Though this is immeasurably cool, judging by the ever rapid price decline of Globalstar's junk bonds, we can expect Iridium style bankruptcy pretty soon. Hell, Globalstar doesn't even have the massive millitary contract that Iridium did to help keep it afloat. That said, Qualcomm is a pretty big player in the wireless industry (much more so than those involved with Iridium), so there is still a chance that GS could stick around. In my opinion, all they really need to do to have a successful sat. phone company would be to create a small, sexy phone that can still work with the sats, analog cell, and digital cell. Though it would be an engineering marvel to make something like that and not give the users cancer after a couple minutes of use, it would certainly sell like nothing before it in the lucrative CEO/CEO-wannabe market. There are many executive types who would want such a phone, but don't like the golf-club-sized antennas on Iridium phones. The other possible customers - those placed outside of normal cell coverage (ships, airplanes, research stations, etc) are either already pleased with Iridium or stayed away because of the high price.
Oh yeah, they also have to make the system, unlike Iridium, work in buildings, or anywhere in the vicinity of a city. With Iridium you have to go through hell to try and make a call with tall buildings around.
Not to mention that human germ cells aren't produced until later in the development cycle, and thus would have the same regenerate defects that lie in the DNA of the reasonably young.
Once DNA can be physically constructed (via nano-assemblers or whatever) and sequencing becomes more rapid, you could even take a batch of germ cells from a human, use error checking to eliminate mutations/crossovers (just find the most common expression for each locus) and make a *perfect* clone by mating two germ cells with equal genetic code. This is hardly the last nail in the coffin for cloning - even human cloning.
I'm not a big fan of them either, but from the studio's standpoint it helps subsidize the cost of the movie. Lots of people (at least those outside of the DVD collecting community) would be happy to pay $5 less for a movie and watch some commercials. Lots of older DVD players could skip the "legal notices" though, which is quite nice. Quite frankly, the FBI warning isn't even required by law and I'd be happy to see that gone on the "collector editions" that are released. Why not just open right to the menu? Hell, since the content is "scrambled" they don't even need a copyright notice since it's illegal to descramble the stuff regardless.
I saw it while exchanging a CDRW at CompUSA today in their playstation section. I'm reasonably certain it was a LCD, but I don't know how much luck you'd have with the video input. I believe playstations have a "video multi out" type cable that would be specialized for whatever use you want - RF, Svideo, composite, whatever. Of course, once you hack apart the LCD I imagine it would just have some sort of standard input.
eio.com used to have a $100 TFT LCD that you could play with to accept composite input really easily. The url doesn't seem to be resolving for me though. Check out http://www.ryanspc.com/carmp3/ for one application of this screen (not mine, but cool).
I think you missed my point. Americans are *slowly* catching on to some internation culture. Of course I know that CT:HD and Moby aren't exactly unamerican, but people still tend to dig them because they have some sort of foreign allure. Perhaps seeing CT will make some brainwashed 12-year-old go look up more wushu movies. By the way, aside from the cockney, lock stock is way less foreign then crouching tiger.
Actually, sony sells a 5" or so LCD for the PS One for $130 and I imagine it is fairly marked up from production costs (it seems like a niche product.) I've seen 6" LCD screens for $100 quite a few times (tft too!), so making a DVD/LCD really isn't that expensive. The only thing keeping the costs so high now ($500 or so for the cheapest) is a lack of demand.
I think the main issue here (pun intended) is that you are in Bangor. Though a congressman from Maine may have attempted to get it to be part of Nixon's city modernization program, it isn't exactly a thriving metropolis. I'd imagine that there are far more homogeneous communities in Scotland than there are diverse metroplexes as well.
That said, the spread of "urban sprawl" throughout America sickens me. Though it is possible to occasionally find non-franchised establishments in most suburban areas (which is, essentially, what America is now outside of deep rural and high-density urban areas), multi-national chains are taking over every town in America.
Yeah, Ben Franklin was a great visionary, but it should be noted that his "worldliness" was quite selfish. He was always disappointed to head over to Britain and not be included in the whole aristocracy deal and that could probably explain a lot of his efforts. Maybe he thought that by giving away his stove he could rise in ye ole status ladder. I suppose many things haven't changed in 230 years.
