It wasn't Parlimentary Democracy that caused the collapse of the Wiemar Republic.
Democratic parties were in the majority in the Weimar Republic until 1933. They could have formed a majority democratic government and excluded the Nazis from power. But because they failed to do so, Hitler was eventually appointed Chancellor with a minority government. That's what allowed him to seize power.
The parliamentary system of the Weimar Republic, and attitudes like yours--that every splinter group should have a voice in parliament--were therefore what permitted the Nazis to seize power in Germany. If Germany had had a better parliamentary system, the horrors of WWII wouldn't have happened.
You may want to refer to the soul crushing economic conditions.
If a democracy can't survive bad economic times, it is not a stable democracy. US democracy certainly survived a lot of "soul crushing" problems as well, including a civil war and the Great Depression.
Measured in representation of the views of their constituents.
Well, like many Europeans as well, you are wrong to think that that's a good measure of how well a democracy functions. Not everybody can get their way or have their voice heard at the national political level, and history suggests that keeping fringe groups away from the national political level is a good thing.
2564 miles at 270 mph (China's maglev speed) = 9.5 hours assuming no stops in between.
That's about as long as an airline trip realistically takes: 6h flight, 1-2h check-in, 1/2-1h baggage retrieval, 1h drive to and from the airport at either end. But you have less hassle, less interruption, fewer delays, and much more legroom on the train. In fact, on the train, you can get a full 8h of sleep and arrive rested.
When time is the critical factor, air will win
It's a toss-up for 6h flights. For shorter flights, rail clearly wins. The continental US could comfortably replace its airlines with HSR and reduce travel times on average.
You think those debates or political schemes are anything new? US politics has worked that way for two centuries, and Europeans have always said how much better things were in Europe. But millions who have voted with their feet and emigrated to the US, and the US managed to hold together during all that time, while Europe murdered millions of Jews, fought two world wars, and had military dictatorships and internal strife until the late 20th century.
And today, Europe isn't doing well at all: high and rising social expenditures and commitments, an aging population, continued distrust between European member nations and lack of a European identity, and an inability to defend itself and its interests.
Don't worry about the US, the US will muddle through. You should rather be worried about wherever it is you are coming from.
China is one of the oldest civilizations on Earth, and yet it's just now climbing out of a third world status that it's been in for centuries.
China likes to present and view itself that way but that's a fiction, starting with the notion that something like a continuous Chinese civilization has even existed over the past two millennia. Generally, the societies and civilizations that have existed in the area of modern China have been significantly behind Europe and far behind the Middle Eastern civilizations on major developments (bronze, iron, writing, etc.), and in many ways even behind the Maya. For example, the Middle East had writing 2000 years before China had even a rudimentary writing system. The oldest writing systems still in use today are Greek and Latin, predating (in the case of Greek) the development of the current Chinese writing system by more than 1500 years. Entire civilizations came, flourished for millennia, and perished in the Mediterranean before China even appeared on the scene.
It's probably best to view Chinese civilization as analogous to Northern Europe, in both age and history, really taking off only during the first millennium. And it remains to be seen how much of Chinese civilization developed independently and how much was derivative from the Middle East.
You don't need HSR for moving freight around. HSR only makes sense for transporting people.
And while few people will want to go the entire distance at once, I expect it will greatly enhance commerce and communications for cities within a few thousand kilometers.
china makes shit that everyone else in the world buys by the ton, likely because the rest of the world is incapable of making the same shit themselves for similar cost, and china would like to see it shipped to end customers faster.
The rest of the world is "incapable of making the same shit for similar cost" because the rest of the world has gotten accustomed to cushy social and medical services, as well to a fairly clean environment. So, instead of living with less security and destroying their own environments, Europe and America have the work done in China. I have no idea whether this is good or bad in the long run (and neither does anybody else). But it's happening because both Western and Chinese politicians want it to happen. The US and Europe could stop this in an instant if they wanted to, no matter what China says or wants.
Leaks are, by their nature, anonymous. Whether you believe them or not should not depend on how you got the information but whether it makes sense in context and is corroborated by known facts.
Really? Measured how? The number of political scandals? How vociferous the debates are? What do you think is gained by having extremists that represent only a small percentage of the population in decision making bodies?
Maybe both you and Israel would do well to remember that it was that kind of political system that caused German democracy to collapse in the 1930's.
