Er, the current "Revolutionary" government of Iran kidnapped dozens of Americans for over a year to kick off the relationship. It's spent the past quarter-century funding terrorists who attack America and our allies. It's currently going nuclear in exactly the way that Iraq seemed (to some insane criminals) to be doing that precipitated a war. It's helped lead the manipulation of the oil markets that are helping bankrupt America.
Which part of "Death to America" and "America: the Great Satan" didn't you understand?
So we'll just wind up depending on Iran and Russia to produce our uranium, and they'll control the energy market for the next century like they did with oil. All our old bombs are made of oil (plastic and explosives), so the transition to the new bombs in the hands of our historically worst enemies should be unsurprising.
Canada, Mexico and Germany aren't threats to America's economic and national security the way China is. They don't control our economy, nor are they positioned to. China is undeniably not only a rival, but a declared enemy, especially militarily. Do the words "Taiwan" and "Greater China" ring a bell?
Thank you for strutting your geopolitical denial in perfect terms displaying your cheap-labor global fascism.
I agree with everything you said. What makes it all make sense is that the theory of global mutual ownership to raise the costs of bombing foreign countries is mainly the way to disrupt the system that Americans have built to protect ourselves from corporate abuse of most of us, and the rest of the world that follows our lead. In other words, it's a trick. Not because of the theory itself, but because of how it's executed. By now, almost 2 decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Most Favored Nation trading status for China, America is supposed to be selling vast amounts of stuff to most of the Chinese market. We're not. We're supposed to be able to threaten the Chinese market share in the US to extract concessions from China, specifically in human rights upgrading their labor and environmental requirements to improve people's lives and reduce their price-competitive edge. We're not. In other words, we've totally blown the "mutual ownership security" that convinced us to both invest in China and become dependent on their debt purchases.
These problems aren't going to get fixed. We're giving away the ability to fix them every day. Like a drunk who will go sober tomorrow, after one last drink, we're not only emptying out wallets, but we're losing our judgement while sinking the hook deeper into our guts. The only hope is some fast footwork like we pulled on Japan in the late 1980s, when we leveraged our own crash into taking them down harder, because they were so dependent on our market throughput. But the new generation of American financiers isn't nearly as skilled as the 1980s mechanics, and the Chinese aren't the Japanese. Our falls will more likely ratchet us deeper into their debt, while they use their leverage in supplying both our debt and our retail markets into stealing away our strategic supplies, like oil and immigrant brains.
That's why we should have looked at these problems a long time ago. And why some of us did, like me, and knew it would go this way. Including many others, namely the National Association of Manufacturers and lots of international banks, and placed their bets against us.
That WWPC looks about right. Though I'd like one with a snap-off (Bluetooth) controller I'd hold in my right hand. And it would be great if it rolled around to underside my forearm, rotating the display bitmap into portrait mode. The display should cover the whole face, and maybe flip open to double in size.
It looks like their current version expanded the display. If it's not vaporware, costs under $1500, and is fast enough to run a SIP softphone, I might get one. Thanks for the pointer.
You're right about the multiplicity of the threat of foreign control of manufacturing for US retail. China is emblematic, because it is by far the most monolithic of those countries you mentioned. Indonesia and the Phillipines are not nearly as coordinated, nor was Japan under its famed MITI. India is probably even less coordinated, but, as you point out, is bigger and more industrialized (they invented the trick, after all).
I'm not against China specifically for any "Chinese" reason. I just don't want foreigners controlling my economy. Especially since my government sold my people on allowing so much manufacturing to flee to countries like China on the premise that we'd have more control of their politics, which we wanted to reform (human rights, anticompetitive behavior). I knew they were lying then, so I watch it. China is the most specific case, and the most direct threat (in every endeavor). But I'm against the US squandering our power in every sphere, especially economic and moral. Calling it "China" is an easy way to communicate the threat in public, because many people are already wary of their threat. Anyone wary of those other foreign competitors increasing control over us is also wary of China.
The foreign investment in China that's abandoned investment in the US, especially by US investors, is one main reason China is such a threat, while our domestic defenses are dismantled by the same actions. The idea that it's "Wall Street", which feeds on American strength and weakness whenever it can, merely underscores the threat. Especially to American workers, who "Wall Street" has mainly fought at every opportunity, and then robbed when it lost battles to keep the profits from reaching workers savings.
