Right now China is looking for resources and prestige, wherever they can get them. There has been talk lately of Helium-3 laying around on the Moon - a suitable source of energy, which China has been particularly interested in. And if that doesn't pan out, there's still the prestige.
The question comes when the second party goes to land on the Moon, after China has established a secure foothold. What if, at any point during that other-nation mission, they make ANY sort of ownership-encumbered statement? It could be as simple as, "We grant you permission to land on the Moon at XXX location," presumably where the mission was landing, anyway. In fact, "granting exploratory permission" would be their best move, because in this case time would be on their side. Once "permission is granted," landing on the Moon could also be construed as tacit acceptance of China's authority to grant that permission. Landing without accepting permission or recognizing their authority to grant it is the diplomatic challenge. This also presumes that they're busy building on-Moon infrastructure and other nations are just sending footprints'n'flags missions. At the point where the next nation tries to establish a base, be it halfway around the Moon, is when we'd have to watch for some shooting. Incidentally, at this stage in the game it wouldn't take much in the way of weaponry to "own" the Moon. Anything installed there has serious advantages over anything Earth-launched or carried on a spacecraft from Earth.
So is anyone going to make a stink when China claims the Moon for themselves?
I know there is a treaty prohibiting this, though I don't know if China is signatory, and I don't know if they care, or if they'll find a way out of it.
But it appears that the general way if the future is: China does what China wants.
They should. I just consider it another layer. By the OpenBSD philosophy, you don't need a firewall. I try and run my systems that way, but I use a firewall, anyway. I'm not sure exactly how many layers I'd like to have, I guess it depends on how expensive they are. But I do know that I want more than 1 layer, at least.
But maybe you want product placement. So cut out the empty street and put in a car from your sponsor. I'm sure the program can be "assisted" in making these kinds of decisions. Like perhaps drop a "car icon" where you want a car, and the program knows it has to get rid of that "noise" or "blank spot" by picking an appropriate car to put there.
Run your user account inside a guest, and at least the base OS won't get compromised, and you won't need to reinstall. Run your browser and/or email inside a guest inside your account, and you won't have to worry about virii or web nasties compromising your precious code and data. It's all about damage limitation/confinement.
I don't want a non-free VM, either. I'm figuring that right now Linux has so darned many virtualization options that whenever I have the right hardware, I can just pick one.
This also presumes that with the right hardware features, virtualization is cheap, in terms of cycles and disk space.
One use you might be interested in is a security barrier. The base system boots, but very little really runs on it. Instead you start guest images, and the stuff runs under the guests. Compromise a guest and you haven't compromised the machine. In fact, one thing you might run on the host is an Intrusion Detection System that monitors the guests and shuts down any that might go rogue. Better yet, you could "freeze" the rogue by ceasing to schedule CPU cycles to it, and save the image for forensic analysis. A few reasons might be to run outside-facing services in guests, or run user accounts, or maybe just browsers in guests. I've been interested in this usage, but don't have powerful enough hardware, yet.
Another use is simply safety. There has been talk (and proof-of-concept) of "hypervisor worms" that tunnel under an existing OS and virtualize it. If you're not running some sort of hypervisor, you're vulnerable. If you are running some sort of hypervisor, its security should stop the worm from tunneling.
Cut out a car, and the algorithm will replace the blank spot with a car. Not necessarily the same car, but a car of about the same size, etc.
So for location shooting, you no longer need to go through extensive "scene sanitation" ahead of the shoot. Take select frames of the footage, point out what you want to snip, and let software propagate the snips through the rest of the footage. Then let this new stuff fill those holes with "approved product placement" items that fit the scene. Yank the Chevys, put in Fords. Yank the Pepsi, put in Coke, etc.
There isn't spit that can be done in Vermont about federal rights or rights in other states for Civil Union participants, even if we were to call it "marriage." I agree with the other poster's comment about separating secular and religious aspects of "marriage", and only let the State fiddle with the secular side, perhaps calling it a Civil Union. Once all couples have a Civil Union, and all are equal to the State, the "separate but equal" argument becomes a religious issue, with atheists on the same side as gays who practice a non-gay-tolerating religion.
One could argue that this is a "separation of Church and State" issue, that marriage is a religious institution and the State has no business messing in it. Then we could make it effectively like it is today by allowing the State to delegate the process of granting Civil Unions to "qualified representatives," some of which happen to be priests and ministers. In other words, just like today you can go to the priest or minister and get married, and on the side get your Civil Union which takes care of all of the State-related legal stuff. Or you can do everything outside the religious process, and in essence a Justice of the Peace grants Civil Unions instead of marriages.
