FWIW: Iran is not psychotic. Neither Ahmadinijad nor Bush. Their reason for bellicose language is to get the rabble exited, and to energize their wingnut base. Also the reason Bush tortured: not to actually gather good intel or protect us - but to get voters exited about voting for Bush. (Bush=torture=safety).
Iran is not likely to "wipe Israel off the map".
But Ahmadinijad is very likely to get votes from angry (scared) anti-semites.
It worked for the Romans, it worked for Hitler, and it worked for Bush, for a while.
What Kim Jong "License to" Il has going for him, is he controls the message: the press. That's what worked for the Romans, what worked for Hitler, and what works for Ahmadinijad. And this is why Americans got sick of Bush after 5 years. Even with Fox News - we still had a semi-free press.
Possibly you mean, "why would the leader of a nation want..." or "why would the party leadership want..." or "why would the man on the street want...",
Okay - why would {insert_stakeholder_here} want their country to be isolated?
stakeholder.ManInTheStreet = "I want communism because before we were communists, we were poor and starving. . . "
stakeholder.PartyLeadership = "Man, this gig is good. We keep the people happy with their communism mythos, and we get to live the posh-life as party-leaders!"
stakeholder.Dictator = "Well, I'm stuck as the figurehead of this thing, and I know the party leaders will kill me if I step out of line, but on the other hand, it's GOOD to be the King!"
Man in the street was starving BEFORE communism. Now they're starving, and they have guns pointed at their heads.
As long as they stay ignorant and isolated, they won't have the chance to live the posh-posh life that the East Germans got to live in the first 10 years after the Berlin Wall fell, with no western/modern education, no business skills, in fact, no skills at all. They've been SHELTERED from the necessity of competition by the artificial convenience of National Sovreignity. And this sheltering has bred massive incompetence; as it always does - whether you're talking about a real slave, or a deluded wannabe communist, or a deluded wannabe capitalist who does not understand that their Commons (public roads, public schools, social safety net, etc.) also shelters them.
What's the difference?
In communism, man (party) exploits man (people). In capitalism, it's the other way around.
Oh yeah? Well, the country I live in, Atlantis, has 100% of it's land below sea level by as much as 3000 feet already. We can handle a few additional feet of water.
BRING IT BITCHES!
More water spurs great engineering, and that's exactly why we had nuclear powered flying machines and death rays, 2000 years before your moronic asses even figured out bronze.
Yeah, but what he and Lex Luthor stupidly failed to realize, is that whether you set-off nukes to trigger the San Andreas fault to drop California into the ocean, or if you drive your SUV to crank up global warming; one undeniable fact remains:
You have just drowned all the people who even WANTED to live near the ocean. Your property values will NOT go up!!!
If party A (Advertiser) makes a deal with party B (Business running a website), that in exchange for money, party C will "behave in a certain way" (ie. view ads, and buy products) - without any agreement or consultation with party C (Customer); then that makes party A an idiot, and party B a lying scammer.
This is independent of whether party C actually views ads or buys products; or whether party C avoids those ads.
Now - there is an implied agreement by party C to party B on whether party C can view content while ads are filtered - but that's party B's problem. Because party C still has not agreed to squat.
That makes party B ALSO an idiot, as well as a liar and scammer.
Never mind the new Aircraft Carrier, "George H W Bush". (known for fathering a smaller ship, a destroyer, which tended to list and steer to the right, often steaming in circles, and occasionally randomly firing torpedoes at other vessels, whether they posed a real threat or not. Eventually its maneuvers drove an entire fleet of ships aground. . . )
IIRC, on more than one occasion, such a smoking was implied. Kaylee did spend a lot of time hanging out in Inara's room.
Just sayin'
Long voyages. Romantic complications with the male characters. Bored hot chicks. Hypothetical futuristic culture unburdened with the moralistic medieval psychosexual baggage we, in the present, are. (hmmm. I think I just figured out WHY I'm such a big fan of Science Fiction. . . )
uh - yeah, the quiet-pastoral-life-charm would wear off after the first winter, and 2/3 of the population is dead from exposure, starvation, disease, and predators. (wolves, lions, sabretooth tigers, T-Rexes, etc.)
The rest would be like: WTF were we thinking? This sucks!
When oil goes up to 80-100 dollars per barrel, the production costs of the Algae will go up as well. How do the plant-workers drive to work in the morning? How do they heat their homes? What happens when oil hits $80/bbl, and the economy crashes (as it is doing now, after last years oil price spike) - and the price of oil goes back down as a result?
Energy is the input to our economy. Right now, the bulk of that is oil. Instability in oil prices might make alternatives look more attractive, short-term. But it requires a very long-term increase, and large-scale structural changes in how our economy operates to make energy alternatives attractive. (unfortunately).