I don't agree with Israel's politics, but Judaism is actually a very well reasoned religion
All the major religions love to construct pseudo-logical arguments to support their irrational dogmas and rules. But as we know from mathematics, if you start of with a set of inconsistent premises, you can arrive at any conclusion you like through the application of logic and reasoning.
As I understand it, man is created in God's image, therefore is as close to perfection as you can already make it
Man "is" not created at all. Man evolved from primates in response to evolutionary pressures. And he keeps evolving and changing as the environment is changing. It's not that man is "imperfect", it's that the notion of "perfection" in regards to a biological organism makes no sense.
Well, in different words, you agree then: Apple didn't pioneer easy-to-use touch screen devices, Palm did, they just dropped the ball at some point. Nor, for that matter, did Apple pioneer easy-to-use smart phones or the appstore, Danger did that.
for one, the speed of light is a pretty insurmountable barrier to practical remote operation. you just cant operate things in real time when the signal takes 5 minutes to get there.
You don't need to operate things "in real time". The planets aren't going anywhere and robotics is getting to the point where all you need to send is high level commands. Round trip times of a few hours are perfectly fine.
so it ends up that theres no substitute for a actual person there.
The speed of light isn't going to be an obstacle for exploration out to Saturn (90 light minutes). That should keep us busy for decades if not centuries. If, at some point, it becomes a problem, we can put people into orbit and they can operate by telepresence; there is no need in the foreseeable future to land astronauts on planets.
The iPhone's paradigm has pretty quickly become the standard touch screen phone paradigm
You're trying to give Apple credit for things they simply don't deserve credit or.
"Just turn it on and it works" was pioneered by the Danger Hiptop, the same team that built the Android phones, long before the iPhone. It was even easier to use than the iPhone. And there have been plenty of other easy-to-use phones.
Palm devices worked very much like the iPhone: touch screen, a launcher with a bunch of icons, pretty easy to use. Sync required some fiddling, but the original iPhone also required iTunes for activation.
And you keep mixing up "some things just work on iPhone" with "everything just works on iPhone". Some things "just work" on almost every platform. But on all platforms, including iPhone, there are plenty of things that are damned complicated and hard to figure out.
No matter how good Windows Mobile 7 itself may be, the fundamental problem with Windows Mobile 7 is that it is still tied to other Microsoft products, and Microsoft's other products often suck. You just know that if you're going to try to use it Google Apps, Mac, Linux, Firefox, or iTunes, there's going to be tons of problems.
They're probably going to use it to try to push Windows Live, Bing, Bing Maps, Xbox, Zune, Office, and all the other crap they are selling. And while you may use and like some of that, I don't know anybody who really likes everything Microsoft makes.
And Microsoft can't escape that trap. The Mobile division would be fired if they tried to give people what they actually wanted: Gmail, iTunes, Google Maps, PS3, etc.
And the things they have optimized for Windows Mobile 7 are not necessarily the ones I care about. "Bright superflat squares that fill the screen"? A good mobile phone interface is not primarily about the best graphic design, it's about a lot of other things.
I don't think it's possible for Microsoft to produce a good mobile phone given the way the company operates.
Of course, in many ways, Apple is just as proprietary and annoying. But unlike Microsoft, Apple is happy with a few percent market share. And Apple doesn't have as much crap to tie into, so despite Jobs's control-freakishness, the iPhone still ends up being more open.
Yes, Apple pays a bit more attention to user-friendliness than Microsoft. Mostly, though, they are paying a lot of attention to a good unboxing experience and fun. Apple also focuses their efforts on specific markets and demographics while Microsoft wants it all.
But people should stop saying that "it just works". Apple products often don't "just work"; just go look at the Apple support forums and do some web searches. Nobody has managed to make computer systems or software of any significant complexity that "just works".
What's been catastrophic for space exploration is that we have sunk trillions into the manned space program for little return. What's been catastrophic is that romantic visions of test pilots and the moon landing completely skewed everybody's understanding of what space exploration is or what it can achieve.
The military is already figuring it out and increasingly switching from manned planes to drones. In a generation or two, when "military pilot" becomes synonymous with someone wielding a joystick, hopefully, we can also do the sensible thing and focus all our efforts on remotely operated space exploration.
Surely the Linux world learned its lesson from the desktop wars, hasn't it?
Yes, the Linux world has: nothing other than Apple will ever satisfy the Apple fanboys. They'll badmouth Linux and complain about it no matter what. And Microsoft will say anything because they know Linux is a big threat to them.