As far as creativity in America - it's what you make of it. I'm not all too up on force feeding internationalism down the collective throat America. People seem to be catching on to popular world culture (see popularity of movies like Run Lola Run and Crouching Tiger and of euro music like Moby, etc) - sure, this is a relatively mild interest, but it seems to be gaining ground. Eventually with the Internet, et al, Americans will realize that the world has more to offer than N'Sync and Jerry Bruckheimer.
Except that the printing cost is quite similar for CDs and DVDs and that decoding a mpeg-4 file is much more hardware intensive and thus, expensive. Also note that VCD players have been around forever at what is essentially VCR quality (better in some areas, worse in others) and they never caught on. People don't like DVD because it is a convenient, easily breakable/scratchable disc, they like it because of the better quality and the extra features. More likely, we'll end up with double releases of DVDs - barebones and special editions. For $15 you can get the barebones edition with stereo audio and no special features (plus a load of pre-movie advertising like on VHS). Then for $30 you get surround sound, commentary and other features, and no extraneous advertisment. This way the MPAA companies can get people hooked on DVD with the regular discs and then once they decide they like surround sound and the special features they'll start buying the more expensive discs. Disney is really the only company to have started doing this and I really can't believe the others haven't. It is an excellent (if annoying to the DVD collector) business strategy. Lots of studios will release a barebones disc and later a special edition, but this practice is starting to come to an end - most movies out now are labeled "special edition" or something similar regardless of the disc's contents.
Dreamcasts can already play burnt vcd's and I am pretty sure they are working on porting a divx decoder as well. I remember seeing a beta binary for it somewhere. Of course, you can always download a divx encoded flick and change it to vcd for playback in most DVD players.
Sega still does the exact same thing with the Dreamcast (well, not exactly for much longer). The Naomi arcade board is essentially just dreamcast hardware with a solid-state game rom. Now they even have gd-rom (cds) games so you can have a naomi board and simply get new discs and change the cabinet artwork. Porting to the Dreamcast is exceptionally simple. Probably too simple as quite a few games get ported with zero changes. Arcade Naomi games include Crazy Taxi, Samba de Amigo, 18-Wheel-Pro-Trucker, and Ferrari F355 (though that one used 3 naomi boards - one for each screen.)
Of course, every PC game that comes out, for the most part, can be downloaded first in demo form or you can go over and play with a friend's copy. Magazines are given pre-release review copies with specific liscenses. If they have a problem with a no-screenshot clause, they can refuse to review the game. If you want a real world example, look at Trespasser. That game basically became known as the "look at her breasts game" before it was released because every single review had a screenshot of the player looking down as far as possible and checking out their own cleavage. Of course, the game sucked anyway so maybe this was actually beneficial to sales:)
If you get Calligrapher or Transcriber (for CE), you don't even have to write in a specified area. You just write on the screen and it recognizes your action. You can tap a taskbar icon to turn recognition off if you want to use a paint program or something that requires stylus movements rather than tapping. Quite cool - though the actual handwriting recognition could improve. Then again, no one can read my handwriting anyway:)
I have a epods (wince device from a company that went out of business.) It's got a decent battery life of about 6-8 hours depending on use/screen contrast. That's 6-8 hours with a 6"x4" passive matrix 16bit lcd. I also have a 128mb cf card. What for you ask? GPS maps, music, notes, and whatever else I feel like transfering over. A Palm is great for what it is, but this thing can do everything a Palm can do (we also have a IIIx btw) and a hell of a lot more for the same price. It doesn't quite fit in my pocket as it was originally intended to be a web tablet rather than a PDA, but it fits easily enough into my backpack.
I don't really see the advantage of a one month battery life vs. an 8 hour one. I don't know anyone who uses their PDA 8 hours a day, and I can just plug it into the wall when I get home. Now, my Rio has like a 2 hour battery life which is annoying as all hell. That reminds me - I've gotta go run off to compusa and pick up some cheap NiMH's and a recharger.
Now, I'm just as annoyed with SPAM as anyone else here, but just think about the consequences of seeking a law that ends most spam. Obviously, it'd have to be a federal law and even then you'd have to deal with foreign spam. So even if passed, it wouldn't work. More importantly, think about the dangers of putting even more regulatory power over the Internet in the hands of the US Congress. By requesting this regulation, you open up more discussion on Internet taxation, content restrictions, required filtering in public buildings, etc. Just because you can't install an e-mail filter to block out USA.net and, hopefully, hotmail.com, don't go persecuting spammers. The Internet is great because, though this is changing, it's free. You can spam, flame, and virtually threaten people all you like without consequence. Of course, you can also create controversial songs, art, prose, etc that wouldn't get any visibility outside of the Internet.
