That's not the point. The '|' character is simply a representation which the shell interprets to mean a pipe. It is a shorthand for what we mean when we say pipe, just as when a painter paints a pipe, it is meant to represent a pipe (the smoking kind), but it doesn't really smoke, and it doesn't really exist. To the shell, the '|' character means a pipe (the unix kind) but the pipe doesn't exist until the shell creates it. The existence of the thing being represented (smoking pipe or unix pipe) is implied by the existence of the representing artifact (painting of a pipe or '|' character) but the representing artifact is not the thing being represented.
Or something like that.
The reason people use LP's is because they prefer analog reproduction, instead of the (down) sampling done by the digital format. These guys clean their power so it's perfect sine waves and then use vacuum tubes to amplify thhe signal. I've listened to one rig like this and I have to admit that it sounded pretty darn good. What's the point of doing a crappy scan of an LP if you're going to digitize the picture, mangle it through a bunch of filters and try and reproduce the sound.
I'm still not convinced that you can get decent sound out of a 1200 dpi scan of the LP. You'll only get two or three 32bit dots on the actual track. track speed of 9-18" per second, at 1200 dpi and you get 16800 x 3 dots, or about 50k dots per second. 60 Mega pixels of really really noisy, hard to work with information.
BTW, the ELPJ's laser turntable claims to be completely analog. If it were digital, they'd probably lose 70% of their market. After, the reason you have LP's is because you want the analog sound.
If Boeing can pull off the design, this'll be the cargo plane of the future, with superior range, fuel efficiency and cargo capcity. The BWB design doesn't have the drag induced by the non-lifting central fuselage, the whole fuselage adds to the lift. Very cool. In the past, pitch and yaw control were problems but with a well designed fly-by-wire interface, it should fly quite well. The fact that they went with 3 HUGE turbofans also helps them in the fuel efficiency area. The more rigid aeroframe may also lower maintenance costs. Looks like a winner to me.
Wonder why they picked NorthWest's colors for their graphic?
1024x768 for each screen. That's 1536x1024 for the whole "virtual screen". So, it's actually less pixels than the UXGA+ 1600x1200 screens available at half the total price. What's the point of that? Now, if they had gone for the whole enchilada with 1280x1024 for each screen, resulting in 2048x1280 in total screen estate, I would have been impressed. As it is, it seems to me to be a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
I have read the original short story (also titled "Minority Report"). It's in my treasured first edition (1957 or 58) paperback of "The Variable Man and other Stories". The movie is a (slightly) closer to the original story than the Bladerunner is compared to the "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" story, but it's still pretty different.
The broad strokes of PKD's "Minority Report" are faithfully reproduced: the department of precrime, the three "cogs", the inherent paradox of precrime, and the idea of a "minority report" where two cogs disagree with another. Also, the plot line has a similar feature in that John Anderton discovers that he is supposed to murder someone, and is attempting to find the minority report to clear his name. But everything else is quite different.
The original short story is way antiquated in technology, thus most of the technological details are completely new for the movie: like the eye scanners, jet packs, guns, cars, etc. Heck, in the story, John Anderton uses magnetic (or is it punch?) tape and printouts for interfacing with the reports for the cogs, not some uber hand flicking interface (very cool BTW). The cogs in the story are drooling idiots who babble stuff about the future, not the drugged, sentinent (photogenic) oracles of the movie. The story doesn't deal with the origins of the cogs (not that I remember at least). In the original, John Anderton is an old man (closer to the Max Von Sydow character of the movie), and there is no subplot involving missing/dead children or missing parents. In the original, there are no past crimes to dig up, nor old enemies, just a new one out to discredit the deparment of PreCrime. Compared to the movie, the short story is a much less layered, direct story dealing with the central paradox of precrime; the paradox of foreseeing the future and being able to act upon that knowledge. The movie on the other hand, touches on themes of privacy, identity, justice, societal benefit, and drug addiction in addition to that paradox.
On the whole, I prefer the movie to the book. well, except for the ending of the movie, that was typical Spielberg sentimental mush. Of course, without the incredible vision of PKD to begin with, there would have been no movie. IMHO, PKD remains one of the most influential SF writers ever.
I'll be sure to check out those two books. Sounds pretty interesting. Maybe they'll change my mind, but I doubt it: even with a good power source communication and organization pose serious problems for mecha-nanobots. For the time being I'll stick with my preference for bio-nanobots.
For instance: How about the first letters of phrases mixed in with numbers and symbols? "Tis not too late to seek a newer world" becomes "Tnt82saNW" which ain't gonna come up in any matching scheme. Or my sig "There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself" becomes "T1ntsDa%tys4y". Of course, none of these examples fit the 8 char limit (which personally I think we need to increase. Computers will become fast enough to brute force even totally random 8 char strings, but that's not the point of this post) but I'm sure you get the point.
Now "dictionary word" -> "easy to remember" -> "insecure" but that doesn't imply "insecure" -> "easy to remember". Far from it in my opinion.
Thanks for the interesting discussion. Still some holes in your arguments:
WRT to the piston machine: Obviously when the pressure rises outside the piston, the piston is accelerated inward, however, the force * distance it is accelerated inward is the energy extracted. For nano-bots, that is going to be really really small due to the minute areas we're dealing with. Also, the spring needs to push the piston out before the next pressure wave hits, for high frequencies this means a stiffer spring, resulting in less energy extracted. Again, show me the power calculations.
Your intuition is wrong. Friction is a macroscopic effect, like colour or policical affiliation. Bellow a certain size, it doesn't apply, because the things you are dealing with don't have enough internal complexity to support it. With macroscale objects, there are many, many atoms that meet at the interface, and the sum of all their interactions is what we call friction. At the other extreme, when two atoms meet there are (obviously) only two atoms meeting. To a first aproximation, they either bond or they don't. If they don't, they behave (again, to a first aproximation) pretty much like perfect, elastic, frictionless spheres.
My intuition may be wrong but not for the reasons you give. There are also forces like electro-static friction and molecular forces. Disregarding that, do you seriously expect me to believe that our nano-bots will be manipulating the world at an atomic scale? At that scale, brownian motion, electro-static and chemical forces create a whole new set of problems. Different from friction, but just as bad, if not worse. On a more reasonable size scale (millions of atoms long), I still believe that friction is a big problem.
We may, to use your analogy, have to go through a phase of animal-labor before we develop maschines of our own. But you are wrong about the efficency of living things. The vast majority of "what they do" is centered around things like finding mates, spreading to and colonizing new environments, fighting other organisms, foraging for food, etc. that we don't want nanobots to do, any more than I want my car to go out and prowl for a mate, eat my neighbor's rose bushes, or speend the night out drag racing other cars to determine who's the big wheel in the neighborhood.
