Imagine a beowolf clus I mean array of them. I'm still working it out. I was thinking maybe you could use an ANALOG sensor on the far end (the 4 pixels part) and then use a high range A/D converter to digitize the resulting waveform. Then I was thinking, maybe you could make one that the mirrors could scan in 3 different directions instead of just on-off, and have MORE sensors there. I don't know, I'm not really a scientist. They do have a switching speed of 15us which is quite a bit faster than typical exposure times. I'm sure someone will figure it out. It makes sense that if the benefits are there for projection, the same benefits should be there for recording. QED.
I'm talking about focusing the light on one large sensor. If it can easily scan 30fps at 1080 you're looking at a 1/30s exposure, which isn't too bad. Furthermore, the mirrors actually flip hundreds of times faster to make the greyscales during projection. I admit this sounds disingenious but if you have multiple sensors for each color you could easily multiply the number of actual real world "pixels" or resolution seen by the camera without having more pixels on the sensor. Obviously they aren't the best for scanning because they really have more of an array effect. But, just as in the projector, you would have a "light dump" which would absorb light coming from angles that aren't currently being scanned. Look at the switching speeds for the Texas Instruments DMD's, on the order of 15us, or 1.5/100000s, definitely above what is standardly used. If you were to bring it down to 1/1000s, you could easily scan through 150x the pixels with the same sensor (you'd need an array so you're not subject to the lag time inherent in all CMOS and CCD devices.)
My cell phone camera will create a squished picture out the car window at 30mph, and I know this is CPU based, not sensor based. Likewise, I think the DLP camera would have no problems switching fast enough for even extreme shutter speeds, but you'd need a wide bus to capture the data. You could have a very large sensor surface which means you can lower the gain and have a greater dynamic range. CMOS sensors, even in the experimental arena, are barely able to reach 100db even utilizing double sampling techniques (a form of interpolation). The human eye, by contrast, has 200db range. I think with a larger sensor surface 175-180db could be easily acheivable, especially with some type of active cooling (maybe not cheap enough for a handheld). Perhaps a return to an analog sensor with a wide range A/D converter could get you to 180db.. I can think of many other uses, such as telescopy, etc. where having a high dynamic range would be worthwhile, especially on non-visible wavelengths.
What about the future of the digital camera? The CCD is reaching the end of it's useable life. They are just packing more and more pixels in, when really what you need is more levels of greyscale and a better signal to noise ratio. I'm wondering when they'll get rid of CCD entirely and move to a 4 "pixel" sensor with a DLP chip in between handling the scanning, instead of a bunch of piddly pixels on a 1/3" ccd. The sensors could be larger, with focusing lenses in between. The color isolation would be perfect. Plus you could use variable filtering/exposure PER COLOR based on the ambient light to do true (not digital enhancement after capture) white balancing. There's no reason a DLP couldn't work in reverse, I don't think. Other possibilities include nanotubes "tuned" to certain visible frequencies that cause them to vibrate slightly, etc.
There's also the liquid lenses such as Varioptic, which are going to change what we know about photography. Coupled with GIS/GPS I think we're in for a great next century.
I wonder if you could use a screw. I wonder what the momentum would be on a 22,000 mile screw? What would the torque required be? Or could you use a long two-way cable with a pulley at the end such as those on a ski lift? What about helium or hydrogen? When the air got too thin to provide much lift, the hydrogen could be burned in a rocket or fuel cell or something else. What about a sterling engine? Couldn't you fly the far end out to 44000 miles, and use the thing on an incline as the earth's rotation pulls it around to the tangent?
There's only 21 million comments and far fewer stories. It's really not that many records. They have multiple DB's just for snappy performance, I would bet those servers are sitting idle a lot of the time. I remember after Sept. 11, 2001, they got slammed and they did a story about how they expanded their servers to deal with spikes in traffic..
Considering myISAM can easily do 4G rows and postgreSQL allows unlimited rows you are not going to run into a problem with the DB. And they are basically storing text. The average comment is probably what, 1k, so you're looking at around 25GB total data size, plus indexes, journals, etc. Still easily managable with today's hardware.
I'd like to see what google earth has behind it or shit, google itself. That would be impressive. But it is pretty amazing that a site like slashdot can do so much with so little. It does seem a lot bigger, doesn't it?
Between "thrustworthy" and "master db" I'm starting to think this really is geek porn.
