It depends on what development environment you are in as to whether XML is efficient to parse.
In Perl (and probably C/C++) I would think that the verbosity of the format would be a limiting feature but that this would not be too bad. I wouldn't think that processor time would be saved by moving to a more terse format, but I/O time might be...
In Java, the fact that the language does not efficiently handle text strings is a major limiting factor and the verbosity only makes this worse. Hence XML and Java is one combination I would try to avoid... I would think that a custom binary serialization format in Java would be *way* faster and use maybe 20% of the memory that an XML format would use in the parsing stage.
The major advantate to XML is that it is a useful language for interchange between applications of structured data. I.e. one application can serialize its data into a form which can be transformed into an object model of the other application. However, it still trades efficiency for human readibility and the fact it is based on older standards (SGML). In other words, it is accepted as the method of choice for such interchange, is human readable, and reasonably familiar, but is inefficient.
I agree that it depends on what you are doing. But reading/writing XML just for a 1-app format makes no sense. Nor does it matter that the data is going to be read later. In that case, I would suggest an RDBMS for many sorts of things.
XML is very good as an object serialization format when you need the ability to transform the object model into that used by another application. So XML in your application would only be a good idea if:
1) Application A was writing files for application B to process or 2) Application A was trying to write data directly to application B's interfaces.
XML is sort of designed to be the second best data format for any application. I disagree.
XML is excellent at two tasks and sucks at everything else.
1) Human-readable object serialization format with possibilities of transformation into other object models (notice I didn't say "formats"). 2) Interfaces between applications based on the above advantage (I would argue that XHTML is an example of this).
As soon as you start going away from this (say, to try to use it for database-related tasks), or try to make your application natively work in XML, you are doing it wrong. XML should be used where it is the right tool for the job and not used anywhere else.
XML is probably the second-worst format for things like: 1) Mass data storage 2) Complex information management
Most things like "master document management" really come down to attempts to do the legitimate two uses but a lot of other things go way outside what the format can reasonably handle.
Personally I disagree with you. XML *is* good at exactly two things:
1) Object serialization format with transformation possibilities, as long as you don't mind the verbosity 2) Interfaces using the above benefits between programs.
To be fair you are basically talking about using XML as a serialization format for hypertext and then transforming to other formats, but in the end it suffers from:
1) Verbosity (like all SGML dialects) compared to something like LaTeX (which is, I believe, better at multi-format document maintenance). Verbosity is an issue because if you have a human editing it, this increases the likely error rate. 2) People think of XML as an information storage device (out to replace the RDBMS). This is just wrong.
The further you get from the two uses I outlined earlier, the worse XML does...
Science also has the concept of the burden of proof and the principle of parsimony, so no, it doesn't. To be perfectly clear, my position is: 1) Postulating the existance of a creator is unscientific. 2) Postuating the lack of existance of a creator is also unscientific.
Both of the above postulates lack testability (you can't test a non-falsifiable idea) which is a key aspect of the scientific method. Hence they are neither scientific theories nor hypotheses. They are, rather, matters of individual interpretation which are currently beyond the scope of scientific inquery.
I wonder what percentage of scientists believe in a higher power. Is your position that they are either nuts or hypocrits? It is my position that their belief is just outside the domain of their work.
BTW, you may find it worth going back to read books like "A brief history of Time" by Stephen Hawking and "Physics and Philosophy" by Werner Heisenberg.
Funny-- my first intellectual love is philology which is a combination of comparitive literature and historical linguistics. May not be quite the social sciences you are talking about, but....
However, in this case we are talking about technical design issues which, while they cannot be wholely separated from cultural issues, are addressed at least in part in terms of functionality by the people who build them. We see borrowing of practical issues from another culture which seems to have technological advances way back in Western history and pre-history (look at the spread of pattern-welded steel swords and spears in the early iron age-- this occurred primarily in Northern Europe among conservative cultures and was never adopted by the more innovation-centric Romans. Areas in the Roman Empire had to wait until the Gothic invasions to get access to usable steel-forging techniques).
