Yeah, the UAV thing is not to be understated. The USAF is buying -many- Predators and Predator B. Predator B is still in test but it can carry 16 Hellfire I think or 500lb bombs. It's becoming a serious ground to air asset.
Electronically, the JAS-39 is pretty cool because multiple JAS-39 combine their radars to form a single view of the battlespace. It's also more maneuverable than our own F-16. Because the JAS-39 is a smaller aircraft, it does not compete with the F-15. However, as it stands, the -only- aircraft that the USA produces that really outclasses all European fighters is the F-22. The EF-2000 and Rafale are at least as good as, if not better, than our own F-15 variants.
I don't know where the Navy's new FA/18s stand with respect to the above.
Building a passenger jet is completely different than building a fighter aircraft, so calling military hardware purchases a subsidy is completely wrong.
Airbus only has to pay its taxpayers back when it makes money on the A380. Boeing gets to avoid paying taxes to the city that builds it. Essentially Airbus gets free R&D but Boeing does not.
It is ridiculous to blame the present state of Islamic nations on the Mongols or the Crusades.
First off, the USA did not even exist when the Mongols or Crusades happened, yet, has easily surpassed the greatest achievements of the middle east within a scant two hundred years. Americans did, after all, put a man on the moon.
Secondly, the Japan and Germany were both completely destroyed during World War II through its bombing campaigns, and those nations both have bounced back. The Mongols did not fire bomb Baghdad.
To have a scientific society, you have to have some pre-requisites:
a) You have to accept scientific findings when they clash with religious findings. You have to admit that whatever holy book you believe in is not the only source of knowledge, and -gasp- is probably wrong. Even the Communists could manage that one, which is why despite Russia going to hell in a handbasket economically, they beat the USA into space.
b) You have to have a society which accepts open communications on scientific matters, as a minimum, and encourages open communication altogether. Again, even under Russian communism, they could communicate relatively freely about matters of science. But more so in western nations can scientists communicate, and that is why the west leads in technology.
Islamic societies do not have these prerequisites.
Religious leaders have real political power, and Islam, religious leaders hold that, because Islam is a "practical religion", they can rule on all aspects of life. Every time someone says anything, you get some two bit cleric tossing out a fatwah or declaring a jihad about topics that they aren't remotely qualified to speak to. In the west, if someone asks a question, the thing to do is to run an experiment and find out. In Islam, the thing to do, is ask a cleric, who makes something up.
Islamic societies have achieved nothing despite vast investment.
The transfer of American money into the middle east is one of the largest transfers of capital in human history. Since the end of World War II, America has purchased probably close to 20 trillion dollars worth of oil from the middle east. Where has all this money gone? Are there new technology centers in the middle east? Is the middle east producing any new drugs to fight disease with? Is the middle east even a banking center? Nope, no and no. Instead, they just sit on that oil and take their money and just waste it, the same way they sat on world trade routes and wasted their money when they were a great empire.
It's time for Islamic countries to stop blaming their failures on everyone else but themselves.
The articles detail a conclusion that the F-15 is no match for the SU-30, which I agree. The F-15 is what, almost 40 years old by now? The Cope India debacle is one of the reasons why the USA is buying new F-22s and new F-35s.
The new SU-37 has similar flight characteristics to the F-22 and might even be more maneuverable. It is not contracted for yet by the Russian Air Force but it is reasonable to think they will either upgrade down that path or invest in an aircraft based on the SU-45 technology test bed.
Russia has -always- been at or near the forefront of aviation technology, dating back to World War I. I would not be so smug as to overestimate the F-22 or underestimate Russian aircraft. Yes, we have had much success against third world nations operating Russian made aircraft, but those aircraft are generally one, two, or even three generations behind current Russian design.
I never stated that the Islamic civilizations were dumb librarians. But one does have to ask, how does one become exposed to algebra and then not invent calculus? They never allowed their science to progress to the point where a technological revolution could upset the centers of religious power, a problem that continues to haunt them to this day.
Muslims borrowed heavily from India when they invaded India. The Islamic role in the sciences tended to be more about preserving the best of what they had conquered. As traders, they acted as a point where that knowledge could be disseminated to Europe.
