Is going to be a rapid acceleration in the restriction and closing off of the Internet, greater activity by Governments in monitoring and repressing activity, and eventually a culture in which computer users are licensed and all computers outside the Government and academia run limited, crippled operating systems and applications.
Way to go, guys. You need to learn some history and some sociology. Then you will understand that the most successful criminals DO NOT ADVERTISE their existence. At a certain nuisance level, the cost of your attacks will exceed the cost of fixing the system to stop you. And the rest of us will be made to pay for it.
Yes, because out here in the sticks we regularly used to get 7Mbit/s downloads in the 11th century AD, just like I do today. At our office, which is in the real sticks, we get a miserable 4Mbit/s download and 1Mbit/s upload on our lines, just like they did in the days of Henry 1st.
Actually, London is a problem - it is spaghetti under the streets and a lot of areas have poor connectivity.
However, you really do need to reconsider your voting. The Party that wants us out of the EU (civil liberties, human rights) seems to want to allow us to be bought by the US. Energy privatisation under Thatcher just worked so well, didn't it? So well that we pay the Germans and the French for the privilege of supplying us with energy, and then they nearly run out of gas because they have emptied our tanks to be sure their home markets are OK in a cold spell. And we have to be bailed out by the Russians. And now the idea is to get the US to pay for our broadband infrastructure so that for the rest of time our money can be exported to US companies, who will naturally bend over backwards to supply our data to the US and avoid European data protection laws.
The Conservatives went wrong when they appointed a PR man with media connections to run the Party rather than an old fashioned English patriot. I can't see how David Davis (who understands civil liberties) would have gone along with this. It would be funny if it was not so sick that the Conservatives are run by the man who did PR for the channel that puts on Big Brother.
What's more, this failure to assess risk properly is a bigger waste of tax and income than almost anything else, from the tax dollars going to foreign wars, to the insurance dollars wasted on allowing risky behaviour and vehicles on the roads. I find it quite amazing how "fiscally conservative" people can go all knee-jerk about spending money on near-imaginary threats, simply because some right-wing bloviator gets exercised about it, and then regards the (vastly greater) risk of getting killed on the roads or the streets as just an aspect of civil liberties.
XMPP is the future, but it will only be the future so long as the pressure is kept up to get service providers to adopt open standards. The moment they see an advantage in lock-in they will adopt proprietary "extensions".
XMPP is the best thing to happen in the messaging protocol world for many years, we need to make sure that it continues to develop (especially server to server) and be as widely deployed as possible.
Disclaimer: Our company produces a system management product that uses XMPP as its first line fault notification. I would prefer even the most backward MS shop to have heard of it, and not to confuse it with the horror that is MSN.
We are not nationalistic (because we don't need to be.) No country name on our stamps because we invented them. Davy discovered sodium and potassium (natrium and kalium) and gave them proper Latin names. Rutherford was a colonial so it was OK to name an element after him. In fact Herschel (who was partly German, which explains it) wanted to call his newly discovered planet "Siderius Georgius" after King George, but the King said "Herschel, we British don't do that kind of thing. Kindly stick it up your anus", and the name stuck.
We also rather own the thermodynamic part of the SI system with the Watt, the Joule, and the Kelvin, not to mention the Faraday and the Newton but that's because the rest of the world was so awed by our scientific progress that they insisted.
For non-native English readers, please insert an irony tag wherever you find most convenient.
I guess you must live in the US, where cars are mostly very technologically backward compared to Europe (there was an article by a Honda guy in the last Scientific American promoting many "future developments" in IC engines which are already mainstream in Europe.
For road transport there are not many small-vehicle options outside the 4-wheeled box, co complaining that a car is still a car is stupid. VW has volume car designs which use remarkably advanced technologies - small 4-cylinder engines with outputs on a par with US V6 models, and with vastly superior fuel consumption. They make the FSI engine which produces 170BHP from 1.4 liters, with high torque from little more than tickover. They make Diesels which produce 170BHP from 1.9 liters. VW are achieving "hybrid" efficiencies from conventional engines with no expensive nickel batteries. They have commercialised close-ratio 7 speed automatic boxes with dual clutches and no slushbox. And this has been done with genuine innovation rather than incremental improvements.
