Resist your fondness for shiny objects and don't install updates the instant they come out. Wait a few hours, or even days, then install. That way you can install them all at once.
You're right about the extension, thanks for telling me about that.
I can't find any reference to getting trade secret status after a patent expires at the link you provided. Since trade secret status requires that the invention be unpublished, and a patent absolutely requires public disclosure and publication of the invention, it seems impossible that you'd be able to get a patented invention declared as a trade secret. After all, it's available in patent libraries everywhere, so it's not a secret. To quote:
To have any value, the trade secret must remain secret. If it becomes known through inadvertent disclosure or through reverse engineering, the information may be used freely by anyone.
Last, I never argued that the industry was not recouping their investment. Rather, I argued that without the patent system, they may feel that they won't recoup their investment, and therefore wouldn't make it in the first place.
Re:The unintended benefits of pollution
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The thing people always seem to forget is that climate stasis is impossible even if humans had never existed. This stuff changes with or without us. We may or may not be affecting the process, but no matter what, we can't make it stay the way it is forever.
What is the ethical difference between buying yourself a candy bar or an amusement park ticket, and buying a ride into space?
The way I see it, the only difference is in magnitude. Just as the $20 million could have been spent on charity, so could the $1 for the candy bar or the $40 for the amusement park. I've never met somebody who didn't occasionally buy something useless for their own amusement. And while you could say that it's simply a matter of not being completely able to follow your beliefs, just like christians believe we all sin, I've never known anybody to talk about having sinned for buying something useless either.
Patents don't go to the first person to apply for one, they go to the first person to actually invent the idea. In theory, at least, if the inventor doesn't file a patent, then nobody else can either.
That isn't to say that some big, evil company couldn't patent it anyway, and have it granted because the patent office doesn't check enough, but as soon as that happened, the inventor could sue. Even though he's the little guy, I'm sure plenty of people would be contributing to his legal fund if his claim was well-documented and he really did have a cure for cancer.
Filing for a patent is still a good idea, and it doesn't imply that the person who has it is evil, of course. Better to have everything squared away at first rather than spending years in court later, even if you do win.
1) Without the patent system, it is very possible that this research would never have been developed in the first place.
2) Having a patent does not require you to charge exorbitant rates. It's possible, but it's also possible that he'll decide to give the technique away for free.
3) Patents expire after 17 years. So the absolute worst case is that it becomes available at lower cost in 17 years, not 'several decades'.
4) Medical treatment isn't free, no matter how much we'd like it to be. The reasons that these 'economically deficient' (nice euphemism for 'poor', by the way) regions can't afford treatments for diseases with known cures isn't because of patents, it's because these treatments actually cost money to produce!
The description mentions a "Pop-up Manager", which implies something along those lines, but doesn't explicitly state it. I was reacting to the post I was replying to (of course), which talked about a bunch of stuff relating to popups but didn't mention a blocker.
Every time one of these articles pops up, we have self-righteous idiots saying what a waste it is, and wouldn't it be better to give that twenty million dollars to starving children in Africa or the local hospital?
We don't go around telling you what to do with that twenty you have in your pocket. It's his money. Understand that concept? He owns that money and he can do whatever he wants to do with it within the law. If he wants to get it in $100 bills and have a bonfire, that's his right. If he wants to spend it on expensive cars which he then crushes with a wrecking ball, that's his right. If he wants to fund a dot-com startup with no business plan, that's his right. If he wants to go to the space station for a week, and somebody's willing to take him there, that's his right.
For one, they've apparently made a lot of changes to IE that will make it less of a pain in the ass to use. Some major changes to popup windows in general - they're making it much harder to trick users with popups.
Why don't they just block popups, like everybody else does? I'm not usually one to go for conspiracy theories, but as time goes on, the only explanation that makes sense for why MS doesn't provide popup blocking is that they're in bed with advertisers. Or maybe it's just a case of "we're a monopoly, we don't give a shit"? But seriously, every user out there would like popup blocking, so why don't they add it? Or did they put it in when I wasn't looking?
PAL and NTSC are TV signal formats. They describe how pixels get encoded into electronic signals. DVDs simply contain a bunch of MPEG-2 files which are played back. The only correspondence between the two is that it's usually better if your MPEG-2 files have similar attributes (like framerate and size) to the signal you're producing. So PAL DVDs have a PAL framerate and PAL dimensions, likewise for NTSC. Any reasonable DVD player should be able to understand either one and output it in the formats that it understands.
