People actually do research on crime rates and crime rates in general do appear to be lower in Taiwan than they are in the US.
People DO actually do research and most of that research shows that crime statistics are highly unreliable because the crime statistics are reported by the government and government, ALL governments, lie about crime statistics. That's why I said "everybody lies".
I walk with my flashy new notebook in my hand through the back alleys of Taipei at night, you do the same for Harlem. Wanna try?
I don't have to. I've done it. East Palo Alto and Richmond are way rougher than Harlem and I've never been attacked with or without my laptop. Just because it's filled with black people doesn't mean the town is automatically a death sentence. You've probably never even been to Harlem. You're much more likely to be a crime victim in Manhattan where you have the armies of pickpockets.
Just to remind you: although China claims Taiwan as a part of its territory, it de facto actually has a separate democratic government, which nobody in his right mind would call authoritarian.
There is definitely brutal policing in the US some of the time, and we're not "authoritarian". I really wasn't commenting on policing in Taiwan. I really don't know anything about them. I've heard good things about the Hong Kong PD, but not much about Taiwan. I was simply commenting that the USA isn't as dangerous as people would have you believe, even if you live in a rough neighborhood. Take Compton for example. Supposedly really scary, but I've been there and it's nowhere near as rough as parts of Ft. Collins, Colorado that I've been too.
Denmark and Germany are the only places I've been where it seemed to me that crime was substantially smaller problem. Especially Denmark. The UK? Not so much. London was a bit rough, and Liverpool is downright seedy.
1) Fuel prices are one of the biggest costs in food production
True.
2) The price of foreign sugar is not a component in US food costs, it's already not used because it's too expensive due to a sugar tariff.
The sugar tariff and corn subsidies drive up US food prices. McCain is talking about eliminating the tariff and possibly corn subsidies.
3) Right now we are using corn to make ethanol. If we use sugar to make ethanol (its more efficent), and corn syrup as a sweetener (more efficent), we are better off than the status quo.
Wrong, if we switched ENTIRELY to sugar (grown in tropical climates) for food and eliminated 90% of corn production we'd be much better off than the status quo.
Ethanol is complete snake-oil for solving the world energy problems, which INCLUDES solving pollution problems. Replacing oil, which creates lots of pollution, with ethanol, which produces EVEN MORE pollution, is not a solution. Yes, ethanol is "cleaner burning" than oil. But it's less energy dense than gasoline to the point where you need to burn at least 2X as much ethanol to generate the same energy as gasoline, which ends up generating more pollution.
And we simply can't make enough of it to meet demand. As I said, sugar is the only practical ethanol crop and we're just about tapped out on sugar as it is. Switching to sugar means massively expanded growing in the areas sugar grows well, like South America, Central Africa, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia. Good luck with that.
Too many people seem to be more upset about how the police handles a suspect than they are about high crime rates. It was great when I was living in Taiwan and could be out at 2am without having to be concerned for my well-being. I can't say the same in many parts of the US.
You've been tricked by the sensationalist Western media. Crime rates are LOWER here than they were in Taiwan (probably, everybody lies about it). Note your terminology: you're "concerned". Nothing has actually happened, but you're concerned anyway because the media has told you to be.
And brutal policing doesn't decrease crime, it INCREASES it. Brutalized offenders have much higher recidivism rates.
I don't know where you are getting your information from, but studio masters have been 24 bit 96 KHz since the mid-90's.
I get my info from audio engineers, like my girlfriend. They laugh at audiophiles because they are keenly aware how lousy most mastering really is. If the recording equipment does not have the sensitivity or the good ADACs to take advantage of extra fidelity of 24 bit 96 KHz audio it does not matter if you record in that format or in 16bit 14KHZ (CD audio quality) or in fucking mono. Virtually no studio recording equipment even comes CLOSE to pushing the boundaries of CD audio. Don't take my word for it, talk to actual audio engineers. Most of the people I talk to are in the music industry, but the same thing applies to films. If they're using $50 microphones to make the recordings Blu-Ray doesn't matter.
Once people hear the difference between DTS HD MA and the 12:1 compressed DD 5.1 NOBODY is going to want DD 5.1.
You're talking about people who are too cheap to pay for basic DD 5.1 recording equipment here. I suspect there is one, or maybe two, studios in LA equipped with DTS HD MA gear. I suspect perhaps 10 films made this year will take advantage of it.