And no, I am not a VW driver. I prefer the products of another innovative German company based in Stuttgart.
They will have fun with the word "intended". British judges, who (thank Pratchett*) are still independent minded, do not take kindly to the Home Office.
Basically they have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you intended to commit or promote terrorism. Since the Government has locked people up and tried on the argument "we know they plan terrible things but we can't tell you what they are for reasons of State", and m'Lud has responded "Bollocks to that, Jacqui" (or Dave, or whoever was currently disgracing the office of Home Secretary), I remain unconvinced they will get away with this one.
Here's a thought. I know enough to be able to design quite a good dirty bomb. Lots and lots of people like me also know this. Some could design a really, really good dirty bomb. My current application of my knowledge is to participate in the public consultation on the safety of new nuclear reactors. I'm trying to do my little bit to help prevent a terrorist attack, or indeed a straightforward criminal attack (my own view is that they should not be dignified as "terrorists" - they are simply violent criminals). Mr. Plod is not going to feel my collar. Unlike Peter Mandelson and his Government, Mr. Plod is not stupid.
*As a good atheist I feel justified in substituting the name of the best-known UK theorist of religion in this phrase.
Arm is a chip designer that licences their designs. They do not specify cache or on board peripherals. Microsoft would have to strong-ARM (pun intended) rather a lot of manufacturers to get what they wanted. Including a small manufacturer called Samsung whose mobile phone strategy is now based around Linux.
One attraction of ARM is that if you can find a fab you can get what you want. This is precisely its advantage over X86. Everybody makes "small variants" for their special purposes. And everybody wants out from under MS/Intel.
The disadvantage of being US-centric is that a lot of people on Slashdot don't realise that outside the US there is a whole different ball game and it is bigger than the US market. The Nokia N900 is a Euro-computer descended ultimately from the Acorn Risc machine. South Korea has cultural and linguistic affinities to Finland. The weight piling up against Microsoft outside the US is increasing every day, and European computing is starting to take a different direction.
N00b. The seventies were the years of 8-bit computing. The eighties were the years of 16-bit: the holy PDP-11, the 8086, the 68000, the 9900, the accursed and never-to-be remembered F100-L. Used them all. Nostalgia - when if you needed more memory you fired up the wire wrap gun and just added a breadboard while you waited for the PCB department to knock a design up for you.
Now get that Turing machine off my goddam motherboard.
I have a new Phonak - it has no mould but a soft silicone guide for the in-ear speaker which is cheaply replaceable. The guides come in a few standard sizes. The main problem with it is, quite literally, not knowing if it is there or not. It makes me wonder why bluetooth headsets are so big and heavy.
Read it again. It is not legal to add a motor to a standard bicycle. I personally agree with that. It is legal to operate a moped, i.e. a vehicle with a motor and pedals which complies with type regulations, or a motorcycle. The rules do not say these cannot be electric.
Given the way some of them are thrown together, I'm completely in agreement with the NY view that electric two wheeled vehicles should comply with the same regulations as gas-powered ones. It is not like there are none available.
When he went to Brazil and discovered that his Portuguese was not as good as he hoped, he was asked "have you found a sleeping dictionary yet?" (apologies to any Slashdot readers who conform to the stereotype.)
Really? I find my knowledge of chemistry helps a lot when designing data structures. Anybody who understands how organic chemistry works has a head start when it comes to understanding encapsulation, extension, and a lot of other concepts - because it makes you think not only about how things fit together but how external behaviour can be different from the inner content.
There's a distinction between "useful" as in "I know the solution of this differential equation", and "useful" as in "this has shown me a different way of thinking about things". The second on is actually more likely to be of benefit over the long term.
In fact, this thought is hardly original to me: it was expressed to us many years ago by our crystallography lecturer.
This was information from a pitch by PWC which I can't disclose any further - but similar numbers are mentioned in passing here:
murdoch press alert The article mentions the premium over A levels: PWC quoted different numbers as a baseline over non-Russell group universities, hence my lower number.