Re:Is cloud computing for the masses finally here?
on
Amazon EC2 Open To All
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You can actually install any operating system or applications. It's basically a virtual server but you pay hourly rates. So if you do some heavy computing once a month, you can just lease time on a server and not have to buy a server, rack, ups, network gear, etc. They store your image and data for you, up to 1.7TB. It's actually a pretty good idea.
They need to go to the guys who run the CO's, those guys will let you in to see the little closet they had to build for every CO.. This is already public knowledge from the ACLU and EFF lawsuits. You think they only did that in San Francisco? They can easily get a list of all the CO's from the FCC, then work their way thru the list. Say there are 10000 CO's in America, and it costs $100,000 per CO for the "upgrades", that's only $1Billion, a grain of sand in the NSA/Homoland Security budget. Plus we already know that the government was using these as contingencies in getting other larger, less secret contracts. Talk to any CO manager and they will know where the equipment is and probably show you.
Don't forget to use logrotate and use logwatch to send your logs to your admin email.
hosts.deny and.allow are a great way to minimize incoming requests without having to change the port. Obviously it can cause problems if you need to manage from a remote computer.
A lot of rootkits are pretty smart about logs so you might want to enable some sort of signature (MD5) on the logs to monitor their integrity. Likewise you can do an MD5 on a tar of/etc nightly and it will notify you if anything gets changed in there. Typically they aren't smart enough to catch stuff like this, esp if you bury it in something else that gets run by cron.
Disable your compilers and stuff so they have to use their own.
It's rough but just having the basics in place will save you 99.9% of the time. You are not going to be able to keep out a determined expert, but having tripwires and basic good security practices in effect will prevent the kiddies out there who are the people you really are afraid of. Unless you're like the NSA or something.
Dude, it's not an EHR, it's a PHR. PERSONAL health record. Basically it's a spot where you can put the information you WANT to share. Gradually, the industry will realize that people don't want independent records kept (almost like the credit report system, but not as accessible). I have a kid, and when you see all the crap you have to keep yourself, like immunization records, certificates of this and that for school/daycare, etc etc. having a central point to share them would be rather nice. Imagine switching daycares and only having to basically show up. And since I can give them a one-time access code and only grant them the information they really need, I don't have to worry about them screwing anything up. And it could be a real boon for people with chronic diseases that require daily (hourly) management, such as diabetics. A script could review the blood sugar and your dietary log and make suggestions about what foods to limit/avoid. Companies could sell treatment models just like doctors sell themselves now. Because let's face it, doctors don't really do shit but write prescriptions nowadays. Why pay $250 for a person to guess when the computer can give you an educated correlation. This is the future of healthcare. Of course you will still need surgeons to open you up, and any physical procedures will require a doc. Must most of the nursing crap like blood tests, blood pressure, etc. can be done in the comfort of your home, for practically free.
That's what this is for, an online tool to manage your own health records. And it interfaces with some popular home medical devices such as blood pressure and blood sugar monitoring, which means you don't have to worry about recording it in a journal (which most people are too lazy to do). If you've ever had to fill the same damn personal history form out again and again, you know why this might be useful. Also, you can edit it to show whatever you want. It's getting to the point where we are going to have to take care of ourselves. There are simply not enough doctors. Use this to keep yourself healthy, move all of your insurance to high deductible plans, fund a Medical Savings Account or HSA and start taking back your medical options.
This might not be THE solution, but it's definitely a niche someone WILL fill. I don't know if M$FT is the ones to do it or not, but they are basically the only player in consumer software, so why not have consumer medical software.
I expect Google will find a non-evil way to do this exact thing. I'm telling you all, this is the killer industry for the next 20 years, and whoever figures out a way to save us is going to win big.
Not to mention the ability to dynamically change tempraments based on the chord, and what the other instruments are doing. This is just one step towards the enevitable true perfection of music, which is still so far away. Even in guitar, there are many compromises constantly made. Great players know how to bend the strings and place them just right in the fret depending on the chord to make it sound close to perfect. With this, you can just flub along and it will always be perfect. Obviously, the current system doesn't move quite fast enough to do this, but I'm sure a faster (10ms) response time might be possible. Maybe you would use muscle wires for strings or something.
Try this one, it's much better and actually correctly laid out:)
Re:Sorry for the lenght but it needs to be said.
on
Replacing a Thinkpad?
·
· Score: 1
Do you have any idea what actually went on in Iran and how disgusting of a government that is even to this day?