The same applies for good video. At best, I suspect that about 10 discs released each year will take full advantage of the Blu-Ray format.
Fact: 35 mm film has far higher resolution than HD. Even Cineon (early 1990's technology) processing results in immaculate 4K resolution from films as old as Snow White
Do you know how much Cineon processing costs? You really don't seem to grasp how expensive it is to make high quality masters. The problem is not that the technology exists, but that the studios are FAR to cheap to pay for it. HD is something being pushed by electronics manufacturers who want to sell equipment, not by studios that want to reduce their capital expenditures.
The studios only even CONSIDER these technologies for big-budget blockbuster films that are guaranteed to have millions of Blu-Ray sales.
Lord of The Rings?
Sorry, it was the DVD release of Lord of the Rings. If you want Blu-Ray examples look at Ghost in the Shell, Sum of all Fears, House of Flying Daggers. The point I'm trying to make is lousy mastering negates most of the benefits of Blu-Ray.
Yes getting good quality code from India is a difficult management (not engineering) problem.
How are poor coding practices, like not commenting your code, the result of "management"?
Well managed outsourcing requires trusted management to be on site.
I'm not just talking about outsourcing. I'm talking about Indian companies producing code for themselves. I had the job of doing QA for one of these outfits. I did shit like tell then the exact line of code to change and the exact changes to make and they still managed to screw it up. They sucked at things that were no problem for untrained 14-year-old Americans I've worked with. Communication is a factor, but some of these guys spoke English as their first language.
I think the core problem is that in India (and a lesser extent, China) the relatively limited opportunities have attracted Indians and Chinese who are not temperamentally suited to programming to that field because it's lucrative. This doesn't happen in the US, Europe, and Japan because smart people have a lot more choices.
In other words, Indian and Chinese programmers suck because many of them aren't REAL computer nerds.
A Blu Ray will generally have a lossless DTS HD MA track that is 24 bit uncompressed 5.1, EXACTLY the same as the studio master.
Which sounds exactly the same as 640k DD track from the DVD because the studio masters are so crappy. Yes, on a handful of properly-mastered movies it makes a difference. You can count these discs on the fingers of one or maybe two hands.
Most DVDs and Blu Rays are based on film masters that have far higher resolution than either digital format.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. MOST DVDs and Blu-Rays are based on grainy film stock or analog video.
And with movies like Dark Night the fact is that is not changing.
Dark Knight, and similar films, are the exceptions that prove the rule. And you're assuming even with a good master like Dark Knight they'll do the transfer properly. Usually they don't. Look at what happened to Lord of the Rings.
Again, well-mastered BDs (and DVDs for that matter) are the EXCEPTION, not the rule.
DVDs are 480i, BluRay is 1080p. There is an order of magnitude increase in the data making it to your ears and eyes.
If your base is grainy film stock or STV, which is 95% of content, 1080p doesn't make a bit of difference over 480i. 95% of everything you buy for Blu-Ray will perform exactly the same as a DVD, or perhaps worse due to mandatory ads and the slow software on the player.
Both men AND women have the compulsion to fall sleep after an orgasm. If the woman you've having sex with hasn't been falling asleep, then it just means she didn't get to finish.
It's not the same. Women are just tired from exertion. For men, "make me sleep" chemicals (I forget the name, shoot me) flood the brain after orgasm.
This cost extremely small and HAS almost NOTHING to with hardware.
Have you even done internationalization? I have, it's time-consuming and costs money.
And it DOES affect hardware. Do all those Japanese laptops have English keys? While most of the hardware you Europeans get has English-only labels on it (What does that tell you about how cheap internationalization is?) some of it *IS* properly labeled and that costs money.
Go and buy a US English version in EU. You have to pay the sime high price!
When I was last in Denmark, English versions of many electronic products cost a lost less than Danish versions. To a large extent Danish hardware is seen as a specialty item IN DENMARK because almost everyone speaks English. Of course, everything electronic was more expensive than in the US in general, usually around 3X as much.
Repealing the tax on imported ethanol will cause an increase in ethanol production overseas which will increase the cost of food as grain is diverted to ethanol production. You can have lower food costs or you can have ethanol, NOT BOTH.