Now these guys managed to break something with the high volume of spam they sent, so there is a bit of a difference. That said, shouldn't any good server admin have this vulnerability covered? What if your legitimate e-mail bounced through the server during the period when the spamming occurred. Aren't you then possibly responsible for the malfunction? This wasn't an organized attempt to take down the server, so it isn't nearly on the level of intentional DOSs and the like. More like ServerSlaughter. Just think twice before you start writing your congressmen eh?
What was that code again...
Oh yeah:/* Square it! */
cin >> X;
X=X^2;
Gilligan.fall("hammock");
Cout X;
Sorry for the simpleton program, I took a C++ class two years ago and that's it.
"This is indeed intriguing; what unit will replace the familiar megahertz"
Hear that? That's the sound of thousands of Apple engineers cheering as they anticipate the coming of widespread acceptance of ByteMark as the universal benchmark of computing power!
Which completely ignores the fact that people invovled in "high fashion" aren't ones to wear a suit till it has been through four sets of elbow patches anyway. Just like most schools will update to the newest textbook editions solely to be "up to date" (though companies force the schools' hands a bit by ceasing publication of old editions, it would still happen.) For a more slashdot-esque example, look at the switch from C++ to Java. Sure, to a point Java is a more "perfect" object-oriented language, but you have to admit that the switch is also mandated by the buzzword-based education philosophy.
I have one response: eeeeeehhhhh! (think Happy Days.) The Fonz would be upset that you forgot his extremely successful spin-off.
For what it's worth, I was also impressed with TLG (not to mention the fact that the title makes me remember Airheads.) Sure, you have to "suspend disbelief" a bit, what with the chips w/ built-in modems and internet-controlled airplanes and all. That put aside, it was fun. Certainly a better conspiracy thriller than that Mel Gibson movie that was released a couple years back. The Mission Impossible rip-off that the show opened with was also great.
How are the Chinese dangerous? Sure, they had problems initially, but their government is hardly that of the tao era. Socialism could probably work (look at canada) if we didn't come along and force any budding socialist country to spend >50% of its resources on their millitary. And don't say that we wouldn't attack a budding socialist country because they don't have a strong military. Look at Guatamala, Vietnam (though that hardly worked out), and Cuba. We essentially sanction or fight them just because they are socialist. Try and spare the crap about human rights violations as well. How many people are starving in africa or have aids? Do you have any idea how far this outweighs the deathtoll of the "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo? Hell, if a sect of the US rebelled, I'm sure there would be something very akin to Kosovo's ethnic cleansing. Oh wait, that already happened, go read up on Japanese internment. The albanians weren't that bad off, and they could have moved to albania if they really disliked the race-based class structure in Kosovo (hmmm... we have that too, not to mention that it's a way of life in India.) One thing though - albania is nearly a 3rd world nation. Of course they couldn't move there and help their breathren with their Yugoslav riches, they had to fight for their independence. Bleh.
As far as learning Arabic. The United States probably has had the single biggest role in the recent (last 50 years) escalation of fighting in the middle east. First we get into a tiff with Iran. Then we arm Saddam. Then we fight Saddam. Then we take Israel's side on their abuse of Palestinians (which, btw, very closely resembles the plight of the albanians in kosovo) in order to get the Jewish vote. Now we're back at it with Saddam, who has not many any offensive move toward any of our ever-so-precious oil suppliers or made any threat of an attack with "a weapon of mass distruction." Not to mention that Saddam probably has one of the highest approval ratings of any leader in the world. Of course, you could point to how he got that approval. You'd have to realize that his approval subsisted through an astounding downturn in the Iraqi economy (thanks to us, hooray for making Iraqis starve.) The United States is STILL playing morality cop of the world. Heck, it's worse today than during the time of Roosevelt. Sure we aren't converting people to Christianity anymore, but we sure are molding international society so that they must follow Christian values and the American Way (tm) lest they be embargoed. If the millitary were focused solely on three things, defense, terrorist espionage (to prevent attacks), and technology development instead of fitting other nations into our progressive corporate mold, we really could cut the budget by 50%. Of course, that would mean 50% less money going to military sector companies, who are some of the biggest campaign contributers. We couldn't have that now could we? I'm not preaching isolationism here, only a lack of offensive meddling in others' affairs. International trade, etc, is just dandy and should be allowed, even with restrictions removed. People should decide whether they want to buy from slave laborers, not the government (who sometimes pins the "slave/prison labor" term on any nation who they feel threatened by in a given industry.)