We don't have to take the whole organism. We can just crib their parts (mitochondria, flagella, digestive cycles etc.) and use them to assemble them other organisms. I'm not saying that that it'll be easy to do that. I'm just saying that the parts to get bio-nano-bots going are already designed, built and functioning. It's assembly that's the problem. With nano-bots, we don't have all the parts yet.
I, on the other hand, object to tax dolars being spent on short-term-returns things that ought to be paid for by private capital. I think tax dolars should be saved for the long-term we'll-need-this-someday-so-we-should-start-on-it-n ow stuff that otherwise won't get funded.
I don't have a problem with long term research or with short term research. I have a problem with one being funded with stupid sums of money to the exclusion of the other. BTW, what's paid for with private capital, isn't released for public use, it's kept for private gain.
Thanks again for the interesting discussion.
Re:Foul mood or troll, what's the difference :-).
on
More on Micro Turbines
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Remember, if you double the linear scale you have eight times the volume to cool across only four times the surface area. So the smaller you go (other things being equal) the easier cooling will become. More to the point, what really matters isn't the absolute temperature but the gradient. At smaller scales, you can get temperature gradients much higher than you can with larger scales (e.g. in collapsing bubbles) without exposing your components to nearly as high average absolute temperatures.
Good point. However, too much cooling and you lose efficiency. You don't want your combustion chamber to be cool, you want it to be as hot as possible. Yes, you can get higher temperature gradients when you are very very small, but with higher temperature gradients, more rapid cooling and heating, you get other material related problems. Now with clever design, you could probably turn some of those problems to advantages. The power problem, in my opinion, still remains.
It sure helps. The main problem is finding something that will spin as fast as you like without flying apart. The forces/cross sectional area scale as RPM x r, so for something half the size you can use a material only half as strong.
Ah, but you also get less power. That's why they need to scale up in RPM. This negates some (if not all) of the advantages gained by scale. You do get better control over defects with smaller scale because there is alot less volume for defects to creep in, so fabrication may be easier.
We aren't talking light here; you can extract energy from a pressure wave with a wavelength much larger than you are. You can even build something that sits on a desk to extract power (not much of course) from daily variations in barometric pressure. In effect, it's just a piston.
Ah, but only if you're stationary relative to the pressure wave. Nano-bots are going to be hard pressed to do that with the mass that they have. If the pressure wave is big enough to move you (which I assume to be the case with nano-bots), you're just a particle in the matrix which gets moved around. You'd have to use an intertial generation system, and with masses so small, you'd be hard pressed to extract any usable energy. Show me a realistic design that could work and I'll change my mind. Just a design with the appropriate mass calculations, materials and expected power. It doesn't have to be exact or even workable, but should outline the general principles of how it would work.
Sure. Not fluidics of course. See Nanosystems [barnesandnoble.com], Chapter 12, for a proof of concept design using only mechanical linkages.
Mechanical linkages then. No objection with regard to feasability, but with regard to practicality.
For the same reason we don't harness birds to pull our airplanes. Those billions of years of evolution were hampered by the fact that the beasties had to stay alive every single day. That means no radical redesign, no optimizing for a specific purpose at the cost of evolutionary fitness, etc. As a consequence, we can do many orders of magnitude better than evolution has--when "better" is defined by meeting our needs and not by reproductive success.
Ah, but what we are trying to accomplish on the nanoscale is quite akin to the aims of what biology has been doing for a billion years or so. Biology hasn't built F-16's because there wasn't any evolutionary gain in building them (there not being any SAM-7's or Su-27's to compete against). But our nano/micro world has been teaming with (competing) life doing all sorts of interesting things (coral, ant colonies, bee hives, bacteria, yeast, fungi just to name a few examples) with close analogues to our aims in nano-technology. On the micro/nano scale of doing things efficiently, we haven't even made it to the stone age when compared to the biological world. Heck, we don't even have fire yet.
Exactly backwards. Friction is a bulk effect; if you make things small enough, the whole concept of "friction" goes away. Of course, we're talking nanoscale now, not microscale, and thus many orders of magnitude smaller than these turbines.
I thought friction was a counteracting force to motion, usually at the surface/boundaries. Does friction just magically cease to exist for nanoscale materials? Mechanical linkages don't encounter the problems of viscosity and surface friction? Again, my intuition could be wrong, but it seems to me that the primary problem that ants and small insects deal with in mechanically manipulating their environment is friction. As things scale down, I only expect things to get worse.
I'm not against people trying to do nanoscale projects as long as they're realistic about their prospects. I have a problem with people trying to do nanoscale stuff before we've even figured out how to do autonomous mini/microscale stuff. I have a problem with supposedly intelligent people not sitting down and doing basic mechanical/physical feasibility checks before zooming off into lala land (often with my tax dollars).
Like that biology professor and compsci professor a year or so ago, who wanted to make nanobots to monitor and track water pollution, without understanding 1) that radio waves don't work for shit in water, 2) GPS can't work without an appropriately sized antenna, 3) We don't have any designs for your power source, 4) We don't have any communications protocols/designs for 4 billion nanobots scattered in the Monterey Bay and on and on. Now if they had talked about softball/volleyball sized monitors floating or floating and sinking on some random/autonomous pattern, I would have been all for them. But because nano is the cool word of the decade, they spouted on and on about their new research on nanobots. I recall that they got about 1 Megabuck in tax dollars for their research proposal.
Mostly, I object to more of my tax dollars going to research into nano dreck (and fusion crap) instead of going to research towards more efficient power generation/solar generation/geothermal generation/waste heat utilization/home generation/efficient transportation/waste reduction/erosion prevention; all of which have a darn good chance of improving the state of the world during the next decade.
WRT to nano + fusion: the next "20 to 30 years" my ass. If we have an actual power generating hot fusion reactor (that is: we start it up and net power comes out) or a useful and efficient nano-bot matrix in less than 25 years (Before 1/1/2028), I'll eat my hat. Heck I'll eat all my hats.
I admit that I was in a foul mood caused by uncritical reporting and bullshit research (you should hear my rant on fusion research), but I don't think I'm completely clueless about this.
200C is a much better estimate of the temp.
Uhmm, Just doing a quick google search on turbine combustion temperature gives me a figure of 1250F. Or about 675C. I admit that 2000C was a load of horse-pucky but so is 200C. Turbine blades are notoriously difficult to manufacture because of the high stresses and high temperatures involved in their operation. Making them really small doesn't sidestep the issue. Especially with regard to friction.