Brazil does not generate enough of a surplus to meet the US' energy needs, they would have to dramatically increase production. You can only produce ethanol efficiently in tropical countries using sugarcane because in tropical countries you have the enviroment necessary to produce extremely water-intensive high-energy crops like sugarcane. Really, the only places you can efficiently do it are Brazil, the Congo, and maybe Southeast Asia. So before we seriously consider ethanol we have to fix Congo, Burma, etc. and convince them to grow huge amounts of sugarcane.
Switchgrass and other claimed efficent ethanol crops won't work, and basic physics would tell you that. Anything in the USA is right out due to climate. People really need to learn about "potential energy" and "energy density" before talking about energy policy.
This is the best thing I've ever heard about the UAV program.
Maybe being forced to look into the eyes of the kids they're killing will lead some of these UAV operators to refuse to fire on civilian targets or in civilian areas.
If you have clients with a mixed environment, and you keep getting inquries on whether your application can run on Linux, not as a must-have
Which is exactly the point. Most environments aren't mixed, they're 100% Windows desktops, and for those that are Linux is not a must-have in that they're willing to pay a LOT more for a Linux version.
It takes a lot more development effort to make a Linux GUI app because of the lousy toolkits (or you could use slow-as-molasses Java), so you're asking commercial developers to put more effort into developing an app for a LOT fewer people that are willing to pay a LOT less. The reality is that most sites that have deployed Linux extensively have done so because it's CHEAP, not because it's technically better. Why would commercial software houses want to cater to cheapskates?
He is saying that IBM should not complain about not having open-source applications because they have shifted their workforce to Indian and Russian developers who contribute a lot less to the open-source community. Do you dispute this?
Right, because a nuclear power like India with a billion citizens must not have a single creative person.
You chose a poor example. India imported it's nuclear knowledge from the USA and Russia. They really didn't do anything themselves except labor.
The simple reality is that, without exception, every single American, European, and Japanese developer I have met has complained about the quality of Indian and Chinese programming. Russia gets very mixed reviews. I'm not much of a developer, but I can read code. And all the code I've seen from Indian developers has been poor. In particular, extremely bad or nonexistent documentation. I have also noticed that Indian programmers take very little pride in their work. Their boss is 3000 miles away so they slack off. When working with Indian programmers if usually took them 3 or 4 tries to "get it right", which slowed development to a crawl. And there was no internal accountability at all. If something is fucked up or doesn't ship, too bad. We've got your money. If you don't like it, start from scratch with another development house because we won't give you your code.
The big problem I have personally seen from the Chinese and Russians is stealing code. Right now, there are lots of Chinese and Russian companies that take open-source or commercial apps, either internationalize or tweak them a bit, and the sell it as their own product. For example, there are several Russian and Chinese anti-virus apps that steal their engines and definitions from Trend and Symantec.
There are quite a few options for a drop-in exchange replacement. Scalix comes to mind.
Speaking as someone who has extensively tested many of these products, Scalix is NOT a drop-in Exchange replacement. If you don't use their web client it's basically unusable (contrary to what they'll tell you) and I ran into tons of bugs. Don't want a web client? Too bad. It's basically HP OpenMail and is stuck emulating Exchange 4.5, about 10 years old now.
Having said that, Scalix is the second-best groupware server available, which says something about the gulf between Exchange and other solutions.
What can be said is that there is demand for Adobe applications for Linux, natively. There is also enough demand that Photoshop has been a goal of WINE. There is demand, but strangely no supply
No, there isn't. The question is: "Are there enough Linux users willing to PAY ENOUGH MONEY for Adobe (or insert any other commercial developer here) applications to justify the massive development effort necessary to port Photoshop and other popular applications to some Linux distributions?" IOW, who do you know that is willing to spend $10 million on Photoshop for some Linux distributions, because that's what porting it would cost.
The reason the audio formats never caught on are the same reasons Blue-Ray is failing:
1) They're not giving people what they really want. In the case of audio it's 5.1 mixes. In the case of Blu-Ray it's basically searching. Why not make 5.1 audio mixes? The studio equipment cost 100x as much as stereo equipment and it takes twice as long to produce the album. IOW, it's too expensive.
2) The quality of most masters is extremely poor. This can't be stressed enough. The vast majority of studio recordings, including content produced this month, doesn't come close to surpassing the quality of CD Audio. In fact, due to compression and cheapness by the big labels, studio masters are actually getting worse. While video recording IS improving dramatically, some very recently released films (the last 3 years) can take advantage of Blu-Ray, the vast majority of film and TV still isn't HD and doesn't take advantage of the format.