I'd say forget the underlying OS and put Workplace Shell on top of Linux. Not that the underlying OS is bad, it's actually quite good. It's just that, Linux and Windows have both moved on. You would need a whole new driver base, everything, and that's a tall order. If we had the workplace shell desktop, you would get a really powerful desktop - folders that act the way they are supposed to act, etc.
I wouldn't mind having the EPM editor either. It had a really cool undo feature. Come to think of it, IPMD was a pretty darned good debugger.
Didn't the Linux community bash Microsoft thoroughly when Microsoft decided to fold the graphics systems into the Kernal in Windows 2000? In Windows NT 4.0, the graphics and audio systems sat above the low level microkernal, which could be extremely stable. Not so in Windows 2000. Microsoft did it for performance reasons and also availability reasons. NT 4.0 could not run DirectX above 2.0, but Windows 2000 could. But when Microsoft took that everything in the kernal plunge, the Linux community just unleashed both barrels.
Now Linux is taking the same plunge, one has to ask if previous Linux protests were so much protesting about nothing, and if today's Linux moves are a tacit admission that this "superior" operating system is actually far behind Windows in some ways.
My better half was a Canon junkie and switched to Nikon because Nikon lenses are faster. The reason you see Canon at sporting events everywhere, particularly tennis, is because the top journalists are only allowed to use Canon equipment at a Canon sponsored event. In other words, Canon is Microsofting people by trying to create the perception that their competition is dying.
a) Presentation is information. Font, placement, color, all of these "superflous" things, matter and are often just as important as the text being decorated by them.
b) It is incorrect to assume that a program which uses libraries is somehow different from a document which uses fonts. A program is merely a presentation of its underlying libraries, and a word processing document is an as assembly of its components.
c) The creators of the fonts are entitled to the same rights as the creators of an operating system. They spend many many hours working on them. If an operating system or c compiler provider can get you to sign onto their licensing scheme, so too can the creator of the font.
Incidentally, all of the above applies to images, sounds, or any other sort of intellectual property. Yes, a creator of an icon could release it GPL, or even more pervasive. For example, a web server that uses somebodies images might be required to divulge its source.
WIFI infrastructures must not be that much to set up and run. Otherwise hotels, large businesses, etc, would not be doing it. Extending it to a city only makes sense from a cities perspective. A city, in a nutshell, provides shared infrastructure so that people can live and make money theres. Offering everyone universal WIFI is a great selling point for cities looking to compete with exurbia.
I'm as Republican to the bone as any man, but it bothers me that Verizon is taking this stance. The entire theory of competition is that private institutions can compete better than governments can. If that is the case, then Verizon could easily offer a service at a lower cost than that offered by San Fransisco or Philadelphia. If not, then, they should shut the f- up.
I honestly don't care if gays get married or not, so long as they don't keep nominating John Kerry's and Al Gores always trying to take away my guns!
But...
1) The courts actually have no job to interpret the Constitution! That is a tradition that began because the Supreme Court gave the job to itself in a famous ruling, Marbury vs Madison.
2) The real question is, how do you determine what conflicts the Constitution?
You could either choose to broadly interpret it, or strictly interpret it.
Strictly interpreted, the US government has no legal authority to enact civil rights, environmental, or educational legislation. All it can do is regulate commerce and raise armies. The states get the rest.
Loosely interpreted, the US government has the power to do anything. Anything that can even elliptically effect commerce has been capriciously ruled to be constitutional. So, we get all sorts of inconsistencies, like, abortion is a fundamental right even though it was never contemplated in the constitution, but, somehow, guns are not a fundamental right even though they are explicitly allowed. Pretty much, by giving the government the power to make laws about their pet causes, the liberals gave the conservatives the right to make laws about their pet causes, particularly religion, and thus wrecked the country. It was much better when gov't had little power.
Well that's good that you've given yourself the right to say that someone could not sell icons of their images on their web site. And whose to say what "an actual art form is". Isn't that confinining. What if someone's medium, and hence livelihood, is icons.
Honestly I can't see what the problem with DRM is, if it is merely a pipeline to ensure that one's IP is protected. If consumers want art, they should pay up.
Today, images are so easy to copy that they almost don't count. But every icon that you see, every image that is on the screen, and there are millions of them, represent the collective efforts of many artists working for a long time.
What if a budding photographer wanted to put his or her work on a web site? He can't, unless he plans on giving up eating.
At some point, we do have to respect that images and sounds placed on the internet really do belong to other people and that at some level it is wrong to just take from these folks without compensating them.