As for the rest of the world, it seems to be standardizing on a couple of Linux distributions and Linux is steadily growing in market share. It innovates (even if Microsoft and Apple copy it and then claim they did it all themselves). And it's everywhere around you even if you don't notice it.
The Smalltalk browser is pretty nice (and Smalltalk is a great programming language). Nevertheless, Smalltalk lacks a facility for linear presentation of code, something like literate programming. That kind of facility really is needed.
That's what I get for quick typing... Translation: AFAIK, unless Apple has been sued first (a la Nokia), HTC is the first company they have sued for patent infringement.
And that's relevant... how? A company the size of Apple usually doesn't need to sue, they merely need to threaten to sue, in order to get their way. It's the fact that Apple procured those patents in the first place that is wrong.
But they did pretty much the same thing with Microsoft in the 1980's. Back then, they tried to construct a novel legal theory of "look and feel" instead of using patents, which was even more evil. These days, patents are all they have left.
Furthermore, Nokia's complaints against Apple are legitimate IMO, while Apple's against Nokia and HTC are not. Apple came into the phone market late, copied everybody's technologies, put it in a shiny box, and now claims they "reinvented the phone".
The thing Apple's HTC lawsuit really tells you is how little innovation Apple actually has: they basically had to scrape the bottom of the patent barrel in order to sue HTC. Furthermore, apparently their own marketing lies have gone to their head if they actually believe that they can get away with this. Let's see what happens when Google, Nokia, and some other companies flex their patent muscle against Apple. Unlike Apple, those companies have real patents.
Sorry, the sentence was ambiguous. People were considering the applications; they were doing more than that, they were designing an entire set of standards to address those applications.
They weren't considering patenting them because that simply doesn't make sense: if you already have an industry consortium creating public standards to solve problem X, then "solving problem X" cannot reasonably be subject to patent protection.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't Parlimentary Democracy that caused the collapse of the Wiemar Republic.
Democratic parties were in the majority in the Weimar Republic until 1933. They could have formed a majority democratic government and excluded the Nazis from power. But because they failed to do so, Hitler was eventually appointed Chancellor with a minority government. That's what allowed him to seize power.
The parliamentary system of the Weimar Republic, and attitudes like yours--that every splinter group should have a voice in parliament--were therefore what permitted the Nazis to seize power in Germany. If Germany had had a better parliamentary system, the horrors of WWII wouldn't have happened.
You may want to refer to the soul crushing economic conditions.
If a democracy can't survive bad economic times, it is not a stable democracy. US democracy certainly survived a lot of "soul crushing" problems as well, including a civil war and the Great Depression.
Measured in representation of the views of their constituents.
Well, like many Europeans as well, you are wrong to think that that's a good measure of how well a democracy functions. Not everybody can get their way or have their voice heard at the national political level, and history suggests that keeping fringe groups away from the national political level is a good thing.
2564 miles at 270 mph (China's maglev speed) = 9.5 hours assuming no stops in between.
That's about as long as an airline trip realistically takes: 6h flight, 1-2h check-in, 1/2-1h baggage retrieval, 1h drive to and from the airport at either end. But you have less hassle, less interruption, fewer delays, and much more legroom on the train. In fact, on the train, you can get a full 8h of sleep and arrive rested.
When time is the critical factor, air will win
It's a toss-up for 6h flights. For shorter flights, rail clearly wins. The continental US could comfortably replace its airlines with HSR and reduce travel times on average.
You think those debates or political schemes are anything new? US politics has worked that way for two centuries, and Europeans have always said how much better things were in Europe. But millions who have voted with their feet and emigrated to the US, and the US managed to hold together during all that time, while Europe murdered millions of Jews, fought two world wars, and had military dictatorships and internal strife until the late 20th century.
And today, Europe isn't doing well at all: high and rising social expenditures and commitments, an aging population, continued distrust between European member nations and lack of a European identity, and an inability to defend itself and its interests.
Don't worry about the US, the US will muddle through. You should rather be worried about wherever it is you are coming from.
Wikipedia is wrong; the term "third world" has a different meaning now from the one that Sauvy originally intended:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/third+world
China is one of the oldest civilizations on Earth, and yet it's just now climbing out of a third world status that it's been in for centuries.