# John McCain believes we should send a strong message to world markets. Under his plan, the United States will be telling oil producing countries and oil speculators that our dependence on foreign oil will come to an end - and the impact will be lower prices at the pump.
The site doesn't explicitly SAY to use them in comments, but it's certainly a strong encouragement. I'd also point out that most of these "talking points", like the one above, say nothing substantive. Weirdly, on the same page he has these talking points:
# John McCain will repeal the 54 cents per gallon tax on imported sugar-based ethanol, increasing competition, and lowering prices of gasoline at the pump.
# John McCain will roll back corn-based ethanol mandates, which are contributing to the rising cost of food.
One of the big reasons that Vista hasn't rolled out to the enterprise is that most of the new manageability features in Vista require a Server 2008 back-end, and that was just released in February. So, in practice, organizations are just starting to have good business reasons to roll out Vista. Believe me, we will see large deployments now that Server 2000 is out. The new management features are pretty compelling.
I don't buy this. MS' internally seems to think the group switching to Vista fastest is Media Center users (they get a LOT out of Vista), closely followed by gamers. The biggest complaint with Vista is hardware requirements, and gamers are out buying the beefy PCs that have no problem running Vista. There are very few gaming-oriented PCs sold nowadays that even offer XP as an option.
Well then, my friend, you're just not thinking it all the way through.
"Thinking it through" does not count as evidence. Contrary to what you may "think", a lot of research as gone into the questions you're speculating about.
Woman has spent EONS perfecting her control of the male's life via sexual gratification.
Human women do not control men through sexual gratification per se. The only artifact of this I can think of is the compulsion men feel to sleep after orgasm. This is a evolutionary adaptation to keep men closer to women after sex to encourage bonding. This is necessary because women are adapted to have sex with several partners per day.
The very notion of monogamy is centered around a single woman being a husband's source of sexual gratification
The purpose of MARRIAGE (humans are not monogamous) is to establish PATERNITY OF CHILDREN. If a woman is sleeping around, how can a man determine whether or not the children she bears (the MOTHER of children is rarely in question) are his? Nowadays we have DNA testing, but that's only been around for about 15-20 years. Human history is a lot longer than that.
When a man wants sex and the woman would rather use it for leverage,
Marriage is specifically NOT about restricting a man's sexual activity. It doesn't matter if he cheats because that doesn't affect his asset allocation, bastard children don't get any money. And money is what marriages are about. This is why, historically, the punishments for women cheating on their husbands have been MUCH worse than the punishments for men (often, death).
Marriage is a bargain. A woman agrees to not have sex with other partners in exchange for the man agreeing to help her raise the children she bears. Without the promise not to have sex with other men, the husband has no interest in spending money on children that may or may not be his.
People bought the wii because of the compelling gameplay related to the controller... what software is being released for this thing. ASUS isn't in the content business, so I'm not sure where the software is going to come from. Probably nowhere.
The biggest problem with Blu-Ray is they're not releasing compelling products. They're releasing a 2 hour movie that loads slower with very marginally better video (because they used the same masters for the DVD) and exactly identical audio (very few BDs have a true 7.1 mix) that costs more. Why the fuck would people want that?
The solution is to take advantage of the 50GB capacity and give people stuff they want. Like an entire TV season on a single disc. Collections of playable Java games. A search function in the menus (possible with BD!) for searchable clip segments. ex. type "little friend" into the menu of the Scarface DVD and you jump directly to the "Say hello to my little friend". Look at porn BDs to see what the studios should be doing.
So, your two options are either violent lawlessness, or corrupted rule -- please don't say that's what we have now; I urge to look at government corruption in other countries, especially ones that have gone through a government collapse before uttering that statement.
Well, look at Russia. Horribly corrupt under the Soviet system, slightly less under Yeltsin, and about the same under Putin. Many other nations have improved corruption after government upheavals, notably Cuba.
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People actually do research on crime rates and crime rates in general do appear to be lower in Taiwan than they are in the US.
People DO actually do research and most of that research shows that crime statistics are highly unreliable because the crime statistics are reported by the government and government, ALL governments, lie about crime statistics. That's why I said "everybody lies".
