As someone who lives in the town the first Murdoch newspaper was started in (News Corp. is named after the Adelaide News, now defunct), let me assure you that the concepts "Rupert Murdoch" and "quality journalism" are almost completely antithetical:)
Not so, the London Sun daily presents a pair of mamary glands of surpassing excellence and newsworthiness.
Wrong. "Royal patents" existed long before the US -- but these were gained by political pull rather than set procedures, and were more likely to grant a monopoly on well-known processes than to protect innovations.
The industrial revolution began a century before the US Constitution was written. The idea of awarding patents to inventors was already well established in the UK. Adam Smith came up with the definitive rationale, although by the time he wrote wealth of nations the sale of state monopolies was known as the continental system because that is where it was used.
The US did not in any case become an industrial power for another 75 years just before the civil war. And it only became a technology leader with Ford and Edison.
Even then Ford's main claim to fame was not the idea of a cheap car. It was taking on the patent baron who had obtained a fraudulent patent on the internal combustion engine.
The framers of the constitution were not making it up as they went along. They were attempting to codify what they saw as the best political traditions of the old world. The innovation was the idea of a federal political structure, but even that was a fact that had to be accounted for rather than a deliberate choice.
United States Patent 6,270,404
Sines , et al. August 7, 2001
Automated system for playing live casino table games having tabletop changeable playing card displays and play monitoring security features
Abstract
Systems and methods for playing live casino-type card games, in particular blackjack. The systems include a presentation unit which has video displays which portray virtual playing cards and other information at gaming tables attended by live participants. Shuffling, cutting, dealing and return of playing cards are accomplished using data processing functions within an electronic game processor or processors which enable these functions to be performed quickly and without manual manipulation of playing cards. The invention allows casinos to speed play and reduce the risk of cheating while maintaining the attractive ambiance of a live table game.
Inventors: Sines; Randy D. (Spokane, WA); Kuhn; Michael J. (Spokane, WA); Gregory; Randy A. (Spokane, WA)
Assignee: Digideal Corporation (Spokane, WA)
Appl. No.: 749046
Filed: December 26, 2000
Patents do a great deal to keep control of an idea/concept/plan/what-have-you for even single people. It is like all things that have come from the US so far, it started off as an excellant idea
Did you study advanced ignorance in school or something? Patent law existed long before the US.
The principle defect of the US PTO, the lack of public review before a patent is issued is unique to the US.
US citizens regularly provide funding to terrorist organisations. Go look up NorAid. You will find that it is a 'charitable' front for the IRA. Does this mean that the British government has a legitimate excuse to nuke the US?
Actually the US has banned fund raising by the IRA on several occasions. In addition the US assistence to the UK under the joint intelligence agreement is considerable.
The situation with the Taleban is very different. In the first place the Taleban do not have the degree of control of the country that would allow them to expel or arrest bin Laden, on the other hand they have shown absolutely no inclination or desire to do so.
The Taleban will probably be issued with an ultimatum, either they liquidate Bin Laden themselves or allow US troops to do it for them. Meanwhile the Taleban themselves will have their arms supply from Pakistan cut.
My informed guess is that the ultimatum will be such that the Taleban will be unable to agree to its terms. It is a fractious coalition at best. The chances it will not stay in one piece are good.
Regardless of whether the Taleban did or did not have a role in the attacks and whether that was active or merely passive, providing Bin Laden with a base to operate from, the fact is that only Pakistan would be at all upset if the regime went away
Not to be mean or anything, but the IRA has continually bombed the hell out of the place while people have been pleading for peace.
The total casualties in NI over the twenty odd years of the conflict were about 1,600 for both sides. Of those about 450 were catholics murdered by protestant paramilitaries. 250 ish were paramilitaries, most of whom either blew theselves up making bombs or were shot by other paramillitaries.
The observation decks of the WTC alone have more tourists on an average day.