* The "biobot"/nanobot distinction is also a straw man, or at perhaps handwaving flummery.
I disagree. bio-bots (or modified biological organisms) use existing biological power sources whereas pure nano-bots need to start from scratch for their power (micro-turbines etc.) without cribbing the Kreb cycle from mitochondria.
Fuel cells already perform controlled micro-combustion on homogenious fuels. Clever filtering can handle mixed fuels.
Fuel cells may be a good option. Hadn't thought of that. Still, filtering isn't going to transform compost into methane (of course, bacteria can do that, but not terribly quickly).
Sound waves can be made easily and cheaply with things called "speakers".
Uhmm, to be high in frequency enough to be absorbed/used by nanobots, your average tweeter ain't going to cut it. Let's consider the case of sound waves powering microbots (1mm in size, never mind nanobots (1m in size). Now velocity / wavelength = frequency. 340 m/s / 0.1 mm = 340000mm/s / 0.1 mm = 3400000 Hz or about a sound frequency of 3.4 MHz. For nanobots you'd be talking 3.4 GHz. I don't have much knowledge about sound waves at that frequency other than my intuition that they probably aren't easy to deal with. Of course, I could be completely wrong about that and sound waves may be a viable alternative. Just haven't seen any examples yet. Like I said: Show me the power.
You don't need electronics to control machines.
Fluidics then? Pure mechanical linkages? What's the point of a turbine if you're not going to generate electricity? Sure it's probably possible, but how practical are fluidics and/or mechanical gears and cams for complex control?
The whole point of this is that they are working on new technologies, so saying that they don't exist yet doesn't add information.
This is true. What I was pointing out was that there were difficulties in the objectives, not posed by techniques not yet invented, but by fundamental properties of scale, materials and physics. In another post I give the example of rotary engines (specifically Wankel type engines). They have better power/weight ratios, fewer moving parts, can handle a wider range of fuels etc. They had one difficulty: the darn seals. This being mostly a problem of geometry and materials. Today, there's only one production car with a rotary engine and I recall that its engine life is pretty stinky compared to well designed piston engines. All because of the seals.
Yes, it would be cool if nano-bots could make me breakfast everyday. It would be cooler if I could swallow a pill of nano-bots to keep me free of disease and stave off aging. But I just don't see it happening any time soon. No power == no nanobots in my view. Biobots on the other hand, allow us to crib off of a couple billion years of evolution. Why reinvent mitochondria?
The problem is with mostly doped silicon; at high temperatures the dopants tend to migrate, which is bad for very small, very fast electronics. It isn't a mechanical problem.
That's when you're talking about temperatures at the 200 Celcius range. We're talking 2000 Celcius here. Heck, it's a mechanical problem with steel and ceramics. And amorphorous atomic silicon way less durable than steel, titanium and ceramics. And who says that parts of your micro-turbine won't be doped? What about the circuitry?
All they need to do for most applications is receive power (e.g. from high frequency sound waves) and convert it to mechanical energy. For the sound waves--which look like pressure waves at that scale--all you need is a piston.
And how will the electronics that control those machines be powered? Oh, with little microscopic sound generators eh? Oh, and that'll be real efficient, heh. Whose going to be making those sound waves? And what about inter nanabot communication?
How about yesterday's trash? 1) it's there, and 2) there's plenty of it, so 3) you aren't going to use all of it, and 4) part of what you don't use would burn, so 5) controlled, small scale oxydation (e.g., what microbes, fungi, etc. would do if they were converting the trash) should give you all the energy you need.
Now you're mixing bio-bots and nano-bots which I specifically said at the end was a possibility. Controlled nano (nm) scale oxidation is fine in theory, but we don't even have controlled efficient micro (micro-m) scale oxidation of non-uniform fuel. Heck, we don't even have it on the mini scale (cm).
Technologies usually take off when most of the basic building blocks are there but it's only missing a piece or two. Then someone develops those pieces and presto, you've got Aibo's running around the house. In the case of nano-bots, we're missing more than half the basic building blocks and they don't look like they're going to appear anytime soon.
Umm, what about the working model from the previous article that makes 20W? If that ain't happened, I don't know what is. 20W is about 1/10 of what you can make with your legs for any usable period of time. The working model ran for 24 hours. It's problems were heat dissipation, but the same can be said for any heat engine. If you don't want to hook this thing up to make electricity, why not let it work as an air compressor or hydrolic motor? Power in any form is good. If the damn thing does not last long, shit can it, mass produced it's disposable. Apply where approriate.
Yeah, but it wasn't powering anything was it? I don't see a picture of a 20W bulb being lighted do you? Where's the electricity?
Silicon and high tempertures? Hmmm, ever heard of glass and ceramics? Oh yeah, I forgot they are made of... silicon. Next.
Silicon dioxide. I haven't heard of any chip fabricating techniques being used on ceramics yet. Anybody home?
There will be improvemnts and inovations, there always are. The simplified drawing showed a radial inflow turbine. These have never worked well on a larger scale becuase particles reciculate in the blades and destroy them. Axial and radial outflow work better. So what? The next designs will have them if it's practical.
There are still the problems of electrical generation and the problem of durability. And they are, in my opinion, going to be alot harder to overcome than just saying, "improvements will continue and it will soon be practical". Remember rotary engines? They only had one problem. The darn seals. And I don't see any Ford's with rotary engines yet...
I usually expect better reporting from the Economist. This is the kind of breathless "This is great! Here's what all the believers have to say!", I expect from "People" or "Popular Mechanics". Here are some of the problems I see with this wonder battery/generator.
Operating life. Now, I'm no scientist, but I do know that silicon and high temperatures don't get along too well. But, you could side step that by using similar manufacturing technologies with other materials. Not that I can think of any candidates...
A turbine does not a generator make. Show me the electricity! Silicon ain't magnetic people. OK, magnetless generators exist, how about "coils" then? Show me the coils! Until I see a working, efficient, microsized generator, I don't see any of this happening.
Call me a crotchety old man, but I just don't buy the efficiency numbers I'm seeing. As things get smaller and smaller, your perceived viscosity goes up and up. Same design + smaller size = less fluidic efficiency. Same goes for the friction + mass problem. Combustion efficiency will probably go up since it's easier to model with the small size.
This leads me to my problems with the nano-technologists we have nowadays. Where's the power? Anybody have a 1 cubic milimeter battery that'll last 1 hour yet? Show me a self powered nanobot. Hell, show me a nano-power source that works! Remember, volume decreases by the cube as you scale down. Sure a quintillion nano-bots could make me breakfast out of yesterday's trash, but what's going to power them? You can't get out more than you put in, you know. Reminds me of the great Larry Niven's quote: "Another beautiful theory, murdered by a gang of ugly facts."