>Why do you think so many gay people want to get married? To get official recognition for their rights.
In Vermont a few years back we enacted, "Civil Unions," which grant gays all of the "secular benefits and rights" of marriage, like inheritance, insurance, etc. AFAIK, a Civil Union does everything that marriage does except get recognized in other states and carry the name, "marriage." Gays in Vermont are still pushing for "full marriage" legislation.
Since you've uncloaked as a Canadian, a question is necessary:
In the US, every time the topic of Universal Health Care comes up, "they" trot out the bogeymen of long lines, poor service, unmotivated poorly paid doctors, etc. Then one goes to see Michael Moore's "Sicko" and those bad things don't appear to be there - it actually does seem to work.
Where is the truth? You're living it, please tell us your perspective.
It's easily believable that the "they" who tell us about the evils of Universal Health Care are the Health Insurance and Pharma industries who benefit most from the current system. It's also believable that the Utopian vision of Universal Health Care comes from those who just plain don't like our current system. Then again, all of that net revenue, profits, etc of the Health Insurance Industry is from another perspective, "wasteful overhead" when what one is really trying to get is health care. Of course from the Health Insurance Industry's point of view, "health care" is wasteful overhead when their goal is profit. Then again, sometimes I'd swear that the pharma budget for TV advertising in the evenings must exceed their Research budget, by the sheer number and polish of the commercials.
BTW, anyone else who is receiving Universal Health Care, please add your experiences. Many of us in the US would like to hear FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE.
Fine job of counter-villainizing, there. Because of course we ALL know that ALL environmentalists are either cohorts of Dr. Evil or his unwitting pawns. We also know that Prius owners generally commute long distances, and SUV owners generally live a few blocks from their places of work and shopping.
Actually, I like your proposal, and I can see some environmentalists disliking it, for the reasons you state. But in addition to the "environmentalist" reasons you state, you forgot the "conservative" reasons for disliking it...
-It contains the word "tax", and must therefore be EVIL! -It would require corporations to change practices, and they don't like doing that, frequently even if it means that they could make more money.
My fears are three-fold.
- Gaming the system - finding a way to meet the regulatory definition of carbon sink, without actually being one, and they siphoning off more of the funds than the legitimate carbon sinks. I suspect this is why environmentalists would generally distrust your line about "Big evil corporations would...". It's a heck of a lot easier to game the system when you have a stable of lawyers who not only know very well how to read them, but no doubt had a heavy lobbying influence in their being written. In software it's called a "back door." - The tax side of it might create a pot of money. Any time a pot of money is created, it attracts human vermin, people with the appearance of respectability who are generally good at locating and tapping those pots of money. - "(in transparent process)" Very little about the current administration has been transparent. The cloak of secrecy magnifies my other fears.
But the TV spectrum is going to go silent in a few years, at least as radiated by the US. What'll be in its place? Noise. Any sufficiently compressed and encoded signal ends up looking like noise, to the "uninitiated." Maybe it'll be high-power noise, but noise nonetheless.
Plus even ignoring that, just because we're emitting more net RF power now doesn't mean we'll continue to do so for anotther century. It *is* inefficient the way we've been using RF power, and if Peak Oil is real, at some point we're going to go after more and more energy wastes, RF into space being one of them. On the timescalse of the Drake Equation we're still pretty darned immature.
>and one of my readers pointed out that by changing a line or two of my code, that Open XML could be >processed in the same way - I stand corrected.
Then let's watch him do it. The objections to OOXML center around that fact that it's not really open, and that the significant information is buried in blobs and cruft.
IMHO the real task is to put tools out there to access and manipulate ODF data, making life easier for people. Then let the challenge become getting the equivalent done with OOXML. That's really what this is all about - access to data. At present the "tool of choice" for data access is MS Office, but the ability to script data access with ODF makes this look like a sysadmin problem, GUI single-system admin vs scripted multi-system admin.
Use ODF to make peoples' lives easier. If OOXML can't work this way, since we don't believe the "standard" is complete/workable, it will show.
This means that Second Life and WoW have become terrorist-affiliated/terrorist-supporting orgainizations. That means that everyone subscribing to Second Life or WoW now have financial links to terrorism. Therefore :
Everyone on Second Life and WoW is open game for DHS, warrantless wiretaps, asset freezing, etc.
(silly sarcasm, frightening Orwellian reality, or absurd conspiracy theory, you decide.)
Years ago I picked up a book on "XINU" that was kind of like that. There wasn't really an OS, you linked OS components into an application that was loaded onto the hardware.