Greater firepower as you put it is irrelevant. The UK is still one of the top ten millitary powers, the IRA had less than 500 active members, the protestant factions slightly more and the INLA about 50. No action has ever involved more than light arms and most of the bombs have used home made explosives.
The INLA ceased to operate after its members killed each other in a dispute of the extortion rackets. The IRA suspended operations for a variety of reasons, in part in exchange for self government of NI but chiefly because 20 years of violence had achieved nothing.
The issue is not greater firepower, war is diplomacy by other means. Regardless of whether Bin Laden is proven to be responsible the US will demand that the Taleban hand him over pronto. The demand for his capture will likely be worded in the same manner as the demands made on Serbia after the assasination of the Arch Duke. I do not expect them to accept the terms and the likely outcome will be a war.
Much more important than the firepower against the Taleban will be which side Pakistan and Iran take. At this point I suspect that even the Pakistan generals who have been supporting the Taleban will realise that the game is up. Iran is not very likely to support the Taleban, particularly if the democraticaly elected leaders use the excuse to liquidate the clerics.
This explains why Microsoft chose to use VMS as a basis for their next generation operating system.
There is another reason. DEC screwed Dave Culter, the chief architect of VMS at just the time Microsoft got serious about operating systems again. Cutler left DEC with most of the core VMS kernel team for Microsoft. Shortly after DEC signed a co-development agreement with Microsoft under which Windows-NT would become the successor to VMS.
A few years later Rashid, the chief architect of CMU's MACH microkernel, which is generaly considered one of the bes UNIX kernels arround also joined Microsoft.
Bill works by offering top engineers seven figure golden hellos. That is how he got the team who designed Word to switch from Xerox Parc.
I am a Sysadmin. I do not work cheap. My services run a minimum of $25 an hour, which is not cheap (Although if I wanted a much more intense job I could get double that.).
Sounds cheap to me, the guy who fixed my roof charged me $40 an hour and that was a bargain compared to the going rate arround here.
If the game is soooo boring that you charge the time you would spend playing it one wonders why you bother. Before I stopped consulting I charged $400 an hour for my time, at that rate it would cost me about $2,000 to hear Gotterdamerung, perhaps I should send someone to Beyreuth to listen to it for me? If I sent them coach class I could save big on the airfare as well.
I was reading through what PowerPC 2002 was offering and it kept reminding me "Palm already had that for some time.... Palm offers that now... Palm has it already..." Geesh. And to think Microsoft itself with Windows is slowly becoming Unix back in 1970!!!
Oh really? I have a Palm VII that I bought to evaluate the company. I really don't see a great deal there. The lack of an earphone socket and a compactflash port was particularly lame.
Sure you can now get PalmOS devices from other manufacturers that arn't as lame. But I don't see PalmOS being arroung much longer unless their own hardware catches up.
My biggest worry with XML and CVS is someone using a GUI editor that chooses to re-wrap hard line breaks, or change every tag in some (XML) legal, yet CVS noticeable way.
What you really need is a source code system that can recognize that the input is XML and convert the document to canonical form before applying the diff. Unfortunately you would have to write code, the C14N for XML is, well utterly unsuited for that task.
Alternatively you could switch to a source code manager that used compression across the different archived versions rather than a simple diff. Unfortunately that probably involves writing the code yourself.
Re:eBay is and old idea on new Tech, not so with N
on
eBay Beats DMCA
·
· Score: 3, Informative
On the other hand, Napster, P2P, and mp3's are all relatively new technologies that judges don't know the first thing about, and are not comfortable with at all
Untrue, Patel knew precisely what Napster was about, it had no real purpose other than copyright infringement and its creators had no intention of discouraging piracy. No amount of/. sophistry changes that.
eBay on the other hand has a real purpose that does not depend on infringing others copyrights and had established a takedown proceedure that was clearly in good faith.
The ratio of infringing content to non-infringing on Napster was at least 20:1. The ratio of infringing to non-infringing on eBay is no more than 1:2000.
