Dude, China currently has more US currency reserves than the US does
It also has a population of 1.3 billion people among which those resources are spread. The US's economic backbone is based on a mere 300 million. That's about a 4:1 difference. The US is still more economically powerful, and will remain that way for now. I'll start worrying when modern living conditions, technology, and high-paying jobs become available to ALL 1.3 billion Chinese, and not just those living in major cities.
Or to put it bluntly, the Communist control is not conducive to strong economic development. The USSR also tried to run their economy out of just the major economic centers and went bankrupt for it. (Much of the US's strength comes just as much from its rural economic machines as it does its high-population areas.)
The Cold War couldn't have been won by either side, so we bankrupted the USSR.
That mostly happened on its own.
No, it didn't. The USSR was definitely headed in that direction, but we seized the opportunity to stick it to them. Remember the Star Wars program? It was mostly hogwash that forced the Russians to spend incredible amounts of money to "keep up". Remember the Russian Space Shuttle? Yeah, it cost them a fortune to "keep up". (Amusingly, for no real return on space technology.)
Altogether, the US was able to force the hand of the USSR on some really expensive stuff. By the time it collapsed, the government was bankrupt and the leaders were all too ready to get out of office.
All of which China has in spades over the US right now.
Not really. The Chinese economy has been improving, but it's nowhere near powerful enough to match the US's economy. If it was, they'd be devoting all their economic power toward producing products for the average Chinese person and not the average American or European.
Make no mistake: China is really good at posturing. They make themselves out to be a lot more threatening than they actually are. That's not to say that they are not dangerous on a world stage, merely that they cannot compete with US economic output. Yes, our heavy industry would take a huge hit if China stopped producing tomorrow. But it would recover very fast (partially through a factory building program, and partially by shifting to our industry outsourced to other areas of the world), and have no real impact on our ability to execute military or space-based industry. (Both of which are required to be handled by US companies.)
China doesn't have the funds to build an Ares rocket. Keep in mind that these things are based on shuttle technology. They're going to be incredibly expensive for us to fly until we get better at mass production, much less a country that has only minor space-infrastructure.
- WWII - Space Race - Cold War
The U.S. won these because it's an economic powerhouse, not because it was technologically superior. Heck, Germany was kicking our asses on technology in WWII and Russia was ahead of us for most of the space race. The Cold War couldn't have been won by either side, so we bankrupted the USSR.
The deciding factor in all cases was that we could out-spend, out-manufacture, and over-commit manpower that the opposition could not. Combined with a bit of American "can-do" attitude, these factors have always lead the US to victory.
China does not have the economic power (at least, not yet) to compete in a true space-race. If they did, they wouldn't actually need our designs. They'd be capable of making their own.
47" is definitely a good size. Exactly how close are you to the TV? If you used your Wii Remote at the same distance I do during development (I have a 15" LCD Monitor), you're going to have a fully-immersive experience!:-P
If your TV is big enough and you're standing at least 4 feet away, then its probably your sensor bar. Either there is too back background IR light, or the bar is becoming invisible at certain angles. If it's the latter, you can try one of two things:
1. Move the sensor bar closer to the edge of the television. Mine has a lip protruding slightly over the edge of my monitor. (If you're not already aware, there are sticky strips on the bottom of the sensor bar! Just peel back the edges of the "feet".)
2. Mount the sensor bar underneath the television. This will give the Wii Remote a different angle of view. Just remember to recalibrate in the Wii Remote settings screen.
Ah, I see how that could be a problem. The minimum distance is really about 4-5 feet from the screen. Even then, you pretty much need to be in a chair to play effectively.
Possibly the best advice I can give you is this: Get a bigger TV.:-)
I keep wanting to bash the thing against my coffee table because it won't detect that it is pointing at the screen.
Check that there are no bright IR light sources nearby. Sunlight and Christmas lights are two common ones that confuse the Wii Remote. Also make sure that your Sensor Bar is far enough forward that it isn't blocked at certain angles.
