Of course not. China has 'best country' trade status with us.
The term is "most favored nation" and it's often misunderstood. There are lots of MFNs, the UK is one for example. All it means is that China is guaranteed that no trade concession will be granted to another MFN without being offered it themselves. That's it.
human rights issues, communisim are quickly ignored
Any other issue is... well, another issue. But if you really are worried about human rights and communism, then capitalist free trade is the best way to do something about it. After all, that strategy buried the Soviet Empire and freed its captive peoples, many of whom want to join democratic Western organizations like NATO and the EU.
Not likely... That was a time when corporations weren't as powerful as countries.
That's not insightful, it's just dense. How do corporations enforce patents? Answer: they don't, the government does it for them by providing a legal framework and sanctions for noncompliance. If a government simply decides not to honor a patent (see examples of various third world companies deciding to produce generic pharmaceuticals) there's really nothing the corporation can do.
In fact there is one thing it can do: it can refuse to develop new products. That's actually far worse for everyone than what we have now. For example, the choice might be:
Expensive AIDS drugs
No AIDS drugs at all, because the corporates couldn't patent, couldn't recoup their investment in R&D and decided it would be easier to make lifestyle drugs like Prozac and Viagra.
Patents, on the whole, are good; the only problem is the patent system is administered incompetently and patents are granted that shouldn't be.
It means when I am Compiling 30 Programs at the same time even though the system is noticably slower it is still usable. Unlike on Intell systems with Both Linux and Windows when they go under heavy load they will not respond to your input Untill they are done. I have not seen this happen to Sun and Mac Hardware.
That's more likely to be a function of the kernel's scheduler rather than the processor architecture.
If you'd talked about a correlation between CISC and higher context switch times (altho' there actually isn't one) then maybe you'd have a point, because it would mean that CISC performance deteriorates under multitasking loads, and would benefit from larger time quanta. That could conceivably be called "less smooth" but the original poster didn't have a clue what he was talking about.
Do you notice, btw, that phones grow bigger in size nowsdays?
I wonder if that's a usability thing and nothing to do with the technology. Take the Nokia 8210 for example: it's too small. It's uncomfortable (for me at least) to use, and it's easy to lose. My 6210 feels at lot more comfortable in my hand, the buttons are easy to use, and the speaker and microphone are the right distance apart, closer to that on a landline handset. Some people may like miniaturization, but for me, it's not a selling point at all - I want a bigger handset anyway, so why not pack in as many features and as much battery life as possible?
I should have asked is 4.7Ghz 4x faster than 1.2Ghz.... Put it down to too little sleep and too much coffee!
Maybe, but only if your entire application and all its data can fit into the on-chip cache, and you make sure the cache is loaded before you start your measurements.
In the real world, there are no such applications. As I said in another post yesterday, the bottleneck in the majority of computing tasks is not the CPU but the memory and I/O bandwidth. A fast CPU starved of useful work by a bus that can't keep up will spend most of its time idle.
That'd finally put a full stop to all those religious morons that are so full of "we're the centre of the universe". Just by showing that there's _a_ life form outside earth would remove a huge barrier from all those debates and we could concentrate on more interesting topics.
No it wouldn't. Faith is by definition a belief that exists without any supporting evidence, or contrary to evidence.
Give me an engineer that is willing to stay late and get the job done. And do so before the night of the dealine.
Sure, if you think "engineering" is writing Perl CGI scripts. Real engineering is not a seat-of-the-pants affair, just like any other mature profession. The reason good engineers work 9-5 is because you can't make silly mistakes when you're building something that has to do serious work in the real world. There's nothing glamorous about staying up all night before the delivery date, it merely indicates poor planning and unnecessary risk. Read this and get a clue.
More likely, they'll design a servo loop that breaks into oscillation and jams the X-band transponder because they had no understanding of how to work with real components of the non-mathematical variety.
Yeah, that happened to me once. Fortunately, Scotty was able to reconfigure the main deflector sprocket to create a tachyon causality loop in the warp flanges. We were back at Starbase 001 in time for alien babes and Romulan Ale!
Ever since I learned how to make bread, I have had utter distaste for that white, mush stuff. It's so full of air that you can actually compress it to 1/4th the length!
I know what you mean. Just got me a Panasonic SD253 breadmaker, an update of the SD251. That's one excellent piece of hardware.