In this case the chump refused to submit a sworn statement to state that the material was infringing so the court threw out the case. The courts are entitled to consider whether the parties are acting in good faith and protect a good faith party from an unjustified lawsuit.
They're all Unix flavors, all conforming to POSIX to some degree or another. If your inhouse developers followed the POSIX standard closely, (which they should have, as that gives you the flexibility to switch unix flavors), tranistioning to Linux is an order of magnitude easier than switching to NT/2K.
There are many applications that do not and cannot run on Posix. A lot of Digital customers were running code for real time control systems that requires features that Posix simply does not provide.
Nobody is going to switch an aplication to Linux just for kicks. Legacy UNIX systems will endure for the same reason that many companies still run obsolete O/S like MVS (and their idiot sysadmins will still maintain that it is the acme of progress rather than the acne).
More likely would be that HP/UX and Tru64 were made open source.
No, during that time I was on the other side, living in one of the countries controlled by the Soviets.
Living in a totalitarian state with little contact with the outside world would be the only reasonable excuse for the narrowness and insularity of your views.
We had plenty of answers to leftist rhetoric but we are not talking about rhetoric here but direct or indirect intervention by the Soviets.
You rightist hawks were pissing in your pants with fear of the Soviets. The idea that the entire edifice was so corrupt and incompetent that it would simply collapse never entered your minds.
The reason that you were so afraid of them is that you know that they are just like you. No matter the means, power at any cost.
US rightly recognizes that places where regimes of Zambia and Sudan are recognized as a valid and equally important partners are not where want to be "influential."
Oh please, the Sudan 'regime' has control of 30% of the country at best and even that is pretty ineffectual. Its influence in the UN would be negligible if the US didn't spend so much time and effort denouncing it. Given that Africa has two seats on the commission and the state of the African regimes that vote for them the choice is hardly surprising. The US did not loose its seat to either of them however its seat was from the European/Vestern block and the US can hardly claim that France has a notably worse record on human rights of late (give or take the odd terrorist outrage in Auckland harbour). After all France did invent them.
We had to do that to keep up with Soviets who were busy propping up anyone who would listen to their "rhetoric"
Ahh you believe we were forced to arrange a coup to replace a democratically elected government in Chile with a bunch of murdering thugs because we had no answer to communist rhetoric?
Maybe, just maybe these organizations are NOT places where real decisions are being made.
The current crisis in US foreign policy is precisely because the only role the US has managed to find for itself has been as global policeman being called to the scene of every disaster.
Wether the 'real decisions' are taken in the UN or elsewhere the US suspects that it is not influential in the decisions and it is right.
As far as special relativity is concerned the general consensus is that that would have been formulated within that approxiate time frame (several people had promising work in that direction, some pople say about 3-5 years later for the non-Einsteins).
I don't think so, the Mitchelson-Moorely anomaly and the Lorentz contraction had been sitting arround for about 20 years without anyone making sense out of them before Eistein came along.
The leap from the special to the general relativity was already anticipated in the original paper. Einstein knew that the equations would have to be modified to take account of acceleration. The problem was finding a mathematical tool that was up to the job.
If Einstein had been hit by a bus after developing the special theory someone would have tried using tensor calculus to describe general relativity sooner or later.
The imaginative leap in special relativity was jettisoning the intellectual baggage of the aether and returning to Newton's relativity principle.
As for the theory being borne out by experiment, it is just as well that WW1 prevented the first eclipse measurement so that Einstein could develop general relativity in time for the next one.
Hell, Germans had problems subduing Tito and other partisans yet only lunatic would claim that their military wasn't one of the best in the world.
I seem to remember being taught in history that we beat Germany 2-nil at their national sport.
That the USSR was a powerful military force was never in dispute. That they would overwhelm Europe in 3 days was an utterly ridiculous assertion. Yet that defeatism was parotted by every NATO general I met at the time.
