended sufficiently long.
I see your point, but I still disagree. I don't belive the Vietcong "forced" anything like it. I think our leaders were simply morons who didn't really care and didn't listen to the military as to how to go about it.
You make the error of seeing the war in purerly military terms. Clausewitz's assertion highlights that war must be seen as part of a wider political process. It really doesn't matter if the Vietcong won because they defeated America militarily, or because they made the cost of America winning politically unacceptable. The result is the same
Militarily? Not really. His troops are really no match for the US/British toops. Yeah, the troops will take casulties, maybe more maybe less, but they'll still win....
...US troops look bad for shooting civilians that are being forced to shoot at them, and thereby try and sway public opinion against this conflict. But, that's not a military strategy, it's a political one.
There is no difference. The political is military and vica versa. Not that this simple truth seems to have been grasped by the truly dreadful Donald Rumsfeld - a man who seems to posses the dialectic sophistication of Lenny Osborne.
Following the bomb in the Baghdad Market this evening, and the consequent achievement by America in uniting all Arab opinion against it, I am now firmly of the conclusion that the Baathists will most probably win. Of sure, they'll be a battle and the republican guard will be defeated, but America will not be able to take and hold Baghdad in the long term without unacceptable political consequences.
I'm not at all sure however this will apply to the whole country. The British experience in Northern Ireland may well stand them in sufficiently good stead that in Basra and the Shi'ite south a viable peace could be achieved. Similarly in the Kurdish north.
To paraphraise Mr Banks...
All the usual rules of uprising realpolitik will still apply, especially that concerning the peculiar dialectic of dissent which - simply stated - dictates that in all but the most dedicatedly repressive hegemonies, if in a sizable population there are one hundred rebels, all of whom are then rounded up and killed, the number of rebels present at the end of the day is not zero, and not even one hundred, but two hundred or three hundred or more; an equation based on human nature which seems often to baffle the military and political mind.
As Clausewitz said "war is politics by other means". Vietnam was won by the Vietcong because they forced the Anericans into a position whereby they couldn't win without taking politically unacceptable actions.
There's a good chance Saddam could, by skillful political and military manouvering, manipulate the situation to the same effect.
Mod this up. Assuming the poster is being ironic it's very perceptive - DEM and Sat data for europe is very hard to get hold of for free because of the mercinary attutude of our National Mapping agencies.
For example, the UK Ordnance Survey recently 'withdrew' it's 50 metre DEM data and replaced it by a more complex product at 14 times the price (yes 14!).
We've been developing a couple of similar products for several years now. GenesisII attempts to create photorealistic images based on GIS data, and Landscape Explorer is a more traditional 'Image Overlay' product (there's also an online embedded ActiveX version). Site is at www.geomantics.com
Both these programs are intended to take a 'feed the data in and get the image' type of approach rather than the 'build your world from blocks' approach you'd get with a 3D modeller application.
With the 'Image Overlay' program this is relatively straightforward because the data is not that complex, but when you go for something more detailed and 'photorealistic' like GenesisII then complexity of the solution seems to increase exponentially with the degree of detail needed. For example modelling a mid to far distance mid-western US landscape is actually quite easy, doing it in Europe is vastly more complex because of something as apparently simple as the hedgerow and field pattern. Similarly really high mountains (Rockies, Himalaya) are easy, Mid range stuff with confirers is not too bad, but the real challenge is the English Cotswalds because of the shear complexity of a 3,000 year old mixed deciduous forest/farmed/grazed landscape.
Even with Satellite data the problems on landscape are complex. Sure I can tell it's a forest, but is it Oak or Birch? It may not matter if I'm viewing from a long shot, but closer up it does. How do I tell? get better data? (available, expense), guess (ok for games maybe, but it's not reality), or use an algorithm (you have an tree/soil/landscape distribution algorithm to hand?)
And that's before we've even considered villages and towns
Karma to burn I fear
This is an excellent example of how our 'American allies' sold us down the river in their haste to break up the British empire and curry favour with the Egyptians.
There's been much talk over recent months of the Americans comming to 'help' the British in 1943. America's lack of loyalty over Suez is never mentioned.
Why is that I wonder?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2858957.stm
Cook systamatically rips apart the pro-war stance, and in particular wipes the floor with Blair's strategy.
I believe the oldest know house still standing is 6,000 years old, which predates the pyramids by quite a bit.
Some information on the Kap o' Howar here
http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/knaphowar.htm
I've personally seen this. It's in amazing condition - looks like it could have been abandoned only a few decades ago.
For real durability stone is the only way to go, but recognise that just because the external structure will survive hundreds or even thousands of years, the interior won't. The house I'm in at the moment is about 250 years old with nice 3 ft thick stone walls. However about 15 years ago it was a complete shell missing a roof in parts and used as a cow shelter. It was redeveloped by completely gutting it and building a 'new' house within the walls. So the house I 'effectively' live in is 15 years old, even though the shell is over 10 times that.
So true. The kind of 'skilled' job being complained about here is in reality semi-skilled at best. Being able to do a bit of design and throw around some script hardly counts as the apex of development.
r ston.html). What we have here isn't in the same league
Joel on Software has a wonderful article on what constitutes real skill (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LordPalme
This has to have exceeded all expectations. Nearly 6,000 years old and the basic building is still in reasonable condition. http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/knaphowar.htm
:-)
Pyramids, pah
Occam's Razor has very little to do with this. What William of Occam actually said was (roughly translated from the Latin)..
"It is vain to do with more that can be done with less"
That is, the best explanation for an observation is the simplest one that fully explains the facts given. But in this case we just have a set of observations about the environment around the Moon's orbit, and to extend these to support or contradict an indirect hypothesis is unjustified.
And you have to question if your co-worker is worth having in the first place. Every good developer I've ever know has always jumped at a chance to learn a new language/environment. Of course you don't become truly competent in an environment until you've used it for quite some time, but any degree of exposure to anything new invariably impoves your general coding abilities - and good coders know that.