But we're hitting the point where few people [*] can tell the difference between 1GHz and 2.8GHz and even hardware engineers are starting to realize this, so maybe it Just Doesn't Matter.
Definitely. PC manufacturers love to compete on Mhz, but a fast CPU is useless if it's starved of useful work by bottlenecks in I/O, memory bandwidth, etc. It's not unusual for a sub 1Ghz PC with good SCSI disks to handily outperform a 2Ghz+ machine with mere IDE.
Sun, SGI et al realized this years ago. Serious computing is limited not by clock speed of the CPU but by bus and memory bandwidth. That's why Sun sell systems with 300-400Mhz processors and gigaplane XB crossbar active backplanes. Nowadays with the increasing sophistication of consumer software (like the latest games), the same issues are recurring.
If you're buying a system in the near future, drop 500-1000 Mhz in CPU speed and buy faster disks or more memory with the money you saved.
basically it'll mean we won't have to pay exaggerated prices for Macs to be able to use OS X!!
You will never see MacOS X running on a generic x86 "beige box". Apple developed MacOS X for the sole purpose of selling hardware, that's where they make all their money, despite charging for Jaguar. (Sun are the same with Solaris). In addition, the "just works" ability touted as a major Mac selling point would cease to happen once they could not guarantee with any certainty exactly what hardware their OS was running on - this is the real problem faced by Microsoft, most Windows crashes boil down to needing to have drivers for every conceivable piece of hardware supported, and being unable to prove them all.
An x86 based Mac will have sufficient custom hardware on its motherboard that you will still only be able to run MacOS on Apple hardware.
True, but it's a lot harder to prove copyright infringment if you never applied for it.
Copyright is created literally by appending (c) $YEAR $AUTHOR to it. There's no central registry of things that are copyrighted - you're thinking of trademarks (TM).
it ain't cheap being a record company where 50 acts fail for every one you make money on
Exactly. People criticize the prices charged by pharmaceutical companies, and losing control of your company to venture capitalists, but the fact is that these are all high-risk industries, and one success has got to cover the cost of many, many failures.
It's difficult to find a pure recording company these days, so it's hard to evaluate the margins, but I would be very surprised if recording and media companies consistently outperformed the S&P 500 or FTSE 100.
Everyone who isn't a trained actor looks like an idiot when a camera is trained on them. That's the point. Real, goofy, quirky, neurotic, normal people, not paid actors.
Unfortunately, no-one who isn't a trained actor knows that.
most people can only afford $9.95 a month internet.. Yes, these same poor that make up 75% of the population happily spend $3.00 to $6.00 a day on other luxurues like smoking but it still comes down to the same basic fact....
What you mean is "internet access is only worth $9.95/mo to most people" which isn't the same thing at all. Because they evidently do have money to spend on other things, the only question is, what will cause the internet to be more valuable to these people? Work that out, and you've solved the problem.
and until it passes from the realm of Luxury to somthing that is absolutely needed... it will retain the luxury level pricing...
It doesn't work like that. Is good quality toilet paper a luxury or a necessity? Maybe it's a luxury, but people are happy to pay for it. Toast is a luxury if you've got bread, but people still happily buy toasters (one friend of mine even calls bread "raw toast"). What I'd saying is, things that aren't technically necessary for the maintenance of life still count as necessities to many people.
At such time as broadband actually becomes useful, it will become widespread. At the moment it isn't because there isn't much practical use for it, i.e., insuffient compelling content.
Or interferes with a private transaction between two individuals when one is selling a legal service to the other. Think about it. If I hire someone to rip pages out of the Reader's Digest for me, what right does anyone have, to interfere?
I would pay £5 to hire someone to buy a copy of Reader's Digest and tear it into little pieces. Not because I have anything against Reader's Digest in particular, but because I want to break this silly law before it's even passed. I'm in London - any takers?
Most families that have kids have TVs sitting in their garage or attics, or the parents have a set in their bedroom along with the one in the living room
Well, they were only off-the-cuff assumptions. The only reliable way to get the data would probably be to buy it from someone like Gallup, and the/. editors are far too cheap for that...
Mega chain hotels like Ramada and Hilton would be first to switch, since they can easily afford it, and they would dump quite a bit of televisions from their hotel rooms...
We would need to know how often they replace their TVs as part of normal operations... could be that this is a complete non-issue for them, since they were planning an upgrade in 2005 anyway. Remember that the hotels need to keep their TVs fairly current anyway, people are coming to expect good quality TVs in their hotel rooms.