Yeah, because they Shah we installed in the 50's was SUCH a good leader. Pft.
The US needs to stay they leader of the "Free World" and get away from the leader of the "Christian World" thing. That is so 1950. Then JFK got elected and we actually got somewhere. Til they killed him. For being Catholic.
Maybe the Russians and Chinese are the greatest threat to the Free World and not some deluded Muslims.
It's important to make a distinction in your mind that People != Bad Leadership. I think the majority of humans want the same things out of life. It's just that the power-hungry float to the top...because they WANT it. So, you tend to have power-hungry, seven-deadly-sin embracing douchebags at the top and regular folks like us at the bottom. The problem with Russia and China is not their people, but the fact that their leadership has little or no checks and balances and so the power-hungry douchebags at the top can do evil with no consequences. It has been like that here in America lately, since everyone was so paralyzed in "fear" of "terror" (that sounds funny, doesn't it?) that we let the government (which was also free of the normal R vs. D dichotomy) and especially the Executive branch have it's way. And what happens? The power-hungry snatch more power at the expense of the people.
Now, back to your comment. The Russian leaders and the Chinese leaders have shown a willingness to play in the global economy. They've also shown a willingness to direct their people in a decent way. They have embraced capitalism, even if they are trying to back out constantly, I don't think they can go back. As generations pass, the "old" leadership in Russia and China will gradually be replaced by the "new", and just like in America they progress, slowly, toward a more perfect union with a free-market economy.
In the world stage no one can really CONTROL the world economy. You can only set the trends. And as America is the biggest, and American companies in that economy are the world's biggest, we set the economic trends that the rest of the world follow. The problem is we are not being wise with our spending, and we're borrowing a lot of money as a country and it's going to be a long time before we can make that up. That's what we get for letting power-hungry people print their own money and increase their own power.
You are correct, however, that under the right (wrong) leadership, China and Russia represent the greatest threat to the American idea of the "Free World" (ie: free market), simply because they muster so many people under them, along with massive resources and land assets. Islam is merely a religion, not unlike Catholic or Hindu. Bush, an evangelical Christian, would like you to believe that the Muslims represent some sort of apocalyptic society (because that's what he believes), but in reality, the almost 1.8 Billion muslims are as a majority good people. I don't care if they don't believe in Jesus.
Now, in the middle east, Muslims have been used as tools by the Anglo Saxons since Christianity began. Naturally the rise of Radical Imams and the like occurs during times of great poverty and this is one of those times. During the 60's and 70's the exponential rise of oil fortunes in the middle east has resulted in, you guessed it, power-hungry people getting lots of money and power and using it to keep down their people. If we are so concerned about "democracy" in Iraq, why don't we get the Saudi MONARCHY to let it's people go democratic? Or Jordan. Because you see, radical islam is bred in spots where there are leaders like this who keep their people down. It's the people's way of fighting back. The fact that they've turned their attention to the suppliers of power over there (America) is only natural. We supply the money, weapons and other gear to the Israelis, Saudis, Jordanians, and more that they use to keep the poor people down. It's no wonder they don't like us very much.
But no, they are not a "threat" per se, since Radical Islam only flourishes with poverty, lack of education and of course a power-hungry person at the top to keep the poor down. There are MANY Muslims in America and you would never know them becuase they are no different than Christians, other than they don't believe in the Jesus myth, they believe in the Mohammed myth.
Anyway, I'm not scared of China and Russia either, but I do agree that Burma is a hotbed and could produce terrorists also, because they are being kept down and not allowed to be free.
That's bullshit. We are number one not because our people work hard, it's because we have natural resources. And we've never been bombed like in WWII. The rest of your comment is BS. Most people in America work in the "service industry", that means bullshit jobs like waiters, mortgage brokers, and yes in many situations "computer people". The percentage of workers in America actually PRODUCING something, be it physical products or new ideas or software, is very very low. Our economy is bullshit, we basically borrow all the money we have and we don't have to pay it back because all those countries know that we have huge untapped mining reserves, agriculture, oil, coal, land land land that has to be worth something someday. And someday we will have to pay it back. They have been steadily printing $500Billion a year in new money for 6 years and most of it is being squandered on the War (IE being spent out of the country). We are borrowing that money because for every dollar they print, they have to issue a government bond (T-note) to cover the accounting. And China buys those from us to keep the cycle flowing. Sooner or later we will run out of numbers, trillions will become pentillions and sooner or later we won't be able to comprehend it as humans any more and we'll lose confidence in the whole ponzi scheme.