The whole point of science is not so that we can trust the opinions of scientists, it is so that scientists can give us repeatable steps to demonstrate a new point.
This whole notion of "it makes the scientists happy so we should just trust them" goes against every single thing that we in the west have fought for since the renaissance.
Your whole argument illustrates this problem precisely. You argue that, "well, even though the key piece of statistical evidence in global warming is questionable, we should still believe in the conclusion."
This is so wrong.
Maybe if scientists published all of their data in a uniform format, to a uniform site, with exact steps to reproduce, all of their source data, and how they draw conclusions from them, then, you might have a field that is useful. But right now, you have got hyper expensive journals all over the place as a repository for articles that only sketch out a discovery and not actually do it, and that simply is not good enough to be taken credibly.
The scientific process is excellent. But today's scientific product sucks.
One's interests in keeping clients does not entitle you to make a scientific claim that cannot be peer reviewed. If a paper such as Mann is now regarded as fact, and indeed, makes policy, despite the obvious sloppiness regarding its data management process, then, what is the point of science anyway?
Science is supposed to be about peer review, rigor, that every assumption behind every assertion can be challenged. If, all we have is someone with a Phd can claim that they have a fact as our science, then, what is the point of even trusting them?
Without independent verification and an open process, there's nothing to separate scientists from creationists, and the people are going to pick whoever makes the most attractive sales pitch.
Medicare, etc, are services. The intellectual property in that case is of little market worth and belongs to the patient as the interest in health privacy trumps the need to know.
However, in the case of research, federally funded research should have a complete disclosure. If you have a scientist doing work, and not disclosing the entire body of it, then in reality, the end product must not be regarded as science, but opinion. If Mann does not disclose his entire body of work used to comprise his conclusions, then how else can we assess whether his conclusions are accurate or not?
Slashdot Mirror
$200 for that? I'll wait.
Yeah, the UAV thing is not to be understated. The USAF is buying -many- Predators and Predator B. Predator B is still in test but it can carry 16 Hellfire I think or 500lb bombs. It's becoming a serious ground to air asset.
Electronically, the JAS-39 is pretty cool because multiple JAS-39 combine their radars to form a single view of the battlespace. It's also more maneuverable than our own F-16. Because the JAS-39 is a smaller aircraft, it does not compete with the F-15. However, as it stands, the -only- aircraft that the USA produces that really outclasses all European fighters is the F-22. The EF-2000 and Rafale are at least as good as, if not better, than our own F-15 variants.
I don't know where the Navy's new FA/18s stand with respect to the above.
F 16 Net
Air Force Association
Building a passenger jet is completely different than building a fighter aircraft, so calling military hardware purchases a subsidy is completely wrong.
Airbus only has to pay its taxpayers back when it makes money on the A380. Boeing gets to avoid paying taxes to the city that builds it. Essentially Airbus gets free R&D but Boeing does not.
It is ridiculous to blame the present state of Islamic nations on the Mongols or the Crusades.
First off, the USA did not even exist when the Mongols or Crusades happened, yet, has easily surpassed the greatest achievements of the middle east within a scant two hundred years. Americans did, after all, put a man on the moon.
Secondly, the Japan and Germany were both completely destroyed during World War II through its bombing campaigns, and those nations both have bounced back. The Mongols did not fire bomb Baghdad.
To have a scientific society, you have to have some pre-requisites:
a) You have to accept scientific findings when they clash with religious findings. You have to admit that whatever holy book you believe in is not the only source of knowledge, and -gasp- is probably wrong. Even the Communists could manage that one, which is why despite Russia going to hell in a handbasket economically, they beat the USA into space.
b) You have to have a society which accepts open communications on scientific matters, as a minimum, and encourages open communication altogether. Again, even under Russian communism, they could communicate relatively freely about matters of science. But more so in western nations can scientists communicate, and that is why the west leads in technology.
Islamic societies do not have these prerequisites.
Religious leaders have real political power, and Islam, religious leaders hold that, because Islam is a "practical religion", they can rule on all aspects of life. Every time someone says anything, you get some two bit cleric tossing out a fatwah or declaring a jihad about topics that they aren't remotely qualified to speak to. In the west, if someone asks a question, the thing to do is to run an experiment and find out. In Islam, the thing to do, is ask a cleric, who makes something up.