China likes to present and view itself that way but that's a fiction, starting with the notion that something like a continuous Chinese civilization has even existed over the past two millennia. Generally, the societies and civilizations that have existed in the area of modern China have been significantly behind Europe and far behind the Middle Eastern civilizations on major developments (bronze, iron, writing, etc.), and in many ways even behind the Maya. For example, the Middle East had writing 2000 years before China had even a rudimentary writing system. The oldest writing systems still in use today are Greek and Latin, predating (in the case of Greek) the development of the current Chinese writing system by more than 1500 years. Entire civilizations came, flourished for millennia, and perished in the Mediterranean before China even appeared on the scene.
It's probably best to view Chinese civilization as analogous to Northern Europe, in both age and history, really taking off only during the first millennium. And it remains to be seen how much of Chinese civilization developed independently and how much was derivative from the Middle East.
You don't need HSR for moving freight around. HSR only makes sense for transporting people.
And while few people will want to go the entire distance at once, I expect it will greatly enhance commerce and communications for cities within a few thousand kilometers.
Consider it a giant straw through which China will suck up Asia and Europe's raw materials.
Europe doesn't have any raw materials anymore; they were used up during the first wave of industrialization.
china makes shit that everyone else in the world buys by the ton, likely because the rest of the world is incapable of making the same shit themselves for similar cost, and china would like to see it shipped to end customers faster.
The rest of the world is "incapable of making the same shit for similar cost" because the rest of the world has gotten accustomed to cushy social and medical services, as well to a fairly clean environment. So, instead of living with less security and destroying their own environments, Europe and America have the work done in China. I have no idea whether this is good or bad in the long run (and neither does anybody else). But it's happening because both Western and Chinese politicians want it to happen. The US and Europe could stop this in an instant if they wanted to, no matter what China says or wants.
Leaks are, by their nature, anonymous. Whether you believe them or not should not depend on how you got the information but whether it makes sense in context and is corroborated by known facts.
Microsoft is probably hoping that the large number of browsers will confuse people so much that they'll stick with IE.
Their system really works much better than ours.
Really? Measured how? The number of political scandals? How vociferous the debates are? What do you think is gained by having extremists that represent only a small percentage of the population in decision making bodies?
Maybe both you and Israel would do well to remember that it was that kind of political system that caused German democracy to collapse in the 1930's.
I don't agree with Israel's politics, but Judaism is actually a very well reasoned religion
All the major religions love to construct pseudo-logical arguments to support their irrational dogmas and rules. But as we know from mathematics, if you start of with a set of inconsistent premises, you can arrive at any conclusion you like through the application of logic and reasoning.
As I understand it, man is created in God's image, therefore is as close to perfection as you can already make it
Man "is" not created at all. Man evolved from primates in response to evolutionary pressures. And he keeps evolving and changing as the environment is changing. It's not that man is "imperfect", it's that the notion of "perfection" in regards to a biological organism makes no sense.
Well, in different words, you agree then: Apple didn't pioneer easy-to-use touch screen devices, Palm did, they just dropped the ball at some point. Nor, for that matter, did Apple pioneer easy-to-use smart phones or the appstore, Danger did that.
for one, the speed of light is a pretty insurmountable barrier to practical remote operation. you just cant operate things in real time when the signal takes 5 minutes to get there.
You don't need to operate things "in real time". The planets aren't going anywhere and robotics is getting to the point where all you need to send is high level commands. Round trip times of a few hours are perfectly fine.
so it ends up that theres no substitute for a actual person there.
The speed of light isn't going to be an obstacle for exploration out to Saturn (90 light minutes). That should keep us busy for decades if not centuries. If, at some point, it becomes a problem, we can put people into orbit and they can operate by telepresence; there is no need in the foreseeable future to land astronauts on planets.
The iPhone's paradigm has pretty quickly become the standard touch screen phone paradigm
You're trying to give Apple credit for things they simply don't deserve credit or.
"Just turn it on and it works" was pioneered by the Danger Hiptop, the same team that built the Android phones, long before the iPhone. It was even easier to use than the iPhone. And there have been plenty of other easy-to-use phones.
Palm devices worked very much like the iPhone: touch screen, a launcher with a bunch of icons, pretty easy to use. Sync required some fiddling, but the original iPhone also required iTunes for activation.
And you keep mixing up "some things just work on iPhone" with "everything just works on iPhone". Some things "just work" on almost every platform. But on all platforms, including iPhone, there are plenty of things that are damned complicated and hard to figure out.
So do MS think they can copy it or are they just trying to extract all the ip they can
Since Apple copied most of the iPhone's technologies from others, I really don't see what's wrong with Microsoft copying the iPhone.