At that point we will have to cover that with real stuff to make our loans good. And that means land, resources, etc. going out of our country to other countries. Or we have to fight for it, and this time WE'LL be the bad guy, WE'LL be the Nazi Germany to the world. Does that sound good?
I think not. We have to get our act in gear, and this president really lacks the leadership, the vision, hell the INTELLIGENCE to even understand what's happening. And the few big businessmen who are benefiting from all this government spending (who get the money with no obligation to pay it back, like the US government has) are few and many of them have jobs in the government right now, and will return to their newly capitalized Oil, Gas and contracting companies at the end of the term. Deficit spending is an invisible tax that we are only starting to see affect our prices. Have you seen that a block of cheese is $12.00 now?! WTF? Steaks are 10 dollars a POUND? Everything has gone up 30% or more. And it's not Energy Prices that are doing it, it's the credit card of the government. This has to stop or we are Doomed to face a long a deadly war to defend our "freedom", not to do what we please as citizens, but our GOVERNMENT'S freedom to borrow and spend as much as they want without paying it back.
Meanwhile we, the people are forced to work more and more hours just to enjoy the same quality of life our parents did. Wow, we can get bigger TV's now, who cares? A TV is nothing more than 100 pounds of PLASTIC! What really matters, our lives, our families, our recreation time to truely be creative, is what is being lost.
Try using aggregate functions on money columns in Sql Server 2005.. They have the classic excel rounding error that drops a tenth of a cent. Or their Retail Management System (Dynamics RMS), which does the same thing in the opposite direction. Surely a penny doesn't matter! Fucking idiots. On the bright side, I set up a script to "take from the penny jar" and put it into a numbered account. Like in Superman ]|[.. Thumbs up their assholes, thumbs up their assholes...
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine a beowolf clus I mean array of them. I'm still working it out. I was thinking maybe you could use an ANALOG sensor on the far end (the 4 pixels part) and then use a high range A/D converter to digitize the resulting waveform. Then I was thinking, maybe you could make one that the mirrors could scan in 3 different directions instead of just on-off, and have MORE sensors there. I don't know, I'm not really a scientist. They do have a switching speed of 15us which is quite a bit faster than typical exposure times. I'm sure someone will figure it out. It makes sense that if the benefits are there for projection, the same benefits should be there for recording. QED.
I'm talking about focusing the light on one large sensor. If it can easily scan 30fps at 1080 you're looking at a 1/30s exposure, which isn't too bad. Furthermore, the mirrors actually flip hundreds of times faster to make the greyscales during projection. I admit this sounds disingenious but if you have multiple sensors for each color you could easily multiply the number of actual real world "pixels" or resolution seen by the camera without having more pixels on the sensor. Obviously they aren't the best for scanning because they really have more of an array effect. But, just as in the projector, you would have a "light dump" which would absorb light coming from angles that aren't currently being scanned. Look at the switching speeds for the Texas Instruments DMD's, on the order of 15us, or 1.5/100000s, definitely above what is standardly used. If you were to bring it down to 1/1000s, you could easily scan through 150x the pixels with the same sensor (you'd need an array so you're not subject to the lag time inherent in all CMOS and CCD devices.)
My cell phone camera will create a squished picture out the car window at 30mph, and I know this is CPU based, not sensor based. Likewise, I think the DLP camera would have no problems switching fast enough for even extreme shutter speeds, but you'd need a wide bus to capture the data. You could have a very large sensor surface which means you can lower the gain and have a greater dynamic range. CMOS sensors, even in the experimental arena, are barely able to reach 100db even utilizing double sampling techniques (a form of interpolation). The human eye, by contrast, has 200db range. I think with a larger sensor surface 175-180db could be easily acheivable, especially with some type of active cooling (maybe not cheap enough for a handheld). Perhaps a return to an analog sensor with a wide range A/D converter could get you to 180db.. I can think of many other uses, such as telescopy, etc. where having a high dynamic range would be worthwhile, especially on non-visible wavelengths.