I can't tell you how they are controlling, and I have described the estimate as "rough", but my own experience of my own extended family, which has a number of Oxbridge and Russell group graduates as well as US, German and Italian universities, suggests that getting into Oxbridge is partly accidental and, other things being equal, depends on your school and your social circle. My brother is far more intelligent than I am, but associating with a group of kids who clowned about at school caused the school not to put him forward for Cambridge, whereas I was more conformist and was being guided in that direction from the age of 13. I think I am unprejudiced in saying that Oxbridge does not in fact take the top tier of UK students because, in fact, it is too small and the selection process can never be sufficiently accurate. I believe that in practice their recruitment system gets them students reliably from the top 5% of the IQ range, i.e. +2sd, and some obvious standouts, but that overall the majority of students from that group go to the Russell group.
There is no British High Court: Scotland has a separate system of justice and it is the High Court of England and Wales. BSkyB is ultimately owned by News International, the multinational creation of Rupert Murdoch, born Australian but now a US citizen of convenience, and is British only in appearance. EDS is a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard, a US multinational. I will forgive you collage, because calling it a college would clearly be exaggeration.
I'm going to venture to doubt that you really have "multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard and Oxford." I find it hard to believe that you attended those institutions without getting some idea of why you were there.
I've only been to one university - though I have plenty of vocational qualifications. Although what I learned at Cambridge was rapidly obsoleted as knowledge - and I work in a field which did not even really exist when I was there - what I did there benefits me almost every single day of my life. I learned the things you mostly do not learn at work.
Specifically I learnt the critical attitude - to take nothing at face value. At a University famous for its experimentalism, I learnt how to design experiments and test the results. I learnt how to use statistical and probabilitistic analysis to eliminate false results. I learnt to distrust the wisdom of crowds. And I learnt how to learn.
Ever since then I have discovered that many people simply do not think but accept what is perceived as the norm in their industry or group. That is why you get everything from religious cults to stock market bubbles. Anyone who learnt experimental technique as I did could never be fooled by the early-80s boom. Anyone who learnt those techniques (as I did) would be able to go away, analyse the quality records of their company and suddenly realise that what "everybody believed" about a major industrial process of the company was quite wrong - and, after nearly getting fired for whistleblowing, convince the CEO (a Cambridge PhD) and end up as CTO.
When I had to learn some metallurgy and electrochemistry in a hurry - I knew where to go and how to do it. When I suddenly needed a working knowledge of technical German and French - I knew how to do it.
Vocational courses are great when you have a vocation. But a good University is not a vocational school. It expands your mental horizons and it shows you how to both access knowledge and bend it to your purpose.
It has been estimated roughly that an engineering, science or maths degree from Oxford or Cambridge has a net worth of over $300000 - that is the increase in annual income over life, minus the three years out of the workforce and the costs of doing the degree. This benefit is leveraged by vocational courses - I have obtained distinctions on every one of mine by applying proper habits of study.
Unless you sleepwalked through those universities and did not take full advantage of what they offered, I suspect that you've never really been there.
Let's put the funding into all the technologies that are already proven and work. The technical problems of running a Th fluoride reactor are horrible - just finding containment materials for a start - a fact that its proponents consistently ignore. History shows that new reactor types are associated with accidents well down the line, because there is only so much you can do with modeling. And thorium is truly nasty stuff.
The GDP of China is overtaking Japan, which has a twelfth of the population. It is nowhere near the EU or the US, and its profligate and uneconomic use of resources suggests that it will before long be limited by its own inefficiencies. We do not know how much of the Chinese claimed growth is real, because the figures are produced by a State which consistently lies. The fact that bankers and investors believe something proves nothing: those dimwits were taken in by the property bubble in the English-speaking world. We know they are incompetent at finding inconvenient facts.
China may become the world's biggest economy. In 1939 a lot of people thought that Germany would become the world's biggest economy. But saying it "is" is unsupported by any real evidence.