You seem to think it would more prudent to assume that your enemy is inferior and incapable of hurting you
No, I consider it to be more prudent to accurately asses the threat posed by a potential adversary. In the name of 'freedom' we spent the cold war proping up every tin pot dictator that would support us, Saddam, Noriega, Marcos, Pinochet, etc. we didn't care how many tens of thousands they murdered so long as they were on 'our side'.
It is not a coincidence that the majority of the 'rogue states' that are now a problem were former client states, Cuba, Iran, Iraq. Meanwhile the US has remarkably little political capital in South Africa, Indonesia, Chile, Argentina, the Congo, etc. etc. having been the principal supporter of the former despots.
The assumption that the world is divided up into 'enemies' and 'friends' is a very naive one. It is a useful propaganda tool but a poor basis for public policy.
I am truly happy that we had "hawks" and not people like you making decisions about this stuff.
So you don't care about the fact that despite spending more on its military than the rest of the world put together, US influence in world affairs is declining. The US was bumped off the UN drugs and human rights comissions by the Western powers.
As I recall, President Carter killed the neutron bomb project because it made war too tempting. The ramifications of a war should not be lowered - if anything they should be raised.
That was one reason, cost was another. But the biggest reason was that the easiest way to start the multilateral arms reduction process was to agree to not build new classes of weapon and countermeasures to add to the equation.
That is the reason the Russians are now saying that if the US abrogates the ABM treaty they will regard the SALT-I and SALT-II treaties void as well.
The neutron bomb was designed as a battlefield weapon. This was in the days when NATO believed that it could only defend Europe from a Warsaw pact attack for 3 days before having to resort to nuclear weapons. Those of us who pointed out that a large proportion of the USSR forces were built during WWII and that Russia was having enough trouble keeping its satelite states subdued were ridiculed. The claim was repeated even while the USSR demonstrated it could not hold Afghanistan against irregular troops with light arms and Ghadaffi demonstrated that he could not win a desert war with the latest soviet tank against a much smaller Chad force lead by a handful of ex-NATO mercenaries.
The hawks only changed their tune after the USSR collapsed so spectacularly that anybody who admitted they were scared stiff of them looked stupid. So instead they cooked up the ridiclous canard that they deliberately spent the USSR into bankrupcy. Once the full implications of the sino-Soviet pact signed by Putin are understood they will undoubtedly switch to claiming that Russia and China are still poised to invade the West and that only a massive handout to military contractors can save civilization. The tactics would be comical if the consequences were not so great.
It is very easy to promote the most aggressive pig-headed policy as being 'tough' and 'resolute'. Arrafat and Sharon are both making sure their respective consitutencies consider them so. However their tactics are nowhere near as impressive from the outside.
Q:How do you know GWB is lying? A: His buttocks are moving
Salieri commissioned it? To pass it off as his own!? Perhaps you might like to consider historical sources other than the film industry. (Well, Peter Schaffer's play)
Your entire knowledge of the controversy may come from the play, mine does not. A film does not have to be fiction, in the case of Amadeus nobody knows the facts for certain but the plot is certainly not a complete travesty as say The Patriot's invented massacre of civillians was.
The play only explores one theory of what Salierri was up to and by no means the most or least sinister. Before the play the most common allegation against Salierri was that he murdered Motzart with poison. Schaffer's play implies Salierri murdered him with overwork but even then there is a deliberate ambiguity.
Schaffer did not make up the comissioning of the requiem incident. The debate over what Salierri's motives were and whether he intended to kill or helped hill Motzart as he claimed long predates the play.
It is generally agreed that Salierri comissioned the Requiem but what his motives were is impossible to know for certain because his own statements on the matter came long after he went to the lunatic assylum. Salierri did claim to have killed Motzart, however it is difficult to know if that meant murder (which he did claim on occasion) or if he thought he killed him through overwork. It is not possible to take a madman's words at face value.