Again, look at how an extremely conservative culture (the Proto-Indo-Europeans) invented the spoked, bronze-rimmed wheel and how quickly this lead to other functional improvements (chariots, horse-carts, etc). I personally credit this development as the cause of the population pressures which lead to all the Indo-European migrations we know about as well as the cause of one of the most widespread stories in Indo-European mythology (what Dumezil calls "The War of the Functions").
The major conclusion I can draw from this is that traditional craftsmen learn pretty quickly what works and what doesn't, particularly when in a conservative culture which stresses tradition to a large degree (changes are small and the results more obviously tied to a specific change). They may not have scientific understanding of why, but they do observe and make changes accordingly.
No, it'd be like postulating that anyone believing in quantum theory in, say, the 1600s would have been nuts to do so, which is true. Really? So now we are saying anyone who believes in a creator is nuts to do so? Since when is science the only ontology which matters?
The fact that you can't be absolutely certain that it's true is a reflection of the fact that our scientific knowledge is always an approximation at best. s/approximate/incomplete/
Unless of course you think we will ever understand things to the point where no further discoveries can be made....
The fact that something might be wrong does not make it unscientific; in fact, every single scientific hypothesis might be wrong. That's just the nature of things. It's not possible to know anything for sure. This emphatically does not mean that all hypotheses are equally valid or likely, though. Since Science requires that all hypotheses must be falsifiable to be valid, doesn't this invalidate your idea that science necessitates a sort of atheism? (my own view is that science is entirely agnostic when it comes to religion.)
Furthermore parsimony only says that one cannot postulate an intelligent designer without need. It does *not* state that one cannot exist simply because current data doesn't require one to explain. Hence it does not suggest that the matter is closed, just that it is not necessary based on what information we have at present.
Invoking parsimony to attempt to prove the lack of existance of an intelligent designer would be like stating that various quantum particles didn't exist before we had a reason to suggest that they existed. Nothing in scientific epistomology suggests that things we don't have a present need to use to explain things don't exist.
Hence postulating either the existance or lack thereof relating to an intelligent designer is unscientific.
The problem is that FOSS is rarely cheaper for the initial instalation. Unless you happen to be creating your IT infrastructure now (that means, you are a new company), and have no communication problems with partners, FOSS is actualy more expensive to implement. I agree. It is also usually more expensive in the long run, at least in my experience.
But here is the catch-- this is the case because you can, if you want, pay more to get something which really matches what you need it to do, not what some marketing droid things it should do. And you can pay even more to make it match your business processes optimally.
The issue is not that you generally *have* to pay more for open source, but rather that you *can* do so and that this generally provides a better return on investment (in the case of cost savings elsewhere, better productivity, etc).
Feel free to contact me. My business provides support for just about every open source project out there. What we can't do internally, we can get other people to do. We provide great support (at a price), but then it depends on what you need.
A few of us are both engineers and project managers:-) Also every good project manager I have ever met was also an engineer....
In general, I have found that open source projects when they fail are more salvageable than closed source ones. In short a failure can be rescued when you have the option to do what is necessary to make the solution work for you.
Now, granted, I manage consulting projects, so I don't directly talk as much to DIY people, but I suspect the same observations apply whether a consultant is doing the project or not.
1) Single vendor open source products (SQL-Ledger, MySQL) are commerical products which are released under open source licenses. Getting patches upstream means that they have to go through a single commercial entity with a stake in the process. In general, I consider these the least optimal solutions if more open ones exist.
2) Multi-Vendor open source projects (LedgerSMB, PostgreSQL, Apache, for example) are products where multiple vendors provide first-class support and are able to commit patches upstream.
The increasing DIY approach to open source projects is bad news for the former and good news for the latter.
Postulating a designer poses fundamental problems for scientific epistomology without solving any problems.
This means that the existance of a designer or lack thereof doesn't really have to do with the question of evolution. There may be a designer or not, but one cannot scientifically postulate one way or the other.
ID states that an intelligent designer *is necessary* to explain certain things. Mainstream evolutionary theory states that an intelligent designer *is not necessary* to explain things. It does not postulate the lack of existance of such a designer though.
Joe here makes better canoes than Jim so I will buy them from Joe.
Next year:
Jim has copied Joe's designs and charges less so now I will buy then from Jim.