Half the Internet is porn, half of it is unverified rumors. Only one tenth of it is actually useful.*
*Yes, I know this adds up to more than one. Five percent is overlap (some porn and rumors are useful) and five percent is because since you did the last survey, traffic has gone up by 5%.
Both on the same day. Those of us for whom it's only a frigging computer or only a frigging car can get on with some work.
The funny thing is, I can remember when SAABs were above the run of middle manager mobiles, and when Apple hardware really was superior to much of the competition. But those days are long gone.
The thing to watch - the thing that car makers and vanity goods makers don't tell you - is the percentage of their budget that is marketing. The really good stuff is the stuff that is not cheap but sells with hardly any marketing budget.
Being old and boring I shall continue to make do with my laptop that has an all-black carbon fibre reinforced case and my car that has a little silver propeller for a brand symbol. After several years of heavy use of both I can't find anything that would persuade me to change. It would certainly take a bit more than a tablet PC or a car brought to you by the guys who produced the Lada.
Responding to one of your points, the US/UK war around 1812 resulted from several factors, one of which was growing American imperialism (they wanted to annex Canada) and one was perceived British weakness (they were fighting Napoleon at the time.)* Japan fought WW2 over imperialism - they wanted to dominate the Far East which was fast becoming an American zone. Their trading status was unimportant.
China consists of a strange mix: two First World territories (Hong Kong and Taiwan), an emergent country (mainly the seaboard) and a large Third World country. In order to become the dominant power, the emergent bit has to become First World and the Third World bit has to become emergent. This is unlike Europe (where the emergent bit is the poorest part) or the US, where the emergent and Third World parts are relatively small and mixed in with the First World part.
On this analysis, China needs to look inwards before it looks outwards. An aggressive war would result in the destruction of the most advanced parts of China, leaving the rest back near the iron age. Europe and the US would be badly damaged but would survive and retain First World capabilities. It is simply not in the Chinese interest to damage its most valuable assets. Just like Mao, they would let the peasants starve first.
* The War of 1812 does not figure in glorious US victories. A coalition of French Canadians, native Americans and the British successfully defended Canada and burned the White House, then the British went on to defeat Napoleon and weaken US power in the Caribbean for many years. The US turned Westwards. So much for Imperialist wars.
If you don't mind going back to the Stone Age while we divert all the earth's engineering and energy resources for a decade or so, feel free to assemble enough like minded people to put it to an electorate that screams when oil goes to $4/US gallon.
The title of the post suggests this is a troll. An asteroid strike is a very credible threat, as the geological evidence for past ones is all around us. The last one that could have been really serious was Tunguska, which had it hit head on rather than at an angle, and in an inhabited region rather than Siberia, would have been so destructive that it would have been worth the cost of deflecting it. That was in 1908. The next possible impact is, I believe, in 2037/8.
Only last week hard evidence was reported that asteroids themselves collide. This implies that yet another mechanism to cause asteroids to leave their relatively stable orbits and head Sunwards exists (apart from gravitational deflection by planets.)
The cost of a program to detect all credible collision threats and do something about it is, I imagine, around $1 billion per annum. The cost of a single asteroid collision in the developed world could easily run into thousands of times that. Look on it as relatively cheap life insurance, on a par with solving the Year 2000 problem and cheaper than protecting the US eastern seaboard against inundation, and it makes a lot of sense.
One thing that bugs me is the people who think that requiring at least one capital and one non-alphanumeric makes the password a lot stronger. Using lower case alphanumeric gives a range of 36 symbols at each point. Adding the new constraint increases this to around 70, given the limited set of non-alpha likely to be used. It doesn't take a genius to work out that, for instance, an 8-character plain lower case alphanumeric has more possible values than a 6-character mixed password. And I can easily generate a highly insecure password with the stricter requirement which will still be memorable for me and perhaps guessable - e.g. Fred-41
As a simple example, test installing SQL Server 2008 refused to accept an sa password which was highly secure - 11 random lower case alphanumerics - but was quite happy with Micro$0ft. Childish I know, but I wanted to check if they had implemented an algorithm to detect "obvious" password variants.