All this foreign trade, especially with ambitious global enemies (more than mere competitive rivals) like China, has needed "some thought and review" by government and the media since before it began to be uncontrolled. Now it's getting too late to put the horse back in the barn. And the power already lost to foreign competition is further consolidated throughout our complex economy by rules like this one now being consider by the Court, which protected us in many ways from upstream since antitrust and labor unions were avant garde.
So the US government will control all the US economy at the retail pricing point? That sounds almost as bad, and probably the same, as letting the Chinese control it.
Besides, the people who are getting these rules set up will continue to set the government policy, including those tariffs. So it's the same thing, just even more points of control.
More of the PCI Express experts who are somehow "wrong" while you, a nobody, are somehow right. Let Jon Stokes explain it to you:
In a point-to-point bus topology, a shared switch replaces the shared bus as the single shared resource by means of which all of the devices communicate. Unlike in a shared bus topology, where the devices must collectively arbitrate among themselves for use of the bus, each device in the system has direct and exclusive access to the switch. In other words, each device sits on its own dedicated bus, which in PCIe lingo is called a link.
Those links together are collectively known as a bus, though everyone knows it's switched. Because, like ethernet through a switch, it is used like a bus, though many bus problems are solved by the switch.
That's the reality. If you insist on dogmatism, you can get off the bus, and lose track of the actual use of these technologies.
Because the point-to-point topology of PCIe is dynamically configurable through the PCIe switch, making its points selectable at will. It's backwards compatible with PCI, which is indisputably a bus, so new devices can treat it as a bus.
Ethernet is still a bus when it's run through a switch.
Get a grip on what these terms mean now, in practice, not what some abstract semantics say they'll mean when they're invented in a lab.
The US already destroyed capitalist freedom by making profits mandatory when outlawing "dumping".
What will manufacturer-mandated pricing of retail sale do to the US economy when manufacturing is dominated by China? Chinese manufacturers, organized by their Communist Party, will have broad and tight control over the essence of American economy from production through consumption. They could organize whatever economic warfare they require to beat America's economy to a pulp.
That transceiver is good for 160Gbps, in 2010, when it might be for sale.
Meanwhile, what do you do when you need more than 10Gbps? Stuff a PCIe bus with 2x10Gbps boards? Spend a $million on an experimental 100Gbps transceiver?
It's weird that there seems to be $10 1Gig-e, $450 10Gig-e, $750 2x10Gig-e, and then... nothing. Since even PlayStations include 1Gig-e, surely the horizon isn't really just 10x that speed?
I didn't say that CT is "releasing these books to further profit from his father's legacy", or that he's an "ignoramus".
All I said was that the Middle Earth books released after his editing aren't nearly as good as the ones his father wrote without him. For the reasons I stated, not his profit motive or any "ignoramus" problems.
If anything, his editions of his father's work needed lots more editing, the kind his father and his father's editors applied. That lack is why they're not as good.
Even in the case of Frank Herbert, his own later sequels to the original trilogy lack their magic. The imaginative power and elegant execution in each of those two original editions is unrivaled in either of their genres. That their authors couldn't recapture the magic, either alone or in collaboration (however one-sided) with their son, leaves the subsequent work in the same category that most authors achieve without that extraordinary transcendence.
What that article doesn't mention is how many grams it weights. Especially since it sits very high off the wrist, it looks like it would be unwieldy. It needs to be a lot flatter. And it looks like it was designed by a company from Logan's Run.
The OnHand was much smaller and probably lighter, probably smaller than it needed to be. It ran some kind of Japanese DOS clone on some kind of Japanese x86 clone.
That annoying remark aside, I read only the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and the first couple "Translations from the Elvish". Which weren't even as good as told stories as JRR's minor works like Smith of Wooten Major and Leaf by Niggle. I have a close friend who publishes facsimile editions of manuscripts annotated and discussed by genre scholars, and CT's versions of JRR's work (that I read) is much closer to the Silmarillion than to just publishing the text. I wasn't encouraged enough to read any more. Because they're not fun for me to read.