I don't see this stuff (nano-technology, micro-turbines) panning out any time soon (Now, bio+nano or plain bio, I can see scaling down. Also, mini-turbines (1-10 cubic centimeters) I can see happening also.
I whole heartedly agree. I'm still using the P450 that I started work with almost 3 years ago, and its still runs VC6 tolerably, and MSOffice too. Of course, I started with an UltraSCSI 7200RPM hard drive and I've bumped the memory to 512MB.
If you upgrade the RAM and HardDrive, I doubt if you even need to upgrade the CPU. Let's see, 256MB + a 7200 60GB drive would probably put you back around $200 per station. For another $100 you could double the CPU speed if people really needed it.
1. A consistent UI helps MS greatly by lowering training costs between OS versions. The fewer things change the fewer costs associated with deployment, which clearly leads to increased rollout and better sales.
Which helps them maintain their monopoly. Am I missing something here?
2. A consistent UI helps MS greatly because it reduces training and other tangible costs when developing software, both in house and in the ISV sector. A consistent base-UI makes sense for all software developers.
They don't pay for training. They don't pay for ISV's developing software. They are always changing the MSF causing no end of grief to the ISV. Have you ever developed for Windows? And so why did MS radically change their interface for XP? Why didn't they keep their icons? Why do they change their save and load dialogs? Why does Word get its own special save and load dialogs?
3. Competitors benefit equally from this consistent UI. Occasionally you will see an application that breaks this standard UI - for example many applications that ship with Sony Vaio apps are "gnomish" in appearance. In every single case the end users I've dealt with are *confused*, *disorientated*, and *befuddled*. It makes no sense for a single app to break UI consistency.
What competitors? So the Sony Vaio's have a different UI? And people don't like it? What's your point? How does Sony compete with Microsoft? They're still selling MSWindows, right?
Changing the UI - either on the OS level or on the app level - causes sales of products to fall. A drastic change in the paradigm would deter rollout of the new version.
Not for Microsoft. They have a monopoly. MS can and does FORCE all of the OEM's to install the newer operating system. Everything you say would be applicable but for the fact that Microsoft is a monopoly. I never said that Microsoft always provided an inconsistent interface. I said that Microsoft only provided it to maintain their monopoly, not for the good of the consumer or the ISV's. When MacOSX threatened to make the old Windows interface look, well old, Microsoft responded by making their interface INCONSISTENT with the old interface in order to add "snap".
4. The idea of an "Enhanced Start Bar" from Compaq or whatnot - that has the potential to damage Windows and thats what MS is really afraid of. For example, lets say the largest computer manufactuer creates a new "UI", and so 20% of Windows users get it. If that UI sucks they will have no or little barrier in their between the sucky UI and Windows - it will hurt the "Windows" brand. This of course hurts MS. Additionally it hurts ISVs would would sell to those customers, and again hurts MS (less ISVs equal less platform appeal).
No it wouldn't, it would hurt Compaq's bottom line becuase Compaq wouldn't be able to call it Microsoft windows but Compaq Enhanced windows. Just as the enhanced Sony Vaio interface, you claim, is hurting their sales. The converse also holds true, if Compaq were to create a useful enhancement to the interface, they would benefit the consumer and their own brand, not Microsoft. You seem to be under the impression that any alteration to the Microsoft UI would be labelled "Microsoft". That would be a trademark violation and illegal.
But what it all boils down to? Speculation. I cant think of *any* cases where its even alleged that MS modified/failed to modify the UI to hurt competition. As I have said MS has much more to lose from a fundamentally altered UI than anyone, especially competitors.
OK, here's a few for you:
Adding the cofusing IE disk browsing in addition to the standard Explorer browsing to kill Netscape. By my count, there are in NT, three different screens to browse my hard disk, all of them different in subtle ways.
Double clicking on mp3's launches MSMediaPlayer by default.
Forcing OEM's to hide the Netscape icon in favor of the IE icon
Forcing OEM's to prominently display the MSN icon over the AOL/Earthlink icon.
Allowing "Open Office Document" to have a special place in the Start menu.
Preventing OEM's from removing the IE icon.
Preventing OEM's from showing the Real Networks icon on the Desktop.
Preventing OEM's from installing QuickTime by default.
I'll think of some more. Have you read Penfield Jackson's Findings of Fact? You really should read it.
A consistent UI helps ISVs, OEMS (who must support the damn things), Microsoft (who gets ISV support, consumer sales, OEM sales, brand recognition) but most of all it benefits consumers and the business world - who cant count on the commonalities of Windows X from machine to machine, vendor to vendor.
Boy, you really have been drinking the Bill-Aid. I never said it didn't benefit people. I did say that Microsoft doesn't provide much consistency across versions and that they change the UI to stifle competition. Show me a company which runs Windows95, 98, 2000, NT4.0 and XP and I'll show a company with a seriously harried IT staff. Most big companies upgrade everything at the same time because of inconsistencies from version to version.
Forcing MS to allow OEMS to customize trival things like the start bar, the desktop, etc is a bad idea. It makes no sense - because it can only hurt the consumer - and does a lot of harm to the ISVs out there who depend on saying "runs the same on 100 million machines".
How? Alterations can be beneficial or detrimental. Are you saying that it's impossible to improve the Microsoft Windows interface? It's perfect then, eh? Changing the UI, BTW, doesn't have to change the underlying system calls (unless you're microsoft trying to fuck a potential competitor). The same software will still run. Ever heard of modularity?
Bottom line is that your claim stating that MS changes the UI to hurt competition is silly - MS has the most to lose if its customers can find things or need retraining.
Microsoft has nothing to lose. Customers can't find things. Customers need retraining. Microsoft doesn't pay for training!
If you think that people don't need retraining when they move from 95 to NT to 2000 to XP you are sorely mistaken. Which customers did they lose? They have a monopoly. They have a monopoly. Repeat after me: Microsoft is a monopoly.
But we are talking about the start button! That was the whole point of the quotes from the article. The MS guy claimed that allowing the OEMs to change the start bar would hurt the consistency of the Windows UI - and it would! According to your own words it would!
Of course it would. I was stating that Microsoft itself doesn't have the consumer's best interests in heart when it changes its UI. It changes its UI to keep out competitors. If a product confuses consumers by altering the UI, then consumers would respond by uninstalling it and not buying it in the future. Competition anyone? And what about products that made changes to the UI which consumers liked?