Islamic societies have achieved nothing despite vast investment.
The transfer of American money into the middle east is one of the largest transfers of capital in human history. Since the end of World War II, America has purchased probably close to 20 trillion dollars worth of oil from the middle east. Where has all this money gone? Are there new technology centers in the middle east? Is the middle east producing any new drugs to fight disease with? Is the middle east even a banking center? Nope, no and no. Instead, they just sit on that oil and take their money and just waste it, the same way they sat on world trade routes and wasted their money when they were a great empire.
It's time for Islamic countries to stop blaming their failures on everyone else but themselves.
The articles detail a conclusion that the F-15 is no match for the SU-30, which I agree. The F-15 is what, almost 40 years old by now? The Cope India debacle is one of the reasons why the USA is buying new F-22s and new F-35s.
The new SU-37 has similar flight characteristics to the F-22 and might even be more maneuverable. It is not contracted for yet by the Russian Air Force but it is reasonable to think they will either upgrade down that path or invest in an aircraft based on the SU-45 technology test bed.
Russia has -always- been at or near the forefront of aviation technology, dating back to World War I. I would not be so smug as to overestimate the F-22 or underestimate Russian aircraft. Yes, we have had much success against third world nations operating Russian made aircraft, but those aircraft are generally one, two, or even three generations behind current Russian design.
I never stated that the Islamic civilizations were dumb librarians. But one does have to ask, how does one become exposed to algebra and then not invent calculus? They never allowed their science to progress to the point where a technological revolution could upset the centers of religious power, a problem that continues to haunt them to this day.
Muslims borrowed heavily from India when they invaded India. The Islamic role in the sciences tended to be more about preserving the best of what they had conquered. As traders, they acted as a point where that knowledge could be disseminated to Europe.
I'd say forget the underlying OS and put Workplace Shell on top of Linux. Not that the underlying OS is bad, it's actually quite good. It's just that, Linux and Windows have both moved on. You would need a whole new driver base, everything, and that's a tall order. If we had the workplace shell desktop, you would get a really powerful desktop - folders that act the way they are supposed to act, etc.
I wouldn't mind having the EPM editor either. It had a really cool undo feature. Come to think of it, IPMD was a pretty darned good debugger.
Didn't the Linux community bash Microsoft thoroughly when Microsoft decided to fold the graphics systems into the Kernal in Windows 2000? In Windows NT 4.0, the graphics and audio systems sat above the low level microkernal, which could be extremely stable. Not so in Windows 2000. Microsoft did it for performance reasons and also availability reasons. NT 4.0 could not run DirectX above 2.0, but Windows 2000 could. But when Microsoft took that everything in the kernal plunge, the Linux community just unleashed both barrels.
Now Linux is taking the same plunge, one has to ask if previous Linux protests were so much protesting about nothing, and if today's Linux moves are a tacit admission that this "superior" operating system is actually far behind Windows in some ways.
My better half was a Canon junkie and switched to Nikon because Nikon lenses are faster. The reason you see Canon at sporting events everywhere, particularly tennis, is because the top journalists are only allowed to use Canon equipment at a Canon sponsored event. In other words, Canon is Microsofting people by trying to create the perception that their competition is dying.
This argument is wrong on three counts:
a) Presentation is information. Font, placement, color, all of these "superflous" things, matter and are often just as important as the text being decorated by them.
b) It is incorrect to assume that a program which uses libraries is somehow different from a document which uses fonts. A program is merely a presentation of its underlying libraries, and a word processing document is an as assembly of its components.
c) The creators of the fonts are entitled to the same rights as the creators of an operating system. They spend many many hours working on them. If an operating system or c compiler provider can get you to sign onto their licensing scheme, so too can the creator of the font.
Incidentally, all of the above applies to images, sounds, or any other sort of intellectual property. Yes, a creator of an icon could release it GPL, or even more pervasive. For example, a web server that uses somebodies images might be required to divulge its source.
WIFI infrastructures must not be that much to set up and run. Otherwise hotels, large businesses, etc, would not be doing it. Extending it to a city only makes sense from a cities perspective. A city, in a nutshell, provides shared infrastructure so that people can live and make money theres. Offering everyone universal WIFI is a great selling point for cities looking to compete with exurbia.