Mozart died only a short while after the first performance of the magic flute and was composing his requiem right up to his death. In fact his ability to compose was still so strong that a rival composer Salieri had actually commissioned the requiem, apparently with the intention of passing it off as his own.
Mozart's financial difficulties were not quite as dire as his wife later made them out to be. He certainly did not die from poverty, he simply had difficulty meeting the expenses of living in the style expected at court. At the time of his death the English court had decided to open negotiations with him to bring him to London as court composer so his money problems would have been shortly solved.
Larry Ellison, on the other hand, will buy the first one available, the microsecond it comes up.
And then sue San Jose Airport to force them to let him land or take off at any time of the day or night he damn well pleases.
You missed one significant part of the finances of private jet ownership, hiring it out. Very few corporate jet owners make enough use of the thing to justify the cost and hassle. If you think waiting in an airport is bad then try buying a plane - hint maintenance, insurance, employing 2 pilots etc.
The reason it makes sense is that you can lease your private plane to a 'management company' that handles all the tedious stuff for you and in addition leases the plane out to other people when you are not using it. If you only use the plane occasionally it can be a lucrative source of income.
It is also a cultural and historical city (country even) People like Goethe or Victor Hugo and William Turner enjoyed Luxembourg.
My ancestor, George Gordon (Lord Byron) enjoyed a significant fraction of the population of Geneva and Rome repeatedly. However even he never managed to enjoy an entire country.
Slashdot Mirror
Not so, the London Sun daily presents a pair of mamary glands of surpassing excellence and newsworthiness.
rm -rf
The industrial revolution began a century before the US Constitution was written. The idea of awarding patents to inventors was already well established in the UK. Adam Smith came up with the definitive rationale, although by the time he wrote wealth of nations the sale of state monopolies was known as the continental system because that is where it was used.
The US did not in any case become an industrial power for another 75 years just before the civil war. And it only became a technology leader with Ford and Edison.
Even then Ford's main claim to fame was not the idea of a cheap car. It was taking on the patent baron who had obtained a fraudulent patent on the internal combustion engine.
The framers of the constitution were not making it up as they went along. They were attempting to codify what they saw as the best political traditions of the old world. The innovation was the idea of a federal political structure, but even that was a fact that had to be accounted for rather than a deliberate choice.
United States Patent 6,270,404 Sines , et al. August 7, 2001
Automated system for playing live casino table games having tabletop changeable playing card displays and play monitoring security features
Abstract Systems and methods for playing live casino-type card games, in particular blackjack. The systems include a presentation unit which has video displays which portray virtual playing cards and other information at gaming tables attended by live participants. Shuffling, cutting, dealing and return of playing cards are accomplished using data processing functions within an electronic game processor or processors which enable these functions to be performed quickly and without manual manipulation of playing cards. The invention allows casinos to speed play and reduce the risk of cheating while maintaining the attractive ambiance of a live table game.
Inventors: Sines; Randy D. (Spokane, WA); Kuhn; Michael J. (Spokane, WA); Gregory; Randy A. (Spokane, WA) Assignee: Digideal Corporation (Spokane, WA) Appl. No.: 749046 Filed: December 26, 2000
Did you study advanced ignorance in school or something? Patent law existed long before the US.
The principle defect of the US PTO, the lack of public review before a patent is issued is unique to the US.
Actually the US has banned fund raising by the IRA on several occasions. In addition the US assistence to the UK under the joint intelligence agreement is considerable.
The situation with the Taleban is very different. In the first place the Taleban do not have the degree of control of the country that would allow them to expel or arrest bin Laden, on the other hand they have shown absolutely no inclination or desire to do so.
The Taleban will probably be issued with an ultimatum, either they liquidate Bin Laden themselves or allow US troops to do it for them. Meanwhile the Taleban themselves will have their arms supply from Pakistan cut.
My informed guess is that the ultimatum will be such that the Taleban will be unable to agree to its terms. It is a fractious coalition at best. The chances it will not stay in one piece are good.