A Diebold ATM in my hometown was found crashed; apparently running XP. With an open DOS window and a flashing prompt. There was some dotNet class dump gobbledygook scrolled up in that window. I could enter numbers with the keypad, and the enter button would return "bad command or file name".
I found it that way in the morning, and when I drove past later that afternoon, it was still sitting in that state. Scary.
I think most people are lacking the historical perspective to understand the broader symbolic meaning of this buyout.
SUN represents everything about computer evolution, the computer is the network, Silicon Valley enterpreneurship, crusty - bearded old Unix guys, hacker culture, West Coast Innovation, etc.
IBM represents New York, East Coast, old-school business mentality, mainframes, closed-source, proprietary, white-shirt-and-tie cubicle-dwelling programmers.
It's the end of the Net as we know it.
If you look at the "1984" Apple Commercial: Big Brother just won.
That is a pretty expensive way to buy US Jewish activist votes
Expensive for whom? Not the beneficiaries of the votes. It's only the general taxpayer who pays for this. Who gives a crap about that dumb schmuck. If the general taxpayer gave a crap, he'd be out in the streets marching and rioting. Instead, he's in his backyard, barbecuing pork ribs.
As individuals we need certain things to provide for our survival and comfort. If we work together we produce more of these things.
We can.
But this assumes that nobody is going to act in this system in bad-faith.
The thing that is needed in THAT case, is a collective, impartial, state-actor, that provides justice and equal protection under the law.
And that assumes that the state-actor is acting in good-faith as well. (not always a given, either).
These two extremes: Lassez-faire, and Communism, both fall apart when you assume that people are going to act in good faith to either their own self-interest, or the interest of the community. (remember Greenspan remarking how surprised he was that the banks didn't act in their own self-interest prior to the economic crisis). Lassez-faire also presumes to leverage this self-interest as some magical emergent behavior (also known as: "The Invisible Hand").
Most psychologists will tell you that this amounts to "magical thinking" - which is little more than a neurotic psychological defense mechanism.
The only system that has ever worked, is a system that allows individuals to act to their own self interest - yet balanced with an occasional nudge (sometimes at the point of a sword or gun, unfortunately) to act in the interest of the community. Actually - that's not entirely true, because NO system has ever worked, long term. At least on a small (national/empiric) scale. (by long term, let's say, Roman-Empire-long).
Even today: there is an implied threat that ALL nations currently suffer, and that is the nuclear arsenals of the US and Russia. (and others). If either of these "players" step really far out of line in the world-community - guess what? Who's going to take either of them to task? International Law? That's the Community of Nations, and how it works today.
The instruments which can perform this stuff live have not yet been invented. So nice that it can be performed at all with today's technology. But someday, someone's going to invent an "instrument" which can perform stuff like this LIVE.
An example of a rudimentary instrument for a very primative form of live audio collage performance, is those two-turntable rigs currently in-use by "DJ's". (not my taste, but still a valid point nonetheless).
Topsoil still should be replaced and drinking water checked for possible contamination, but the long term effects of an area that is properly cleaned up are usually fairly minimal.
How do you replace hundreds of square miles of topsoil?
But the more important question is: How does a country that has been targeted in a nuclear attack, economy disrupted by the hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths, pay to replace hundreds of square miles of topsoil, or "clean up" an area?
It's never been done before. And in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there were elevated levels of thyroid cancer (and other radiation-related maladies) for decades afterwards. And those explosions were orders of magnitude SMALLER than the typical weapon today.
The 2001 Prius batteries are still going strong. Except in the cases where users went against the recommendation in the manual, and ran the batteries dry - the batteries have pretty much vastly outperformed their original estimates.
(source: neighbor who has a 2001, and is kind of a nut, brings over articles and stuff to show me.)
. . the other nice benefit of a Prius, is because of the regenerative braking, my neighbor has never had to replace brake pads.
(of course, the pads on my 2003 jetta are still going strong, because I have the 5-speed manual)
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know - after WWII, the world also fucked Germany in the ass. DP-style if you count West Germany/East Germany.
The difference is - we kept doing it for some 40-odd years afterwards. Just to be sure Germany knew they were our bitches.
What great gift did we give to Germany when we were through?
We let them reunify: West German businesses got a very nice source of EXTREMELY cheap skilled labor; in the form of starving East Germans.
Then Daimler bought Chrysler.
Whose yer daddy now?
Then Daimler SOLD Chrysler.
Yeah, that was some sweet action.
Too bad NK folks can't get on the WWW and look up heavens-above, to see the satellite pass schedule. . .
This is what's known as a "poison pill" :)
Overlap is exactly why 90% of these mega mergers happen: Removal of Competition From the Marketplace.