No matter how good Windows Mobile 7 itself may be, the fundamental problem with Windows Mobile 7 is that it is still tied to other Microsoft products, and Microsoft's other products often suck. You just know that if you're going to try to use it Google Apps, Mac, Linux, Firefox, or iTunes, there's going to be tons of problems.
They're probably going to use it to try to push Windows Live, Bing, Bing Maps, Xbox, Zune, Office, and all the other crap they are selling. And while you may use and like some of that, I don't know anybody who really likes everything Microsoft makes.
And Microsoft can't escape that trap. The Mobile division would be fired if they tried to give people what they actually wanted: Gmail, iTunes, Google Maps, PS3, etc.
And the things they have optimized for Windows Mobile 7 are not necessarily the ones I care about. "Bright superflat squares that fill the screen"? A good mobile phone interface is not primarily about the best graphic design, it's about a lot of other things.
I don't think it's possible for Microsoft to produce a good mobile phone given the way the company operates.
Of course, in many ways, Apple is just as proprietary and annoying. But unlike Microsoft, Apple is happy with a few percent market share. And Apple doesn't have as much crap to tie into, so despite Jobs's control-freakishness, the iPhone still ends up being more open.
Yes, Apple pays a bit more attention to user-friendliness than Microsoft. Mostly, though, they are paying a lot of attention to a good unboxing experience and fun. Apple also focuses their efforts on specific markets and demographics while Microsoft wants it all.
But people should stop saying that "it just works". Apple products often don't "just work"; just go look at the Apple support forums and do some web searches. Nobody has managed to make computer systems or software of any significant complexity that "just works".
What's been catastrophic for space exploration is that we have sunk trillions into the manned space program for little return. What's been catastrophic is that romantic visions of test pilots and the moon landing completely skewed everybody's understanding of what space exploration is or what it can achieve.
The military is already figuring it out and increasingly switching from manned planes to drones. In a generation or two, when "military pilot" becomes synonymous with someone wielding a joystick, hopefully, we can also do the sensible thing and focus all our efforts on remotely operated space exploration.
Surely the Linux world learned its lesson from the desktop wars, hasn't it?
Yes, the Linux world has: nothing other than Apple will ever satisfy the Apple fanboys. They'll badmouth Linux and complain about it no matter what. And Microsoft will say anything because they know Linux is a big threat to them.
As for the rest of the world, it seems to be standardizing on a couple of Linux distributions and Linux is steadily growing in market share. It innovates (even if Microsoft and Apple copy it and then claim they did it all themselves). And it's everywhere around you even if you don't notice it.
See the Smalltalk browser: http://onsmalltalk.com/on-the-smalltalk-browser
The Smalltalk browser is pretty nice (and Smalltalk is a great programming language). Nevertheless, Smalltalk lacks a facility for linear presentation of code, something like literate programming. That kind of facility really is needed.
You don't know what you're talking about. Go read up on NFC communications and how it's integrated with phones and SIM cards.
That's called "cognitive dissonance"; look it up sometime.
That's what I get for quick typing... Translation: AFAIK, unless Apple has been sued first (a la Nokia), HTC is the first company they have sued for patent infringement.
And that's relevant... how? A company the size of Apple usually doesn't need to sue, they merely need to threaten to sue, in order to get their way. It's the fact that Apple procured those patents in the first place that is wrong.
But they did pretty much the same thing with Microsoft in the 1980's. Back then, they tried to construct a novel legal theory of "look and feel" instead of using patents, which was even more evil. These days, patents are all they have left.
Furthermore, Nokia's complaints against Apple are legitimate IMO, while Apple's against Nokia and HTC are not. Apple came into the phone market late, copied everybody's technologies, put it in a shiny box, and now claims they "reinvented the phone".
The thing Apple's HTC lawsuit really tells you is how little innovation Apple actually has: they basically had to scrape the bottom of the patent barrel in order to sue HTC. Furthermore, apparently their own marketing lies have gone to their head if they actually believe that they can get away with this. Let's see what happens when Google, Nokia, and some other companies flex their patent muscle against Apple. Unlike Apple, those companies have real patents.
Sorry, the sentence was ambiguous. People were considering the applications; they were doing more than that, they were designing an entire set of standards to address those applications.
They weren't considering patenting them because that simply doesn't make sense: if you already have an industry consortium creating public standards to solve problem X, then "solving problem X" cannot reasonably be subject to patent protection.