I know that sounds a whole lot like Harry Brown, but I'm not a Libertarian. We should definitely increase funding of education, the arts, grant-based research, etc in order to further our national character (not the characters of other nations.) We need social programs to get rid of barriers to market entry (as employees/students) once and for all. We also need to tax the bloody hell out of the rich and redistribute the wealth. Yeah, I guess I'm a socialist in some respects. A socialist that seems like a libertarian. My ideals, however, are not "pie in the sky." Look at what Johnson/Carter did during their presidencies. Sure, they fucked up social programs so bad that no one ever wants to try them again (HUD, Wellfair, etc), but they did get a lot done, regardless of how misguided it was.
It means they have the heart to admit that slavery/immigration class disperancies and barriers to market entry still exist. Leveling the playing field with an upward skewed tax rate and federal education funding (equal/student, based on algorithmic distribution, no bloody bureaucratic org. to skim cash) would mostly dispell this in a generation or two, but with the estate tax repealed, school vouchers, whatever else G Dub propeses, the status quo will remain. Plus his kids will get their grandpa's oil wealth. Hooray for aristocracy!
So you're saying that the Pluto mission, the X program, and any further improvements to the I.S.S. were all going nowhere fast? They don't have enough cash. Face it. Personally, I'd just as soon slice the millitary budget in half and then slice that in half and give it to NASA and education. Their 14 billion dollar budget is barely above the cost of one week of that little worthless skirmish in Kosovo a little while ago. I'd rather spend the money on something to advance the human race than something to demolish innocent albanians/serbs.
If successful, expect the follow up 5th installment of the series, "The Holocaust: Fact or Fiction?" with expert commentary by David Duke and John Ashcroft. And please, don't embarass yourself by pointing to one of the oft-referenced Holocaust-denial websites.
Slashdot Mirror
Though this is immeasurably cool, judging by the ever rapid price decline of Globalstar's junk bonds, we can expect Iridium style bankruptcy pretty soon. Hell, Globalstar doesn't even have the massive millitary contract that Iridium did to help keep it afloat. That said, Qualcomm is a pretty big player in the wireless industry (much more so than those involved with Iridium), so there is still a chance that GS could stick around. In my opinion, all they really need to do to have a successful sat. phone company would be to create a small, sexy phone that can still work with the sats, analog cell, and digital cell. Though it would be an engineering marvel to make something like that and not give the users cancer after a couple minutes of use, it would certainly sell like nothing before it in the lucrative CEO/CEO-wannabe market. There are many executive types who would want such a phone, but don't like the golf-club-sized antennas on Iridium phones. The other possible customers - those placed outside of normal cell coverage (ships, airplanes, research stations, etc) are either already pleased with Iridium or stayed away because of the high price.
Oh yeah, they also have to make the system, unlike Iridium, work in buildings, or anywhere in the vicinity of a city. With Iridium you have to go through hell to try and make a call with tall buildings around.
Kruchev: Sir, our propaganda dissemination office has been Slashdotted! Rise from you cryochamber!
Lenin: Must crush capitalism!
Thanks a lot taco...
You mean they all can't play tennis worth a damn?
Not to mention that human germ cells aren't produced until later in the development cycle, and thus would have the same regenerate defects that lie in the DNA of the reasonably young. Once DNA can be physically constructed (via nano-assemblers or whatever) and sequencing becomes more rapid, you could even take a batch of germ cells from a human, use error checking to eliminate mutations/crossovers (just find the most common expression for each locus) and make a *perfect* clone by mating two germ cells with equal genetic code. This is hardly the last nail in the coffin for cloning - even human cloning.
I'm not a big fan of them either, but from the studio's standpoint it helps subsidize the cost of the movie. Lots of people (at least those outside of the DVD collecting community) would be happy to pay $5 less for a movie and watch some commercials. Lots of older DVD players could skip the "legal notices" though, which is quite nice. Quite frankly, the FBI warning isn't even required by law and I'd be happy to see that gone on the "collector editions" that are released. Why not just open right to the menu? Hell, since the content is "scrambled" they don't even need a copyright notice since it's illegal to descramble the stuff regardless.