Consider that there's hundreds of thousands of major hotels in the world, and several dozen thousand major hotels in the US, each of which have well over 200 rooms, and you're talking an additional 4-5 million sets that will be dumped in mass renovations...
On that scale, it may be cheaper for them to bulk-purchase digital-to-analogue conversion technology.
Now, I have no problem with people doing their own editing.
What Clean Flicks do is nothing more than provide a service editing movies that their customers own. Really, buying from Clean Flicks is no different from renting time in an editing suite and hiring someone to show you how to operate it.
The main issue, as I see it, is that all these little companies are making money off of the destruction of someone else's creative vision
By that argument, so is any company that makes equipment allowing someone to edit any tape. All Clean Flicks do is facilitate; it's not as if they are editing, then reproducing the edited movie without the studio getting paid. Every copy they sell is owned.
And that... just sits very badly with me.
The question is: do you own the movie, or just the right to watch the movie? If the studio retains control of the media, then that means you only have an license to watch the movie, you don't own it. Clearly that is an indefensible position: if it were true, and you damaged your copy, the studio would replace it for no more than the cost of duplication. That doesn't happen, which suggests that there is plenty of precedent for the movie being owned by whoever buys it, and thus they are free to do with it as they please.
"Assuming there are approximately 300 million Americans, with 2/3 having upwards of 2 TV sets, that amounts to close to 500 million or more perfectly functional TVs that will wind up in landfills or third world 'recycling' countries like China.
You're saying that 2/3 of Americans, including newborn infants, own two or more televisions? Too much TV has rotted your brain, my friend. Assume 300M Americans, and an average household size of 4 (which may be way off), then assume 2/3 of those households have 2 televisions and you might be a little closer the mark. Also you are assuming that none of these TVs are digital capable; in Europe at least, many modern widescreen sets are digital capable.
Re:Here's a few suggestions
on
Accurate OCR?
·
· Score: 2
For longer texts, it might be worth it to call the publisher and ask if they have an electronic version available.
An electronic copy definitely will exists - no-one typesets books by hand any more. It is highly likely in fact that the book was written with a mainstream word processing program like Word and a final draft exists in this format. You only need a) to make a strong enough case for them to let you have it and b) a technique for converting it into a format that you can use. The latter probably already exists too.
... if these people knew how to write good CVs, would they be working for a CV-writing service?
It's like taking investment advice from your broker: there's a reason he's a broker and not a fund manager. There's a reason that your waiter isn't a chef.
The best person to ask for advice is someone who has successfully written a CV that has gotten an interview for a similar job to the one you want. Another good source would be someone who interviews candidates for that job, at least they can point out common mistakes.
Remember, a CV can get you an interview, but only an interview can get you a job.
The reason a lot of you probably don't like it is because it's different from the geeky Star Trek you know and love. This one is more humble, down to earth - more "Human" and contemporary.
Next Gen was the "geeky" one, followed by Voyager and DS9 (which was a crap Babylon 5 knockoff). The problem with Enterprise is that the universe is badly planned. In the original series, Kirk could swagger around the galaxy meddling in other people's business because he was the captain of the Flagship of the mighty Star Fleet of the powerful Federation. Whereas Archer, in Earth's only starship which is primitive by the standards of other species freely meddles (see the episode where he frees a bunch of alien POWs) with established space powers... and nothing happens. They don't have shields yet but the writers were too lazy to think of an alternative to the "shields failing" plot device so they simply called it "hull polarization" and carried on as before.
Even the beginning, where Archer is complaining that the Vulcans were holding back Earth by withholding technology... hardly holding them back if they didn't have it! It would have been far better to say that Vulcan diplomats were restricting passage through their space, because now it's saying that humans didn't make it into space on their own. Every episode is "Enterprise outgunned, miracle happens, everyone escapes". Not to mention that the rest of the galaxy seems to be getting along fine... why does anyone need the Federation in the first place, and how did Earth, a backwater, come to be the capital?
I had high hopes, but sadly Enterprise is actually rubbish. The only Sci-fi worth following in TV at the moment is Stargate. It does the Enterprise premise (ordinary humans venturing into a galaxy that is far more complex and dangerous than they ever imagined) far better than Enterprise does.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course not. China has 'best country' trade status with us.