Why the compliant lapdogs at the FTC allow such mergers to happen (over and over and over again) - remains a mystery. . . .
. . . . oh wait, no it doesn't. They're on the take!
FWIW: Iran is not psychotic. Neither Ahmadinijad nor Bush. Their reason for bellicose language is to get the rabble exited, and to energize their wingnut base. Also the reason Bush tortured: not to actually gather good intel or protect us - but to get voters exited about voting for Bush. (Bush=torture=safety).
Iran is not likely to "wipe Israel off the map".
But Ahmadinijad is very likely to get votes from angry (scared) anti-semites.
It worked for the Romans, it worked for Hitler, and it worked for Bush, for a while.
What Kim Jong "License to" Il has going for him, is he controls the message: the press. That's what worked for the Romans, what worked for Hitler, and what works for Ahmadinijad. And this is why Americans got sick of Bush after 5 years. Even with Fox News - we still had a semi-free press.
Possibly you mean, "why would the leader of a nation want..." or "why would the party leadership want..." or "why would the man on the street want...",
Okay - why would {insert_stakeholder_here} want their country to be isolated?
stakeholder.ManInTheStreet = "I want communism because before we were communists, we were poor and starving. . . "
stakeholder.PartyLeadership = "Man, this gig is good. We keep the people happy with their communism mythos, and we get to live the posh-life as party-leaders!"
stakeholder.Dictator = "Well, I'm stuck as the figurehead of this thing, and I know the party leaders will kill me if I step out of line, but on the other hand, it's GOOD to be the King!"
Man in the street was starving BEFORE communism. Now they're starving, and they have guns pointed at their heads.
As long as they stay ignorant and isolated, they won't have the chance to live the posh-posh life that the East Germans got to live in the first 10 years after the Berlin Wall fell, with no western/modern education, no business skills, in fact, no skills at all. They've been SHELTERED from the necessity of competition by the artificial convenience of National Sovreignity. And this sheltering has bred massive incompetence; as it always does - whether you're talking about a real slave, or a deluded wannabe communist, or a deluded wannabe capitalist who does not understand that their Commons (public roads, public schools, social safety net, etc.) also shelters them.
What's the difference?
In communism, man (party) exploits man (people). In capitalism, it's the other way around.
The DPRK is heavily dependent on aid from the West,
The Mafia actually calls it "insurance".
having a nuclear stick allows it to demand aid on far more favourable terms and remain relevant on the world stage.
Yes - the ability to commit Nuclear Extortion makes one very relevant.
Oh yeah? Well, the country I live in, Atlantis, has 100% of it's land below sea level by as much as 3000 feet already. We can handle a few additional feet of water.
BRING IT BITCHES!
More water spurs great engineering, and that's exactly why we had nuclear powered flying machines and death rays, 2000 years before your moronic asses even figured out bronze.
Yeah, but what he and Lex Luthor stupidly failed to realize, is that whether you set-off nukes to trigger the San Andreas fault to drop California into the ocean, or if you drive your SUV to crank up global warming; one undeniable fact remains:
You have just drowned all the people who even WANTED to live near the ocean. Your property values will NOT go up!!!
If party A (Advertiser) makes a deal with party B (Business running a website), that in exchange for money, party C will "behave in a certain way" (ie. view ads, and buy products) - without any agreement or consultation with party C (Customer); then that makes party A an idiot, and party B a lying scammer.
This is independent of whether party C actually views ads or buys products; or whether party C avoids those ads.
Now - there is an implied agreement by party C to party B on whether party C can view content while ads are filtered - but that's party B's problem. Because party C still has not agreed to squat.
That makes party B ALSO an idiot, as well as a liar and scammer.
Oh, I can't tell you how many times that's gotten me laid.
Anything with skulls is more manly.
Never mind the new Aircraft Carrier, "George H W Bush". (known for fathering a smaller ship, a destroyer, which tended to list and steer to the right, often steaming in circles, and occasionally randomly firing torpedoes at other vessels, whether they posed a real threat or not. Eventually its maneuvers drove an entire fleet of ships aground. . . )
IIRC, on more than one occasion, such a smoking was implied. Kaylee did spend a lot of time hanging out in Inara's room.
Just sayin'
Long voyages. Romantic complications with the male characters. Bored hot chicks. Hypothetical futuristic culture unburdened with the moralistic medieval psychosexual baggage we, in the present, are. (hmmm. I think I just figured out WHY I'm such a big fan of Science Fiction. . . )
uh - yeah, the quiet-pastoral-life-charm would wear off after the first winter, and 2/3 of the population is dead from exposure, starvation, disease, and predators. (wolves, lions, sabretooth tigers, T-Rexes, etc.)
The rest would be like: WTF were we thinking? This sucks!