Regardless of whether the Taleban did or did not have a role in the attacks and whether that was active or merely passive, providing Bin Laden with a base to operate from, the fact is that only Pakistan would be at all upset if the regime went away
The total casualties in NI over the twenty odd years of the conflict were about 1,600 for both sides. Of those about 450 were catholics murdered by protestant paramilitaries. 250 ish were paramilitaries, most of whom either blew theselves up making bombs or were shot by other paramillitaries.
The observation decks of the WTC alone have more tourists on an average day.
Greater firepower as you put it is irrelevant. The UK is still one of the top ten millitary powers, the IRA had less than 500 active members, the protestant factions slightly more and the INLA about 50. No action has ever involved more than light arms and most of the bombs have used home made explosives.
The INLA ceased to operate after its members killed each other in a dispute of the extortion rackets. The IRA suspended operations for a variety of reasons, in part in exchange for self government of NI but chiefly because 20 years of violence had achieved nothing.
The issue is not greater firepower, war is diplomacy by other means. Regardless of whether Bin Laden is proven to be responsible the US will demand that the Taleban hand him over pronto. The demand for his capture will likely be worded in the same manner as the demands made on Serbia after the assasination of the Arch Duke. I do not expect them to accept the terms and the likely outcome will be a war.
Much more important than the firepower against the Taleban will be which side Pakistan and Iran take. At this point I suspect that even the Pakistan generals who have been supporting the Taleban will realise that the game is up. Iran is not very likely to support the Taleban, particularly if the democraticaly elected leaders use the excuse to liquidate the clerics.
There is another reason. DEC screwed Dave Culter, the chief architect of VMS at just the time Microsoft got serious about operating systems again. Cutler left DEC with most of the core VMS kernel team for Microsoft. Shortly after DEC signed a co-development agreement with Microsoft under which Windows-NT would become the successor to VMS.
A few years later Rashid, the chief architect of CMU's MACH microkernel, which is generaly considered one of the bes UNIX kernels arround also joined Microsoft.
Bill works by offering top engineers seven figure golden hellos. That is how he got the team who designed Word to switch from Xerox Parc.
Sounds cheap to me, the guy who fixed my roof charged me $40 an hour and that was a bargain compared to the going rate arround here.
If the game is soooo boring that you charge the time you would spend playing it one wonders why you bother. Before I stopped consulting I charged $400 an hour for my time, at that rate it would cost me about $2,000 to hear Gotterdamerung, perhaps I should send someone to Beyreuth to listen to it for me? If I sent them coach class I could save big on the airfare as well.
Oh really? I have a Palm VII that I bought to evaluate the company. I really don't see a great deal there. The lack of an earphone socket and a compactflash port was particularly lame.
Sure you can now get PalmOS devices from other manufacturers that arn't as lame. But I don't see PalmOS being arroung much longer unless their own hardware catches up.
What you really need is a source code system that can recognize that the input is XML and convert the document to canonical form before applying the diff. Unfortunately you would have to write code, the C14N for XML is, well utterly unsuited for that task.
Alternatively you could switch to a source code manager that used compression across the different archived versions rather than a simple diff. Unfortunately that probably involves writing the code yourself.
Untrue, Patel knew precisely what Napster was about, it had no real purpose other than copyright infringement and its creators had no intention of discouraging piracy. No amount of /. sophistry changes that.
eBay on the other hand has a real purpose that does not depend on infringing others copyrights and had established a takedown proceedure that was clearly in good faith.
The ratio of infringing content to non-infringing on Napster was at least 20:1. The ratio of infringing to non-infringing on eBay is no more than 1:2000.
In this case the chump refused to submit a sworn statement to state that the material was infringing so the court threw out the case. The courts are entitled to consider whether the parties are acting in good faith and protect a good faith party from an unjustified lawsuit.
There are many applications that do not and cannot run on Posix. A lot of Digital customers were running code for real time control systems that requires features that Posix simply does not provide.
