The instances you mention are why I said "soft" right. In european political terms Salon is at best "centre-right". It's is most definatly not left wing - not by any wild stretch of the imagination.
A UK example will illustrate. The "soft right" of our conservative (right wing) party a week or two ago defied conservative party policy and voted for a bill to allow adoption of children by gay couples.
There's an old joke commonly trawled up when teaching US politics to British students. Runs something like this. "America has two main political parties. On one side there's the Republican party, which is roughly the equivalent of our Conservative party, and on the other side there's the Democratic party, which is roughly the equivalent of our... Conservative party"
Far left? Jeez. To me Salon - British - sounds distinctly 'soft right' - i.e. it's view would fit on the middle to left wing of out Tory (right wing) party.
Different environment here. Monopolies are seen as a bad thing generally, irrespective or their behaviour to the customer. Actually the 'monopoly' law also applies to oligopolies too, especially where the act as a 'de facto' monopoly.
Also mobiles are apparently much more pervasive in our society. Nearly all kids have them by the time they hit high school (11 or 12), and although we havn't adopted 2.5G and now 3G mobile technology at the rate the mobile companies had hoped, the upgrade trend is most definently continuing and relentless.
It's not unusual nowdays for people to be carry around mobiles with substantial colour screens, embedded JVMs (with downloadable java games increasinly popular), a camera and software including pims, calculators, web browser, alarm clocks and as much else as the manufacturer can embed. Mobile data comms are already just about as fast as desktop, in the next few years they will be faster for most people. It will only be another three or four years before the mobile 'phone' as turned into the truly ubiqutous personal communication device more important to most people than their desktop computer.
So put this trend together with european thinking about monopolies and it's not at all suprising that the EU is very interested in regulating so we are not under MicroSoft's ubiqutous thumb.
I've seen several offers here in the UK of 'choose any 4 X-Box games and get a free X-Box'.
Coincidentally walked into my local mall games store today. X-Box used to have a small section (about half the size of the PS2 and a little smaller than GC) at the front of the shop. It's now been relegated to a dark corner right at the back.
I've been running cloudmark (http://www.cloudmark.com) for the past couple of months (in outlook). Very very impressive. With me it has a 100% accuracy rate for marked spam (i.e. I've not seen it create any false positives) and it successfuly filters 95%+ of all spams I get. My only gripe is it's passive - it can't generate a dummy 'address not found' email - but hopefully they may add this.
I've no connection with the company, but this wonderful bit of software has effectively wiped out any problem I have with spam.
Apparently the effects have been looked for in the fossil record, and, perhaps suprisingly, there is absolutly no evidence of any impact whatsoever. There's no discernable increase in speciation (which would suggest no increase in mutation) or extinction rates.
Presumably 'no magnetic field' recorded in the rocks actually means 'no single stable magnetic field'. Given discussions above about the mechanics of the actual flip I'd have thought it quite likely lots of small chaotic magnetic fields give adequate protection against any major catastophy
I think you have to take the long view. I've often thought the analogy was with Columbus discovering America in 1492 and yet a hundred years later Europeans were still trying to establish colonies. However maybe the analogy of Apollo should be with the Vikings in the 10th Century - they had ships just about capable of getting there, but not of sustained commerce.
It took another 500 years before Europeans developed true ocean-going ship technology. Maybe we have to wait for nanotechnology to produce materials light and strong enough for single stage to orbit cheaply before we can really venture out. That could be another 100 years.
Okay so wait, journalists are knowingly witholding information during legal proceedings
The right of a journalist not to reveal his sources except in extrodinary circumstances is a fundemental safeguard on the freedom of the press.
If journalistic sources are not protected then information is less likely to come to light in the first place. In effect censorship by stealth.
Any country that does not allow a journalist to protect his/her sources almost by definition does not have a free press, which goes a long way to explain the USA's ranking.
Satellite's now two way. I'm in the Scottish Highlands with a satellite connection courtesy of Bridge Broadband (a reseller of course, Hughes Satellite Systems underneath).
Bandwidth is 512kbs UNCONTENDED down and 2Mbs burst contended. Only 150kbs up, but that should improve soon. It's expensive to put in, but with a pipe that size share the connection with a few neighbours and it's no more expensive than BT's ADSL offering.
Latency is only a problem if you want to play games. Notice that because the line is uncontended I've actually got considerably more bandwidth than you get in practise from ADSL.
If it's anything like the UK market no-one would notice. My local store (one of a big chain) is now selling X-Boxen for £129 - about $200. That's down from £300 at launch. Furthermore it gives every indication that it's desperate to get rid of them. I even overheard two staff a few weeks ago desparing if they were ever going to shift *any* stock.