An easy way to figure things out is to go into the Wii Remote settings screen. There's a black and white image there that effectively shows you exactly what the Wii Remote "sees". You should see a few dots that do not flicker or go away as you move the remote around. If the dots disappear at any point during your tests, you may need to adjust your sensor bar.
If the lights appear to be working okay, but the remote is still confused, try turning down the sensitivity of the remote. That will encourage the remote to ignore light sources other than the sensor bar.
What makes you think that web apps are the only ones capable of having document sharing?
I didn't. I said that the implementation method used is an indicator of the quality of work. As I said, hopefully they'll start putting more work into their solution and begin closing the gap.:-)
I dont trust floating point number rounding to a browser javascript engine
Nearly all Javascript engines use IEEE 754 numbers. The rounding errors have more to do with the engine than the underlying platform. I found that out the hard way when I imported a spreadsheet into GoogleSheet with computations that resulted in very small numbers. GoogleSheet truncated the number to two digits for display (somewhat okay, though I would have preferred if it kept the original formatting) but then based all further computations on the truncated number! (Definitely, not okay.) Suddenly, my mass calculations went from many, many tons to zero.
As you might imagine, I haven't used GoogleSheets for scientific or engineering computations since.:-/
Looks like the program is projected over a VNC, Remote X, Citrix, or some other remote GUI session. The good news is that such a design makes the software as interactive as a desktop application. The bad news is that it's a sign of minimal changes, which can sometimes mean a poor-quality product. (e.g. The complaints about lack of document sharing.)
I'm a big fan of delivering software over the web, but simply remote GUI sessions aren't going to do it. Consumers may not know *why* the software acts the way it does, but they will see through the ruse to something they can get for much less than the asking price. Heck, setup a Unix server or Windows Terminal Server and you can push out the app just as effectively.
I'll give them an B+ for effort, but a D- for execution. Let's hope they customize the app a bit more in the future, and close the gaps to become a competitive product.
Try again. The Vectrex was a reasonably popular machine. It was simply unlucky enough to come into existence a mere year before the Great Video Game Crash of '83. In a Post-Crash World (apologies to John Katz), not a single *home-console* system did anything more than limp along. Everyone was buying computers like the Commodore 64, instead. It wasn't until Nintendo released the NES that home-console systems took off again.
Flash is useful for a lot more than just Youtube. While video is possibly the most common use for Flash (it's the only *standard* that all browser makers can agree on) it's also used for purposes like web games. I know in of itself that's not all that interesting, but it's also one of two ways of making homebrews for the Wii Internet Channel.
The AMF format has been reverse engineered before, but having it fully published should make it easier to create desktop integration programs that play Wii games using a Wiimote with the desktop as if they were on the Wii. (The WiiCade API uses a local connection which passes AMF messages through a shared memory pool.)
Since when is "struggling" a synonym of "bankrupt"? Atari "struggled" with its 7800 and Jaguar systems in the late-80's/early-90's, but it closed its doors with money in the bank. The same was effectively true of Apple. They had money in the bank, but they were quickly losing relevance in the market.
I was going to make a flippant remark about how you could implement the new government and call it "Communism", but it occurred to me that a bit of education would be better.
You see, Direct Democracy (rule by consensus of the masses) has been considered many times in history. Unfortunately, no such democracy really got off the ground or survived. There are simply too many competing interests to make it viable. In the few instances where there is a consensus, a Tyranny of the Masses can often create worse conditions for some individuals. Effectively, you have no real justice.
Representational Democracies are intended to blend the best aspects of consensus with the best aspects of a Benevolent Dictator. (An example of such a dictator was Emporor Trajan of the Roman Empire.) By electing someone to represent their views, the majority is able to have their viewpoints expressed but with their competing interests solved at the level of the representative. The representatives then work out their differences and come to an agreement that (if they're doing their job correctly) generally pleases the people they represent.
Of course, what is to stop the representatives from carrying out tyranny against people they do not represent? What is to prevent them from creating unjust conditions for individuals in their attempts to improve the life of the majority of those they represent? Worse yet, what is to prevent an official that the representatives grant power to from using that power to take control? (e.g. The Roman Republic being overthrown to become the Roman Empire.) That's where checks and balances step in.