Next year:
My friends tell me that Joe's new canoes are just a little better than Jim's because he has made some tiny improvements. I guess I will go back to buying them from Joe.
The fact of the matter is that it is generally harder to improve on a good design than a bad one. Yet people want something that is functional and often people learn from their mistakes.
I think the term "natural selection" is misapplied in this case because it is looking at technical developments moreso than cultural developments. Ultimately, however, culture is extremely complex and it is next to impossible to evaluate functional aspects of culture in a statistically valid way.
So designes which are more optimal change slower than those which are less optimal. Sounds like trial and error to me.
My second thought was:
We know that conservative approaches to design (small incrimental changes) tend to do a better job of creating functional items than innovative approaches because designs tend to be based on what works and subject to successive approximation rather than new ideas. That is true of software engineering, canoe building, swordsmithing etc.
In short, it dosn't sound well thought out. Can one see it as analogous to natural selection? Sure, but in this case it is artificial selection....
Someone who can dictate law unilaterally with no legal limits limits.
Presumably the Communist Party in China has that power so that corporate entity is a dictatorship.
A democracy which might be subject to majority rule without limit might also qualify. Fortunately I cannot think of any examples off the top of my head (Singapore might qualify but that seems to me a stretch).
is to look at this as an example of how the same arguments that a lot of people hold against certain video games in this country can be used to censor other literary forms of media.
Personally, I don't care what the Chinese government does to the Chinese citizens. That is the responsibility of the Chinese citizens, not ours, provided that China does not cause problems beyond their current borders. I say the same about Cuba, Russia, etc (note that my concern about Russia has to do with things that the Putin administration appears to have done outside the borders of Russia proper-- in places like The Ukraine and the UK).
Dictatorships aren't all bad and the citizens have to decide what form of government they want. I say this because if you look at Indonesia and compare the country with (dictatorial) Malaysia, the latter has a better human rights record, less radicalism and terrorism, and in general a healthier society than the former where the politics of trying to inject Islam into a secular democratic republic seem to dominate everything. Indeed I say this despite the fact that the Malaysian dictator has silenced political speech, imprisoned political opponents, etc. Our only proper response, IMO, is to make our country the sort of country we want and let the rest of the world decide whether or not to follow.
However, the question here is do we want to take this for what it is-- a warning that the same arguments which are made against one medium (video games) can be applied to any other medium with impunity, and that censorship is censorship regardless of how it is approched.
Today video games. Tomorrow movies. Next week the books.
(BTW, I do think that literature affects adolescents. In particular there is enough evidence to argue that the portrayal of suicide of a sympathetic character in a book can help push people in that direction; there may not be enough evidence to conclusively prove one way or another yet though. The underlying question is the extent to which we allow the government to silence artistic expression simply because it is seen as dangerous.)
Central Europeans are Europeans South Europeans are Europeans North Europeans are Europeans Eastern Europeans are probably Europeans (I assume this includes portions of Turkey too)
However:
Central Americans are not Americans South Americans are not Americans North Americans are not always Americans Eastern Americans don't include all Eastern North Americans or any South Americans.
BTW, when I have travelled in South America, I got in the habit of saying: Soy de los Estados Unidos. rather than Soy es un Americano.
The latter *does* cause confusion in parts of The Americas....
Right, because human rights in, say, Iran are far worse than in any country we reward (say, Uzbekestan, or China). If you really think this is about human rights instead of commercial rights, you haven't been paying attention. For that matter, which of these nations has the best human rights record: Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey? Which has the worst? Which ones are we allied with?
For that matter, when was Saddam's human rights record worst? What was the US's reaction when Saddam gassed the Kurds? Hint-- we didn't institute sanctions. We didn't send in troops. We did nothing.
I don't think that the US qualifies as a world-wide dictator at the moment because we simply don't have the power to force governments to do things our way. At the moment, our army is stretched thin in active duty Afghanistan and Iraq, and in scores of other places (such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea) where we have allowed stability to become dependant on the presense of American forces. Hence we cannot pose any credible military threat to any non-nuclear power anywhere in the world today (air strikes don't count), thanks to W.