In MacOS there are lots of "extensions" which extend the UI, by adding special hot spots, menus, tweak the (consistent BTW) save and load dialogues. I have used many and like some. What does MS gain by keeping these off of the OEM market? What's wrong with selling a Compaq Desktop with and "Enhanced Start Menu?". This may be confusing to some consumers, but some may benefit. Isn't that what an ecosystem is about?
Much of the configuration has changed (though not all that much really, I mean its basically the same) but the basic UI hasnt - double click to open something, single clikc to select something, drag, drop, click the Start button - its all the same since Windows 95.
And none of that part of the UI would be changed by allowing other programs to be installed. I agree that the basic UI paradigm hasn't changed, but it hasn't changed in KDE, Gnome or MacOS either. If it was changed, then people wouldn't buy it because it would make their computing experience confusing. This is called competiion.
The original post said that it was complete bullshit that MS would try to preserve a functionally common UI - he couldnt even allow room for that possibility - that the common UI elements helped consumers.
No argument from me on that point.
So go blow it somewhere else.
Make me:-).
IF you can make room to allow that consumers benefit from a consistent UI (again, even if imperfect) than you obviously not living on this planet.
I agree wholeheartedly that consumers benefit from a consistent UI. My argument with your statement lies in the implication that Microsoft actually provides and protects tthis because "consumers will benefit." The only reason Microsoft does provide it is because it allows them to maintain their monopoly. When providing a consistent UI is incompatible with that goal, they will happily change the UI and make it inconsistent if it will aid them in crushing a potential competitor.
Ohh come on, you're telling me that you can't see the least little bit of good in providing a consistent navigation system across all operating systems sold since 1994?
Hahahahahahaha! Boy, you have been drinking the Bill-Aid haven't you? I practically fell out of my chair laughing! That since 1994 realy slayed me. Apart from the start button itself practically EVERYTHING has been changing from release to release. Uhmmm, Have you tried using 95, NT 4.0, ME, 2000 and XP in the same day? Have you tried finding the fucking network settings [the ipconfig command line program doesn't count, BTW]? How about your sound card settings? Microsoft has been changing their interface with every tweak often to match the Apple's interface tweaks. After Apple came out with the Aqua interface for Mac OS X, Microsoft came out with XP, a huge candy coated HACK on top of the 2000 interface. Consistency my ass.
Edgar Allen Poe did a good analysis of the machine which he published (It may be available from the Gutenberg project for free... Why here it is.) Here's a link to some background info. Poe's essay is a good read, a little hard to follow without good diagrams but a good look into how smart he was.
Don't know how the duck worked, so I can't help you there. But people can be amazingly clever with the tools on hand.
Why should MSFT pay taxes to fund its competition? Even if MSFT doesn't pay a dime in taxes, why should the government compete with MSFT? If the government can arbitrarily decide to compete with a business, what is the point of going into business? It's very discouraging to think I might someday build a business, only to have the government confiscate it because a bunch of Leftists are all in a snit.
Microsoft doesn't pay any taxes, because they write off all of their funny money options. Why should I pay taxes to support welfare? Those people will just compete with me for resources and jobs. Why should the government compete with road builders? Toll roads everywhere would provide billions of dollars in profit for some companies. Why is the government competing with them? It's very discouraging to think that I might someday build a business (through illegal means), only to have the government confiscate it because I got caught and a bunch of nit picking lawers got in a snit.
In case you haven't gotten my point yet, the government should support future software development because software and standards will provide the infrastructure for the future. Remember DARPA and the Internet? Government funded development of communications standards are neccessary for future growth and stability.
No. It's proven them right. The non-GPL'd BSD consistantly outperforms Linux; especially in security. GPL advocates often point to Apache (either due to ignorance or intentional deception), but that isn't GPL'd. It isn't even copylefted. Perl was originally Artistic only, not copylefted. It was only dual-licensed with the GPL due to community pressure. The gcc compiler keeps most free *NIXs hobbled at lower performance levels due to its subpar optimization. Non-copylefted Open Source consistantly attracts better developers for a very good reason: The better developers want to keep their options open, and that includes the option to release proprietary versions.
Let's see, BSD is how much older than Linux? Your points on Apache and Perl and well made. However, the gcc compiler provides the most standards compliant, universal compiler that has greatly benefited the entire software community. Linux, Apache, Perl, PHP, Python would have found it hard to take root where universal tools didn't exist. Oh, and I suppose Guido, Linux, Alan, etc are just stooges. Some of the better developers prefer to keep their work open and prevent it being stolen by the likes of Microsoft.
First of all, Microsoft doesn't pay squat in taxes. All that profit which has added up to $40 billion in the bank was all offset by massive options writeoffs. Go read a financial report.
Second, Microsoft isn't going to credit my tax contributions when they sell their software, they are going to charge as much as they can for code that my tax dollars already paid for. And they aren't going to give me access to the code. This is precisely why I won't support BSD. Because every dollar of support to BSD will be stolen in the form of code and will go to enriching Microsoft who is intent on destroying the very system of programmatic and standards freedom which created the "ecosystem" allowing it to come into existence..NET an open standard? C#? Passport? they are all simply attempts to poison the ecosystem for potential competitors.
Nothing prevents Microsoft from using GPL'ed code. Just make the source available to their customers. Oh, that prevents MS from screwing their customers and selling shitty software? Well, exxcccuuuusseee me. Don't steal my code then.
Microsoft doesn't want a healthy ecosystem. They want an ecosystem which they dominate and directy all advances to prevent any bigger beast from evolving and threatening their existence. If MS really wanted a healthy ecosystem, they'd publish their networking protocols, their Word, Excel and Access file formats and their MSExchange protocol.
I guess we should have arrested Nabakov for writing Lolita. When you rob a store you are doing damage to someone else. When I read Lolita or look at a Playboy or what have you, whom am I hurting? When you go work on your marksmanship, whom are you hurting? One of the fundamental principles behind our freedom is the freedom to be let alone. That's why robbing a store is illegal, whatever the tools. That's also why child pornography is illegal, because it damages the children involved.
Saying you're disturbed by it isn't a valid reason for making it illegal. Lots of people are disturbed that you go shooting. Would you like it if they made it illegal for you to own guns and shoot? Restricting one person's right to read/listen/watch/do things that don't affect others ends up restricting your right to read/listen/watch/do things that don't affect others also. It's only freedom if you're willing to share.
For the record, I am a liberal in every sense of the word. Law's should punish those who harm the freedom or well being of others. Law's should not make criminals of people who have done no harm to others. Victimless crimes aren't crimes. Owning a gun, shouldn't be a crime, using it to harm others should be a crime. Owning "Lolita" shouldn't be a crime, acting it out should be a crime. Get the picture?