But I also advise you to check with someone who knows more about this than I do before you spend any real money.
Huh? PAL/NTSC is irrelevant, unless you mean the players, not the discs. PAL and NTSC discs are not identical, but I've never heard of a DVD player that couldn't play both.
The illusion of a slowing of progress is caused by relative compression of time. Basically, the twenty years before you were born seem like much less time than the twenty years after you were born. Everything seems to have happened faster in the past, because you can cover the entire period in a couple of hours reading a book, whereas you're forced to wait while current events unfold.
Building something larger than before is not a very big challenge, so the 747 is not very interesting from a 'progress' point of view. More interesting is a more modern craft, like the 777, which is fly-by-wire, two-engined, and yet reliable enough to make long overwater flights.
Passenger craft in general are less interesting, because there are certain economic and political realities that are hard to get around. No matter how fast a given airplane can take you from airport A to airport B, your total travel time will still be at least three or four hours due to checkin time, security, seating, baggage, etc. The same thing goes for size; once you hit a certain size, it's better to just run planes more often than to get bigger ones, both because of cost and because of better scheduling flexibility.
The more interesting stuff is happening in the general-aviation sector and the military sector. Take military first: yes, they're still using F-14s and F-15s, as well as really old stuff like B-52s. But those (well, not B-52s...) are getting near their end of life. Thirty years is perfectly reasonable. At the same time, new models like the F-22 and the JSF are coming on line, both of which have very interesting features.
As far as general aviation goes, just look at yesterday's slashdot headlines: the X-Prize. There are a dozen groups in the world which are actually somewhat serious about putting people into space within the next year. I don't know how many of them are realistic, but the groups themselves are serious about it, which means that they must have at least some ability. That is really amazing! And sure, in a technical sense, it's nothing new; we've had the ability to put people in space for forty years. But the ability to do it without the amount of support and infrastructure that a national space program provides is incredible.
I don't dispute that things have slowed down a bit. Things moved really, really fast from about 1940 to 1960. But I do believe that our perceptions greatly exaggerate the slowdown. There are plenty of interesting things going on today.
I find it kind of odd that in you're quick little 'what will happen?' list, you don't even admit to the possibility that the New Zealand flight wasn't actually first. Don't believe everything you read blindly.
however with P2P traffic currently taking 60-70% of ISPs bandwidth they have to do something.
Why?
If 60-70% of the traffic was e-mail, would they have to do something? If it was HTTP?
Lots of people get broadband to do P2P. This is pretty obvious if it's taking up that much bandwidth. Lots of P2P activity is illegal, but that's not really the ISP's concern.
ISPs are oversubscribing and suddenly the applications are appearing that are making that strategy unviable. Just like everybody else who has a business plan that doesn't work out in the real world, these ISPs need to raise prices or stop claiming "unlimited" access now that people are able and willing to use all of the access they were promised.
This is totally unreliable. It's very easy to imagine someone doing massive amounts of uploading in a work-at-home situation. (Say, an artist.) It's likewise very easy to imagine that person doing both a lot of uploading and a lot of downloading.
The problem with these providers is that they're taking the approach of sending out notices at the first sign of suspicion, then waiting for the customer to explain. They should be doing more legwork themselves first. How long would it have taken some tech at the ISP to look into your situation a little further, instead of sending you a letter and forcing you to call them back? My high school used to pull shit like this when they thought I was doing evil with their systems. It is not very becoming of a large business.
Yes, there is plenty of doubt that there were plenty. OS 9 literally has no services built in; none. A fresh install of OS 9 is displaying no open ports to the outside world. The only kind of vulnerability it could possibly have had would be a vulnerability in the TCP stack itself. And then you have to somehow load in enough code to gain remote access. It's not going to be some little 500-byte assembly program that opens a port and connects it to/bin/sh, because these ideas don't exist. You'll have to send over a complete remote access solution with your vulnerability, because the OS didn't come with one.
OS 9 was not particularly useful in a network environment, but rest assured that it was plenty secure.