What about the future of the digital camera? The CCD is reaching the end of it's useable life. They are just packing more and more pixels in, when really what you need is more levels of greyscale and a better signal to noise ratio. I'm wondering when they'll get rid of CCD entirely and move to a 4 "pixel" sensor with a DLP chip in between handling the scanning, instead of a bunch of piddly pixels on a 1/3" ccd. The sensors could be larger, with focusing lenses in between. The color isolation would be perfect. Plus you could use variable filtering/exposure PER COLOR based on the ambient light to do true (not digital enhancement after capture) white balancing. There's no reason a DLP couldn't work in reverse, I don't think. Other possibilities include nanotubes "tuned" to certain visible frequencies that cause them to vibrate slightly, etc.
There's also the liquid lenses such as Varioptic, which are going to change what we know about photography. Coupled with GIS/GPS I think we're in for a great next century.
I wonder if you could use a screw. I wonder what the momentum would be on a 22,000 mile screw? What would the torque required be? Or could you use a long two-way cable with a pulley at the end such as those on a ski lift? What about helium or hydrogen? When the air got too thin to provide much lift, the hydrogen could be burned in a rocket or fuel cell or something else. What about a sterling engine? Couldn't you fly the far end out to 44000 miles, and use the thing on an incline as the earth's rotation pulls it around to the tangent?
Only a matter of time before they figure out a way to use this with pr0n. Not that I'm against it.
CASH: Don't leave home without it.
oh yeah:
There is NO SEX in the champagne room.
There's only 21 million comments and far fewer stories. It's really not that many records. They have multiple DB's just for snappy performance, I would bet those servers are sitting idle a lot of the time. I remember after Sept. 11, 2001, they got slammed and they did a story about how they expanded their servers to deal with spikes in traffic..
Considering myISAM can easily do 4G rows and postgreSQL allows unlimited rows you are not going to run into a problem with the DB. And they are basically storing text. The average comment is probably what, 1k, so you're looking at around 25GB total data size, plus indexes, journals, etc. Still easily managable with today's hardware.
I'd like to see what google earth has behind it or shit, google itself. That would be impressive. But it is pretty amazing that a site like slashdot can do so much with so little. It does seem a lot bigger, doesn't it?
Between "thrustworthy" and "master db" I'm starting to think this really is geek porn.
You can actually install any operating system or applications. It's basically a virtual server but you pay hourly rates. So if you do some heavy computing once a month, you can just lease time on a server and not have to buy a server, rack, ups, network gear, etc. They store your image and data for you, up to 1.7TB. It's actually a pretty good idea.
They need to go to the guys who run the CO's, those guys will let you in to see the little closet they had to build for every CO.. This is already public knowledge from the ACLU and EFF lawsuits. You think they only did that in San Francisco? They can easily get a list of all the CO's from the FCC, then work their way thru the list. Say there are 10000 CO's in America, and it costs $100,000 per CO for the "upgrades", that's only $1Billion, a grain of sand in the NSA/Homoland Security budget. Plus we already know that the government was using these as contingencies in getting other larger, less secret contracts. Talk to any CO manager and they will know where the equipment is and probably show you.
Seriously, this is a slippery slope.
It's much easier to believe when you know the truth... there is no war.
Don't forget to use logrotate and use logwatch to send your logs to your admin email.
.allow are a great way to minimize incoming requests without having to change the port. Obviously it can cause problems if you need to manage from a remote computer.
/etc nightly and it will notify you if anything gets changed in there. Typically they aren't smart enough to catch stuff like this, esp if you bury it in something else that gets run by cron.
hosts.deny and
A lot of rootkits are pretty smart about logs so you might want to enable some sort of signature (MD5) on the logs to monitor their integrity. Likewise you can do an MD5 on a tar of
Disable your compilers and stuff so they have to use their own.
It's rough but just having the basics in place will save you 99.9% of the time. You are not going to be able to keep out a determined expert, but having tripwires and basic good security practices in effect will prevent the kiddies out there who are the people you really are afraid of. Unless you're like the NSA or something.
Dude, it's not an EHR, it's a PHR. PERSONAL health record. Basically it's a spot where you can put the information you WANT to share. Gradually, the industry will realize that people don't want independent records kept (almost like the credit report system, but not as accessible). I have a kid, and when you see all the crap you have to keep yourself, like immunization records, certificates of this and that for school/daycare, etc etc. having a central point to share them would be rather nice. Imagine switching daycares and only having to basically show up. And since I can give them a one-time access code and only grant them the information they really need, I don't have to worry about them screwing anything up. And it could be a real boon for people with chronic diseases that require daily (hourly) management, such as diabetics. A script could review the blood sugar and your dietary log and make suggestions about what foods to limit/avoid. Companies could sell treatment models just like doctors sell themselves now. Because let's face it, doctors don't really do shit but write prescriptions nowadays. Why pay $250 for a person to guess when the computer can give you an educated correlation. This is the future of healthcare. Of course you will still need surgeons to open you up, and any physical procedures will require a doc. Must most of the nursing crap like blood tests, blood pressure, etc. can be done in the comfort of your home, for practically free.