I object to the increasing criminalization of the simple ownership of objects and not the acts of using them in ways which infringe upon the rights of others. That goes for guns, virtual child porn and bebop jazz. I don't like some of them, but I respect your right to own them. Laws should not make criminals of people who respect other peoples' rights and freedoms.
About the flashlight. They would have gotten them from here or from here. Here's a good intro to flashlights beyond what you can get from K-Mart or Big-5. Some of these flashlights are designed to blind you at close range. Plenty bright enough to wake up a guy across the garden (not street). Oh their batteries only last about 1 hour or so, and their batteries cost $4 bucks EACH and they flashlights themselves cost $100 and up. Still, for the money, the brightest light you can carry in your hand (hidden if you have biggish hands).
If it were me moving in, I would have had a shotgun in the panic room with a couple of vests. Would have made for a much shorter film.
enkidu EOT
The Problem Isn't Globalization, But Our Hypocrisy
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Globalism Post 9/11
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The parts of the world that hate us, (even those that do hate us seem to love other parts of the U.S.), don't hate us because we have so much power, or because we export so much of our "decadent" culture, or because they "hate our freedom", or even because we are turning our back" on the rest of the world. They hate the U.S. because they view us as hypocrites. And so we are.
We talk of free trade and then enact tariffs to protect our industries from "unfair" trading. We talk of democracy and we support repressive, undemocratic regimes. We talk of justice and refuse it to innocent victims of our bombings. We talk of international rules but ignore them when it doesn't suit us. We talk of equality but treat all others as inferiors. We talk of freedom but want our "partner" nations to do what we tell them to do. What do you expect?
And who is to blame? We all are to blame. The media is to blame for ignoring their public responsibility, printing and broadcasting spineless mush (like this piece) that serve the interests of corporations and stability. The government is to blame for supporting coroporate profits to the exclusion of higher social and diplomatic goals. And we the public are to blame, for electing these bozos, for giving them high approval ratings when they do not deserve them, for not demanding better coverage of the foreign press and international affairs, for being content with our computers, our SUV's, our anime cartoons and our prosperity with no thought as to how these things are produced. We are to blame because we allow our government to continue to act hypocritically and we say nothing.
So don't give me that bullshit about "abandoning" the global arena. Globalization isn't the problem. It's our hypocrisy that is pissing people off. And it's pissing me off too.
Perhaps he meant kilometers not miles...
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Chase the Rabbits
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· Score: 1
As mentioned elsewhere, ultra distance runners can do 220+km in 24 hours. It may be a stretch but given an extremely competent runner, he/she might finish 141km in 16 hours or so. A truly world class ultra distance runner might finish it in 12 hours, but these are guys who don't have very little excess muscle/weight.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not the point. The '|' character is simply a representation which the shell interprets to mean a pipe. It is a shorthand for what we mean when we say pipe, just as when a painter paints a pipe, it is meant to represent a pipe (the smoking kind), but it doesn't really smoke, and it doesn't really exist. To the shell, the '|' character means a pipe (the unix kind) but the pipe doesn't exist until the shell creates it. The existence of the thing being represented (smoking pipe or unix pipe) is implied by the existence of the representing artifact (painting of a pipe or '|' character) but the representing artifact is not the thing being represented. Or something like that.
The reason people use LP's is because they prefer analog reproduction, instead of the (down) sampling done by the digital format. These guys clean their power so it's perfect sine waves and then use vacuum tubes to amplify thhe signal. I've listened to one rig like this and I have to admit that it sounded pretty darn good. What's the point of doing a crappy scan of an LP if you're going to digitize the picture, mangle it through a bunch of filters and try and reproduce the sound.
I'm still not convinced that you can get decent sound out of a 1200 dpi scan of the LP. You'll only get two or three 32bit dots on the actual track. track speed of 9-18" per second, at 1200 dpi and you get 16800 x 3 dots, or about 50k dots per second. 60 Mega pixels of really really noisy, hard to work with information.
BTW, the ELPJ's laser turntable claims to be completely analog. If it were digital, they'd probably lose 70% of their market. After, the reason you have LP's is because you want the analog sound.
EnkiduEOT
Wonder why they picked NorthWest's colors for their graphic?
EnkiduEOT
EnkiduEOT
The broad strokes of PKD's "Minority Report" are faithfully reproduced: the department of precrime, the three "cogs", the inherent paradox of precrime, and the idea of a "minority report" where two cogs disagree with another. Also, the plot line has a similar feature in that John Anderton discovers that he is supposed to murder someone, and is attempting to find the minority report to clear his name. But everything else is quite different.
The original short story is way antiquated in technology, thus most of the technological details are completely new for the movie: like the eye scanners, jet packs, guns, cars, etc. Heck, in the story, John Anderton uses magnetic (or is it punch?) tape and printouts for interfacing with the reports for the cogs, not some uber hand flicking interface (very cool BTW). The cogs in the story are drooling idiots who babble stuff about the future, not the drugged, sentinent (photogenic) oracles of the movie. The story doesn't deal with the origins of the cogs (not that I remember at least). In the original, John Anderton is an old man (closer to the Max Von Sydow character of the movie), and there is no subplot involving missing/dead children or missing parents. In the original, there are no past crimes to dig up, nor old enemies, just a new one out to discredit the deparment of PreCrime. Compared to the movie, the short story is a much less layered, direct story dealing with the central paradox of precrime; the paradox of foreseeing the future and being able to act upon that knowledge. The movie on the other hand, touches on themes of privacy, identity, justice, societal benefit, and drug addiction in addition to that paradox.
On the whole, I prefer the movie to the book. well, except for the ending of the movie, that was typical Spielberg sentimental mush. Of course, without the incredible vision of PKD to begin with, there would have been no movie. IMHO, PKD remains one of the most influential SF writers ever.
EnkiduEOT
EnkduEOT
Now "dictionary word" -> "easy to remember" -> "insecure" but that doesn't imply "insecure" -> "easy to remember". Far from it in my opinion.
EnkiduEOT
WRT to the piston machine: Obviously when the pressure rises outside the piston, the piston is accelerated inward, however, the force * distance it is accelerated inward is the energy extracted. For nano-bots, that is going to be really really small due to the minute areas we're dealing with. Also, the spring needs to push the piston out before the next pressure wave hits, for high frequencies this means a stiffer spring, resulting in less energy extracted. Again, show me the power calculations.