In modern democracies, these checks tend to take the form of legalistic means or division of power. The U.S. Constitution, for example, grants basic rights which are then upheld by the courts. It is the responsibility of the Supreme Court to ensure that the representatives never override the intent of the basic rights granted by the Constitution. Another example is the control of the military. The direct control of military assets in the U.S. are divided among individual states. Funding for those assets is controlled by Congress. Use of the assets is controlled by the President, but War may not be declared without the approval of Congress.
This division of power ensures that neither the President or Congress can turn the military on their own people. Those in the military report to the President of the United States, but their actual responsibility is to the citizens and the states. (In ancient Rome, the responsibility of the soldiers was to their commander. A mistake that allowed Julius Caesar to seize control.)
What I'm getting at is that the design for modern governments has been well thought through. There are a lot of reasons behind the layout of our governments, and they are (to date) the best balance for free societies that history has been able to produce. Simply throwing away the government in favor of anarchy ignores the thousands of years of history that have lead to the abolishment of empires and dictator rule.
Today's governments can still be improved, but let's make sure we're making those improvements with a full awareness of what our ancestors learned.
Congressman 'Hollywood' Howard Berman (D-CA) used a House subcommittee hearing today to express his view that the DMCA was in need of a rewrite. In his view, it doesn't go far enough.
So the story is that yet another Congressman is proving himself to be an idiot. If he makes enough noise, he'll probably be indicted in a few years for some sort of unrelated wrongdoing. Welcome to the world of politics. Next time elect a better representative. Or even better, get involved and run for yourself. While I don't always agree with their platform, the representatives that run because they have a solid cause are always more effective and trustworthy than the career politicians.
Of course, honest politicians rarely make headlines...
Presumably, the battery cells of say, a car, could be charged in parallel. So let's say that a recharge takes about 15-20 minutes. Seems that the "pumping station" of the future would take the Convenience Stores of today to their logical conclusion.
Instead of a few pumps, you see a small parking lot. You pull into a space and hook up the charger. Then you go inside and get a meal, some coffee for the road, or just make a pitstop. You then go to the counter to check if the charge is complete and pay for the electricity you used. Go back out to your car, disconnect the charger, and you're ready to hit the road again.
Re:That was never "obvious".
on
Can Time Slow Down?
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· Score: 3, Informative
They accused Galileo of heresy and placed him under permanent house arrest specifically for following Copernicus' model.
Actually? No. Galileo met resistance from the church because of his belief in a heliocentric model, but he was not arrested for it. Far from it, in fact. He was a good friend of the Pope and had his ideas seriously considered for a time. Eventually he was instructed by the Pope to keep his writings in the theoretical realm and to present both sides of the argument.
Where Galileo eventually tripped up was that he used the character of Simplicus to represent the Pope's opinions in his writings, effectively calling the Pope a simpleton and fool. This didn't go over very well with the Vatican and he stood trial for heresy. His sentence was actually one of imprisonment, but (perhaps as a last gesture from a former friend) his sentence was reduced to house arrest.
As much as I disagree with the Catholic Church's actions both past and present, I do wish that people would stop using Galileo's arrest as an example unless they well and truly understand the history behind the affair.
The Microprocessor's instruction set has been open for decades. It's all the hardware around the SPARC processor that OpenBSD had trouble getting info on. Sun used to make a huge number of hardware devices for which they provided no documentation on the internals. Of course, these days, most of it is pretty standard. But back then, hearing words like "SBUS" used to make people shudder.
Microsoft implemented Javascript with full DOM access at the time Netscape Navigator had rather limited and tedious Javascript support.
Correct. And what happened to Netscape's market share?
Now a bunch of folks came together and declared that Microsoft got it all wrong and has to re-implement its browser with 80% market share to conform to minority's opinion of how a web browser should behave.