Perhaps someone is still using MD5 hashes for passwords. Or not using any hashes at all.
I can't resist pointing out that, unless you are one of the two genuine female/.ers, having an under-saddle lithium battery go wrong is more likely to take away the willy.
I wonder what thought has actually been given to designing safe battery compartments (e.g. strong metal casing facing up, weak plastic base facing down so that a fire will cause all the nasty stuff to head straight for the road)
Slashdot Mirror
Way to go, guys. You need to learn some history and some sociology. Then you will understand that the most successful criminals DO NOT ADVERTISE their existence. At a certain nuisance level, the cost of your attacks will exceed the cost of fixing the system to stop you. And the rest of us will be made to pay for it.
Actually, London is a problem - it is spaghetti under the streets and a lot of areas have poor connectivity.
However, you really do need to reconsider your voting. The Party that wants us out of the EU (civil liberties, human rights) seems to want to allow us to be bought by the US. Energy privatisation under Thatcher just worked so well, didn't it? So well that we pay the Germans and the French for the privilege of supplying us with energy, and then they nearly run out of gas because they have emptied our tanks to be sure their home markets are OK in a cold spell. And we have to be bailed out by the Russians. And now the idea is to get the US to pay for our broadband infrastructure so that for the rest of time our money can be exported to US companies, who will naturally bend over backwards to supply our data to the US and avoid European data protection laws.
The Conservatives went wrong when they appointed a PR man with media connections to run the Party rather than an old fashioned English patriot. I can't see how David Davis (who understands civil liberties) would have gone along with this. It would be funny if it was not so sick that the Conservatives are run by the man who did PR for the channel that puts on Big Brother.
What's more, this failure to assess risk properly is a bigger waste of tax and income than almost anything else, from the tax dollars going to foreign wars, to the insurance dollars wasted on allowing risky behaviour and vehicles on the roads. I find it quite amazing how "fiscally conservative" people can go all knee-jerk about spending money on near-imaginary threats, simply because some right-wing bloviator gets exercised about it, and then regards the (vastly greater) risk of getting killed on the roads or the streets as just an aspect of civil liberties.
XMPP is the best thing to happen in the messaging protocol world for many years, we need to make sure that it continues to develop (especially server to server) and be as widely deployed as possible.
Disclaimer: Our company produces a system management product that uses XMPP as its first line fault notification. I would prefer even the most backward MS shop to have heard of it, and not to confuse it with the horror that is MSN.
We also rather own the thermodynamic part of the SI system with the Watt, the Joule, and the Kelvin, not to mention the Faraday and the Newton but that's because the rest of the world was so awed by our scientific progress that they insisted.
For non-native English readers, please insert an irony tag wherever you find most convenient.
For road transport there are not many small-vehicle options outside the 4-wheeled box, co complaining that a car is still a car is stupid. VW has volume car designs which use remarkably advanced technologies - small 4-cylinder engines with outputs on a par with US V6 models, and with vastly superior fuel consumption. They make the FSI engine which produces 170BHP from 1.4 liters, with high torque from little more than tickover. They make Diesels which produce 170BHP from 1.9 liters. VW are achieving "hybrid" efficiencies from conventional engines with no expensive nickel batteries. They have commercialised close-ratio 7 speed automatic boxes with dual clutches and no slushbox. And this has been done with genuine innovation rather than incremental improvements.
And no, I am not a VW driver. I prefer the products of another innovative German company based in Stuttgart.
Basically they have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you intended to commit or promote terrorism. Since the Government has locked people up and tried on the argument "we know they plan terrible things but we can't tell you what they are for reasons of State", and m'Lud has responded "Bollocks to that, Jacqui" (or Dave, or whoever was currently disgracing the office of Home Secretary), I remain unconvinced they will get away with this one.
Here's a thought. I know enough to be able to design quite a good dirty bomb. Lots and lots of people like me also know this. Some could design a really, really good dirty bomb. My current application of my knowledge is to participate in the public consultation on the safety of new nuclear reactors. I'm trying to do my little bit to help prevent a terrorist attack, or indeed a straightforward criminal attack (my own view is that they should not be dignified as "terrorists" - they are simply violent criminals). Mr. Plod is not going to feel my collar. Unlike Peter Mandelson and his Government, Mr. Plod is not stupid.