My intuition may be wrong but not for the reasons you give. There are also forces like electro-static friction and molecular forces. Disregarding that, do you seriously expect me to believe that our nano-bots will be manipulating the world at an atomic scale? At that scale, brownian motion, electro-static and chemical forces create a whole new set of problems. Different from friction, but just as bad, if not worse. On a more reasonable size scale (millions of atoms long), I still believe that friction is a big problem. We don't have to take the whole organism. We can just crib their parts (mitochondria, flagella, digestive cycles etc.) and use them to assemble them other organisms. I'm not saying that that it'll be easy to do that. I'm just saying that the parts to get bio-nano-bots going are already designed, built and functioning. It's assembly that's the problem. With nano-bots, we don't have all the parts yet. I don't have a problem with long term research or with short term research. I have a problem with one being funded with stupid sums of money to the exclusion of the other. BTW, what's paid for with private capital, isn't released for public use, it's kept for private gain.Thanks again for the interesting discussion.
I'm not against people trying to do nanoscale projects as long as they're realistic about their prospects. I have a problem with people trying to do nanoscale stuff before we've even figured out how to do autonomous mini/microscale stuff. I have a problem with supposedly intelligent people not sitting down and doing basic mechanical/physical feasibility checks before zooming off into lala land (often with my tax dollars).
Like that biology professor and compsci professor a year or so ago, who wanted to make nanobots to monitor and track water pollution, without understanding 1) that radio waves don't work for shit in water, 2) GPS can't work without an appropriately sized antenna, 3) We don't have any designs for your power source, 4) We don't have any communications protocols/designs for 4 billion nanobots scattered in the Monterey Bay and on and on. Now if they had talked about softball/volleyball sized monitors floating or floating and sinking on some random/autonomous pattern, I would have been all for them. But because nano is the cool word of the decade, they spouted on and on about their new research on nanobots. I recall that they got about 1 Megabuck in tax dollars for their research proposal.
Mostly, I object to more of my tax dollars going to research into nano dreck (and fusion crap) instead of going to research towards more efficient power generation/solar generation/geothermal generation/waste heat utilization/home generation/efficient transportation/waste reduction/erosion prevention; all of which have a darn good chance of improving the state of the world during the next decade.
WRT to nano + fusion: the next "20 to 30 years" my ass. If we have an actual power generating hot fusion reactor (that is: we start it up and net power comes out) or a useful and efficient nano-bot matrix in less than 25 years (Before 1/1/2028), I'll eat my hat. Heck I'll eat all my hats.
EnkiduEOT
Yes, it would be cool if nano-bots could make me breakfast everyday. It would be cooler if I could swallow a pill of nano-bots to keep me free of disease and stave off aging. But I just don't see it happening any time soon. No power == no nanobots in my view. Biobots on the other hand, allow us to crib off of a couple billion years of evolution. Why reinvent mitochondria?
EnkiduEOT
Technologies usually take off when most of the basic building blocks are there but it's only missing a piece or two. Then someone develops those pieces and presto, you've got Aibo's running around the house. In the case of nano-bots, we're missing more than half the basic building blocks and they don't look like they're going to appear anytime soon.
Silicon dioxide. I haven't heard of any chip fabricating techniques being used on ceramics yet. Anybody home?
There are still the problems of electrical generation and the problem of durability. And they are, in my opinion, going to be alot harder to overcome than just saying, "improvements will continue and it will soon be practical". Remember rotary engines? They only had one problem. The darn seals. And I don't see any Ford's with rotary engines yet...EnkiduEOT
- Operating life. Now, I'm no scientist, but I do know that silicon and high temperatures don't get along too well. But, you could side step that by using similar manufacturing technologies with other materials. Not that I can think of any candidates...
- A turbine does not a generator make. Show me the electricity! Silicon ain't magnetic people. OK, magnetless generators exist, how about "coils" then? Show me the coils! Until I see a working, efficient, microsized generator, I don't see any of this happening.
- Call me a crotchety old man, but I just don't buy the efficiency numbers I'm seeing. As things get smaller and smaller, your perceived viscosity goes up and up. Same design + smaller size = less fluidic efficiency. Same goes for the friction + mass problem. Combustion efficiency will probably go up since it's easier to model with the small size.
This leads me to my problems with the nano-technologists we have nowadays. Where's the power? Anybody have a 1 cubic milimeter battery that'll last 1 hour yet? Show me a self powered nanobot. Hell, show me a nano-power source that works! Remember, volume decreases by the cube as you scale down. Sure a quintillion nano-bots could make me breakfast out of yesterday's trash, but what's going to power them? You can't get out more than you put in, you know. Reminds me of the great Larry Niven's quote: "Another beautiful theory, murdered by a gang of ugly facts."I don't see this stuff (nano-technology, micro-turbines) panning out any time soon (Now, bio+nano or plain bio, I can see scaling down. Also, mini-turbines (1-10 cubic centimeters) I can see happening also.
EnkiduEOT
Am I correct in assuming that your sig refers to Rudy Rucker's "The Hacker and the Ants"? I wonder if it's still in my collection...
If you upgrade the RAM and HardDrive, I doubt if you even need to upgrade the CPU. Let's see, 256MB + a 7200 60GB drive would probably put you back around $200 per station. For another $100 you could double the CPU speed if people really needed it.
EnkiduEOT
Not for Microsoft. They have a monopoly. MS can and does FORCE all of the OEM's to install the newer operating system. Everything you say would be applicable but for the fact that Microsoft is a monopoly. I never said that Microsoft always provided an inconsistent interface. I said that Microsoft only provided it to maintain their monopoly, not for the good of the consumer or the ISV's. When MacOSX threatened to make the old Windows interface look, well old, Microsoft responded by making their interface INCONSISTENT with the old interface in order to add "snap".
No it wouldn't, it would hurt Compaq's bottom line becuase Compaq wouldn't be able to call it Microsoft windows but Compaq Enhanced windows. Just as the enhanced Sony Vaio interface, you claim, is hurting their sales. The converse also holds true, if Compaq were to create a useful enhancement to the interface, they would benefit the consumer and their own brand, not Microsoft. You seem to be under the impression that any alteration to the Microsoft UI would be labelled "Microsoft". That would be a trademark violation and illegal. OK, here's a few for you:- Adding the cofusing IE disk browsing in addition to the standard Explorer browsing to kill Netscape. By my count, there are in NT, three different screens to browse my hard disk, all of them different in subtle ways.
- Double clicking on mp3's launches MSMediaPlayer by default.
- Forcing OEM's to hide the Netscape icon in favor of the IE icon
- Forcing OEM's to prominently display the MSN icon over the AOL/Earthlink icon.
- Allowing "Open Office Document" to have a special place in the Start menu.