I hardly think that a "minority" of the development community are the ones mad at Microsoft. Anyone who has used IE to any appreciable degree is mad at them. When 5.0 came out back in '99, it was incredible. The best browser, bar none. Microsoft released a fairly insignificant update called 6.0 in '01 and that was where the browser sat. For about 5 years. Then when everyone had almost given up hope that Microsoft would keep developing their browser, they announced 7.0. They also announced how they were going to meet W3C standards and make developer's lives better. 7.0 came out, and it turns out that Microsoft couldn't even be bothered to add support for simple things like DOM2 Events or SVG. (Things which they effectively already had support for, just in a proprietary-yet-not-quite-dislike manner.) In reality, they stamped out a few CSS bugs, screwed up the IE interface, then developed a new certificate scheme that was practically the same as the old one but made more money for all involved.
I say punish Microsoft for illegal use of its monopoly power, but otherwise let critics develop their own software and let the best program win.
The funny thing is, the only reason why IE hasn't died out is aforementioned monopoly power. I have met very few users who prefer IE over Firefox or Safari. However, I have met managers who force the use of IE (thus leaving themselves vulnerable to IE's massive security holes) for the purpose of 100% Microsoft "corporate standards". As a result, IE has lost market share in the home computer segment, but is not taking any losses in the B2B arena. And it's NOT because it's a good product.
The whole/only purpose of AJAX is to have your app work in IE6/IE7 without installing any plugins not bundled with the OS.
Uhhh, no. The point of AJAX is to deliver rich applications over the internet through a standard delivery mechanism. Installing software is not network delivery of an application. Webapps generally provide a true network delivery of an application, but AJAX is a part of a toolkit that provides for a far richer set of applications delivered over the 'net.
If you require an extra download of Firefox, you might as well ask people to download Java or a regular native app which much better UI and performance.
I don't require the download of Firefox. Most of my apps require the use of a browser that meets standards. Which IE is failing to do. For that, the market should reject it. The sooner that pushes down to the customer level, the better. (IE is slowly dieing. I can't wait until it finally dies off altogether.) That being said, I make a rather huge effort to provide Javascript shunts to dynamically patch IE to the latest standards. Need CANVAS? Use the Google VML widget. No installation, just include the JS file. Need GlobalStorage? Create a hidden Flash component and map to the API to provide that exact functionality through SharedObjects. (Flash is bundled, so there's no installing extra components.) Need DOM2 Events? Patch the event system to wrap addEventListener around Microsoft's proprietary attachEvent. Need SVG? Use Javascript to render it through the VML system.
The key to these solutions is that they are forcing IE to be compatible with the standards, but in a way that's transparent to the user. It's a sucky solution when compared with getting Microsoft to fix their %$$#@ browser, but it's a forward compatible solution should Microsoft ever pull their head out.
Just try to encrypt the whole online word processing document with many images before saving it to hosted storage space.
I have done this sort of thing. It really is not that bad. You won't find any production implementations of it, though, because that's what SSL is for. Additional security is simply paranoia and does not increase security to any appreciable degree.
Oh, and RC4 is not a pinnacle of security.
No one said it was. However, it works well enough for any situation you need a stream cipher for. If you need a block cipher or asymmetric encryption (been there, done that, what a major PITA), feel free to implement it. It will be slower than a native implemenation, but not so slow as to be unusable. (Assuming that the encryption you're using would be "usable" in *any* language.) Your example of "saving a document" might require a "Saving..." dialog for a few seconds, but that would probably be there regardless of the encryption.
Perhaps more people can invest in zippy servers if clients do 90% of the processing, cache all received data and changes and just connect to synchronize once an hour.
That is the goal, actually. The richer AJAX applications become, the less bandwidth and server-CPU intensive they become. Which makes it easier to provide low-latency results to clients. Of course, a badly designed AJAX app can do the exact opposite, so it's not a panacea.