Nobody is going to switch an aplication to Linux just for kicks. Legacy UNIX systems will endure for the same reason that many companies still run obsolete O/S like MVS (and their idiot sysadmins will still maintain that it is the acme of progress rather than the acne).
More likely would be that HP/UX and Tru64 were made open source.
Living in a totalitarian state with little contact with the outside world would be the only reasonable excuse for the narrowness and insularity of your views.
You rightist hawks were pissing in your pants with fear of the Soviets. The idea that the entire edifice was so corrupt and incompetent that it would simply collapse never entered your minds.
The reason that you were so afraid of them is that you know that they are just like you. No matter the means, power at any cost.
US rightly recognizes that places where regimes of Zambia and Sudan are recognized as a valid and equally important partners are not where want to be "influential."
Oh please, the Sudan 'regime' has control of 30% of the country at best and even that is pretty ineffectual. Its influence in the UN would be negligible if the US didn't spend so much time and effort denouncing it. Given that Africa has two seats on the commission and the state of the African regimes that vote for them the choice is hardly surprising. The US did not loose its seat to either of them however its seat was from the European/Vestern block and the US can hardly claim that France has a notably worse record on human rights of late (give or take the odd terrorist outrage in Auckland harbour). After all France did invent them.
Ahh you believe we were forced to arrange a coup to replace a democratically elected government in Chile with a bunch of murdering thugs because we had no answer to communist rhetoric?
Maybe, just maybe these organizations are NOT places where real decisions are being made.
The current crisis in US foreign policy is precisely because the only role the US has managed to find for itself has been as global policeman being called to the scene of every disaster.
Wether the 'real decisions' are taken in the UN or elsewhere the US suspects that it is not influential in the decisions and it is right.
I don't think so, the Mitchelson-Moorely anomaly and the Lorentz contraction had been sitting arround for about 20 years without anyone making sense out of them before Eistein came along.
The leap from the special to the general relativity was already anticipated in the original paper. Einstein knew that the equations would have to be modified to take account of acceleration. The problem was finding a mathematical tool that was up to the job.
If Einstein had been hit by a bus after developing the special theory someone would have tried using tensor calculus to describe general relativity sooner or later.
The imaginative leap in special relativity was jettisoning the intellectual baggage of the aether and returning to Newton's relativity principle.
As for the theory being borne out by experiment, it is just as well that WW1 prevented the first eclipse measurement so that Einstein could develop general relativity in time for the next one.
I seem to remember being taught in history that we beat Germany 2-nil at their national sport.
That the USSR was a powerful military force was never in dispute. That they would overwhelm Europe in 3 days was an utterly ridiculous assertion. Yet that defeatism was parotted by every NATO general I met at the time.
You seem to think it would more prudent to assume that your enemy is inferior and incapable of hurting you
No, I consider it to be more prudent to accurately asses the threat posed by a potential adversary. In the name of 'freedom' we spent the cold war proping up every tin pot dictator that would support us, Saddam, Noriega, Marcos, Pinochet, etc. we didn't care how many tens of thousands they murdered so long as they were on 'our side'.
It is not a coincidence that the majority of the 'rogue states' that are now a problem were former client states, Cuba, Iran, Iraq. Meanwhile the US has remarkably little political capital in South Africa, Indonesia, Chile, Argentina, the Congo, etc. etc. having been the principal supporter of the former despots.
The assumption that the world is divided up into 'enemies' and 'friends' is a very naive one. It is a useful propaganda tool but a poor basis for public policy.
I am truly happy that we had "hawks" and not people like you making decisions about this stuff.
So you don't care about the fact that despite spending more on its military than the rest of the world put together, US influence in world affairs is declining. The US was bumped off the UN drugs and human rights comissions by the Western powers.
That was one reason, cost was another. But the biggest reason was that the easiest way to start the multilateral arms reduction process was to agree to not build new classes of weapon and countermeasures to add to the equation.