Will Sony finally merge the PSP with its excellent "Walkman" line of cameraphones, even more integrated with the PlayStation 3 than is the current PSP?
Actually, LotR is six volumes in three bindings of a single story. But it's just fine as the familiar trilogy.
Dune was three dependent stories published in three volumes comprising an epic. Then he took the money decades later and screwed it up by extending it into a series.
These distinctions are purely semantic. Unless there's some point about a "trilogy" publication that these books and stories actually defy, other than arbitrary bookbinding conventions.
The communing with their ancestors is not itself altering history. But the idea is that Paul and Leto II's lives (especially Leto II, but by extension everyone ever living) forced humanity onto a closed loop, or perhaps out of one, into today's state. The "Golden Path" is debatably the path onto or off of the cycle that either produces/ed Leto II, or stops producing him. It's inferrable from the text, and is explained more in the Dune Encyclopedia, which Frank Herbert both approved and contradicted.
Frodo is the ringbearer whose unique personality "saves the world" from its otherwise inevitable corruption by evil. The Fourth Age following the LotR story is the "age of men", the origins of our modern age. Which, as I said, is "today's mundane, if relatively safe, existence".
There are quite a lot of parallels in the overall story structures. Including the inheritance of Frodo/Paul from Bilbo/Leto, combined with their presence in a parallel world deeply rooted in spiritual transformation while under the influence of the main "magic" device (the Ring or the spice, respectively). These are themes fairly common in European myth, literature and history, especially epics, but they are central and remarkably parallel in both Dune and LotR.
Well, the final products are "bad reading" compared to JRR's solo efforts. Part of the difference is just the quality of the content and expression of the drafts that each of father and son started with: JRR worked on his best stuff during his lifetime, and deferred material that eluded even his genius.
I described the difference in author generations the way I did in light of backlash I've received, and learning I've gained, from past discussions of simply "CT's books are bad", some discussed on Slashdot. If you love Middle Earth so much that JRR's solo work isn't enough, you might find CT's work better than nothing. Personally I have other books to read, and things to do, which I like better than CT's revisions. I found the Herbert "dynasty" to be even more pronounced in this phenomenon. Which I think is worth discussing, especially in light of the themes of the stories themselves, among which inheritance and "upwards mobility" are primary.
OK, I got into trouble by mentioning that aspect of the story, so I'll mention a
SPOILER WARNING
before proceeding. Hopefully this is enough advance/whitespace.
The story is set 100,000 years in the future. But it's the story of a messiah who can see the future, talk with the past, of all humanity. His life's work is to adjust the path of humanity to avert an impending, otherwise inevitable disaster that would destroy us. To do so, he becomes a god-emperor, total control of all our possible courses of action. And delivers us onto a path that leads to today. Dune time is at least spiral, if not entirely cyclic.
This idea is not explicit in the trilogy. It might be explored in some of the later books, which I stopped reading towards the end of the second trilogy, because they weren't that good. It is explored in the Dune Encyclopedia, in particular by the author of one of the "Paul Muad'Dib" entries. Under whom I studied science fiction literature for my English major. His insight was clear, and apparently popular among other Dune scholars by the mid-1980s. It also provokes the question of whether Muad'Dib's life actually steered humanity onto precisely the course he saw as a terrible vision to be averted, or whether it locked us into a loop or spiral that either locked in the eventual appearance of Muad'Dib, or finally excluded it.
In fact, the "spoiler" I mentioned is entirely outside the plot inside the books. It's an implied theme that Dune scholars (like those who contributed to the _Dune Encyclopedia_) have inferred, and subject of much controversy, not resolved either in the trilogy or, to my knowledge, by other Frank Herbert writing.
I could have put the "spoiler" warning earlier, but I really thought I was being tongue in cheek, for the benefit of Dune fans. I wish I could edit the post, now that I realize it could piss off people like you, sort of a "spoiler false positive". Instead my apologies, and attempted reassurance that the book is not really spoiled by the idea that it happened in a fictional past.
Slashdot Mirror
Calling Iran part of an "Axis of Evil" is as stupid as calling America "the Great Satan".
The mutual namecalling, as well as the damage done by the governments of both sides to each other's people, is what makes enemies real.