There's a lot of confusion over the origins of Javascript, but it basically went like this:
Self Java -> Mocha -> Livescript -> Javascript
Brendan Eich practically never talks about the Self Java/Mocha days of Javascript. Not all that many people even remember the working title "Mocha". (Implying its early relationship to Java.) Scripting of Java was the goal in those revisions. Javascript 1.0 was kicked out the door incomplete, but 1.1 addressed the initial issues. The JavaClass and Package objects were added, and it became possible to run Java code without an Applet. It was pretty darn nifty, and still can be if you have Firefox with a Java plugin. (See my response lower in the thread for more info.)
The branding concept was stupid, but there was solid reasoning behind it. And it was more than just because Netscape and Sun were partners.
Slashdot Mirror
Do I think that China is run that way now? Absolutely not. I know it is.
Wake the hell up!!!
It also has a population of 1.3 billion people among which those resources are spread. The US's economic backbone is based on a mere 300 million. That's about a 4:1 difference. The US is still more economically powerful, and will remain that way for now. I'll start worrying when modern living conditions, technology, and high-paying jobs become available to ALL 1.3 billion Chinese, and not just those living in major cities.
Or to put it bluntly, the Communist control is not conducive to strong economic development. The USSR also tried to run their economy out of just the major economic centers and went bankrupt for it. (Much of the US's strength comes just as much from its rural economic machines as it does its high-population areas.)
No, it didn't. The USSR was definitely headed in that direction, but we seized the opportunity to stick it to them. Remember the Star Wars program? It was mostly hogwash that forced the Russians to spend incredible amounts of money to "keep up". Remember the Russian Space Shuttle? Yeah, it cost them a fortune to "keep up". (Amusingly, for no real return on space technology.)
Altogether, the US was able to force the hand of the USSR on some really expensive stuff. By the time it collapsed, the government was bankrupt and the leaders were all too ready to get out of office.
Not really. The Chinese economy has been improving, but it's nowhere near powerful enough to match the US's economy. If it was, they'd be devoting all their economic power toward producing products for the average Chinese person and not the average American or European.
Make no mistake: China is really good at posturing. They make themselves out to be a lot more threatening than they actually are. That's not to say that they are not dangerous on a world stage, merely that they cannot compete with US economic output. Yes, our heavy industry would take a huge hit if China stopped producing tomorrow. But it would recover very fast (partially through a factory building program, and partially by shifting to our industry outsourced to other areas of the world), and have no real impact on our ability to execute military or space-based industry. (Both of which are required to be handled by US companies.)
China doesn't have the funds to build an Ares rocket. Keep in mind that these things are based on shuttle technology. They're going to be incredibly expensive for us to fly until we get better at mass production, much less a country that has only minor space-infrastructure.
- WWII
- Space Race
- Cold War
The U.S. won these because it's an economic powerhouse, not because it was technologically superior. Heck, Germany was kicking our asses on technology in WWII and Russia was ahead of us for most of the space race. The Cold War couldn't have been won by either side, so we bankrupted the USSR.
The deciding factor in all cases was that we could out-spend, out-manufacture, and over-commit manpower that the opposition could not. Combined with a bit of American "can-do" attitude, these factors have always lead the US to victory.
China does not have the economic power (at least, not yet) to compete in a true space-race. If they did, they wouldn't actually need our designs. They'd be capable of making their own.
47" is definitely a good size. Exactly how close are you to the TV? If you used your Wii Remote at the same distance I do during development (I have a 15" LCD Monitor), you're going to have a fully-immersive experience! :-P
If your TV is big enough and you're standing at least 4 feet away, then its probably your sensor bar. Either there is too back background IR light, or the bar is becoming invisible at certain angles. If it's the latter, you can try one of two things:
1. Move the sensor bar closer to the edge of the television. Mine has a lip protruding slightly over the edge of my monitor. (If you're not already aware, there are sticky strips on the bottom of the sensor bar! Just peel back the edges of the "feet".)
2. Mount the sensor bar underneath the television. This will give the Wii Remote a different angle of view. Just remember to recalibrate in the Wii Remote settings screen.
Good luck!
Ah, I see how that could be a problem. The minimum distance is really about 4-5 feet from the screen. Even then, you pretty much need to be in a chair to play effectively.
Possibly the best advice I can give you is this: Get a bigger TV.