BTW, there is something of a world government in the United Nations, and yes, it does mean that countries agree to play the game by certain rules. And yes, there are consequences for ignoring these rules, even to the US.
Ok, it is probably safe to say that most of the junk from the destruction will deorbit quickly as most of it will end up in eccentric orbits picking up atmospheric drag quickly), or even deorbit ahead of the time the satellite would.
However, it seems to me that there is a strong probability that at least a small amount of debris would end up in a stable orbit above where the satellite was. So it seems to me that this is not as safe as we might think from an anti-space-junk perspective.
Re:So when do we get its successor?
on
X Power Tools
·
· Score: 1
Well, a *lot* of software I end up using gets called by that label by people who don't take the time to even try to learn it (LaTeX comes to mind). With X, I generally find that this is done by people who don't understand the capabilities of the software itself (particularly the network-transparent elements).
My own experience is that X was pretty painful to troubleshoot 10 years ago but is far easier to deal with today. If X is a dinosaur then it is rapidly evolving into a modern bird. I suspect that this is why every (generally well-published) attempt to make a new GUI layer for Linux has not come even close to getting widespread support (and really, it isn't *that* much software to support-- a number of toolkits like GTK, QT, Tk and then leave the other software for the maintainers to port since that gives you enough to be useful).
This suggests to me that no successor is here because none of the successor attempts offered any compelling advantage over the older software.
Re:So when do we get its successor?
on
X Power Tools
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunately in this thread though the OP (possibly a troll) simply said that we need something else because X is old.
I am quite happy to disregard that criticism as invalid, not because it came from someone who can't code but because it isn't useful in building better systems. So you are left with one troll being countered by a problematic but all-to-common response.
A better response would have been:
"Then get involved. Help make X better, build an alternative, or something else. These things require participation (including but not limited to coding) so...."
1) Voting is the last step in political participation which validates everything else. Voting is not where participation begins and ends.
2) Participation means engaging in a dialog with your representative and senators. This means calling their office, sending email, etc. Note that mail gets quarantined for a while and so snail mail is less of an option. However, check their web sites-- they usually have contact forms.
3) If we don't talk to our congressmen, then the only people doing that will be the lobbyists. Is that what you really want, for their viewpoints to be dominated by conversations with lobbyists?
4) You may get a form letter back. In that case, a longer reply with citations might be in order. Dialog does not mean a single exchange. It means an ongoing conversation as much as is required.
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CSV is a row-based format.
Better to replace it with an RDBMS than with XML (which is a hierarchical format).
It depends on what development environment you are in as to whether XML is efficient to parse.
In Perl (and probably C/C++) I would think that the verbosity of the format would be a limiting feature but that this would not be too bad. I wouldn't think that processor time would be saved by moving to a more terse format, but I/O time might be...
In Java, the fact that the language does not efficiently handle text strings is a major limiting factor and the verbosity only makes this worse. Hence XML and Java is one combination I would try to avoid... I would think that a custom binary serialization format in Java would be *way* faster and use maybe 20% of the memory that an XML format would use in the parsing stage.
The major advantate to XML is that it is a useful language for interchange between applications of structured data. I.e. one application can serialize its data into a form which can be transformed into an object model of the other application. However, it still trades efficiency for human readibility and the fact it is based on older standards (SGML). In other words, it is accepted as the method of choice for such interchange, is human readable, and reasonably familiar, but is inefficient.
I agree that it depends on what you are doing. But reading/writing XML just for a 1-app format makes no sense. Nor does it matter that the data is going to be read later. In that case, I would suggest an RDBMS for many sorts of things.
XML is very good as an object serialization format when you need the ability to transform the object model into that used by another application. So XML in your application would only be a good idea if:
1) Application A was writing files for application B to process
or
2) Application A was trying to write data directly to application B's interfaces.
Beyond that, XML is worthless.
XML is excellent at two tasks and sucks at everything else.
1) Human-readable object serialization format with possibilities of transformation into other object models (notice I didn't say "formats").
2) Interfaces between applications based on the above advantage (I would argue that XHTML is an example of this).
As soon as you start going away from this (say, to try to use it for database-related tasks), or try to make your application natively work in XML, you are doing it wrong. XML should be used where it is the right tool for the job and not used anywhere else.