That's not coincidence, that's a result of tide locking. Tides create friction in a rotating body which slows it down and it eventually stops. This is why the Earth's rotation is slowing down, why the Moon's orbit is getting bigger (angular momentum transfers from the Earth to the Moon) and why the Moon always shows the same face to the Earth. See Mercury for another example, it's not locked but it rotates exactly 1.5 times for every orbit. There are other examples as well, I'm sure.
Are you American? Have you ever travelled abroad? It seems to me that the only people I ever hear saying "Oh, McDonald's is destroying everybody's culture, how horrible!" are people who have never left the good ol' USA and seen what the hell they're talking about. I certainly have never heard any of the "natives" say something like that.
In the various places I've travelled, I've seen lots of McDonald's, and KFC's in China. It doesn't seem to be doing a particularly good job of destroying the local culture. And I'm American, I don't consider McD's or KFC to be part of my culture, so how could their presence be exporting it? They're just stores, they're not magic culture fairies.
When outside influence comes into a culture, it's called "change", not "taint". You're acting as if this is something new. News flash: the entire world has been connected by trade links for the past five hundred years. Europe, Asia, and Africa have been connected by trade links for over two thousand years. Our cultures have continually mixed and changed in response to each other. It just happens faster now that you can fly from Chicago to Beijing in thirteen hours.
Interesting that people here call it outrageous when the RIAA sues a grandmother for downloading music (she couldn't possibly be downloading music)....
Said grandmother owned a Mac, and the RIAA accused her of downloading things from Kazaa. There is no Mac Kazaa client.
The grandmother in this story most certainly is sending spam.
This is slightly offtopic, but not too much, so here goes.
Anybody have advice for computers for robotics applications? I played around quite a bit with lego mindstorms, and I'm wondering if there's something similar but better out there.
Here's what I'm looking for: something with enough CPU power and memory to be able to run a reasonable OS, like Linux or BSD, consume little power, and have good IO support. Bonus points if it has enough power to be able to run gcc so I don't have to compile my programs somewhere else. Some kind of wireless communications, whether 802.11b or IR serial or whatever, is a must.
The best that I've seen so far is the stuff from Soekris, but I'd be interested to know what slashdotters think, if there are other good choices out there.
Sitting in a modern airliner in the middle of a flight is about the safest place you can possibly be, including (if you count average number of deaths per hour) any place inside your house or apartment. More people die from slipping in their shower than from airline crashes, even when you adjust for the number of people who participate in each activity.
If you want to make things safe, let's make cars safe. Talk about deathtraps, not only for the people in them but for anybody nearby....
My memory may be faulty, but as I recall, only two XB-70s were constructed. One was destroyed during a photo-shoot when another airplane ran into its wake turbulence and crashed into it. The other one is sitting in a museum somewhere.
The XB-70s had plenty of problems, but stability was not one of them. You are also wrong about the stability of other airplanes; no modern airliner, that I am aware of, uses an inherently unstable design like the F-16 does. In fact, the only modern airliner that is pure fly-by-wire without the possibility of direct manual intervention is the 777. Other airliners can be flown without computer assistance without falling out of the air.
I disagree. I know a lot more about the rich Chinese than the poor, because those are the ones I've actually visited and talked to. And although most of the conversation was being translated through an intermediate common language, I never once got the feeling that any of these (DVD-player-owning, new-car-buying with cash, etc.) people cared about politics at all. Or maybe I should say that they cared about politics the way people care about the weather; it's strange, interesting, and very useful, but it's not something you try to change. Your theory is good, and I would probably say the exact same thing if I hadn't seen otherwise. It could just be the people I talked to, but my impression is that there is so little tradition of political participation that they don't miss it.
My genuine if weaselly answer: I'm not sure which one, but I do believe that one of those three choices is true. Or maybe more than one; it was slightly justified, is probably winnable, and the Bush administration does not seem to have its head screwed on entirely straight.
it doesn't hurt if you keep most of your population at damn near the global poverty level.
China has been enjoying a truly amazing rate of economic growth for quite some time. Although the government tends to exaggerate the figures, the true figures are still very good. The amount of new construction in places like Beijing and Shanghai is incredible. Even in the interior, places that didn't even have running water not that long ago are getting telephones and TVs. The per-capita GDP is currently about $4,400, which is already not that bad.
China's leaders are totalitarian, but they have absolutely no incentive to keep their population poor. The richer their people are, the richer they are, and the more powerful their country is. They are smart enough to realize this.