I'm as Republican to the bone as any man, but it bothers me that Verizon is taking this stance. The entire theory of competition is that private institutions can compete better than governments can. If that is the case, then Verizon could easily offer a service at a lower cost than that offered by San Fransisco or Philadelphia. If not, then, they should shut the f- up.
I honestly don't care if gays get married or not, so long as they don't keep nominating John Kerry's and Al Gores always trying to take away my guns!
But...
1) The courts actually have no job to interpret the Constitution! That is a tradition that began because the Supreme Court gave the job to itself in a famous ruling, Marbury vs Madison.
2) The real question is, how do you determine what conflicts the Constitution?
You could either choose to broadly interpret it, or strictly interpret it.
Strictly interpreted, the US government has no legal authority to enact civil rights, environmental, or educational legislation. All it can do is regulate commerce and raise armies. The states get the rest.
Loosely interpreted, the US government has the power to do anything. Anything that can even elliptically effect commerce has been capriciously ruled to be constitutional. So, we get all sorts of inconsistencies, like, abortion is a fundamental right even though it was never contemplated in the constitution, but, somehow, guns are not a fundamental right even though they are explicitly allowed. Pretty much, by giving the government the power to make laws about their pet causes, the liberals gave the conservatives the right to make laws about their pet causes, particularly religion, and thus wrecked the country. It was much better when gov't had little power.
Well that's good that you've given yourself the right to say that someone could not sell icons of their images on their web site. And whose to say what "an actual art form is". Isn't that confinining. What if someone's medium, and hence livelihood, is icons.
Honestly I can't see what the problem with DRM is, if it is merely a pipeline to ensure that one's IP is protected. If consumers want art, they should pay up.
Today, images are so easy to copy that they almost don't count. But every icon that you see, every image that is on the screen, and there are millions of them, represent the collective efforts of many artists working for a long time.
What if a budding photographer wanted to put his or her work on a web site? He can't, unless he plans on giving up eating.
At some point, we do have to respect that images and sounds placed on the internet really do belong to other people and that at some level it is wrong to just take from these folks without compensating them.
The whole point of science is not so that we can trust the opinions of scientists, it is so that scientists can give us repeatable steps to demonstrate a new point.
This whole notion of "it makes the scientists happy so we should just trust them" goes against every single thing that we in the west have fought for since the renaissance.
Your whole argument illustrates this problem precisely. You argue that, "well, even though the key piece of statistical evidence in global warming is questionable, we should still believe in the conclusion."
This is so wrong.
Maybe if scientists published all of their data in a uniform format, to a uniform site, with exact steps to reproduce, all of their source data, and how they draw conclusions from them, then, you might have a field that is useful. But right now, you have got hyper expensive journals all over the place as a repository for articles that only sketch out a discovery and not actually do it, and that simply is not good enough to be taken credibly.
The scientific process is excellent. But today's scientific product sucks.
One's interests in keeping clients does not entitle you to make a scientific claim that cannot be peer reviewed. If a paper such as Mann is now regarded as fact, and indeed, makes policy, despite the obvious sloppiness regarding its data management process, then, what is the point of science anyway?
Science is supposed to be about peer review, rigor, that every assumption behind every assertion can be challenged. If, all we have is someone with a Phd can claim that they have a fact as our science, then, what is the point of even trusting them?
Without independent verification and an open process, there's nothing to separate scientists from creationists, and the people are going to pick whoever makes the most attractive sales pitch.
Medicare, etc, are services. The intellectual property in that case is of little market worth and belongs to the patient as the interest in health privacy trumps the need to know.
However, in the case of research, federally funded research should have a complete disclosure. If you have a scientist doing work, and not disclosing the entire body of it, then in reality, the end product must not be regarded as science, but opinion. If Mann does not disclose his entire body of work used to comprise his conclusions, then how else can we assess whether his conclusions are accurate or not?
Science must be open source.
Well, if we used this machine to replicate those miniature black holes the British made, we could have the Earth reduced to a singularity in no time!
Not invented here. If we all fell in for that line of reasoning to not code something, we would all be using only IBM systems. Competition rules.
Who cares about CO2 consumption? What about the all important statistic of 0-60!
My Pontiac GTO goes 0-60 in a little over 5 seconds, and has a top speed of over 150mph!
The Shuttle is a nice toy but JIMO and a nuclear powered spacecraft is clearly the way to go. NASA should kill the Shuttle and build the JIMO.