I walk with my flashy new notebook in my hand through the back alleys of Taipei at night, you do the same for Harlem. Wanna try?
I don't have to. I've done it. East Palo Alto and Richmond are way rougher than Harlem and I've never been attacked with or without my laptop. Just because it's filled with black people doesn't mean the town is automatically a death sentence. You've probably never even been to Harlem. You're much more likely to be a crime victim in Manhattan where you have the armies of pickpockets.
Just to remind you: although China claims Taiwan as a part of its territory, it de facto actually has a separate democratic government, which nobody in his right mind would call authoritarian.
There is definitely brutal policing in the US some of the time, and we're not "authoritarian". I really wasn't commenting on policing in Taiwan. I really don't know anything about them. I've heard good things about the Hong Kong PD, but not much about Taiwan. I was simply commenting that the USA isn't as dangerous as people would have you believe, even if you live in a rough neighborhood. Take Compton for example. Supposedly really scary, but I've been there and it's nowhere near as rough as parts of Ft. Collins, Colorado that I've been too.
Denmark and Germany are the only places I've been where it seemed to me that crime was substantially smaller problem. Especially Denmark. The UK? Not so much. London was a bit rough, and Liverpool is downright seedy.
1) Fuel prices are one of the biggest costs in food production
True.
2) The price of foreign sugar is not a component in US food costs, it's already not used because it's too expensive due to a sugar tariff.
The sugar tariff and corn subsidies drive up US food prices. McCain is talking about eliminating the tariff and possibly corn subsidies.
3) Right now we are using corn to make ethanol. If we use sugar to make ethanol (its more efficent), and corn syrup as a sweetener (more efficent), we are better off than the status quo.
Wrong, if we switched ENTIRELY to sugar (grown in tropical climates) for food and eliminated 90% of corn production we'd be much better off than the status quo.
Ethanol is complete snake-oil for solving the world energy problems, which INCLUDES solving pollution problems. Replacing oil, which creates lots of pollution, with ethanol, which produces EVEN MORE pollution, is not a solution. Yes, ethanol is "cleaner burning" than oil. But it's less energy dense than gasoline to the point where you need to burn at least 2X as much ethanol to generate the same energy as gasoline, which ends up generating more pollution.
And we simply can't make enough of it to meet demand. As I said, sugar is the only practical ethanol crop and we're just about tapped out on sugar as it is. Switching to sugar means massively expanded growing in the areas sugar grows well, like South America, Central Africa, Indonesia, and Southeast Asia. Good luck with that.
Too many people seem to be more upset about how the police handles a suspect than they are about high crime rates. It was great when I was living in Taiwan and could be out at 2am without having to be concerned for my well-being. I can't say the same in many parts of the US.
You've been tricked by the sensationalist Western media. Crime rates are LOWER here than they were in Taiwan (probably, everybody lies about it). Note your terminology: you're "concerned". Nothing has actually happened, but you're concerned anyway because the media has told you to be.
And brutal policing doesn't decrease crime, it INCREASES it. Brutalized offenders have much higher recidivism rates.
I don't know where you are getting your information from, but studio masters have been 24 bit 96 KHz since the mid-90's.
I get my info from audio engineers, like my girlfriend. They laugh at audiophiles because they are keenly aware how lousy most mastering really is. If the recording equipment does not have the sensitivity or the good ADACs to take advantage of extra fidelity of 24 bit 96 KHz audio it does not matter if you record in that format or in 16bit 14KHZ (CD audio quality) or in fucking mono. Virtually no studio recording equipment even comes CLOSE to pushing the boundaries of CD audio. Don't take my word for it, talk to actual audio engineers. Most of the people I talk to are in the music industry, but the same thing applies to films. If they're using $50 microphones to make the recordings Blu-Ray doesn't matter.
Once people hear the difference between DTS HD MA and the 12:1 compressed DD 5.1 NOBODY is going to want DD 5.1.
You're talking about people who are too cheap to pay for basic DD 5.1 recording equipment here. I suspect there is one, or maybe two, studios in LA equipped with DTS HD MA gear. I suspect perhaps 10 films made this year will take advantage of it.
The same applies for good video. At best, I suspect that about 10 discs released each year will take full advantage of the Blu-Ray format.