The term is "most favored nation" and it's often misunderstood. There are lots of MFNs, the UK is one for example. All it means is that China is guaranteed that no trade concession will be granted to another MFN without being offered it themselves. That's it.
human rights issues, communisim are quickly ignored
Any other issue is... well, another issue. But if you really are worried about human rights and communism, then capitalist free trade is the best way to do something about it. After all, that strategy buried the Soviet Empire and freed its captive peoples, many of whom want to join democratic Western organizations like NATO and the EU.
That's not insightful, it's just dense. How do corporations enforce patents? Answer: they don't, the government does it for them by providing a legal framework and sanctions for noncompliance. If a government simply decides not to honor a patent (see examples of various third world companies deciding to produce generic pharmaceuticals) there's really nothing the corporation can do.
In fact there is one thing it can do: it can refuse to develop new products. That's actually far worse for everyone than what we have now. For example, the choice might be:
Patents, on the whole, are good; the only problem is the patent system is administered incompetently and patents are granted that shouldn't be.
It means when I am Compiling 30 Programs at the same time even though the system is noticably slower it is still usable. Unlike on Intell systems with Both Linux and Windows when they go under heavy load they will not respond to your input Untill they are done.
I have not seen this happen to Sun and Mac Hardware.
That's more likely to be a function of the kernel's scheduler rather than the processor architecture.
If you'd talked about a correlation between CISC and higher context switch times (altho' there actually isn't one) then maybe you'd have a point, because it would mean that CISC performance deteriorates under multitasking loads, and would benefit from larger time quanta. That could conceivably be called "less smooth" but the original poster didn't have a clue what he was talking about.
Do you notice, btw, that phones grow bigger in size nowsdays?
I wonder if that's a usability thing and nothing to do with the technology. Take the Nokia 8210 for example: it's too small. It's uncomfortable (for me at least) to use, and it's easy to lose. My 6210 feels at lot more comfortable in my hand, the buttons are easy to use, and the speaker and microphone are the right distance apart, closer to that on a landline handset. Some people may like miniaturization, but for me, it's not a selling point at all - I want a bigger handset anyway, so why not pack in as many features and as much battery life as possible?
I should have asked is 4.7Ghz 4x faster than 1.2Ghz.... Put it down to too little sleep and too much coffee!
Maybe, but only if your entire application and all its data can fit into the on-chip cache, and you make sure the cache is loaded before you start your measurements.
In the real world, there are no such applications. As I said in another post yesterday, the bottleneck in the majority of computing tasks is not the CPU but the memory and I/O bandwidth. A fast CPU starved of useful work by a bus that can't keep up will spend most of its time idle.
That'd finally put a full stop to all those religious morons that are so full of "we're the centre of the universe". Just by showing that there's _a_ life form outside earth would remove a huge barrier from all those debates and we could concentrate on more interesting topics.
No it wouldn't. Faith is by definition a belief that exists without any supporting evidence, or contrary to evidence.
Give me an engineer that is willing to stay late and get the job done. And do so before the night of the dealine.
Sure, if you think "engineering" is writing Perl CGI scripts. Real engineering is not a seat-of-the-pants affair, just like any other mature profession. The reason good engineers work 9-5 is because you can't make silly mistakes when you're building something that has to do serious work in the real world. There's nothing glamorous about staying up all night before the delivery date, it merely indicates poor planning and unnecessary risk. Read this and get a clue.
More likely, they'll design a servo loop that breaks into oscillation and jams the X-band transponder because they had no understanding of how to work with real components of the non-mathematical variety.
Yeah, that happened to me once. Fortunately, Scotty was able to reconfigure the main deflector sprocket to create a tachyon causality loop in the warp flanges. We were back at Starbase 001 in time for alien babes and Romulan Ale!
-- Kirk
Ever since I learned how to make bread, I have had utter distaste for that white, mush stuff. It's so full of air that you can actually compress it to 1/4th the length!
I know what you mean. Just got me a Panasonic SD253 breadmaker, an update of the SD251. That's one excellent piece of hardware.
IAAL, and thought I'd point out that "(c)" doesn't do squat. Really. You must either use the copyright symbol ("©"), and/or spell out the word "Copyright."
Thanks - I did not know that.
I never liked CISC Prossors, I much rather have RISC chips running my systems. I find that RISC chip run smoother then CISC do
Run smoother? What the hell does that mean?