When oil goes up to 80-100 dollars per barrel, the production costs of the Algae will go up as well. How do the plant-workers drive to work in the morning? How do they heat their homes? What happens when oil hits $80/bbl, and the economy crashes (as it is doing now, after last years oil price spike) - and the price of oil goes back down as a result?
Energy is the input to our economy. Right now, the bulk of that is oil. Instability in oil prices might make alternatives look more attractive, short-term. But it requires a very long-term increase, and large-scale structural changes in how our economy operates to make energy alternatives attractive. (unfortunately).
Unfortunately, in most cases, physical demonstrations == budget.
A lot of public schools are slashing their science class budgets.
Of course, money for sports often seems to always be plentiful . . .
A Diebold ATM in my hometown was found crashed; apparently running XP. With an open DOS window and a flashing prompt. There was some dotNet class dump gobbledygook scrolled up in that window. I could enter numbers with the keypad, and the enter button would return "bad command or file name".
I found it that way in the morning, and when I drove past later that afternoon, it was still sitting in that state. Scary.
Stanford University Network.
I think most people are lacking the historical perspective to understand the broader symbolic meaning of this buyout.
SUN represents everything about computer evolution, the computer is the network, Silicon Valley enterpreneurship, crusty - bearded old Unix guys, hacker culture, West Coast Innovation, etc.
IBM represents New York, East Coast, old-school business mentality, mainframes, closed-source, proprietary, white-shirt-and-tie cubicle-dwelling programmers.
It's the end of the Net as we know it.
If you look at the "1984" Apple Commercial: Big Brother just won.
That is a pretty expensive way to buy US Jewish activist votes
Expensive for whom? Not the beneficiaries of the votes. It's only the general taxpayer who pays for this. Who gives a crap about that dumb schmuck. If the general taxpayer gave a crap, he'd be out in the streets marching and rioting. Instead, he's in his backyard, barbecuing pork ribs.
As individuals we need certain things to provide for our survival and comfort. If we work together we produce more of these things.
We can.
But this assumes that nobody is going to act in this system in bad-faith.
The thing that is needed in THAT case, is a collective, impartial, state-actor, that provides justice and equal protection under the law.
And that assumes that the state-actor is acting in good-faith as well. (not always a given, either).
These two extremes: Lassez-faire, and Communism, both fall apart when you assume that people are going to act in good faith to either their own self-interest, or the interest of the community. (remember Greenspan remarking how surprised he was that the banks didn't act in their own self-interest prior to the economic crisis). Lassez-faire also presumes to leverage this self-interest as some magical emergent behavior (also known as: "The Invisible Hand").
Most psychologists will tell you that this amounts to "magical thinking" - which is little more than a neurotic psychological defense mechanism.
The only system that has ever worked, is a system that allows individuals to act to their own self interest - yet balanced with an occasional nudge (sometimes at the point of a sword or gun, unfortunately) to act in the interest of the community. Actually - that's not entirely true, because NO system has ever worked, long term. At least on a small (national/empiric) scale. (by long term, let's say, Roman-Empire-long).
Even today: there is an implied threat that ALL nations currently suffer, and that is the nuclear arsenals of the US and Russia. (and others). If either of these "players" step really far out of line in the world-community - guess what? Who's going to take either of them to task? International Law? That's the Community of Nations, and how it works today.
So - when do I get a refund for the net effects on prices in the marketplace from their price-fixing?
The instruments which can perform this stuff live have not yet been invented. So nice that it can be performed at all with today's technology. But someday, someone's going to invent an "instrument" which can perform stuff like this LIVE.
An example of a rudimentary instrument for a very primative form of live audio collage performance, is those two-turntable rigs currently in-use by "DJ's". (not my taste, but still a valid point nonetheless).
Topsoil still should be replaced and drinking water checked for possible contamination, but the long term effects of an area that is properly cleaned up are usually fairly minimal.
How do you replace hundreds of square miles of topsoil?
But the more important question is: How does a country that has been targeted in a nuclear attack, economy disrupted by the hundreds of thousands or millions of deaths, pay to replace hundreds of square miles of topsoil, or "clean up" an area?
It's never been done before. And in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there were elevated levels of thyroid cancer (and other radiation-related maladies) for decades afterwards. And those explosions were orders of magnitude SMALLER than the typical weapon today.
The 2001 Prius batteries are still going strong. Except in the cases where users went against the recommendation in the manual, and ran the batteries dry - the batteries have pretty much vastly outperformed their original estimates.
(source: neighbor who has a 2001, and is kind of a nut, brings over articles and stuff to show me.)
. . the other nice benefit of a Prius, is because of the regenerative braking, my neighbor has never had to replace brake pads.
(of course, the pads on my 2003 jetta are still going strong, because I have the 5-speed manual)