Fact: 35 mm film has far higher resolution than HD. Even Cineon (early 1990's technology) processing results in immaculate 4K resolution from films as old as Snow White
Do you know how much Cineon processing costs? You really don't seem to grasp how expensive it is to make high quality masters. The problem is not that the technology exists, but that the studios are FAR to cheap to pay for it. HD is something being pushed by electronics manufacturers who want to sell equipment, not by studios that want to reduce their capital expenditures.
The studios only even CONSIDER these technologies for big-budget blockbuster films that are guaranteed to have millions of Blu-Ray sales.
Lord of The Rings?
Sorry, it was the DVD release of Lord of the Rings. If you want Blu-Ray examples look at Ghost in the Shell, Sum of all Fears, House of Flying Daggers. The point I'm trying to make is lousy mastering negates most of the benefits of Blu-Ray.
Yes getting good quality code from India is a difficult management (not engineering) problem.
How are poor coding practices, like not commenting your code, the result of "management"?
Well managed outsourcing requires trusted management to be on site.
I'm not just talking about outsourcing. I'm talking about Indian companies producing code for themselves. I had the job of doing QA for one of these outfits. I did shit like tell then the exact line of code to change and the exact changes to make and they still managed to screw it up. They sucked at things that were no problem for untrained 14-year-old Americans I've worked with. Communication is a factor, but some of these guys spoke English as their first language.
I think the core problem is that in India (and a lesser extent, China) the relatively limited opportunities have attracted Indians and Chinese who are not temperamentally suited to programming to that field because it's lucrative. This doesn't happen in the US, Europe, and Japan because smart people have a lot more choices.
In other words, Indian and Chinese programmers suck because many of them aren't REAL computer nerds.
A Blu Ray will generally have a lossless DTS HD MA track that is 24 bit uncompressed 5.1, EXACTLY the same as the studio master.
Which sounds exactly the same as 640k DD track from the DVD because the studio masters are so crappy. Yes, on a handful of properly-mastered movies it makes a difference. You can count these discs on the fingers of one or maybe two hands.
Most DVDs and Blu Rays are based on film masters that have far higher resolution than either digital format.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. MOST DVDs and Blu-Rays are based on grainy film stock or analog video.
And with movies like Dark Night the fact is that is not changing.
Dark Knight, and similar films, are the exceptions that prove the rule. And you're assuming even with a good master like Dark Knight they'll do the transfer properly. Usually they don't. Look at what happened to Lord of the Rings.
Again, well-mastered BDs (and DVDs for that matter) are the EXCEPTION, not the rule.
DVDs are 480i, BluRay is 1080p. There is an order of magnitude increase in the data making it to your ears and eyes.
If your base is grainy film stock or STV, which is 95% of content, 1080p doesn't make a bit of difference over 480i. 95% of everything you buy for Blu-Ray will perform exactly the same as a DVD, or perhaps worse due to mandatory ads and the slow software on the player.
Correct, they are not related.
Porn restrictions are largely about religious prohibitions, not marriage per se.
We have customers that are just now upgrading to XP. Corporate uptake of Windows is a lot slower than many people seem to think it is.
Both men AND women have the compulsion to fall sleep after an orgasm. If the woman you've having sex with hasn't been falling asleep, then it just means she didn't get to finish.
It's not the same. Women are just tired from exertion. For men, "make me sleep" chemicals (I forget the name, shoot me) flood the brain after orgasm.
This cost extremely small and HAS almost NOTHING to with hardware.
Have you even done internationalization? I have, it's time-consuming and costs money.
And it DOES affect hardware. Do all those Japanese laptops have English keys? While most of the hardware you Europeans get has English-only labels on it (What does that tell you about how cheap internationalization is?) some of it *IS* properly labeled and that costs money.
Go and buy a US English version in EU. You have to pay the sime high price!
When I was last in Denmark, English versions of many electronic products cost a lost less than Danish versions. To a large extent Danish hardware is seen as a specialty item IN DENMARK because almost everyone speaks English. Of course, everything electronic was more expensive than in the US in general, usually around 3X as much.
Vista is the only route to DX10. It requires the new driver model in Vista, so backporting to XP is right out.
Repealing the tax on imported ethanol will cause an increase in ethanol production overseas which will increase the cost of food as grain is diverted to ethanol production. You can have lower food costs or you can have ethanol, NOT BOTH.