As for the picokernel thing, I was more playing on the words. We obviously passed over millikernel too, not to mention decikernels and centikernels.
Related to that in the literary realm, we've all been hearing about nanotech for years. I've working in sub-hundred-nanometer silicon for several years now, so I guess nanotech is getting a little passe'. I'm now reading Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity Is Near" and I saw the term "picotech" for the first time. Around that time, I also read the SF book "Hauling Ice" where they threw in picotech and femtotech. Gotta keep up with the Joneses.
About as many stories I hear of ODF being rebuffed in the US, I seem to hear of it being adopted overseas. Not 100% penetration, but still better than in the US.
In that light, perhaps the metric system is the correct analogy.
Maybe the limit has more to do with how many politicians Microsoft can buy. For many years they ignored politics, preferring to exert their force against "business partners." After the antitrust suits they began to learn about US politics, and with ODF they began to meddle in state politics. But there are subtle difference in politics in every political entity - do it wrong and you're even worse off. They've just put a lot of effort into China, obviously because it's a big emerging market. They'll likely put a lot of effort into India, too. But beyond that, it starts getting little - and local.
>And newer OSs support more recent versions of DirectX than older ones
I was able to put DirectX 9.0(b or c, forget which) on my Win98SE machine - it even came with the my daughter's game that needed it. (2003)
I don't know if there are newer versions of DX9, but DX10 is Vista-only. So it seems like from that perspective Win98SE is as good as XP. (I know there are other perspectives, but these *are* blinders, after all. Win98SE is also there just for games.)
Now that you mention it, did you include some sort of work lights on that crash cart? I don't think I've seen anyone mention work lights yet, or maybe that's such a given that nobody felt it was worth mentioning.
Heck, my office is under the cafeteria. Forget plain old water, how about a soup spill (minor quantities, but messy) or a dishwasher malfunction? (major quantities, almost as messy, per litre.)
Slashdot Mirror
Right now China is looking for resources and prestige, wherever they can get them. There has been talk lately of Helium-3 laying around on the Moon - a suitable source of energy, which China has been particularly interested in. And if that doesn't pan out, there's still the prestige.
The question comes when the second party goes to land on the Moon, after China has established a secure foothold. What if, at any point during that other-nation mission, they make ANY sort of ownership-encumbered statement? It could be as simple as, "We grant you permission to land on the Moon at XXX location," presumably where the mission was landing, anyway. In fact, "granting exploratory permission" would be their best move, because in this case time would be on their side. Once "permission is granted," landing on the Moon could also be construed as tacit acceptance of China's authority to grant that permission. Landing without accepting permission or recognizing their authority to grant it is the diplomatic challenge. This also presumes that they're busy building on-Moon infrastructure and other nations are just sending footprints'n'flags missions. At the point where the next nation tries to establish a base, be it halfway around the Moon, is when we'd have to watch for some shooting. Incidentally, at this stage in the game it wouldn't take much in the way of weaponry to "own" the Moon. Anything installed there has serious advantages over anything Earth-launched or carried on a spacecraft from Earth.
So is anyone going to make a stink when China claims the Moon for themselves?
I know there is a treaty prohibiting this, though I don't know if China is signatory, and I don't know if they care, or if they'll find a way out of it.
But it appears that the general way if the future is: China does what China wants.
They should. I just consider it another layer. By the OpenBSD philosophy, you don't need a firewall. I try and run my systems that way, but I use a firewall, anyway. I'm not sure exactly how many layers I'd like to have, I guess it depends on how expensive they are. But I do know that I want more than 1 layer, at least.
But maybe you want product placement. So cut out the empty street and put in a car from your sponsor. I'm sure the program can be "assisted" in making these kinds of decisions. Like perhaps drop a "car icon" where you want a car, and the program knows it has to get rid of that "noise" or "blank spot" by picking an appropriate car to put there.
Run your user account inside a guest, and at least the base OS won't get compromised, and you won't need to reinstall. Run your browser and/or email inside a guest inside your account, and you won't have to worry about virii or web nasties compromising your precious code and data. It's all about damage limitation/confinement.
I don't want a non-free VM, either. I'm figuring that right now Linux has so darned many virtualization options that whenever I have the right hardware, I can just pick one.
This also presumes that with the right hardware features, virtualization is cheap, in terms of cycles and disk space.
Virtualization is not just for multiple OS's.