XML is probably the second-worst format for things like:
1) Mass data storage
2) Complex information management
Most things like "master document management" really come down to attempts to do the legitimate two uses but a lot of other things go way outside what the format can reasonably handle.
Personally I disagree with you. XML *is* good at exactly two things:
1) Object serialization format with transformation possibilities, as long as you don't mind the verbosity
2) Interfaces using the above benefits between programs.
To be fair you are basically talking about using XML as a serialization format for hypertext and then transforming to other formats, but in the end it suffers from:
1) Verbosity (like all SGML dialects) compared to something like LaTeX (which is, I believe, better at multi-format document maintenance). Verbosity is an issue because if you have a human editing it, this increases the likely error rate.
2) People think of XML as an information storage device (out to replace the RDBMS). This is just wrong.
The further you get from the two uses I outlined earlier, the worse XML does...
1) Postulating the existance of a creator is unscientific.
2) Postuating the lack of existance of a creator is also unscientific.
Both of the above postulates lack testability (you can't test a non-falsifiable idea) which is a key aspect of the scientific method. Hence they are neither scientific theories nor hypotheses. They are, rather, matters of individual interpretation which are currently beyond the scope of scientific inquery.
I wonder what percentage of scientists believe in a higher power. Is your position that they are either nuts or hypocrits? It is my position that their belief is just outside the domain of their work.
BTW, you may find it worth going back to read books like "A brief history of Time" by Stephen Hawking and "Physics and Philosophy" by Werner Heisenberg.
But I suppose they were just nuts right?
Funny-- my first intellectual love is philology which is a combination of comparitive literature and historical linguistics. May not be quite the social sciences you are talking about, but....
However, in this case we are talking about technical design issues which, while they cannot be wholely separated from cultural issues, are addressed at least in part in terms of functionality by the people who build them. We see borrowing of practical issues from another culture which seems to have technological advances way back in Western history and pre-history (look at the spread of pattern-welded steel swords and spears in the early iron age-- this occurred primarily in Northern Europe among conservative cultures and was never adopted by the more innovation-centric Romans. Areas in the Roman Empire had to wait until the Gothic invasions to get access to usable steel-forging techniques).
Again, look at how an extremely conservative culture (the Proto-Indo-Europeans) invented the spoked, bronze-rimmed wheel and how quickly this lead to other functional improvements (chariots, horse-carts, etc). I personally credit this development as the cause of the population pressures which lead to all the Indo-European migrations we know about as well as the cause of one of the most widespread stories in Indo-European mythology (what Dumezil calls "The War of the Functions").
The major conclusion I can draw from this is that traditional craftsmen learn pretty quickly what works and what doesn't, particularly when in a conservative culture which stresses tradition to a large degree (changes are small and the results more obviously tied to a specific change). They may not have scientific understanding of why, but they do observe and make changes accordingly.
But then it is as much a matter of faith in your case in the matter of Science than my religious faith is to me...
Unless of course you think we will ever understand things to the point where no further discoveries can be made.... The fact that something might be wrong does not make it unscientific; in fact, every single scientific hypothesis might be wrong. That's just the nature of things. It's not possible to know anything for sure.
This emphatically does not mean that all hypotheses are equally valid or likely, though. Since Science requires that all hypotheses must be falsifiable to be valid, doesn't this invalidate your idea that science necessitates a sort of atheism? (my own view is that science is entirely agnostic when it comes to religion.)
Only within scientific epistomology.
Furthermore parsimony only says that one cannot postulate an intelligent designer without need. It does *not* state that one cannot exist simply because current data doesn't require one to explain. Hence it does not suggest that the matter is closed, just that it is not necessary based on what information we have at present.
Invoking parsimony to attempt to prove the lack of existance of an intelligent designer would be like stating that various quantum particles didn't exist before we had a reason to suggest that they existed. Nothing in scientific epistomology suggests that things we don't have a present need to use to explain things don't exist.
Hence postulating either the existance or lack thereof relating to an intelligent designer is unscientific.
But here is the catch-- this is the case because you can, if you want, pay more to get something which really matches what you need it to do, not what some marketing droid things it should do. And you can pay even more to make it match your business processes optimally.