Er, the current "Revolutionary" government of Iran kidnapped dozens of Americans for over a year to kick off the relationship. It's spent the past quarter-century funding terrorists who attack America and our allies. It's currently going nuclear in exactly the way that Iraq seemed (to some insane criminals) to be doing that precipitated a war. It's helped lead the manipulation of the oil markets that are helping bankrupt America.
Which part of "Death to America" and "America: the Great Satan" didn't you understand?
Except that's not working out, is it? That's why outsourcing to Russia and Iran looks like the way things will go.
So we'll just wind up depending on Iran and Russia to produce our uranium, and they'll control the energy market for the next century like they did with oil. All our old bombs are made of oil (plastic and explosives), so the transition to the new bombs in the hands of our historically worst enemies should be unsurprising.
Canada, Mexico and Germany aren't threats to America's economic and national security the way China is. They don't control our economy, nor are they positioned to. China is undeniably not only a rival, but a declared enemy, especially militarily. Do the words "Taiwan" and "Greater China" ring a bell?
Thank you for strutting your geopolitical denial in perfect terms displaying your cheap-labor global fascism.
Hu Jintao, is that you?
I agree with everything you said. What makes it all make sense is that the theory of global mutual ownership to raise the costs of bombing foreign countries is mainly the way to disrupt the system that Americans have built to protect ourselves from corporate abuse of most of us, and the rest of the world that follows our lead. In other words, it's a trick. Not because of the theory itself, but because of how it's executed. By now, almost 2 decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Most Favored Nation trading status for China, America is supposed to be selling vast amounts of stuff to most of the Chinese market. We're not. We're supposed to be able to threaten the Chinese market share in the US to extract concessions from China, specifically in human rights upgrading their labor and environmental requirements to improve people's lives and reduce their price-competitive edge. We're not. In other words, we've totally blown the "mutual ownership security" that convinced us to both invest in China and become dependent on their debt purchases.
These problems aren't going to get fixed. We're giving away the ability to fix them every day. Like a drunk who will go sober tomorrow, after one last drink, we're not only emptying out wallets, but we're losing our judgement while sinking the hook deeper into our guts. The only hope is some fast footwork like we pulled on Japan in the late 1980s, when we leveraged our own crash into taking them down harder, because they were so dependent on our market throughput. But the new generation of American financiers isn't nearly as skilled as the 1980s mechanics, and the Chinese aren't the Japanese. Our falls will more likely ratchet us deeper into their debt, while they use their leverage in supplying both our debt and our retail markets into stealing away our strategic supplies, like oil and immigrant brains.
That's why we should have looked at these problems a long time ago. And why some of us did, like me, and knew it would go this way. Including many others, namely the National Association of Manufacturers and lots of international banks, and placed their bets against us.
That WWPC looks about right. Though I'd like one with a snap-off (Bluetooth) controller I'd hold in my right hand. And it would be great if it rolled around to underside my forearm, rotating the display bitmap into portrait mode. The display should cover the whole face, and maybe flip open to double in size.
It looks like their current version expanded the display. If it's not vaporware, costs under $1500, and is fast enough to run a SIP softphone, I might get one. Thanks for the pointer.
You're right about the multiplicity of the threat of foreign control of manufacturing for US retail. China is emblematic, because it is by far the most monolithic of those countries you mentioned. Indonesia and the Phillipines are not nearly as coordinated, nor was Japan under its famed MITI. India is probably even less coordinated, but, as you point out, is bigger and more industrialized (they invented the trick, after all).
I'm not against China specifically for any "Chinese" reason. I just don't want foreigners controlling my economy. Especially since my government sold my people on allowing so much manufacturing to flee to countries like China on the premise that we'd have more control of their politics, which we wanted to reform (human rights, anticompetitive behavior). I knew they were lying then, so I watch it. China is the most specific case, and the most direct threat (in every endeavor). But I'm against the US squandering our power in every sphere, especially economic and moral. Calling it "China" is an easy way to communicate the threat in public, because many people are already wary of their threat. Anyone wary of those other foreign competitors increasing control over us is also wary of China.