Brazil does not generate enough of a surplus to meet the US' energy needs, they would have to dramatically increase production. You can only produce ethanol efficiently in tropical countries using sugarcane because in tropical countries you have the enviroment necessary to produce extremely water-intensive high-energy crops like sugarcane. Really, the only places you can efficiently do it are Brazil, the Congo, and maybe Southeast Asia. So before we seriously consider ethanol we have to fix Congo, Burma, etc. and convince them to grow huge amounts of sugarcane.
Switchgrass and other claimed efficent ethanol crops won't work, and basic physics would tell you that. Anything in the USA is right out due to climate. People really need to learn about "potential energy" and "energy density" before talking about energy policy.
This is the best thing I've ever heard about the UAV program.
Maybe being forced to look into the eyes of the kids they're killing will lead some of these UAV operators to refuse to fire on civilian targets or in civilian areas.
If you have clients with a mixed environment, and you keep getting inquries on whether your application can run on Linux, not as a must-have
Which is exactly the point. Most environments aren't mixed, they're 100% Windows desktops, and for those that are Linux is not a must-have in that they're willing to pay a LOT more for a Linux version.
It takes a lot more development effort to make a Linux GUI app because of the lousy toolkits (or you could use slow-as-molasses Java), so you're asking commercial developers to put more effort into developing an app for a LOT fewer people that are willing to pay a LOT less. The reality is that most sites that have deployed Linux extensively have done so because it's CHEAP, not because it's technically better. Why would commercial software houses want to cater to cheapskates?
...hire someone anyone but Americans.
He is saying that IBM should not complain about not having open-source applications because they have shifted their workforce to Indian and Russian developers who contribute a lot less to the open-source community. Do you dispute this?
Right, because a nuclear power like India with a billion citizens must not have a single creative person.
You chose a poor example. India imported it's nuclear knowledge from the USA and Russia. They really didn't do anything themselves except labor.
The simple reality is that, without exception, every single American, European, and Japanese developer I have met has complained about the quality of Indian and Chinese programming. Russia gets very mixed reviews. I'm not much of a developer, but I can read code. And all the code I've seen from Indian developers has been poor. In particular, extremely bad or nonexistent documentation. I have also noticed that Indian programmers take very little pride in their work. Their boss is 3000 miles away so they slack off. When working with Indian programmers if usually took them 3 or 4 tries to "get it right", which slowed development to a crawl. And there was no internal accountability at all. If something is fucked up or doesn't ship, too bad. We've got your money. If you don't like it, start from scratch with another development house because we won't give you your code.
The big problem I have personally seen from the Chinese and Russians is stealing code. Right now, there are lots of Chinese and Russian companies that take open-source or commercial apps, either internationalize or tweak them a bit, and the sell it as their own product. For example, there are several Russian and Chinese anti-virus apps that steal their engines and definitions from Trend and Symantec.
There are quite a few options for a drop-in exchange replacement. Scalix comes to mind.
Speaking as someone who has extensively tested many of these products, Scalix is NOT a drop-in Exchange replacement. If you don't use their web client it's basically unusable (contrary to what they'll tell you) and I ran into tons of bugs. Don't want a web client? Too bad. It's basically HP OpenMail and is stuck emulating Exchange 4.5, about 10 years old now.
Having said that, Scalix is the second-best groupware server available, which says something about the gulf between Exchange and other solutions.
What can be said is that there is demand for Adobe applications for Linux, natively. There is also enough demand that Photoshop has been a goal of WINE. There is demand, but strangely no supply
No, there isn't. The question is: "Are there enough Linux users willing to PAY ENOUGH MONEY for Adobe (or insert any other commercial developer here) applications to justify the massive development effort necessary to port Photoshop and other popular applications to some Linux distributions?" IOW, who do you know that is willing to spend $10 million on Photoshop for some Linux distributions, because that's what porting it would cost.
The reason the audio formats never caught on are the same reasons Blue-Ray is failing:
1) They're not giving people what they really want. In the case of audio it's 5.1 mixes. In the case of Blu-Ray it's basically searching. Why not make 5.1 audio mixes? The studio equipment cost 100x as much as stereo equipment and it takes twice as long to produce the album. IOW, it's too expensive.