Check that there are no bright IR light sources nearby. Sunlight and Christmas lights are two common ones that confuse the Wii Remote. Also make sure that your Sensor Bar is far enough forward that it isn't blocked at certain angles.
An easy way to figure things out is to go into the Wii Remote settings screen. There's a black and white image there that effectively shows you exactly what the Wii Remote "sees". You should see a few dots that do not flicker or go away as you move the remote around. If the dots disappear at any point during your tests, you may need to adjust your sensor bar.
If the lights appear to be working okay, but the remote is still confused, try turning down the sensitivity of the remote. That will encourage the remote to ignore light sources other than the sensor bar.
I didn't. I said that the implementation method used is an indicator of the quality of work. As I said, hopefully they'll start putting more work into their solution and begin closing the gap.
Oh hai! I is in ur documentz, sellun ur mrk it in nfo, n catchun ur terriorizoring stuff. M'kay? K thx bye.
Hmm... sounds like computer code to me...
Nearly all Javascript engines use IEEE 754 numbers. The rounding errors have more to do with the engine than the underlying platform. I found that out the hard way when I imported a spreadsheet into GoogleSheet with computations that resulted in very small numbers. GoogleSheet truncated the number to two digits for display (somewhat okay, though I would have preferred if it kept the original formatting) but then based all further computations on the truncated number! (Definitely, not okay.) Suddenly, my mass calculations went from many, many tons to zero.
As you might imagine, I haven't used GoogleSheets for scientific or engineering computations since.
I should read a little more carefully. The article says that it's VNC. Soo... now you know. And you don't even have to RTFA. :-P
Looks like the program is projected over a VNC, Remote X, Citrix, or some other remote GUI session. The good news is that such a design makes the software as interactive as a desktop application. The bad news is that it's a sign of minimal changes, which can sometimes mean a poor-quality product. (e.g. The complaints about lack of document sharing.)
I'm a big fan of delivering software over the web, but simply remote GUI sessions aren't going to do it. Consumers may not know *why* the software acts the way it does, but they will see through the ruse to something they can get for much less than the asking price. Heck, setup a Unix server or Windows Terminal Server and you can push out the app just as effectively.
I'll give them an B+ for effort, but a D- for execution. Let's hope they customize the app a bit more in the future, and close the gaps to become a competitive product.
Try again. The Vectrex was a reasonably popular machine. It was simply unlucky enough to come into existence a mere year before the Great Video Game Crash of '83. In a Post-Crash World (apologies to John Katz), not a single *home-console* system did anything more than limp along. Everyone was buying computers like the Commodore 64, instead. It wasn't until Nintendo released the NES that home-console systems took off again.
Flash is useful for a lot more than just Youtube. While video is possibly the most common use for Flash (it's the only *standard* that all browser makers can agree on) it's also used for purposes like web games. I know in of itself that's not all that interesting, but it's also one of two ways of making homebrews for the Wii Internet Channel.
The AMF format has been reverse engineered before, but having it fully published should make it easier to create desktop integration programs that play Wii games using a Wiimote with the desktop as if they were on the Wii. (The WiiCade API uses a local connection which passes AMF messages through a shared memory pool.)
"Self Java" was a language that Mr. Eich worked on that allowed scripting of Java using Self syntax. That is about the sum of what I know about it.
Since when is "struggling" a synonym of "bankrupt"? Atari "struggled" with its 7800 and Jaguar systems in the late-80's/early-90's, but it closed its doors with money in the bank. The same was effectively true of Apple. They had money in the bank, but they were quickly losing relevance in the market.
Beat Apple at their own game? Sounds like admitting defeat to me!
"Yeah, we just realized that thanks to *cough*theZune*cough* PlaysForSure does not, in fact, play for sure."
I was going to make a flippant remark about how you could implement the new government and call it "Communism", but it occurred to me that a bit of education would be better.