But we're hitting the point where few people [*] can tell the difference between 1GHz and 2.8GHz and even hardware engineers are starting to realize this, so maybe it Just Doesn't Matter.
Definitely. PC manufacturers love to compete on Mhz, but a fast CPU is useless if it's starved of useful work by bottlenecks in I/O, memory bandwidth, etc. It's not unusual for a sub 1Ghz PC with good SCSI disks to handily outperform a 2Ghz+ machine with mere IDE.
Sun, SGI et al realized this years ago. Serious computing is limited not by clock speed of the CPU but by bus and memory bandwidth. That's why Sun sell systems with 300-400Mhz processors and gigaplane XB crossbar active backplanes. Nowadays with the increasing sophistication of consumer software (like the latest games), the same issues are recurring.
If you're buying a system in the near future, drop 500-1000 Mhz in CPU speed and buy faster disks or more memory with the money you saved.
basically it'll mean we won't have to pay exaggerated prices for Macs to be able to use OS X!!
You will never see MacOS X running on a generic x86 "beige box". Apple developed MacOS X for the sole purpose of selling hardware, that's where they make all their money, despite charging for Jaguar. (Sun are the same with Solaris). In addition, the "just works" ability touted as a major Mac selling point would cease to happen once they could not guarantee with any certainty exactly what hardware their OS was running on - this is the real problem faced by Microsoft, most Windows crashes boil down to needing to have drivers for every conceivable piece of hardware supported, and being unable to prove them all.
An x86 based Mac will have sufficient custom hardware on its motherboard that you will still only be able to run MacOS on Apple hardware.
True, but it's a lot harder to prove copyright infringment if you never applied for it.
Copyright is created literally by appending (c) $YEAR $AUTHOR to it. There's no central registry of things that are copyrighted - you're thinking of trademarks (TM).
it ain't cheap being a record company where 50 acts fail for every one you make money on
Exactly. People criticize the prices charged by pharmaceutical companies, and losing control of your company to venture capitalists, but the fact is that these are all high-risk industries, and one success has got to cover the cost of many, many failures.
It's difficult to find a pure recording company these days, so it's hard to evaluate the margins, but I would be very surprised if recording and media companies consistently outperformed the S&P 500 or FTSE 100.
Everyone who isn't a trained actor looks like an idiot when a camera is trained on them. That's the point. Real, goofy, quirky, neurotic, normal people, not paid actors.
Unfortunately, no-one who isn't a trained actor knows that.
most people can only afford $9.95 a month internet.. Yes, these same poor that make up 75% of the population happily spend $3.00 to $6.00 a day on other luxurues like smoking but it still comes down to the same basic fact....
What you mean is "internet access is only worth $9.95/mo to most people" which isn't the same thing at all. Because they evidently do have money to spend on other things, the only question is, what will cause the internet to be more valuable to these people? Work that out, and you've solved the problem.
and until it passes from the realm of Luxury to somthing that is absolutely needed... it will retain the luxury level pricing...
It doesn't work like that. Is good quality toilet paper a luxury or a necessity? Maybe it's a luxury, but people are happy to pay for it. Toast is a luxury if you've got bread, but people still happily buy toasters (one friend of mine even calls bread "raw toast"). What I'd saying is, things that aren't technically necessary for the maintenance of life still count as necessities to many people.
At such time as broadband actually becomes useful, it will become widespread. At the moment it isn't because there isn't much practical use for it, i.e., insuffient compelling content.
Or interferes with a private transaction between two individuals when one is selling a legal service to the other. Think about it. If I hire someone to rip pages out of the Reader's Digest for me, what right does anyone have, to interfere?
I would pay £5 to hire someone to buy a copy of Reader's Digest and tear it into little pieces. Not because I have anything against Reader's Digest in particular, but because I want to break this silly law before it's even passed. I'm in London - any takers?
Most families that have kids have TVs sitting in their garage or attics, or the parents have a set in their bedroom along with the one in the living room
/. editors are far too cheap for that...
Well, they were only off-the-cuff assumptions. The only reliable way to get the data would probably be to buy it from someone like Gallup, and the
Mega chain hotels like Ramada and Hilton would be first to switch, since they can easily afford it, and they would dump quite a bit of televisions from their hotel rooms...