- Preventing OEM's from removing the IE icon.
- Preventing OEM's from showing the Real Networks icon on the Desktop.
- Preventing OEM's from installing QuickTime by default.
I'll think of some more. Have you read Penfield Jackson's Findings of Fact? You really should read it. Boy, you really have been drinking the Bill-Aid. I never said it didn't benefit people. I did say that Microsoft doesn't provide much consistency across versions and that they change the UI to stifle competition. Show me a company which runs Windows95, 98, 2000, NT4.0 and XP and I'll show a company with a seriously harried IT staff. Most big companies upgrade everything at the same time because of inconsistencies from version to version. How? Alterations can be beneficial or detrimental. Are you saying that it's impossible to improve the Microsoft Windows interface? It's perfect then, eh? Changing the UI, BTW, doesn't have to change the underlying system calls (unless you're microsoft trying to fuck a potential competitor). The same software will still run. Ever heard of modularity? Microsoft has nothing to lose. Customers can't find things. Customers need retraining. Microsoft doesn't pay for training! If you think that people don't need retraining when they move from 95 to NT to 2000 to XP you are sorely mistaken. Which customers did they lose? They have a monopoly. They have a monopoly. Repeat after me: Microsoft is a monopoly.In MacOS there are lots of "extensions" which extend the UI, by adding special hot spots, menus, tweak the (consistent BTW) save and load dialogues. I have used many and like some. What does MS gain by keeping these off of the OEM market? What's wrong with selling a Compaq Desktop with and "Enhanced Start Menu?". This may be confusing to some consumers, but some may benefit. Isn't that what an ecosystem is about?
And none of that part of the UI would be changed by allowing other programs to be installed. I agree that the basic UI paradigm hasn't changed, but it hasn't changed in KDE, Gnome or MacOS either. If it was changed, then people wouldn't buy it because it would make their computing experience confusing. This is called competiion.No argument from me on that point.
Make meEnkiduEOT
EnkiduEOT
Don't know how the duck worked, so I can't help you there. But people can be amazingly clever with the tools on hand.
Enkidu EOT
Microsoft doesn't pay any taxes, because they write off all of their funny money options. Why should I pay taxes to support welfare? Those people will just compete with me for resources and jobs. Why should the government compete with road builders? Toll roads everywhere would provide billions of dollars in profit for some companies. Why is the government competing with them? It's very discouraging to think that I might someday build a business (through illegal means), only to have the government confiscate it because I got caught and a bunch of nit picking lawers got in a snit.
In case you haven't gotten my point yet, the government should support future software development because software and standards will provide the infrastructure for the future. Remember DARPA and the Internet? Government funded development of communications standards are neccessary for future growth and stability.
Let's see, BSD is how much older than Linux? Your points on Apache and Perl and well made. However, the gcc compiler provides the most standards compliant, universal compiler that has greatly benefited the entire software community. Linux, Apache, Perl, PHP, Python would have found it hard to take root where universal tools didn't exist. Oh, and I suppose Guido, Linux, Alan, etc are just stooges. Some of the better developers prefer to keep their work open and prevent it being stolen by the likes of Microsoft.Enkidu EOT
Second, Microsoft isn't going to credit my tax contributions when they sell their software, they are going to charge as much as they can for code that my tax dollars already paid for. And they aren't going to give me access to the code. This is precisely why I won't support BSD. Because every dollar of support to BSD will be stolen in the form of code and will go to enriching Microsoft who is intent on destroying the very system of programmatic and standards freedom which created the "ecosystem" allowing it to come into existence. .NET an open standard? C#? Passport? they are all simply attempts to poison the ecosystem for potential competitors.
Nothing prevents Microsoft from using GPL'ed code. Just make the source available to their customers. Oh, that prevents MS from screwing their customers and selling shitty software? Well, exxcccuuuusseee me. Don't steal my code then.
Microsoft doesn't want a healthy ecosystem. They want an ecosystem which they dominate and directy all advances to prevent any bigger beast from evolving and threatening their existence. If MS really wanted a healthy ecosystem, they'd publish their networking protocols, their Word, Excel and Access file formats and their MSExchange protocol.
Enkidu EOT
Saying you're disturbed by it isn't a valid reason for making it illegal. Lots of people are disturbed that you go shooting. Would you like it if they made it illegal for you to own guns and shoot? Restricting one person's right to read/listen/watch/do things that don't affect others ends up restricting your right to read/listen/watch/do things that don't affect others also. It's only freedom if you're willing to share.
For the record, I am a liberal in every sense of the word. Law's should punish those who harm the freedom or well being of others. Law's should not make criminals of people who have done no harm to others. Victimless crimes aren't crimes. Owning a gun, shouldn't be a crime, using it to harm others should be a crime. Owning "Lolita" shouldn't be a crime, acting it out should be a crime. Get the picture?
I object to the increasing criminalization of the simple ownership of objects and not the acts of using them in ways which infringe upon the rights of others. That goes for guns, virtual child porn and bebop jazz. I don't like some of them, but I respect your right to own them. Laws should not make criminals of people who respect other peoples' rights and freedoms.
Enkidu EOT
If it were me moving in, I would have had a shotgun in the panic room with a couple of vests. Would have made for a much shorter film.
enkidu EOT
We talk of free trade and then enact tariffs to protect our industries from "unfair" trading. We talk of democracy and we support repressive, undemocratic regimes. We talk of justice and refuse it to innocent victims of our bombings. We talk of international rules but ignore them when it doesn't suit us. We talk of equality but treat all others as inferiors. We talk of freedom but want our "partner" nations to do what we tell them to do. What do you expect?
And who is to blame? We all are to blame. The media is to blame for ignoring their public responsibility, printing and broadcasting spineless mush (like this piece) that serve the interests of corporations and stability. The government is to blame for supporting coroporate profits to the exclusion of higher social and diplomatic goals. And we the public are to blame, for electing these bozos, for giving them high approval ratings when they do not deserve them, for not demanding better coverage of the foreign press and international affairs, for being content with our computers, our SUV's, our anime cartoons and our prosperity with no thought as to how these things are produced. We are to blame because we allow our government to continue to act hypocritically and we say nothing.
So don't give me that bullshit about "abandoning" the global arena. Globalization isn't the problem. It's our hypocrisy that is pissing people off. And it's pissing me off too.
As mentioned elsewhere, ultra distance runners can do 220+km in 24 hours. It may be a stretch but given an extremely competent runner, he/she might finish 141km in 16 hours or so. A truly world class ultra distance runner might finish it in 12 hours, but these are guys who don't have very little excess muscle/weight.