That's what this is for, an online tool to manage your own health records. And it interfaces with some popular home medical devices such as blood pressure and blood sugar monitoring, which means you don't have to worry about recording it in a journal (which most people are too lazy to do). If you've ever had to fill the same damn personal history form out again and again, you know why this might be useful. Also, you can edit it to show whatever you want. It's getting to the point where we are going to have to take care of ourselves. There are simply not enough doctors. Use this to keep yourself healthy, move all of your insurance to high deductible plans, fund a Medical Savings Account or HSA and start taking back your medical options.
This might not be THE solution, but it's definitely a niche someone WILL fill. I don't know if M$FT is the ones to do it or not, but they are basically the only player in consumer software, so why not have consumer medical software.
I expect Google will find a non-evil way to do this exact thing. I'm telling you all, this is the killer industry for the next 20 years, and whoever figures out a way to save us is going to win big.
Not to mention the ability to dynamically change tempraments based on the chord, and what the other instruments are doing. This is just one step towards the enevitable true perfection of music, which is still so far away. Even in guitar, there are many compromises constantly made. Great players know how to bend the strings and place them just right in the fret depending on the chord to make it sound close to perfect. With this, you can just flub along and it will always be perfect. Obviously, the current system doesn't move quite fast enough to do this, but I'm sure a faster (10ms) response time might be possible. Maybe you would use muscle wires for strings or something.
It appears you are about to throw me out of the Window! Perhaps some mood-enhancing serotonin reuptake inhibitors will help?
In the little prequel thingy to Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
This slide rule is broken.
:)
Try this one, it's much better and actually correctly laid out
Do you have any idea what actually went on in Iran and how disgusting of a government that is even to this day?
Yeah, because they Shah we installed in the 50's was SUCH a good leader. Pft.
The US needs to stay they leader of the "Free World" and get away from the leader of the "Christian World" thing. That is so 1950. Then JFK got elected and we actually got somewhere. Til they killed him. For being Catholic.
Maybe the Russians and Chinese are the greatest threat to the Free World and not some deluded Muslims.
It's important to make a distinction in your mind that People != Bad Leadership. I think the majority of humans want the same things out of life. It's just that the power-hungry float to the top...because they WANT it. So, you tend to have power-hungry, seven-deadly-sin embracing douchebags at the top and regular folks like us at the bottom. The problem with Russia and China is not their people, but the fact that their leadership has little or no checks and balances and so the power-hungry douchebags at the top can do evil with no consequences. It has been like that here in America lately, since everyone was so paralyzed in "fear" of "terror" (that sounds funny, doesn't it?) that we let the government (which was also free of the normal R vs. D dichotomy) and especially the Executive branch have it's way. And what happens? The power-hungry snatch more power at the expense of the people.
Now, back to your comment. The Russian leaders and the Chinese leaders have shown a willingness to play in the global economy. They've also shown a willingness to direct their people in a decent way. They have embraced capitalism, even if they are trying to back out constantly, I don't think they can go back. As generations pass, the "old" leadership in Russia and China will gradually be replaced by the "new", and just like in America they progress, slowly, toward a more perfect union with a free-market economy.
In the world stage no one can really CONTROL the world economy. You can only set the trends. And as America is the biggest, and American companies in that economy are the world's biggest, we set the economic trends that the rest of the world follow. The problem is we are not being wise with our spending, and we're borrowing a lot of money as a country and it's going to be a long time before we can make that up. That's what we get for letting power-hungry people print their own money and increase their own power.
You are correct, however, that under the right (wrong) leadership, China and Russia represent the greatest threat to the American idea of the "Free World" (ie: free market), simply because they muster so many people under them, along with massive resources and land assets. Islam is merely a religion, not unlike Catholic or Hindu. Bush, an evangelical Christian, would like you to believe that the Muslims represent some sort of apocalyptic society (because that's what he believes), but in reality, the almost 1.8 Billion muslims are as a majority good people. I don't care if they don't believe in Jesus.