The issue is not that you generally *have* to pay more for open source, but rather that you *can* do so and that this generally provides a better return on investment (in the case of cost savings elsewhere, better productivity, etc).
Feel free to contact me. My business provides support for just about every open source project out there. What we can't do internally, we can get other people to do. We provide great support (at a price), but then it depends on what you need.
A few of us are both engineers and project managers :-) Also every good project manager I have ever met was also an engineer....
In general, I have found that open source projects when they fail are more salvageable than closed source ones. In short a failure can be rescued when you have the option to do what is necessary to make the solution work for you.
Now, granted, I manage consulting projects, so I don't directly talk as much to DIY people, but I suspect the same observations apply whether a consultant is doing the project or not.
I see two levels to open source software.
1) Single vendor open source products (SQL-Ledger, MySQL) are commerical products which are released under open source licenses. Getting patches upstream means that they have to go through a single commercial entity with a stake in the process. In general, I consider these the least optimal solutions if more open ones exist.
2) Multi-Vendor open source projects (LedgerSMB, PostgreSQL, Apache, for example) are products where multiple vendors provide first-class support and are able to commit patches upstream.
The increasing DIY approach to open source projects is bad news for the former and good news for the latter.
Postulating a designer poses fundamental problems for scientific epistomology without solving any problems.
This means that the existance of a designer or lack thereof doesn't really have to do with the question of evolution. There may be a designer or not, but one cannot scientifically postulate one way or the other.
ID states that an intelligent designer *is necessary* to explain certain things.
Mainstream evolutionary theory states that an intelligent designer *is not necessary* to explain things. It does not postulate the lack of existance of such a designer though.
Or maybe:
Joe here makes better canoes than Jim so I will buy them from Joe.
Next year:
Jim has copied Joe's designs and charges less so now I will buy then from Jim.
Next year:
My friends tell me that Joe's new canoes are just a little better than Jim's because he has made some tiny improvements. I guess I will go back to buying them from Joe.
The fact of the matter is that it is generally harder to improve on a good design than a bad one. Yet people want something that is functional and often people learn from their mistakes.
I think the term "natural selection" is misapplied in this case because it is looking at technical developments moreso than cultural developments. Ultimately, however, culture is extremely complex and it is next to impossible to evaluate functional aspects of culture in a statistically valid way.
So designes which are more optimal change slower than those which are less optimal. Sounds like trial and error to me.
My second thought was:
We know that conservative approaches to design (small incrimental changes) tend to do a better job of creating functional items than innovative approaches because designs tend to be based on what works and subject to successive approximation rather than new ideas. That is true of software engineering, canoe building, swordsmithing etc.
In short, it dosn't sound well thought out. Can one see it as analogous to natural selection? Sure, but in this case it is artificial selection....
Someone who can dictate law unilaterally with no legal limits limits.
Presumably the Communist Party in China has that power so that corporate entity is a dictatorship.
A democracy which might be subject to majority rule without limit might also qualify. Fortunately I cannot think of any examples off the top of my head (Singapore might qualify but that seems to me a stretch).
is to look at this as an example of how the same arguments that a lot of people hold against certain video games in this country can be used to censor other literary forms of media.
Personally, I don't care what the Chinese government does to the Chinese citizens. That is the responsibility of the Chinese citizens, not ours, provided that China does not cause problems beyond their current borders. I say the same about Cuba, Russia, etc (note that my concern about Russia has to do with things that the Putin administration appears to have done outside the borders of Russia proper-- in places like The Ukraine and the UK).
Dictatorships aren't all bad and the citizens have to decide what form of government they want. I say this because if you look at Indonesia and compare the country with (dictatorial) Malaysia, the latter has a better human rights record, less radicalism and terrorism, and in general a healthier society than the former where the politics of trying to inject Islam into a secular democratic republic seem to dominate everything. Indeed I say this despite the fact that the Malaysian dictator has silenced political speech, imprisoned political opponents, etc. Our only proper response, IMO, is to make our country the sort of country we want and let the rest of the world decide whether or not to follow.