2) The quality of most masters is extremely poor. This can't be stressed enough. The vast majority of studio recordings, including content produced this month, doesn't come close to surpassing the quality of CD Audio. In fact, due to compression and cheapness by the big labels, studio masters are actually getting worse. While video recording IS improving dramatically, some very recently released films (the last 3 years) can take advantage of Blu-Ray, the vast majority of film and TV still isn't HD and doesn't take advantage of the format.
On this page, the second link on the "Talking Points" section:
http://www.johnmccain.com/Issues/JobsforAmerica/relief.htm
we find a list of bullet points like this one:
# John McCain believes we should send a strong message to world markets. Under his plan, the United States will be telling oil producing countries and oil speculators that our dependence on foreign oil will come to an end - and the impact will be lower prices at the pump.
The site doesn't explicitly SAY to use them in comments, but it's certainly a strong encouragement. I'd also point out that most of these "talking points", like the one above, say nothing substantive. Weirdly, on the same page he has these talking points:
# John McCain will repeal the 54 cents per gallon tax on imported sugar-based ethanol, increasing competition, and lowering prices of gasoline at the pump.
# John McCain will roll back corn-based ethanol mandates, which are contributing to the rising cost of food.
which are contradictory.
One of the big reasons that Vista hasn't rolled out to the enterprise is that most of the new manageability features in Vista require a Server 2008 back-end, and that was just released in February. So, in practice, organizations are just starting to have good business reasons to roll out Vista. Believe me, we will see large deployments now that Server 2000 is out. The new management features are pretty compelling.
I don't buy this. MS' internally seems to think the group switching to Vista fastest is Media Center users (they get a LOT out of Vista), closely followed by gamers. The biggest complaint with Vista is hardware requirements, and gamers are out buying the beefy PCs that have no problem running Vista. There are very few gaming-oriented PCs sold nowadays that even offer XP as an option.
Well then, my friend, you're just not thinking it all the way through.
"Thinking it through" does not count as evidence. Contrary to what you may "think", a lot of research as gone into the questions you're speculating about.
Woman has spent EONS perfecting her control of the male's life via sexual gratification.
Human women do not control men through sexual gratification per se. The only artifact of this I can think of is the compulsion men feel to sleep after orgasm. This is a evolutionary adaptation to keep men closer to women after sex to encourage bonding. This is necessary because women are adapted to have sex with several partners per day.
The very notion of monogamy is centered around a single woman being a husband's source of sexual gratification
The purpose of MARRIAGE (humans are not monogamous) is to establish PATERNITY OF CHILDREN. If a woman is sleeping around, how can a man determine whether or not the children she bears (the MOTHER of children is rarely in question) are his? Nowadays we have DNA testing, but that's only been around for about 15-20 years. Human history is a lot longer than that.
When a man wants sex and the woman would rather use it for leverage,
Marriage is specifically NOT about restricting a man's sexual activity. It doesn't matter if he cheats because that doesn't affect his asset allocation, bastard children don't get any money. And money is what marriages are about. This is why, historically, the punishments for women cheating on their husbands have been MUCH worse than the punishments for men (often, death).
Marriage is a bargain. A woman agrees to not have sex with other partners in exchange for the man agreeing to help her raise the children she bears. Without the promise not to have sex with other men, the husband has no interest in spending money on children that may or may not be his.
People bought the wii because of the compelling gameplay related to the controller... what software is being released for this thing. ASUS isn't in the content business, so I'm not sure where the software is going to come from. Probably nowhere.
The biggest problem with Blu-Ray is they're not releasing compelling products. They're releasing a 2 hour movie that loads slower with very marginally better video (because they used the same masters for the DVD) and exactly identical audio (very few BDs have a true 7.1 mix) that costs more. Why the fuck would people want that?
The solution is to take advantage of the 50GB capacity and give people stuff they want. Like an entire TV season on a single disc. Collections of playable Java games. A search function in the menus (possible with BD!) for searchable clip segments. ex. type "little friend" into the menu of the Scarface DVD and you jump directly to the "Say hello to my little friend". Look at porn BDs to see what the studios should be doing.
So, your two options are either violent lawlessness, or corrupted rule -- please don't say that's what we have now; I urge to look at government corruption in other countries, especially ones that have gone through a government collapse before uttering that statement.
Well, look at Russia. Horribly corrupt under the Soviet system, slightly less under Yeltsin, and about the same under Putin. Many other nations have improved corruption after government upheavals, notably Cuba.