Now, in the middle east, Muslims have been used as tools by the Anglo Saxons since Christianity began. Naturally the rise of Radical Imams and the like occurs during times of great poverty and this is one of those times. During the 60's and 70's the exponential rise of oil fortunes in the middle east has resulted in, you guessed it, power-hungry people getting lots of money and power and using it to keep down their people. If we are so concerned about "democracy" in Iraq, why don't we get the Saudi MONARCHY to let it's people go democratic? Or Jordan. Because you see, radical islam is bred in spots where there are leaders like this who keep their people down. It's the people's way of fighting back. The fact that they've turned their attention to the suppliers of power over there (America) is only natural. We supply the money, weapons and other gear to the Israelis, Saudis, Jordanians, and more that they use to keep the poor people down. It's no wonder they don't like us very much.
But no, they are not a "threat" per se, since Radical Islam only flourishes with poverty, lack of education and of course a power-hungry person at the top to keep the poor down. There are MANY Muslims in America and you would never know them becuase they are no different than Christians, other than they don't believe in the Jesus myth, they believe in the Mohammed myth.
Anyway, I'm not scared of China and Russia either, but I do agree that Burma is a hotbed and could produce terrorists also, because they are being kept down and not allowed to be free.
That's bullshit. We are number one not because our people work hard, it's because we have natural resources. And we've never been bombed like in WWII. The rest of your comment is BS. Most people in America work in the "service industry", that means bullshit jobs like waiters, mortgage brokers, and yes in many situations "computer people". The percentage of workers in America actually PRODUCING something, be it physical products or new ideas or software, is very very low. Our economy is bullshit, we basically borrow all the money we have and we don't have to pay it back because all those countries know that we have huge untapped mining reserves, agriculture, oil, coal, land land land that has to be worth something someday. And someday we will have to pay it back. They have been steadily printing $500Billion a year in new money for 6 years and most of it is being squandered on the War (IE being spent out of the country). We are borrowing that money because for every dollar they print, they have to issue a government bond (T-note) to cover the accounting. And China buys those from us to keep the cycle flowing. Sooner or later we will run out of numbers, trillions will become pentillions and sooner or later we won't be able to comprehend it as humans any more and we'll lose confidence in the whole ponzi scheme.
At that point we will have to cover that with real stuff to make our loans good. And that means land, resources, etc. going out of our country to other countries. Or we have to fight for it, and this time WE'LL be the bad guy, WE'LL be the Nazi Germany to the world. Does that sound good?
I think not. We have to get our act in gear, and this president really lacks the leadership, the vision, hell the INTELLIGENCE to even understand what's happening. And the few big businessmen who are benefiting from all this government spending (who get the money with no obligation to pay it back, like the US government has) are few and many of them have jobs in the government right now, and will return to their newly capitalized Oil, Gas and contracting companies at the end of the term. Deficit spending is an invisible tax that we are only starting to see affect our prices. Have you seen that a block of cheese is $12.00 now?! WTF? Steaks are 10 dollars a POUND? Everything has gone up 30% or more. And it's not Energy Prices that are doing it, it's the credit card of the government. This has to stop or we are Doomed to face a long a deadly war to defend our "freedom", not to do what we please as citizens, but our GOVERNMENT'S freedom to borrow and spend as much as they want without paying it back.
Meanwhile we, the people are forced to work more and more hours just to enjoy the same quality of life our parents did. Wow, we can get bigger TV's now, who cares? A TV is nothing more than 100 pounds of PLASTIC! What really matters, our lives, our families, our recreation time to truely be creative, is what is being lost.
Excuse me, I work for Initech and I don't consider myself a pussy, OK?
I too, am not a pussy.
mwuhahahaa? That's not correct, he actually says "AH Ah ah"
One! ONE blood-sucking vampire bats, AH Ah ah. Try it in transylvanian and you'll see I'm correct.
Try using aggregate functions on money columns in Sql Server 2005.. They have the classic excel rounding error that drops a tenth of a cent. Or their Retail Management System (Dynamics RMS), which does the same thing in the opposite direction. Surely a penny doesn't matter! Fucking idiots. On the bright side, I set up a script to "take from the penny jar" and put it into a numbered account. Like in Superman ]|[.. Thumbs up their assholes, thumbs up their assholes...