Slashdot Mirror
Resist your fondness for shiny objects and don't install updates the instant they come out. Wait a few hours, or even days, then install. That way you can install them all at once.
I can't find any reference to getting trade secret status after a patent expires at the link you provided. Since trade secret status requires that the invention be unpublished, and a patent absolutely requires public disclosure and publication of the invention, it seems impossible that you'd be able to get a patented invention declared as a trade secret. After all, it's available in patent libraries everywhere, so it's not a secret. To quote:
Last, I never argued that the industry was not recouping their investment. Rather, I argued that without the patent system, they may feel that they won't recoup their investment, and therefore wouldn't make it in the first place.
The thing people always seem to forget is that climate stasis is impossible even if humans had never existed. This stuff changes with or without us. We may or may not be affecting the process, but no matter what, we can't make it stay the way it is forever.
What is the ethical difference between buying yourself a candy bar or an amusement park ticket, and buying a ride into space?
The way I see it, the only difference is in magnitude. Just as the $20 million could have been spent on charity, so could the $1 for the candy bar or the $40 for the amusement park. I've never met somebody who didn't occasionally buy something useless for their own amusement. And while you could say that it's simply a matter of not being completely able to follow your beliefs, just like christians believe we all sin, I've never known anybody to talk about having sinned for buying something useless either.
Patents don't go to the first person to apply for one, they go to the first person to actually invent the idea. In theory, at least, if the inventor doesn't file a patent, then nobody else can either.
That isn't to say that some big, evil company couldn't patent it anyway, and have it granted because the patent office doesn't check enough, but as soon as that happened, the inventor could sue. Even though he's the little guy, I'm sure plenty of people would be contributing to his legal fund if his claim was well-documented and he really did have a cure for cancer.
Filing for a patent is still a good idea, and it doesn't imply that the person who has it is evil, of course. Better to have everything squared away at first rather than spending years in court later, even if you do win.
Get real.
1) Without the patent system, it is very possible that this research would never have been developed in the first place.
2) Having a patent does not require you to charge exorbitant rates. It's possible, but it's also possible that he'll decide to give the technique away for free.
3) Patents expire after 17 years. So the absolute worst case is that it becomes available at lower cost in 17 years, not 'several decades'.
4) Medical treatment isn't free, no matter how much we'd like it to be. The reasons that these 'economically deficient' (nice euphemism for 'poor', by the way) regions can't afford treatments for diseases with known cures isn't because of patents, it's because these treatments actually cost money to produce!
The description mentions a "Pop-up Manager", which implies something along those lines, but doesn't explicitly state it. I was reacting to the post I was replying to (of course), which talked about a bunch of stuff relating to popups but didn't mention a blocker.
So, it's about damned time! Hooray.
Blah blah blah blah blah.
Every time one of these articles pops up, we have self-righteous idiots saying what a waste it is, and wouldn't it be better to give that twenty million dollars to starving children in Africa or the local hospital?
We don't go around telling you what to do with that twenty you have in your pocket. It's his money. Understand that concept? He owns that money and he can do whatever he wants to do with it within the law. If he wants to get it in $100 bills and have a bonfire, that's his right. If he wants to spend it on expensive cars which he then crushes with a wrecking ball, that's his right. If he wants to fund a dot-com startup with no business plan, that's his right. If he wants to go to the space station for a week, and somebody's willing to take him there, that's his right.
For one, they've apparently made a lot of changes to IE that will make it less of a pain in the ass to use. Some major changes to popup windows in general - they're making it much harder to trick users with popups.
Why don't they just block popups, like everybody else does? I'm not usually one to go for conspiracy theories, but as time goes on, the only explanation that makes sense for why MS doesn't provide popup blocking is that they're in bed with advertisers. Or maybe it's just a case of "we're a monopoly, we don't give a shit"? But seriously, every user out there would like popup blocking, so why don't they add it? Or did they put it in when I wasn't looking?
PAL and NTSC are TV signal formats. They describe how pixels get encoded into electronic signals. DVDs simply contain a bunch of MPEG-2 files which are played back. The only correspondence between the two is that it's usually better if your MPEG-2 files have similar attributes (like framerate and size) to the signal you're producing. So PAL DVDs have a PAL framerate and PAL dimensions, likewise for NTSC. Any reasonable DVD player should be able to understand either one and output it in the formats that it understands.