We would need to know how often they replace their TVs as part of normal operations... could be that this is a complete non-issue for them, since they were planning an upgrade in 2005 anyway. Remember that the hotels need to keep their TVs fairly current anyway, people are coming to expect good quality TVs in their hotel rooms.
Consider that there's hundreds of thousands of major hotels in the world, and several dozen thousand major hotels in the US, each of which have well over 200 rooms, and you're talking an additional 4-5 million sets that will be dumped in mass renovations...
On that scale, it may be cheaper for them to bulk-purchase digital-to-analogue conversion technology.
Now, I have no problem with people doing their own editing.
What Clean Flicks do is nothing more than provide a service editing movies that their customers own. Really, buying from Clean Flicks is no different from renting time in an editing suite and hiring someone to show you how to operate it.
The main issue, as I see it, is that all these little companies are making money off of the destruction of someone else's creative vision
By that argument, so is any company that makes equipment allowing someone to edit any tape. All Clean Flicks do is facilitate; it's not as if they are editing, then reproducing the edited movie without the studio getting paid. Every copy they sell is owned.
And that... just sits very badly with me.
The question is: do you own the movie, or just the right to watch the movie? If the studio retains control of the media, then that means you only have an license to watch the movie, you don't own it. Clearly that is an indefensible position: if it were true, and you damaged your copy, the studio would replace it for no more than the cost of duplication. That doesn't happen, which suggests that there is plenty of precedent for the movie being owned by whoever buys it, and thus they are free to do with it as they please.
"Assuming there are approximately 300 million Americans, with 2/3 having upwards of 2 TV sets, that amounts to close to 500 million or more perfectly functional TVs that will wind up in landfills or third world 'recycling' countries like China.
You're saying that 2/3 of Americans, including newborn infants, own two or more televisions? Too much TV has rotted your brain, my friend. Assume 300M Americans, and an average household size of 4 (which may be way off), then assume 2/3 of those households have 2 televisions and you might be a little closer the mark. Also you are assuming that none of these TVs are digital capable; in Europe at least, many modern widescreen sets are digital capable.
For longer texts, it might be worth it to call the publisher and ask if they have an electronic version available.
An electronic copy definitely will exists - no-one typesets books by hand any more. It is highly likely in fact that the book was written with a mainstream word processing program like Word and a final draft exists in this format. You only need a) to make a strong enough case for them to let you have it and b) a technique for converting it into a format that you can use. The latter probably already exists too.
... if these people knew how to write good CVs, would they be working for a CV-writing service?
It's like taking investment advice from your broker: there's a reason he's a broker and not a fund manager. There's a reason that your waiter isn't a chef.
The best person to ask for advice is someone who has successfully written a CV that has gotten an interview for a similar job to the one you want. Another good source would be someone who interviews candidates for that job, at least they can point out common mistakes.
Remember, a CV can get you an interview, but only an interview can get you a job.
School assignments should be written in grammatically correct English, using proper spelling.
So should Slashdot editorials, but how likely is that?
The reason a lot of you probably don't like it is because it's different from the geeky Star Trek you know and love. This one is more humble, down to earth - more "Human" and contemporary.
Next Gen was the "geeky" one, followed by Voyager and DS9 (which was a crap Babylon 5 knockoff). The problem with Enterprise is that the universe is badly planned. In the original series, Kirk could swagger around the galaxy meddling in other people's business because he was the captain of the Flagship of the mighty Star Fleet of the powerful Federation. Whereas Archer, in Earth's only starship which is primitive by the standards of other species freely meddles (see the episode where he frees a bunch of alien POWs) with established space powers... and nothing happens. They don't have shields yet but the writers were too lazy to think of an alternative to the "shields failing" plot device so they simply called it "hull polarization" and carried on as before.
Even the beginning, where Archer is complaining that the Vulcans were holding back Earth by withholding technology... hardly holding them back if they didn't have it! It would have been far better to say that Vulcan diplomats were restricting passage through their space, because now it's saying that humans didn't make it into space on their own. Every episode is "Enterprise outgunned, miracle happens, everyone escapes". Not to mention that the rest of the galaxy seems to be getting along fine... why does anyone need the Federation in the first place, and how did Earth, a backwater, come to be the capital?
I had high hopes, but sadly Enterprise is actually rubbish. The only Sci-fi worth following in TV at the moment is Stargate. It does the Enterprise premise (ordinary humans venturing into a galaxy that is far more complex and dangerous than they ever imagined) far better than Enterprise does.