*As a good atheist I feel justified in substituting the name of the best-known UK theorist of religion in this phrase.
One attraction of ARM is that if you can find a fab you can get what you want. This is precisely its advantage over X86. Everybody makes "small variants" for their special purposes. And everybody wants out from under MS/Intel.
The disadvantage of being US-centric is that a lot of people on Slashdot don't realise that outside the US there is a whole different ball game and it is bigger than the US market. The Nokia N900 is a Euro-computer descended ultimately from the Acorn Risc machine. South Korea has cultural and linguistic affinities to Finland. The weight piling up against Microsoft outside the US is increasing every day, and European computing is starting to take a different direction.
Now get that Turing machine off my goddam motherboard.
I have a new Phonak - it has no mould but a soft silicone guide for the in-ear speaker which is cheaply replaceable. The guides come in a few standard sizes. The main problem with it is, quite literally, not knowing if it is there or not. It makes me wonder why bluetooth headsets are so big and heavy.
Given the way some of them are thrown together, I'm completely in agreement with the NY view that electric two wheeled vehicles should comply with the same regulations as gas-powered ones. It is not like there are none available.
When he went to Brazil and discovered that his Portuguese was not as good as he hoped, he was asked "have you found a sleeping dictionary yet?" (apologies to any Slashdot readers who conform to the stereotype.)
There's a distinction between "useful" as in "I know the solution of this differential equation", and "useful" as in "this has shown me a different way of thinking about things". The second on is actually more likely to be of benefit over the long term.
In fact, this thought is hardly original to me: it was expressed to us many years ago by our crystallography lecturer.
I can't tell you how they are controlling, and I have described the estimate as "rough", but my own experience of my own extended family, which has a number of Oxbridge and Russell group graduates as well as US, German and Italian universities, suggests that getting into Oxbridge is partly accidental and, other things being equal, depends on your school and your social circle. My brother is far more intelligent than I am, but associating with a group of kids who clowned about at school caused the school not to put him forward for Cambridge, whereas I was more conformist and was being guided in that direction from the age of 13. I think I am unprejudiced in saying that Oxbridge does not in fact take the top tier of UK students because, in fact, it is too small and the selection process can never be sufficiently accurate. I believe that in practice their recruitment system gets them students reliably from the top 5% of the IQ range, i.e. +2sd, and some obvious standouts, but that overall the majority of students from that group go to the Russell group.
There is no British High Court: Scotland has a separate system of justice and it is the High Court of England and Wales. BSkyB is ultimately owned by News International, the multinational creation of Rupert Murdoch, born Australian but now a US citizen of convenience, and is British only in appearance. EDS is a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard, a US multinational. I will forgive you collage, because calling it a college would clearly be exaggeration.
I've only been to one university - though I have plenty of vocational qualifications. Although what I learned at Cambridge was rapidly obsoleted as knowledge - and I work in a field which did not even really exist when I was there - what I did there benefits me almost every single day of my life. I learned the things you mostly do not learn at work.
Specifically I learnt the critical attitude - to take nothing at face value. At a University famous for its experimentalism, I learnt how to design experiments and test the results. I learnt how to use statistical and probabilitistic analysis to eliminate false results. I learnt to distrust the wisdom of crowds. And I learnt how to learn.
Ever since then I have discovered that many people simply do not think but accept what is perceived as the norm in their industry or group. That is why you get everything from religious cults to stock market bubbles. Anyone who learnt experimental technique as I did could never be fooled by the early-80s boom. Anyone who learnt those techniques (as I did) would be able to go away, analyse the quality records of their company and suddenly realise that what "everybody believed" about a major industrial process of the company was quite wrong - and, after nearly getting fired for whistleblowing, convince the CEO (a Cambridge PhD) and end up as CTO.
When I had to learn some metallurgy and electrochemistry in a hurry - I knew where to go and how to do it. When I suddenly needed a working knowledge of technical German and French - I knew how to do it.