One use you might be interested in is a security barrier. The base system boots, but very little really runs on it. Instead you start guest images, and the stuff runs under the guests. Compromise a guest and you haven't compromised the machine. In fact, one thing you might run on the host is an Intrusion Detection System that monitors the guests and shuts down any that might go rogue. Better yet, you could "freeze" the rogue by ceasing to schedule CPU cycles to it, and save the image for forensic analysis. A few reasons might be to run outside-facing services in guests, or run user accounts, or maybe just browsers in guests. I've been interested in this usage, but don't have powerful enough hardware, yet.
Another use is simply safety. There has been talk (and proof-of-concept) of "hypervisor worms" that tunnel under an existing OS and virtualize it. If you're not running some sort of hypervisor, you're vulnerable. If you are running some sort of hypervisor, its security should stop the worm from tunneling.
Now you've done it...
Cut out a car, and the algorithm will replace the blank spot with a car. Not necessarily the same car, but a car of about the same size, etc.
So for location shooting, you no longer need to go through extensive "scene sanitation" ahead of the shoot. Take select frames of the footage, point out what you want to snip, and let software propagate the snips through the rest of the footage. Then let this new stuff fill those holes with "approved product placement" items that fit the scene. Yank the Chevys, put in Fords. Yank the Pepsi, put in Coke, etc.
There isn't spit that can be done in Vermont about federal rights or rights in other states for Civil Union participants, even if we were to call it "marriage." I agree with the other poster's comment about separating secular and religious aspects of "marriage", and only let the State fiddle with the secular side, perhaps calling it a Civil Union. Once all couples have a Civil Union, and all are equal to the State, the "separate but equal" argument becomes a religious issue, with atheists on the same side as gays who practice a non-gay-tolerating religion.
I agree with you on this one.
One could argue that this is a "separation of Church and State" issue, that marriage is a religious institution and the State has no business messing in it. Then we could make it effectively like it is today by allowing the State to delegate the process of granting Civil Unions to "qualified representatives," some of which happen to be priests and ministers. In other words, just like today you can go to the priest or minister and get married, and on the side get your Civil Union which takes care of all of the State-related legal stuff. Or you can do everything outside the religious process, and in essence a Justice of the Peace grants Civil Unions instead of marriages.
I may not dispute what you say, but I *will* say that the things we're complaining about now will prove ineffective against them.
>Why do you think so many gay people want to get married? To get official recognition for their rights.
In Vermont a few years back we enacted, "Civil Unions," which grant gays all of the "secular benefits and rights" of marriage, like inheritance, insurance, etc. AFAIK, a Civil Union does everything that marriage does except get recognized in other states and carry the name, "marriage." Gays in Vermont are still pushing for "full marriage" legislation.
Since you've uncloaked as a Canadian, a question is necessary:
In the US, every time the topic of Universal Health Care comes up, "they" trot out the bogeymen of long lines, poor service, unmotivated poorly paid doctors, etc. Then one goes to see Michael Moore's "Sicko" and those bad things don't appear to be there - it actually does seem to work.
Where is the truth? You're living it, please tell us your perspective.
It's easily believable that the "they" who tell us about the evils of Universal Health Care are the Health Insurance and Pharma industries who benefit most from the current system. It's also believable that the Utopian vision of Universal Health Care comes from those who just plain don't like our current system. Then again, all of that net revenue, profits, etc of the Health Insurance Industry is from another perspective, "wasteful overhead" when what one is really trying to get is health care. Of course from the Health Insurance Industry's point of view, "health care" is wasteful overhead when their goal is profit. Then again, sometimes I'd swear that the pharma budget for TV advertising in the evenings must exceed their Research budget, by the sheer number and polish of the commercials.
BTW, anyone else who is receiving Universal Health Care, please add your experiences. Many of us in the US would like to hear FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE.
May you live next door to the poor guy who's working 3 jobs, his wife is working 2, and he STILL can't afford Fire and Police services.
By changing the shape of the income curve, the American Dream has been killed for those who need it the most.
Fine job of counter-villainizing, there. Because of course we ALL know that ALL environmentalists are either cohorts of Dr. Evil or his unwitting pawns. We also know that Prius owners generally commute long distances, and SUV owners generally live a few blocks from their places of work and shopping.
Actually, I like your proposal, and I can see some environmentalists disliking it, for the reasons you state. But in addition to the "environmentalist" reasons you state, you forgot the "conservative" reasons for disliking it...
-It contains the word "tax", and must therefore be EVIL!
-It would require corporations to change practices, and they don't like doing that, frequently even if it means that they could make more money.
My fears are three-fold.