You see, Direct Democracy (rule by consensus of the masses) has been considered many times in history. Unfortunately, no such democracy really got off the ground or survived. There are simply too many competing interests to make it viable. In the few instances where there is a consensus, a Tyranny of the Masses can often create worse conditions for some individuals. Effectively, you have no real justice.
Representational Democracies are intended to blend the best aspects of consensus with the best aspects of a Benevolent Dictator. (An example of such a dictator was Emporor Trajan of the Roman Empire.) By electing someone to represent their views, the majority is able to have their viewpoints expressed but with their competing interests solved at the level of the representative. The representatives then work out their differences and come to an agreement that (if they're doing their job correctly) generally pleases the people they represent.
Of course, what is to stop the representatives from carrying out tyranny against people they do not represent? What is to prevent them from creating unjust conditions for individuals in their attempts to improve the life of the majority of those they represent? Worse yet, what is to prevent an official that the representatives grant power to from using that power to take control? (e.g. The Roman Republic being overthrown to become the Roman Empire.) That's where checks and balances step in.
In modern democracies, these checks tend to take the form of legalistic means or division of power. The U.S. Constitution, for example, grants basic rights which are then upheld by the courts. It is the responsibility of the Supreme Court to ensure that the representatives never override the intent of the basic rights granted by the Constitution. Another example is the control of the military. The direct control of military assets in the U.S. are divided among individual states. Funding for those assets is controlled by Congress. Use of the assets is controlled by the President, but War may not be declared without the approval of Congress.
This division of power ensures that neither the President or Congress can turn the military on their own people. Those in the military report to the President of the United States, but their actual responsibility is to the citizens and the states. (In ancient Rome, the responsibility of the soldiers was to their commander. A mistake that allowed Julius Caesar to seize control.)
What I'm getting at is that the design for modern governments has been well thought through. There are a lot of reasons behind the layout of our governments, and they are (to date) the best balance for free societies that history has been able to produce. Simply throwing away the government in favor of anarchy ignores the thousands of years of history that have lead to the abolishment of empires and dictator rule.
Today's governments can still be improved, but let's make sure we're making those improvements with a full awareness of what our ancestors learned.
So the story is that yet another Congressman is proving himself to be an idiot. If he makes enough noise, he'll probably be indicted in a few years for some sort of unrelated wrongdoing. Welcome to the world of politics. Next time elect a better representative. Or even better, get involved and run for yourself. While I don't always agree with their platform, the representatives that run because they have a solid cause are always more effective and trustworthy than the career politicians.
Of course, honest politicians rarely make headlines...
Presumably, the battery cells of say, a car, could be charged in parallel. So let's say that a recharge takes about 15-20 minutes. Seems that the "pumping station" of the future would take the Convenience Stores of today to their logical conclusion.
Instead of a few pumps, you see a small parking lot. You pull into a space and hook up the charger. Then you go inside and get a meal, some coffee for the road, or just make a pitstop. You then go to the counter to check if the charge is complete and pay for the electricity you used. Go back out to your car, disconnect the charger, and you're ready to hit the road again.
Actually? No. Galileo met resistance from the church because of his belief in a heliocentric model, but he was not arrested for it. Far from it, in fact. He was a good friend of the Pope and had his ideas seriously considered for a time. Eventually he was instructed by the Pope to keep his writings in the theoretical realm and to present both sides of the argument.
Where Galileo eventually tripped up was that he used the character of Simplicus to represent the Pope's opinions in his writings, effectively calling the Pope a simpleton and fool. This didn't go over very well with the Vatican and he stood trial for heresy. His sentence was actually one of imprisonment, but (perhaps as a last gesture from a former friend) his sentence was reduced to house arrest.
As much as I disagree with the Catholic Church's actions both past and present, I do wish that people would stop using Galileo's arrest as an example unless they well and truly understand the history behind the affair.
The Microprocessor's instruction set has been open for decades. It's all the hardware around the SPARC processor that OpenBSD had trouble getting info on. Sun used to make a huge number of hardware devices for which they provided no documentation on the internals. Of course, these days, most of it is pretty standard. But back then, hearing words like "SBUS" used to make people shudder.