I saw it while exchanging a CDRW at CompUSA today in their playstation section. I'm reasonably certain it was a LCD, but I don't know how much luck you'd have with the video input. I believe playstations have a "video multi out" type cable that would be specialized for whatever use you want - RF, Svideo, composite, whatever. Of course, once you hack apart the LCD I imagine it would just have some sort of standard input. eio.com used to have a $100 TFT LCD that you could play with to accept composite input really easily. The url doesn't seem to be resolving for me though. Check out http://www.ryanspc.com/carmp3/ for one application of this screen (not mine, but cool).
I think you missed my point. Americans are *slowly* catching on to some internation culture. Of course I know that CT:HD and Moby aren't exactly unamerican, but people still tend to dig them because they have some sort of foreign allure. Perhaps seeing CT will make some brainwashed 12-year-old go look up more wushu movies. By the way, aside from the cockney, lock stock is way less foreign then crouching tiger.
Actually, sony sells a 5" or so LCD for the PS One for $130 and I imagine it is fairly marked up from production costs (it seems like a niche product.) I've seen 6" LCD screens for $100 quite a few times (tft too!), so making a DVD/LCD really isn't that expensive. The only thing keeping the costs so high now ($500 or so for the cheapest) is a lack of demand.
I think the main issue here (pun intended) is that you are in Bangor. Though a congressman from Maine may have attempted to get it to be part of Nixon's city modernization program, it isn't exactly a thriving metropolis. I'd imagine that there are far more homogeneous communities in Scotland than there are diverse metroplexes as well.
That said, the spread of "urban sprawl" throughout America sickens me. Though it is possible to occasionally find non-franchised establishments in most suburban areas (which is, essentially, what America is now outside of deep rural and high-density urban areas), multi-national chains are taking over every town in America.
Yeah, Ben Franklin was a great visionary, but it should be noted that his "worldliness" was quite selfish. He was always disappointed to head over to Britain and not be included in the whole aristocracy deal and that could probably explain a lot of his efforts. Maybe he thought that by giving away his stove he could rise in ye ole status ladder. I suppose many things haven't changed in 230 years.
As far as creativity in America - it's what you make of it. I'm not all too up on force feeding internationalism down the collective throat America. People seem to be catching on to popular world culture (see popularity of movies like Run Lola Run and Crouching Tiger and of euro music like Moby, etc) - sure, this is a relatively mild interest, but it seems to be gaining ground. Eventually with the Internet, et al, Americans will realize that the world has more to offer than N'Sync and Jerry Bruckheimer.
Except that the printing cost is quite similar for CDs and DVDs and that decoding a mpeg-4 file is much more hardware intensive and thus, expensive. Also note that VCD players have been around forever at what is essentially VCR quality (better in some areas, worse in others) and they never caught on. People don't like DVD because it is a convenient, easily breakable/scratchable disc, they like it because of the better quality and the extra features. More likely, we'll end up with double releases of DVDs - barebones and special editions. For $15 you can get the barebones edition with stereo audio and no special features (plus a load of pre-movie advertising like on VHS). Then for $30 you get surround sound, commentary and other features, and no extraneous advertisment. This way the MPAA companies can get people hooked on DVD with the regular discs and then once they decide they like surround sound and the special features they'll start buying the more expensive discs. Disney is really the only company to have started doing this and I really can't believe the others haven't. It is an excellent (if annoying to the DVD collector) business strategy. Lots of studios will release a barebones disc and later a special edition, but this practice is starting to come to an end - most movies out now are labeled "special edition" or something similar regardless of the disc's contents.
Dreamcasts can already play burnt vcd's and I am pretty sure they are working on porting a divx decoder as well. I remember seeing a beta binary for it somewhere. Of course, you can always download a divx encoded flick and change it to vcd for playback in most DVD players.
Sega still does the exact same thing with the Dreamcast (well, not exactly for much longer). The Naomi arcade board is essentially just dreamcast hardware with a solid-state game rom. Now they even have gd-rom (cds) games so you can have a naomi board and simply get new discs and change the cabinet artwork. Porting to the Dreamcast is exceptionally simple. Probably too simple as quite a few games get ported with zero changes. Arcade Naomi games include Crazy Taxi, Samba de Amigo, 18-Wheel-Pro-Trucker, and Ferrari F355 (though that one used 3 naomi boards - one for each screen.)