The shelf space allocated to X-Boxen games has been shrinking progressively in favour of the Gamecube and PS2. Even the demo consol in the shop is deserted - whenever I go in there's a big crowd around the PS2 and particularly Gamecube ones, but no-one ever seems to touch the X-Box.
Your milage may vary, but as far as the UK goes I'd say the X-Box is pretty much dead.
Re:Playing computer games since mid 70s
on
The Aging Gamer
·
· Score: 1
I think it originally ran on a PDP-11 or earlier model and was ported.
I'm only in my early 40's but I remember playing games on a cyber on a school trip to the local polytechnic (a sort of english university) in 1977. Same trip they had someone demonstrate something like a mouse - a sliding positioning device on a large metre square table.
Re:Microbes would be ... depressing.
on
Life on Pluto?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
if you look at evolution on earth there seems to be two *big* rate limiting steps to produce us.
First is the creation of eukaryotic cells. Bacteria seem to have been around just about since the earliest moment we could imagine them being around, but it wasn't until a billion years ago there were any eukaryotes.
Second is the evolution of multicellular organisms. Again there seems to have been a hell of a long gap between simple amoeba like organisms and multicellular organisms.
Once over thse two steps evolution looks pretty set up to produce complex ecosystems. The final hitch though might be that intelligence seems to be only weakly selected for. Generally over time brains got bigger, but very slowly and things seem to have got 'stuck' at several points. Who knows how long the dinosaurs would have been dominent if it wasn't for a certain asteroid 65m years ago?
Water has a lot of unique chemical and physical properties not found in other liquids. It's really difficult to imagine replacing water with anything else.
The only other substance I'm aware of that comes anywhere close is liquid ammonia. I'd consider that unlikely as a solvent for life, but not perhaps totally impossible.
Re:Mankind's preconceptions of life...
on
Life on Pluto?
·
· Score: 1
Carbon, Oxygen, Water etc. have a lot of unique properties that lend themselves to the formation of complex molecules which are stable enough to support 'life'. It's very difficult to imagine a chemisty complex enough based on some other combination that could give rise to life. For example long chains of silicon atoms are unstable so silicon based lifeforms are probably just SF.
It *is* possibly to push 'conventional' life chemistry further than most people expect though. Here on earth our own archeobacteria have numerous examples of living under extremes of temperature, pressure and pH.
A more interesting question is if we do find life elsewhere that has evolved separatly how far will the detailed biochemisty differ? Same DNA/RNA genetics? Same 20 core amino acids? My total guess (but with a background in evolutionary biochemisty) is we'll find that much of the underlying machinary is very similar, but never identical. if it *is* identical we'd need to start asking some very fundemental questions about how we *really* got here:-)
Most of the threads on this topic consist of Europeans posting that the TV was really invented by Logie Baird, and Americans insulting the Europeans.
It seems like one year on the Americans have learnt precisely nothing about why they are regarded with dislike to outright hatred by the rest of the world.
This mixture of arrogance and bullying behaviour displayed towards any group who even dares suggest that Americans are not the fount of all wisdom and invention parallels exactly it's behaviour on a global scale to any country which does not agree with it's geopolitical views.
It's that sort of behaviour which has almost completely drained the great well of sympathy we all felt for your country after 9/11.
Your nation seriously needs to take a mirror to itself before it really gets into trouble by stomping over the rest of the globe.
======
"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. " - Ian M Banks
"I am willing to love all mankind, except an American." (Samuel Johnson. In Boswell's Life, 15 April 1778)
DVD Region Encoding on Verge of Collapse?... with links to the BBC story saying that customers have found a way around this because in practise the DVD manufacturers make their players multi-region and the codes to activate this 'leak' out.
Now DVD regioning is just an very minor inconvenience compared to the restrictions on offer here. The motive for the hardware manufacturers to 'find' a way around it will be immense because the potential profits will be immense. Free markets always win in the end.
I just installed SUSE linux 8.0 on one of my boxen for a project. Third time I've installed a linux distro - Mandrake three years ago and Red Hat about 18 months ago.
And I must say I'm very very impressed. Three years back it was definatly a geek os (and I'm a geek - no insult), 18 months ago it was looking good, but still not at at a stage where I'd recommend it to joe user.
And now... OK it's still got room for improvement, but it's all hanging together now sufficiently well that for some quite a large constituancy I'd say it was a better buy than Windows. People like my neighbours or parents who are not interested in games but would like a comprehensive, usable system.
Slashdot Mirror
The instances you mention are why I said "soft" right. In european political terms Salon is at best "centre-right". It's is most definatly not left wing - not by any wild stretch of the imagination.
A UK example will illustrate. The "soft right" of our conservative (right wing) party a week or two ago defied conservative party policy and voted for a bill to allow adoption of children by gay couples.