But I also advise you to check with someone who knows more about this than I do before you spend any real money.
Huh? PAL/NTSC is irrelevant, unless you mean the players, not the discs. PAL and NTSC discs are not identical, but I've never heard of a DVD player that couldn't play both.
The illusion of a slowing of progress is caused by relative compression of time. Basically, the twenty years before you were born seem like much less time than the twenty years after you were born. Everything seems to have happened faster in the past, because you can cover the entire period in a couple of hours reading a book, whereas you're forced to wait while current events unfold.
Building something larger than before is not a very big challenge, so the 747 is not very interesting from a 'progress' point of view. More interesting is a more modern craft, like the 777, which is fly-by-wire, two-engined, and yet reliable enough to make long overwater flights.
Passenger craft in general are less interesting, because there are certain economic and political realities that are hard to get around. No matter how fast a given airplane can take you from airport A to airport B, your total travel time will still be at least three or four hours due to checkin time, security, seating, baggage, etc. The same thing goes for size; once you hit a certain size, it's better to just run planes more often than to get bigger ones, both because of cost and because of better scheduling flexibility.
The more interesting stuff is happening in the general-aviation sector and the military sector. Take military first: yes, they're still using F-14s and F-15s, as well as really old stuff like B-52s. But those (well, not B-52s...) are getting near their end of life. Thirty years is perfectly reasonable. At the same time, new models like the F-22 and the JSF are coming on line, both of which have very interesting features.
As far as general aviation goes, just look at yesterday's slashdot headlines: the X-Prize. There are a dozen groups in the world which are actually somewhat serious about putting people into space within the next year. I don't know how many of them are realistic, but the groups themselves are serious about it, which means that they must have at least some ability. That is really amazing! And sure, in a technical sense, it's nothing new; we've had the ability to put people in space for forty years. But the ability to do it without the amount of support and infrastructure that a national space program provides is incredible.
I don't dispute that things have slowed down a bit. Things moved really, really fast from about 1940 to 1960. But I do believe that our perceptions greatly exaggerate the slowdown. There are plenty of interesting things going on today.
I find it kind of odd that in you're quick little 'what will happen?' list, you don't even admit to the possibility that the New Zealand flight wasn't actually first. Don't believe everything you read blindly.
however with P2P traffic currently taking 60-70% of ISPs bandwidth they have to do something.
Why?
If 60-70% of the traffic was e-mail, would they have to do something? If it was HTTP?
Lots of people get broadband to do P2P. This is pretty obvious if it's taking up that much bandwidth. Lots of P2P activity is illegal, but that's not really the ISP's concern.
ISPs are oversubscribing and suddenly the applications are appearing that are making that strategy unviable. Just like everybody else who has a business plan that doesn't work out in the real world, these ISPs need to raise prices or stop claiming "unlimited" access now that people are able and willing to use all of the access they were promised.
This is totally unreliable. It's very easy to imagine someone doing massive amounts of uploading in a work-at-home situation. (Say, an artist.) It's likewise very easy to imagine that person doing both a lot of uploading and a lot of downloading.
The problem with these providers is that they're taking the approach of sending out notices at the first sign of suspicion, then waiting for the customer to explain. They should be doing more legwork themselves first. How long would it have taken some tech at the ISP to look into your situation a little further, instead of sending you a letter and forcing you to call them back? My high school used to pull shit like this when they thought I was doing evil with their systems. It is not very becoming of a large business.
This is not "Insightful".
/bin/sh, because these ideas don't exist. You'll have to send over a complete remote access solution with your vulnerability, because the OS didn't come with one.
Yes, there is plenty of doubt that there were plenty. OS 9 literally has no services built in; none. A fresh install of OS 9 is displaying no open ports to the outside world. The only kind of vulnerability it could possibly have had would be a vulnerability in the TCP stack itself. And then you have to somehow load in enough code to gain remote access. It's not going to be some little 500-byte assembly program that opens a port and connects it to
OS 9 was not particularly useful in a network environment, but rest assured that it was plenty secure.
That's not coincidence, that's a result of tide locking. Tides create friction in a rotating body which slows it down and it eventually stops. This is why the Earth's rotation is slowing down, why the Moon's orbit is getting bigger (angular momentum transfers from the Earth to the Moon) and why the Moon always shows the same face to the Earth. See Mercury for another example, it's not locked but it rotates exactly 1.5 times for every orbit. There are other examples as well, I'm sure.