Vocational courses are great when you have a vocation. But a good University is not a vocational school. It expands your mental horizons and it shows you how to both access knowledge and bend it to your purpose.
It has been estimated roughly that an engineering, science or maths degree from Oxford or Cambridge has a net worth of over $300000 - that is the increase in annual income over life, minus the three years out of the workforce and the costs of doing the degree. This benefit is leveraged by vocational courses - I have obtained distinctions on every one of mine by applying proper habits of study.
Unless you sleepwalked through those universities and did not take full advantage of what they offered, I suspect that you've never really been there.
Let's put the funding into all the technologies that are already proven and work. The technical problems of running a Th fluoride reactor are horrible - just finding containment materials for a start - a fact that its proponents consistently ignore. History shows that new reactor types are associated with accidents well down the line, because there is only so much you can do with modeling. And thorium is truly nasty stuff.
China may become the world's biggest economy. In 1939 a lot of people thought that Germany would become the world's biggest economy. But saying it "is" is unsupported by any real evidence.
*Yes, I know this adds up to more than one. Five percent is overlap (some porn and rumors are useful) and five percent is because since you did the last survey, traffic has gone up by 5%.
The funny thing is, I can remember when SAABs were above the run of middle manager mobiles, and when Apple hardware really was superior to much of the competition. But those days are long gone.
The thing to watch - the thing that car makers and vanity goods makers don't tell you - is the percentage of their budget that is marketing. The really good stuff is the stuff that is not cheap but sells with hardly any marketing budget.
Being old and boring I shall continue to make do with my laptop that has an all-black carbon fibre reinforced case and my car that has a little silver propeller for a brand symbol. After several years of heavy use of both I can't find anything that would persuade me to change. It would certainly take a bit more than a tablet PC or a car brought to you by the guys who produced the Lada.
China consists of a strange mix: two First World territories (Hong Kong and Taiwan), an emergent country (mainly the seaboard) and a large Third World country. In order to become the dominant power, the emergent bit has to become First World and the Third World bit has to become emergent. This is unlike Europe (where the emergent bit is the poorest part) or the US, where the emergent and Third World parts are relatively small and mixed in with the First World part.
On this analysis, China needs to look inwards before it looks outwards. An aggressive war would result in the destruction of the most advanced parts of China, leaving the rest back near the iron age. Europe and the US would be badly damaged but would survive and retain First World capabilities. It is simply not in the Chinese interest to damage its most valuable assets. Just like Mao, they would let the peasants starve first.
* The War of 1812 does not figure in glorious US victories. A coalition of French Canadians, native Americans and the British successfully defended Canada and burned the White House, then the British went on to defeat Napoleon and weaken US power in the Caribbean for many years. The US turned Westwards. So much for Imperialist wars.
If you don't mind going back to the Stone Age while we divert all the earth's engineering and energy resources for a decade or so, feel free to assemble enough like minded people to put it to an electorate that screams when oil goes to $4/US gallon.
Only last week hard evidence was reported that asteroids themselves collide. This implies that yet another mechanism to cause asteroids to leave their relatively stable orbits and head Sunwards exists (apart from gravitational deflection by planets.)
The cost of a program to detect all credible collision threats and do something about it is, I imagine, around $1 billion per annum. The cost of a single asteroid collision in the developed world could easily run into thousands of times that. Look on it as relatively cheap life insurance, on a par with solving the Year 2000 problem and cheaper than protecting the US eastern seaboard against inundation, and it makes a lot of sense.
As a simple example, test installing SQL Server 2008 refused to accept an sa password which was highly secure - 11 random lower case alphanumerics - but was quite happy with Micro$0ft. Childish I know, but I wanted to check if they had implemented an algorithm to detect "obvious" password variants.
Perhaps someone is still using MD5 hashes for passwords. Or not using any hashes at all.
I wonder what thought has actually been given to designing safe battery compartments (e.g. strong metal casing facing up, weak plastic base facing down so that a fire will cause all the nasty stuff to head straight for the road)