The foreign investment in China that's abandoned investment in the US, especially by US investors, is one main reason China is such a threat, while our domestic defenses are dismantled by the same actions. The idea that it's "Wall Street", which feeds on American strength and weakness whenever it can, merely underscores the threat. Especially to American workers, who "Wall Street" has mainly fought at every opportunity, and then robbed when it lost battles to keep the profits from reaching workers savings.
All this foreign trade, especially with ambitious global enemies (more than mere competitive rivals) like China, has needed "some thought and review" by government and the media since before it began to be uncontrolled. Now it's getting too late to put the horse back in the barn. And the power already lost to foreign competition is further consolidated throughout our complex economy by rules like this one now being consider by the Court, which protected us in many ways from upstream since antitrust and labor unions were avant garde.
So the US government will control all the US economy at the retail pricing point? That sounds almost as bad, and probably the same, as letting the Chinese control it.
Besides, the people who are getting these rules set up will continue to set the government policy, including those tariffs. So it's the same thing, just even more points of control.
Those links together are collectively known as a bus, though everyone knows it's switched. Because, like ethernet through a switch, it is used like a bus, though many bus problems are solved by the switch.
That's the reality. If you insist on dogmatism, you can get off the bus, and lose track of the actual use of these technologies.
No, you are WRONG.
Because the point-to-point topology of PCIe is dynamically configurable through the PCIe switch, making its points selectable at will. It's backwards compatible with PCI, which is indisputably a bus, so new devices can treat it as a bus.
Ethernet is still a bus when it's run through a switch.
Get a grip on what these terms mean now, in practice, not what some abstract semantics say they'll mean when they're invented in a lab.
The US already destroyed capitalist freedom by making profits mandatory when outlawing "dumping".
What will manufacturer-mandated pricing of retail sale do to the US economy when manufacturing is dominated by China? Chinese manufacturers, organized by their Communist Party, will have broad and tight control over the essence of American economy from production through consumption. They could organize whatever economic warfare they require to beat America's economy to a pulp.
What the hell has happened to this country?
I bet you voted for Bush a couple of times, too.
And you probably have some kind of inane, dishonest excuse that you're somehow still not wrong in spitting pure bullshit like you just did. Spare me.
That transceiver is good for 160Gbps, in 2010, when it might be for sale.
Meanwhile, what do you do when you need more than 10Gbps? Stuff a PCIe bus with 2x10Gbps boards? Spend a $million on an experimental 100Gbps transceiver?
It's weird that there seems to be $10 1Gig-e, $450 10Gig-e, $750 2x10Gig-e, and then... nothing. Since even PlayStations include 1Gig-e, surely the horizon isn't really just 10x that speed?
I didn't say that CT is "releasing these books to further profit from his father's legacy", or that he's an "ignoramus".
All I said was that the Middle Earth books released after his editing aren't nearly as good as the ones his father wrote without him. For the reasons I stated, not his profit motive or any "ignoramus" problems.
If anything, his editions of his father's work needed lots more editing, the kind his father and his father's editors applied. That lack is why they're not as good.
Even in the case of Frank Herbert, his own later sequels to the original trilogy lack their magic. The imaginative power and elegant execution in each of those two original editions is unrivaled in either of their genres. That their authors couldn't recapture the magic, either alone or in collaboration (however one-sided) with their son, leaves the subsequent work in the same category that most authors achieve without that extraordinary transcendence.
How about some of these color nightvision goggles fitted with the bat ears that allow human echolocation?
Those kinds of sense boosters could make night, with less distractions away from the target, the most effective time to purse targets.
What that article doesn't mention is how many grams it weights. Especially since it sits very high off the wrist, it looks like it would be unwieldy. It needs to be a lot flatter. And it looks like it was designed by a company from Logan's Run.
The OnHand was much smaller and probably lighter, probably smaller than it needed to be. It ran some kind of Japanese DOS clone on some kind of Japanese x86 clone.
I've got plenty of learning.
That annoying remark aside, I read only the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and the first couple "Translations from the Elvish". Which weren't even as good as told stories as JRR's minor works like Smith of Wooten Major and Leaf by Niggle. I have a close friend who publishes facsimile editions of manuscripts annotated and discussed by genre scholars, and CT's versions of JRR's work (that I read) is much closer to the Silmarillion than to just publishing the text. I wasn't encouraged enough to read any more. Because they're not fun for me to read.