Of course, every PC game that comes out, for the most part, can be downloaded first in demo form or you can go over and play with a friend's copy. Magazines are given pre-release review copies with specific liscenses. If they have a problem with a no-screenshot clause, they can refuse to review the game. If you want a real world example, look at Trespasser. That game basically became known as the "look at her breasts game" before it was released because every single review had a screenshot of the player looking down as far as possible and checking out their own cleavage. Of course, the game sucked anyway so maybe this was actually beneficial to sales :)
If you get Calligrapher or Transcriber (for CE), you don't even have to write in a specified area. You just write on the screen and it recognizes your action. You can tap a taskbar icon to turn recognition off if you want to use a paint program or something that requires stylus movements rather than tapping. Quite cool - though the actual handwriting recognition could improve. Then again, no one can read my handwriting anyway :)
I have a epods (wince device from a company that went out of business.) It's got a decent battery life of about 6-8 hours depending on use/screen contrast. That's 6-8 hours with a 6"x4" passive matrix 16bit lcd. I also have a 128mb cf card. What for you ask? GPS maps, music, notes, and whatever else I feel like transfering over. A Palm is great for what it is, but this thing can do everything a Palm can do (we also have a IIIx btw) and a hell of a lot more for the same price. It doesn't quite fit in my pocket as it was originally intended to be a web tablet rather than a PDA, but it fits easily enough into my backpack.
I don't really see the advantage of a one month battery life vs. an 8 hour one. I don't know anyone who uses their PDA 8 hours a day, and I can just plug it into the wall when I get home. Now, my Rio has like a 2 hour battery life which is annoying as all hell. That reminds me - I've gotta go run off to compusa and pick up some cheap NiMH's and a recharger.
Now, I'm just as annoyed with SPAM as anyone else here, but just think about the consequences of seeking a law that ends most spam. Obviously, it'd have to be a federal law and even then you'd have to deal with foreign spam. So even if passed, it wouldn't work. More importantly, think about the dangers of putting even more regulatory power over the Internet in the hands of the US Congress. By requesting this regulation, you open up more discussion on Internet taxation, content restrictions, required filtering in public buildings, etc. Just because you can't install an e-mail filter to block out USA.net and, hopefully, hotmail.com, don't go persecuting spammers. The Internet is great because, though this is changing, it's free. You can spam, flame, and virtually threaten people all you like without consequence. Of course, you can also create controversial songs, art, prose, etc that wouldn't get any visibility outside of the Internet.
Now these guys managed to break something with the high volume of spam they sent, so there is a bit of a difference. That said, shouldn't any good server admin have this vulnerability covered? What if your legitimate e-mail bounced through the server during the period when the spamming occurred. Aren't you then possibly responsible for the malfunction? This wasn't an organized attempt to take down the server, so it isn't nearly on the level of intentional DOSs and the like. More like ServerSlaughter. Just think twice before you start writing your congressmen eh?
What was that code again... Oh yeah: /* Square it! */
cin >> X;
X=X^2;
Gilligan.fall("hammock");
Cout X;
Sorry for the simpleton program, I took a C++ class two years ago and that's it.
"This is indeed intriguing; what unit will replace the familiar megahertz"
Hear that? That's the sound of thousands of Apple engineers cheering as they anticipate the coming of widespread acceptance of ByteMark as the universal benchmark of computing power!
Which completely ignores the fact that people invovled in "high fashion" aren't ones to wear a suit till it has been through four sets of elbow patches anyway. Just like most schools will update to the newest textbook editions solely to be "up to date" (though companies force the schools' hands a bit by ceasing publication of old editions, it would still happen.) For a more slashdot-esque example, look at the switch from C++ to Java. Sure, to a point Java is a more "perfect" object-oriented language, but you have to admit that the switch is also mandated by the buzzword-based education philosophy.
I have one response: eeeeeehhhhh! (think Happy Days.) The Fonz would be upset that you forgot his extremely successful spin-off. For what it's worth, I was also impressed with TLG (not to mention the fact that the title makes me remember Airheads.) Sure, you have to "suspend disbelief" a bit, what with the chips w/ built-in modems and internet-controlled airplanes and all. That put aside, it was fun. Certainly a better conspiracy thriller than that Mel Gibson movie that was released a couple years back. The Mission Impossible rip-off that the show opened with was also great.