There's an old joke commonly trawled up when teaching US politics to British students. Runs something like this. "America has two main political parties. On one side there's the Republican party, which is roughly the equivalent of our Conservative party, and on the other side there's the Democratic party, which is roughly the equivalent of our... Conservative party"
Communist? I don't think so. Vaguely soft-right if anything.
Try this - www.socialistalliance.net/ - for a real socialist party
Far left? Jeez. To me Salon - British - sounds distinctly 'soft right' - i.e. it's view would fit on the middle to left wing of out Tory (right wing) party.
You have no idea what leftwing really is!
Different environment here. Monopolies are seen as a bad thing generally, irrespective or their behaviour to the customer. Actually the 'monopoly' law also applies to oligopolies too, especially where the act as a 'de facto' monopoly.
Also mobiles are apparently much more pervasive in our society. Nearly all kids have them by the time they hit high school (11 or 12), and although we havn't adopted 2.5G and now 3G mobile technology at the rate the mobile companies had hoped, the upgrade trend is most definently continuing and relentless.
It's not unusual nowdays for people to be carry around mobiles with substantial colour screens, embedded JVMs (with downloadable java games increasinly popular), a camera and software including pims, calculators, web browser, alarm clocks and as much else as the manufacturer can embed. Mobile data comms are already just about as fast as desktop, in the next few years they will be faster for most people. It will only be another three or four years before the mobile 'phone' as turned into the truly ubiqutous personal communication device more important to most people than their desktop computer.
So put this trend together with european thinking about monopolies and it's not at all suprising that the EU is very interested in regulating so we are not under MicroSoft's ubiqutous thumb.
Charge them double the 'standard' consultants rate for the work. You have expert knowledge of their systems and are well worth the premium.
I've seen several offers here in the UK of 'choose any 4 X-Box games and get a free X-Box'.
Coincidentally walked into my local mall games store today. X-Box used to have a small section (about half the size of the PS2 and a little smaller than GC) at the front of the shop. It's now been relegated to a dark corner right at the back.
I've been running cloudmark (http://www.cloudmark.com) for the past couple of months (in outlook). Very very impressive. With me it has a 100% accuracy rate for marked spam (i.e. I've not seen it create any false positives) and it successfuly filters 95%+ of all spams I get. My only gripe is it's passive - it can't generate a dummy 'address not found' email - but hopefully they may add this.
I've no connection with the company, but this wonderful bit of software has effectively wiped out any problem I have with spam.
Apparently the effects have been looked for in the fossil record, and, perhaps suprisingly, there is absolutly no evidence of any impact whatsoever. There's no discernable increase in speciation (which would suggest no increase in mutation) or extinction rates.
Presumably 'no magnetic field' recorded in the rocks actually means 'no single stable magnetic field'. Given discussions above about the mechanics of the actual flip I'd have thought it quite likely lots of small chaotic magnetic fields give adequate protection against any major catastophy
You've read Marx and Engels?
No?
Thought not.
I think you have to take the long view. I've often thought the analogy was with Columbus discovering America in 1492 and yet a hundred years later Europeans were still trying to establish colonies. However maybe the analogy of Apollo should be with the Vikings in the 10th Century - they had ships just about capable of getting there, but not of sustained commerce.
It took another 500 years before Europeans developed true ocean-going ship technology. Maybe we have to wait for nanotechnology to produce materials light and strong enough for single stage to orbit cheaply before we can really venture out. That could be another 100 years.
The right of a journalist not to reveal his sources except in extrodinary circumstances is a fundemental safeguard on the freedom of the press.
If journalistic sources are not protected then information is less likely to come to light in the first place. In effect censorship by stealth.
Any country that does not allow a journalist to protect his/her sources almost by definition does not have a free press, which goes a long way to explain the USA's ranking.
Very true. But a drop from £300 to £129 - a drop of ~60% in less than a year - is by no means normal.
At this rate they'll be giving them away with soap powder by easter
Back in the mid 80's I did some coding on early Macs using Borland Pascal for Mac. From time to time it would throw up the helpful compilation message
"Syntax error in code"
No clue was given as to where the error was. On a 10,000 line program this could be frustrating!
Satellite's now two way. I'm in the Scottish Highlands with a satellite connection courtesy of Bridge Broadband (a reseller of course, Hughes Satellite Systems underneath).
Bandwidth is 512kbs UNCONTENDED down and 2Mbs burst contended. Only 150kbs up, but that should improve soon. It's expensive to put in, but with a pipe that size share the connection with a few neighbours and it's no more expensive than BT's ADSL offering.
Latency is only a problem if you want to play games. Notice that because the line is uncontended I've actually got considerably more bandwidth than you get in practise from ADSL.
If it's anything like the UK market no-one would notice. My local store (one of a big chain) is now selling X-Boxen for £129 - about $200. That's down from £300 at launch. Furthermore it gives every indication that it's desperate to get rid of them. I even overheard two staff a few weeks ago desparing if they were ever going to shift *any* stock.