Blah blah blah blah blah.
Are you American? Have you ever travelled abroad? It seems to me that the only people I ever hear saying "Oh, McDonald's is destroying everybody's culture, how horrible!" are people who have never left the good ol' USA and seen what the hell they're talking about. I certainly have never heard any of the "natives" say something like that.
In the various places I've travelled, I've seen lots of McDonald's, and KFC's in China. It doesn't seem to be doing a particularly good job of destroying the local culture. And I'm American, I don't consider McD's or KFC to be part of my culture, so how could their presence be exporting it? They're just stores, they're not magic culture fairies.
When outside influence comes into a culture, it's called "change", not "taint". You're acting as if this is something new. News flash: the entire world has been connected by trade links for the past five hundred years. Europe, Asia, and Africa have been connected by trade links for over two thousand years. Our cultures have continually mixed and changed in response to each other. It just happens faster now that you can fly from Chicago to Beijing in thirteen hours.
Interesting that people here call it outrageous when the RIAA sues a grandmother for downloading music (she couldn't possibly be downloading music)....
Said grandmother owned a Mac, and the RIAA accused her of downloading things from Kazaa. There is no Mac Kazaa client.
The grandmother in this story most certainly is sending spam.
This is slightly offtopic, but not too much, so here goes.
Anybody have advice for computers for robotics applications? I played around quite a bit with lego mindstorms, and I'm wondering if there's something similar but better out there.
Here's what I'm looking for: something with enough CPU power and memory to be able to run a reasonable OS, like Linux or BSD, consume little power, and have good IO support. Bonus points if it has enough power to be able to run gcc so I don't have to compile my programs somewhere else. Some kind of wireless communications, whether 802.11b or IR serial or whatever, is a must.
The best that I've seen so far is the stuff from Soekris, but I'd be interested to know what slashdotters think, if there are other good choices out there.
Sitting in a modern airliner in the middle of a flight is about the safest place you can possibly be, including (if you count average number of deaths per hour) any place inside your house or apartment. More people die from slipping in their shower than from airline crashes, even when you adjust for the number of people who participate in each activity.
If you want to make things safe, let's make cars safe. Talk about deathtraps, not only for the people in them but for anybody nearby....
My memory may be faulty, but as I recall, only two XB-70s were constructed. One was destroyed during a photo-shoot when another airplane ran into its wake turbulence and crashed into it. The other one is sitting in a museum somewhere.
The XB-70s had plenty of problems, but stability was not one of them. You are also wrong about the stability of other airplanes; no modern airliner, that I am aware of, uses an inherently unstable design like the F-16 does. In fact, the only modern airliner that is pure fly-by-wire without the possibility of direct manual intervention is the 777. Other airliners can be flown without computer assistance without falling out of the air.
I disagree. I know a lot more about the rich Chinese than the poor, because those are the ones I've actually visited and talked to. And although most of the conversation was being translated through an intermediate common language, I never once got the feeling that any of these (DVD-player-owning, new-car-buying with cash, etc.) people cared about politics at all. Or maybe I should say that they cared about politics the way people care about the weather; it's strange, interesting, and very useful, but it's not something you try to change. Your theory is good, and I would probably say the exact same thing if I hadn't seen otherwise. It could just be the people I talked to, but my impression is that there is so little tradition of political participation that they don't miss it.
My genuine if weaselly answer: I'm not sure which one, but I do believe that one of those three choices is true. Or maybe more than one; it was slightly justified, is probably winnable, and the Bush administration does not seem to have its head screwed on entirely straight.
it doesn't hurt if you keep most of your population at damn near the global poverty level.
China has been enjoying a truly amazing rate of economic growth for quite some time. Although the government tends to exaggerate the figures, the true figures are still very good. The amount of new construction in places like Beijing and Shanghai is incredible. Even in the interior, places that didn't even have running water not that long ago are getting telephones and TVs. The per-capita GDP is currently about $4,400, which is already not that bad.
China's leaders are totalitarian, but they have absolutely no incentive to keep their population poor. The richer their people are, the richer they are, and the more powerful their country is. They are smart enough to realize this.