YMMV.
Will Sony finally merge the PSP with its excellent "Walkman" line of cameraphones, even more integrated with the PlayStation 3 than is the current PSP?
Actually, LotR is six volumes in three bindings of a single story. But it's just fine as the familiar trilogy.
Dune was three dependent stories published in three volumes comprising an epic. Then he took the money decades later and screwed it up by extending it into a series.
These distinctions are purely semantic. Unless there's some point about a "trilogy" publication that these books and stories actually defy, other than arbitrary bookbinding conventions.
The communing with their ancestors is not itself altering history. But the idea is that Paul and Leto II's lives (especially Leto II, but by extension everyone ever living) forced humanity onto a closed loop, or perhaps out of one, into today's state. The "Golden Path" is debatably the path onto or off of the cycle that either produces/ed Leto II, or stops producing him. It's inferrable from the text, and is explained more in the Dune Encyclopedia, which Frank Herbert both approved and contradicted.
Eternity and paradox are funny that way.
Frodo is the ringbearer whose unique personality "saves the world" from its otherwise inevitable corruption by evil. The Fourth Age following the LotR story is the "age of men", the origins of our modern age. Which, as I said, is "today's mundane, if relatively safe, existence".
There are quite a lot of parallels in the overall story structures. Including the inheritance of Frodo/Paul from Bilbo/Leto, combined with their presence in a parallel world deeply rooted in spiritual transformation while under the influence of the main "magic" device (the Ring or the spice, respectively). These are themes fairly common in European myth, literature and history, especially epics, but they are central and remarkably parallel in both Dune and LotR.
Well, the final products are "bad reading" compared to JRR's solo efforts. Part of the difference is just the quality of the content and expression of the drafts that each of father and son started with: JRR worked on his best stuff during his lifetime, and deferred material that eluded even his genius.
I described the difference in author generations the way I did in light of backlash I've received, and learning I've gained, from past discussions of simply "CT's books are bad", some discussed on Slashdot. If you love Middle Earth so much that JRR's solo work isn't enough, you might find CT's work better than nothing. Personally I have other books to read, and things to do, which I like better than CT's revisions. I found the Herbert "dynasty" to be even more pronounced in this phenomenon. Which I think is worth discussing, especially in light of the themes of the stories themselves, among which inheritance and "upwards mobility" are primary.
OK, I got into trouble by mentioning that aspect of the story, so I'll mention a
SPOILER WARNING
before proceeding. Hopefully this is enough advance/whitespace.
The story is set 100,000 years in the future. But it's the story of a messiah who can see the future, talk with the past, of all humanity. His life's work is to adjust the path of humanity to avert an impending, otherwise inevitable disaster that would destroy us. To do so, he becomes a god-emperor, total control of all our possible courses of action. And delivers us onto a path that leads to today. Dune time is at least spiral, if not entirely cyclic.
This idea is not explicit in the trilogy. It might be explored in some of the later books, which I stopped reading towards the end of the second trilogy, because they weren't that good. It is explored in the Dune Encyclopedia, in particular by the author of one of the "Paul Muad'Dib" entries. Under whom I studied science fiction literature for my English major. His insight was clear, and apparently popular among other Dune scholars by the mid-1980s. It also provokes the question of whether Muad'Dib's life actually steered humanity onto precisely the course he saw as a terrible vision to be averted, or whether it locked us into a loop or spiral that either locked in the eventual appearance of Muad'Dib, or finally excluded it.
Man that story is a mindblower.
In fact, the "spoiler" I mentioned is entirely outside the plot inside the books. It's an implied theme that Dune scholars (like those who contributed to the _Dune Encyclopedia_) have inferred, and subject of much controversy, not resolved either in the trilogy or, to my knowledge, by other Frank Herbert writing.
I could have put the "spoiler" warning earlier, but I really thought I was being tongue in cheek, for the benefit of Dune fans. I wish I could edit the post, now that I realize it could piss off people like you, sort of a "spoiler false positive". Instead my apologies, and attempted reassurance that the book is not really spoiled by the idea that it happened in a fictional past.