Correct. And what happened to Netscape's market share?
I hardly think that a "minority" of the development community are the ones mad at Microsoft. Anyone who has used IE to any appreciable degree is mad at them. When 5.0 came out back in '99, it was incredible. The best browser, bar none. Microsoft released a fairly insignificant update called 6.0 in '01 and that was where the browser sat. For about 5 years. Then when everyone had almost given up hope that Microsoft would keep developing their browser, they announced 7.0. They also announced how they were going to meet W3C standards and make developer's lives better. 7.0 came out, and it turns out that Microsoft couldn't even be bothered to add support for simple things like DOM2 Events or SVG. (Things which they effectively already had support for, just in a proprietary-yet-not-quite-dislike manner.) In reality, they stamped out a few CSS bugs, screwed up the IE interface, then developed a new certificate scheme that was practically the same as the old one but made more money for all involved.
The funny thing is, the only reason why IE hasn't died out is aforementioned monopoly power. I have met very few users who prefer IE over Firefox or Safari. However, I have met managers who force the use of IE (thus leaving themselves vulnerable to IE's massive security holes) for the purpose of 100% Microsoft "corporate standards". As a result, IE has lost market share in the home computer segment, but is not taking any losses in the B2B arena. And it's NOT because it's a good product.
Uhhh, no. The point of AJAX is to deliver rich applications over the internet through a standard delivery mechanism. Installing software is not network delivery of an application. Webapps generally provide a true network delivery of an application, but AJAX is a part of a toolkit that provides for a far richer set of applications delivered over the 'net.
I don't require the download of Firefox. Most of my apps require the use of a browser that meets standards. Which IE is failing to do. For that, the market should reject it. The sooner that pushes down to the customer level, the better. (IE is slowly dieing. I can't wait until it finally dies off altogether.) That being said, I make a rather huge effort to provide Javascript shunts to dynamically patch IE to the latest standards. Need CANVAS? Use the Google VML widget. No installation, just include the JS file. Need GlobalStorage? Create a hidden Flash component and map to the API to provide that exact functionality through SharedObjects. (Flash is bundled, so there's no installing extra components.) Need DOM2 Events? Patch the event system to wrap addEventListener around Microsoft's proprietary attachEvent. Need SVG? Use Javascript to render it through the VML system.
The key to these solutions is that they are forcing IE to be compatible with the standards, but in a way that's transparent to the user. It's a sucky solution when compared with getting Microsoft to fix their %$$#@ browser, but it's a forward compatible solution should Microsoft ever pull their head out.
I have done this sort of thing. It really is not that bad. You won't find any production implementations of it, though, because that's what SSL is for. Additional security is simply paranoia and does not increase security to any appreciable degree.
No one said it was. However, it works well enough for any situation you need a stream cipher for. If you need a block cipher or asymmetric encryption (been there, done that, what a major PITA), feel free to implement it. It will be slower than a native implemenation, but not so slow as to be unusable. (Assuming that the encryption you're using would be "usable" in *any* language.) Your example of "saving a document" might require a "Saving..." dialog for a few seconds, but that would probably be there regardless of the encryption.
That is the goal, actually. The richer AJAX applications become, the less bandwidth and server-CPU intensive they become. Which makes it easier to provide low-latency results to clients. Of course, a badly designed AJAX app can do the exact opposite, so it's not a panacea.
There's a lot of confusion over the origins of Javascript, but it basically went like this:
Self Java -> Mocha -> Livescript -> Javascript
Brendan Eich practically never talks about the Self Java/Mocha days of Javascript. Not all that many people even remember the working title "Mocha". (Implying its early relationship to Java.) Scripting of Java was the goal in those revisions. Javascript 1.0 was kicked out the door incomplete, but 1.1 addressed the initial issues. The JavaClass and Package objects were added, and it became possible to run Java code without an Applet. It was pretty darn nifty, and still can be if you have Firefox with a Java plugin. (See my response lower in the thread for more info.)
The branding concept was stupid, but there was solid reasoning behind it. And it was more than just because Netscape and Sun were partners.