However, the question here is do we want to take this for what it is-- a warning that the same arguments which are made against one medium (video games) can be applied to any other medium with impunity, and that censorship is censorship regardless of how it is approched.
Today video games. Tomorrow movies. Next week the books.
(BTW, I do think that literature affects adolescents. In particular there is enough evidence to argue that the portrayal of suicide of a sympathetic character in a book can help push people in that direction; there may not be enough evidence to conclusively prove one way or another yet though. The underlying question is the extent to which we allow the government to silence artistic expression simply because it is seen as dangerous.)
So:
Central Europeans are Europeans
South Europeans are Europeans
North Europeans are Europeans
Eastern Europeans are probably Europeans (I assume this includes portions of Turkey too)
However:
Central Americans are not Americans
South Americans are not Americans
North Americans are not always Americans
Eastern Americans don't include all Eastern North Americans or any South Americans.
BTW, when I have travelled in South America, I got in the habit of saying:
Soy de los Estados Unidos.
rather than
Soy es un Americano.
The latter *does* cause confusion in parts of The Americas....
Right, because human rights in, say, Iran are far worse than in any country we reward (say, Uzbekestan, or China). If you really think this is about human rights instead of commercial rights, you haven't been paying attention. For that matter, which of these nations has the best human rights record: Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey? Which has the worst? Which ones are we allied with?
For that matter, when was Saddam's human rights record worst? What was the US's reaction when Saddam gassed the Kurds? Hint-- we didn't institute sanctions. We didn't send in troops. We did nothing.
I don't think that the US qualifies as a world-wide dictator at the moment because we simply don't have the power to force governments to do things our way. At the moment, our army is stretched thin in active duty Afghanistan and Iraq, and in scores of other places (such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea) where we have allowed stability to become dependant on the presense of American forces. Hence we cannot pose any credible military threat to any non-nuclear power anywhere in the world today (air strikes don't count), thanks to W.
BTW, there is something of a world government in the United Nations, and yes, it does mean that countries agree to play the game by certain rules. And yes, there are consequences for ignoring these rules, even to the US.
Ok, it is probably safe to say that most of the junk from the destruction will deorbit quickly as most of it will end up in eccentric orbits picking up atmospheric drag quickly), or even deorbit ahead of the time the satellite would.
However, it seems to me that there is a strong probability that at least a small amount of debris would end up in a stable orbit above where the satellite was. So it seems to me that this is not as safe as we might think from an anti-space-junk perspective.
Well, a *lot* of software I end up using gets called by that label by people who don't take the time to even try to learn it (LaTeX comes to mind). With X, I generally find that this is done by people who don't understand the capabilities of the software itself (particularly the network-transparent elements).
My own experience is that X was pretty painful to troubleshoot 10 years ago but is far easier to deal with today. If X is a dinosaur then it is rapidly evolving into a modern bird. I suspect that this is why every (generally well-published) attempt to make a new GUI layer for Linux has not come even close to getting widespread support (and really, it isn't *that* much software to support-- a number of toolkits like GTK, QT, Tk and then leave the other software for the maintainers to port since that gives you enough to be useful).
This suggests to me that no successor is here because none of the successor attempts offered any compelling advantage over the older software.
Unfortunately in this thread though the OP (possibly a troll) simply said that we need something else because X is old.
I am quite happy to disregard that criticism as invalid, not because it came from someone who can't code but because it isn't useful in building better systems. So you are left with one troll being countered by a problematic but all-to-common response.
A better response would have been:
"Then get involved. Help make X better, build an alternative, or something else. These things require participation (including but not limited to coding) so...."
Here is the way I look at it:
1) Voting is the last step in political participation which validates everything else. Voting is not where participation begins and ends.
2) Participation means engaging in a dialog with your representative and senators. This means calling their office, sending email, etc. Note that mail gets quarantined for a while and so snail mail is less of an option. However, check their web sites-- they usually have contact forms.
3) If we don't talk to our congressmen, then the only people doing that will be the lobbyists. Is that what you really want, for their viewpoints to be dominated by conversations with lobbyists?
4) You may get a form letter back. In that case, a longer reply with citations might be in order. Dialog does not mean a single exchange. It means an ongoing conversation as much as is required.