- Gaming the system - finding a way to meet the regulatory definition of carbon sink, without actually being one, and they siphoning off more of the funds than the legitimate carbon sinks. I suspect this is why environmentalists would generally distrust your line about "Big evil corporations would...". It's a heck of a lot easier to game the system when you have a stable of lawyers who not only know very well how to read them, but no doubt had a heavy lobbying influence in their being written. In software it's called a "back door."
- The tax side of it might create a pot of money. Any time a pot of money is created, it attracts human vermin, people with the appearance of respectability who are generally good at locating and tapping those pots of money.
- "(in transparent process)" Very little about the current administration has been transparent. The cloak of secrecy magnifies my other fears.
But the TV spectrum is going to go silent in a few years, at least as radiated by the US. What'll be in its place? Noise. Any sufficiently compressed and encoded signal ends up looking like noise, to the "uninitiated." Maybe it'll be high-power noise, but noise nonetheless.
Plus even ignoring that, just because we're emitting more net RF power now doesn't mean we'll continue to do so for anotther century. It *is* inefficient the way we've been using RF power, and if Peak Oil is real, at some point we're going to go after more and more energy wastes, RF into space being one of them. On the timescalse of the Drake Equation we're still pretty darned immature.
>and one of my readers pointed out that by changing a line or two of my code, that Open XML could be
>processed in the same way - I stand corrected.
Then let's watch him do it. The objections to OOXML center around that fact that it's not really open, and that the significant information is buried in blobs and cruft.
IMHO the real task is to put tools out there to access and manipulate ODF data, making life easier for people. Then let the challenge become getting the equivalent done with OOXML. That's really what this is all about - access to data. At present the "tool of choice" for data access is MS Office, but the ability to script data access with ODF makes this look like a sysadmin problem, GUI single-system admin vs scripted multi-system admin.
Use ODF to make peoples' lives easier. If OOXML can't work this way, since we don't believe the "standard" is complete/workable, it will show.
But it doesn't do SPIT to stop the rampant copying/piracy going on in the Far East.
Most of what it does is cause pain to their paying customers.
Come on, put your tinfoil hat on for a moment...
This means that Second Life and WoW have become terrorist-affiliated/terrorist-supporting orgainizations.
That means that everyone subscribing to Second Life or WoW now have financial links to terrorism.
Therefore :
Everyone on Second Life and WoW is open game for DHS, warrantless wiretaps, asset freezing, etc.
(silly sarcasm, frightening Orwellian reality, or absurd conspiracy theory, you decide.)
Years ago I picked up a book on "XINU" that was kind of like that. There wasn't really an OS, you linked OS components into an application that was loaded onto the hardware.
As for the picokernel thing, I was more playing on the words. We obviously passed over millikernel too, not to mention decikernels and centikernels.
Related to that in the literary realm, we've all been hearing about nanotech for years. I've working in sub-hundred-nanometer silicon for several years now, so I guess nanotech is getting a little passe'. I'm now reading Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity Is Near" and I saw the term "picotech" for the first time. Around that time, I also read the SF book "Hauling Ice" where they threw in picotech and femtotech. Gotta keep up with the Joneses.
Since we've run the spectrum from kernel to microkernel to nanokernel...
What are the characteristics of a picokernel?
Or is that what you'd call an interrupt handler and a call gate?
About as many stories I hear of ODF being rebuffed in the US, I seem to hear of it being adopted overseas. Not 100% penetration, but still better than in the US.
In that light, perhaps the metric system is the correct analogy.
Maybe the limit has more to do with how many politicians Microsoft can buy. For many years they ignored politics, preferring to exert their force against "business partners." After the antitrust suits they began to learn about US politics, and with ODF they began to meddle in state politics. But there are subtle difference in politics in every political entity - do it wrong and you're even worse off. They've just put a lot of effort into China, obviously because it's a big emerging market. They'll likely put a lot of effort into India, too. But beyond that, it starts getting little - and local.
>And newer OSs support more recent versions of DirectX than older ones
I was able to put DirectX 9.0(b or c, forget which) on my Win98SE machine - it even came with the my daughter's game that needed it. (2003)
I don't know if there are newer versions of DX9, but DX10 is Vista-only. So it seems like from that perspective Win98SE is as good as XP. (I know there are other perspectives, but these *are* blinders, after all. Win98SE is also there just for games.)
Now that you mention it, did you include some sort of work lights on that crash cart? I don't think I've seen anyone mention work lights yet, or maybe that's such a given that nobody felt it was worth mentioning.
Heck, my office is under the cafeteria. Forget plain old water, how about a soup spill (minor quantities, but messy) or a dishwasher malfunction? (major quantities, almost as messy, per litre.)