That is the reason the Russians are now saying that if the US abrogates the ABM treaty they will regard the SALT-I and SALT-II treaties void as well.
The neutron bomb was designed as a battlefield weapon. This was in the days when NATO believed that it could only defend Europe from a Warsaw pact attack for 3 days before having to resort to nuclear weapons. Those of us who pointed out that a large proportion of the USSR forces were built during WWII and that Russia was having enough trouble keeping its satelite states subdued were ridiculed. The claim was repeated even while the USSR demonstrated it could not hold Afghanistan against irregular troops with light arms and Ghadaffi demonstrated that he could not win a desert war with the latest soviet tank against a much smaller Chad force lead by a handful of ex-NATO mercenaries.
The hawks only changed their tune after the USSR collapsed so spectacularly that anybody who admitted they were scared stiff of them looked stupid. So instead they cooked up the ridiclous canard that they deliberately spent the USSR into bankrupcy. Once the full implications of the sino-Soviet pact signed by Putin are understood they will undoubtedly switch to claiming that Russia and China are still poised to invade the West and that only a massive handout to military contractors can save civilization. The tactics would be comical if the consequences were not so great.
It is very easy to promote the most aggressive pig-headed policy as being 'tough' and 'resolute'. Arrafat and Sharon are both making sure their respective consitutencies consider them so. However their tactics are nowhere near as impressive from the outside.
Q:How do you know GWB is lying? A: His buttocks are moving
Your entire knowledge of the controversy may come from the play, mine does not. A film does not have to be fiction, in the case of Amadeus nobody knows the facts for certain but the plot is certainly not a complete travesty as say The Patriot's invented massacre of civillians was.
The play only explores one theory of what Salierri was up to and by no means the most or least sinister. Before the play the most common allegation against Salierri was that he murdered Motzart with poison. Schaffer's play implies Salierri murdered him with overwork but even then there is a deliberate ambiguity.
Schaffer did not make up the comissioning of the requiem incident. The debate over what Salierri's motives were and whether he intended to kill or helped hill Motzart as he claimed long predates the play.
It is generally agreed that Salierri comissioned the Requiem but what his motives were is impossible to know for certain because his own statements on the matter came long after he went to the lunatic assylum. Salierri did claim to have killed Motzart, however it is difficult to know if that meant murder (which he did claim on occasion) or if he thought he killed him through overwork. It is not possible to take a madman's words at face value.
Mozart died only a short while after the first performance of the magic flute and was composing his requiem right up to his death. In fact his ability to compose was still so strong that a rival composer Salieri had actually commissioned the requiem, apparently with the intention of passing it off as his own.
Mozart's financial difficulties were not quite as dire as his wife later made them out to be. He certainly did not die from poverty, he simply had difficulty meeting the expenses of living in the style expected at court. At the time of his death the English court had decided to open negotiations with him to bring him to London as court composer so his money problems would have been shortly solved.
And then sue San Jose Airport to force them to let him land or take off at any time of the day or night he damn well pleases.
You missed one significant part of the finances of private jet ownership, hiring it out. Very few corporate jet owners make enough use of the thing to justify the cost and hassle. If you think waiting in an airport is bad then try buying a plane - hint maintenance, insurance, employing 2 pilots etc.
The reason it makes sense is that you can lease your private plane to a 'management company' that handles all the tedious stuff for you and in addition leases the plane out to other people when you are not using it. If you only use the plane occasionally it can be a lucrative source of income.
I'll bet that 90% of the people who buy one made their money out of fat corporate welfare handouts.
My ancestor, George Gordon (Lord Byron) enjoyed a significant fraction of the population of Geneva and Rome repeatedly. However even he never managed to enjoy an entire country.
Since the entire population of Luxembourg is only 35 the devising of such a scheme can hardly have taxed the inventor.
Its much bigger than just the US govt, they have a very minor role here. This is an IETF/ITU thing