How are the Chinese dangerous? Sure, they had problems initially, but their government is hardly that of the tao era. Socialism could probably work (look at canada) if we didn't come along and force any budding socialist country to spend >50% of its resources on their millitary. And don't say that we wouldn't attack a budding socialist country because they don't have a strong military. Look at Guatamala, Vietnam (though that hardly worked out), and Cuba. We essentially sanction or fight them just because they are socialist. Try and spare the crap about human rights violations as well. How many people are starving in africa or have aids? Do you have any idea how far this outweighs the deathtoll of the "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo? Hell, if a sect of the US rebelled, I'm sure there would be something very akin to Kosovo's ethnic cleansing. Oh wait, that already happened, go read up on Japanese internment. The albanians weren't that bad off, and they could have moved to albania if they really disliked the race-based class structure in Kosovo (hmmm... we have that too, not to mention that it's a way of life in India.) One thing though - albania is nearly a 3rd world nation. Of course they couldn't move there and help their breathren with their Yugoslav riches, they had to fight for their independence. Bleh. As far as learning Arabic. The United States probably has had the single biggest role in the recent (last 50 years) escalation of fighting in the middle east. First we get into a tiff with Iran. Then we arm Saddam. Then we fight Saddam. Then we take Israel's side on their abuse of Palestinians (which, btw, very closely resembles the plight of the albanians in kosovo) in order to get the Jewish vote. Now we're back at it with Saddam, who has not many any offensive move toward any of our ever-so-precious oil suppliers or made any threat of an attack with "a weapon of mass distruction." Not to mention that Saddam probably has one of the highest approval ratings of any leader in the world. Of course, you could point to how he got that approval. You'd have to realize that his approval subsisted through an astounding downturn in the Iraqi economy (thanks to us, hooray for making Iraqis starve.) The United States is STILL playing morality cop of the world. Heck, it's worse today than during the time of Roosevelt. Sure we aren't converting people to Christianity anymore, but we sure are molding international society so that they must follow Christian values and the American Way (tm) lest they be embargoed. If the millitary were focused solely on three things, defense, terrorist espionage (to prevent attacks), and technology development instead of fitting other nations into our progressive corporate mold, we really could cut the budget by 50%. Of course, that would mean 50% less money going to military sector companies, who are some of the biggest campaign contributers. We couldn't have that now could we? I'm not preaching isolationism here, only a lack of offensive meddling in others' affairs. International trade, etc, is just dandy and should be allowed, even with restrictions removed. People should decide whether they want to buy from slave laborers, not the government (who sometimes pins the "slave/prison labor" term on any nation who they feel threatened by in a given industry.) I know that sounds a whole lot like Harry Brown, but I'm not a Libertarian. We should definitely increase funding of education, the arts, grant-based research, etc in order to further our national character (not the characters of other nations.) We need social programs to get rid of barriers to market entry (as employees/students) once and for all. We also need to tax the bloody hell out of the rich and redistribute the wealth. Yeah, I guess I'm a socialist in some respects. A socialist that seems like a libertarian. My ideals, however, are not "pie in the sky." Look at what Johnson/Carter did during their presidencies. Sure, they fucked up social programs so bad that no one ever wants to try them again (HUD, Wellfair, etc), but they did get a lot done, regardless of how misguided it was.
It means they have the heart to admit that slavery/immigration class disperancies and barriers to market entry still exist. Leveling the playing field with an upward skewed tax rate and federal education funding (equal/student, based on algorithmic distribution, no bloody bureaucratic org. to skim cash) would mostly dispell this in a generation or two, but with the estate tax repealed, school vouchers, whatever else G Dub propeses, the status quo will remain. Plus his kids will get their grandpa's oil wealth. Hooray for aristocracy!
So you're saying that the Pluto mission, the X program, and any further improvements to the I.S.S. were all going nowhere fast? They don't have enough cash. Face it. Personally, I'd just as soon slice the millitary budget in half and then slice that in half and give it to NASA and education. Their 14 billion dollar budget is barely above the cost of one week of that little worthless skirmish in Kosovo a little while ago. I'd rather spend the money on something to advance the human race than something to demolish innocent albanians/serbs.
What's the big deal? 100 days? Jules Verne has already proven that it can be done in 80. Unless they chop down the flight time I won't be impressed.
If successful, expect the follow up 5th installment of the series, "The Holocaust: Fact or Fiction?" with expert commentary by David Duke and John Ashcroft. And please, don't embarass yourself by pointing to one of the oft-referenced Holocaust-denial websites.