The shelf space allocated to X-Boxen games has been shrinking progressively in favour of the Gamecube and PS2. Even the demo consol in the shop is deserted - whenever I go in there's a big crowd around the PS2 and particularly Gamecube ones, but no-one ever seems to touch the X-Box.
Your milage may vary, but as far as the UK goes I'd say the X-Box is pretty much dead.
I think it originally ran on a PDP-11 or earlier model and was ported.
I'm only in my early 40's but I remember playing games on a cyber on a school trip to the local polytechnic (a sort of english university) in 1977. Same trip they had someone demonstrate something like a mouse - a sliding positioning device on a large metre square table.
if you look at evolution on earth there seems to be two *big* rate limiting steps to produce us.
First is the creation of eukaryotic cells. Bacteria seem to have been around just about since the earliest moment we could imagine them being around, but it wasn't until a billion years ago there were any eukaryotes.
Second is the evolution of multicellular organisms. Again there seems to have been a hell of a long gap between simple amoeba like organisms and multicellular organisms.
Once over thse two steps evolution looks pretty set up to produce complex ecosystems. The final hitch though might be that intelligence seems to be only weakly selected for. Generally over time brains got bigger, but very slowly and things seem to have got 'stuck' at several points. Who knows how long the dinosaurs would have been dominent if it wasn't for a certain asteroid 65m years ago?
Water has a lot of unique chemical and physical properties not found in other liquids. It's really difficult to imagine replacing water with anything else.
The only other substance I'm aware of that comes anywhere close is liquid ammonia. I'd consider that unlikely as a solvent for life, but not perhaps totally impossible.
Carbon, Oxygen, Water etc. have a lot of unique properties that lend themselves to the formation of complex molecules which are stable enough to support 'life'. It's very difficult to imagine a chemisty complex enough based on some other combination that could give rise to life. For example long chains of silicon atoms are unstable so silicon based lifeforms are probably just SF.
:-)
It *is* possibly to push 'conventional' life chemistry further than most people expect though. Here on earth our own archeobacteria have numerous examples of living under extremes of temperature, pressure and pH.
A more interesting question is if we do find life elsewhere that has evolved separatly how far will the detailed biochemisty differ? Same DNA/RNA genetics? Same 20 core amino acids? My total guess (but with a background in evolutionary biochemisty) is we'll find that much of the underlying machinary is very similar, but never identical. if it *is* identical we'd need to start asking some very fundemental questions about how we *really* got here
Except water is pretty strange stuff and does a lot of things that other liquids don't.
Expanding when it freezes is just one of them - if it wasn't for that our oceans would be solid ice from a few hundred feet down.
Nope. Actually
2 CH4 + 4 02 = 4 H20 + 2 C02
Most of the threads on this topic consist of Europeans posting that the TV was really invented by Logie Baird, and Americans insulting the Europeans.
It seems like one year on the Americans have learnt precisely nothing about why they are regarded with dislike to outright hatred by the rest of the world.
This mixture of arrogance and bullying behaviour displayed towards any group who even dares suggest that Americans are not the fount of all wisdom and invention parallels exactly it's behaviour on a global scale to any country which does not agree with it's geopolitical views.
It's that sort of behaviour which has almost completely drained the great well of sympathy we all felt for your country after 9/11.
Your nation seriously needs to take a mirror to itself before it really gets into trouble by stomping over the rest of the globe.
======
"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. " - Ian M Banks
"I am willing to love all mankind, except an American." (Samuel Johnson. In Boswell's Life, 15 April 1778)
But further down slashdot we have...
... with links to the BBC story saying that customers have found a way around this because in practise the DVD manufacturers make their players multi-region and the codes to activate this 'leak' out.
DVD Region Encoding on Verge of Collapse?
Now DVD regioning is just an very minor inconvenience compared to the restrictions on offer here. The motive for the hardware manufacturers to 'find' a way around it will be immense because the potential profits will be immense. Free markets always win in the end.
Just my 2c
I just installed SUSE linux 8.0 on one of my boxen for a project. Third time I've installed a linux distro - Mandrake three years ago and Red Hat about 18 months ago.
And I must say I'm very very impressed. Three years back it was definatly a geek os (and I'm a geek - no insult), 18 months ago it was looking good, but still not at at a stage where I'd recommend it to joe user.
And now... OK it's still got room for improvement, but it's all hanging together now sufficiently well that for some quite a large constituancy I'd say it was a better buy than Windows. People like my neighbours or parents who are not interested in games but would like a comprehensive, usable system.
Could there be any connection with the earth's magnetic poles looking like they're going to flip soon?
http://www.cosmiverse.com/science04110206.html