If you RTFA you would know that it has little to do with corporate greed, and lots to do with making the Olympics possible. Without sponsors, the Olympic games simply wouldn't have enough funding to go on.
Rubbish, they managed to hold the Olympics without any TV money or sponsorship before WWII. The only reason the Olympics are ridiculously expensive is because countries build all new stadiums to bring them to their country.
NBC have not mentioned the real reason that the olympics have been so badly attended this year. The tickets are ridiculously expensive, even more expensive than Formula One. Like 200 Euro for a day in the stands. So multiply that by ten days and you have spent $2500 per person on the tickets alone.
It does not need to be this expensive. They could use existing facilities instead of building new.
Care to point some registered or sworn sources where the swift boat vets have lied? Fact is, all but one of the guys that served with Kerry in Vietnam support his campaign... that's pretty bad in and of itself.
I was refering to the "Swift Boat Veterans for Bush", the Karl Rove outfit run by a Nixon goon whose purpose is smearing Kerry.
They have just been proven to be liars. Their advert makes the claim that there was no enemy fire when Kerry won his Bronze star for saving a soldier after his boat hit a mine. Only problem with this claim is that Washington Post just pulled a FOIA on the military records of the 'witness' in the film. Guess what? Thirty years ago he had said that bullets had been flying all over the place.
So when was this guy lying? Thirty years ago when he had no reason to tell a lie or today when his lie would serve the Bush campaign?
Who is paying these "Swift Boat Veterans for Bush" for these smears and how much? It is a fair question since we now know that the whole troopergate smear against Clinton was perjured accounts bought and promoted by Scaife.
First of all, the Swift Boat vets are NOT advocating acts of civil disobedience bordering of violence
No but they are proven to be complete fucking liars.
If we have a repeat of that at the Republican National Convention, those images shown on TV will turn off many "swing" voters and they'll end up voting against Senator Kerry in no time flat.
If there was a repeat of the Chicago situation voters would turn on the incumbent for failing to keep order, same way that they turned on LBJ and his party in '68.
I suspect that there are large numbers of Republicans thinking as you do and are planning ways of making the situation turn violent, but it would be a real bad mistake.
Rove thought that he had a masterstroke when he had his little Top Gun stunt on the USS Lincoln. When I saw the pictures I thought 'we just saw George W. Bush loose the election'. Now they are planning a 13 minute attack ad against Kerry as the centrepiece of their convention. I hope that people convince the networks to give the Kerry campaign equal time to rebutt it.
George W. Bush is an incompetent, corrupt, manipulative, lying, coward. He can think up schemes but he fails to execute. Remember when the Spanish government tried to claim that the Al Qaeda attacks were byu ETA and that a vote against them would be a vote for terrorism? People saw right through that and voted the government out. I think they will see through whatever schemes Rove and his agent provocateurs think up.
When Bush was tested he spent 7 minutes reading My Pet Goat.
It takes a special kind of person to deride an international event based on the ideals of self improvement, national pride, and respect for other countries.
Oh don't forget the upper class elitist snobbery. The whole point about the rules requiring players to be amateurs was to keep out anyone who had to work for their living.
What you are saying basically is that it takes a Brit to rip the piss out of a bunch of pompous clap-trap. You Americans have always done terribly in the piss ripping event. And don't think that sending Jon Stewart off to get coaching from John Cleese is going to get you anything better than the bronze and then only if you are really lucky and draw the Germans in the first round.
Its only a game you know. And don't pretend that you haven't watched the beach volleyball and wondered if they could go back to the original rules and do it nude.
My bullshit alert is blinking on overdrive here. The article seems to use the word patent in every paragraph. If this was a real article the patent would be mentioned at the end if at all.
It is pretty suspicious when any company comes along with a technology that is an order of magnitude better than the state of the art. In this case the state of the art is about 10Gb and they are claiming 4 orders of magnitude better.
Why would the disk be removable for that amount of storage? Surely keeping the heads free of dust would make you want to seal the thing up. Why the incredibly precise price range when we know that every new technology starts high then drops in price?
If the technology was real you could charge $20K for a device easily. You would also find that at this point you had to use some pretty expensive electronics to keep up with the necessary data rates. 100Tb takes a heck of a lot of time to move along a firewire or USB2.0 connection.
Getting the beam size small is not all you need to do. At the beam size they claim you would have to do quite a bit to avoid the effects of vibration etc.
if I hadn't just moved here to Florida, I'd have my Canadian TV satellite dish up so I could be watching live Olympic coverage right now instead of sitting through Meet The Press.
I have a spare dish and LNB. Before I put it up does anyone know if the canadian stations are encrypted?
Can you just think how boring the coverage would be if the USA sent PBS as our national TV representives at the games?
Yes, they would do what they always do and get the feed from the BBC.
Since what NBC is doing is being made available to other nations' media outlets through a content sharing relationship, a lower quality USA feed would effect a lot of smaller nations' TV outlets.
You mean that they would see more than the US competitor out in 6th place?
The "Olympics" (tm) is Globalization defined. Duh. Who wants to watch that?
The NBC coverage would appear to be the exact opposite, trite jingoistic nationalism interspersed with occasional glimpses of actual events.
They seem to be slightly better this time round than last when there would be like 40 minutes of comentary and 15 minutes of ads every hour. But even so you know that NBC is not going to show any event unless the US has won.
Case in point NBC keep showing arial shots of a curiously complete Parthenon, its actually a copy down in Georgia but they don't mention that.
BTW did you know that the olympic torch relay was actually thought up by the NAZIs for their Olympics?
I was defending the creation and right to exist of Israel as a homeland for Jewish people.,
What do you mean by that? For example in what way would New York City be inadequate?
Do you mean exclusively for Jewish people?
Do you mean that non-Jewish people should have exactly the same rights? If not why not?
Do you mean that a Palestinian who was born within the borders of Israel has an equal right to live there? If not how can you claim that there are equal rights without resorting to sophistry?
The problem with your trite slogan is that the reality is that Israel has become an apartheid state, a state where non-Jews are discriminated against and your slogan is given as justification at each step.
but let's not justify current Palestinian terrorism based on actions of Jewish settlers from a bygone era
Both sides attack civilians, both sides violate the laws of war, both sides are guilty.
More than half of the settlements were created after the Oslo peace accords. Israel broke its side of that bargain long before the second Intifada.
With the current spreading around of depleted uranium in unstable regions, and the possibility of using breeding techniques to turn DU into plutonium, I dont feel as confident these days that the difficulty of creating large quantities of fission grade material is beyond a dedicated group
Iran is an advanced industrialized country with engineering as their core economic base. Every step of the oil production process requires engineering skills.
Even so Iran has been unable to build a bomb to date despite a huge influx of resources since the idiotic axis of evil speech. Translated into Farsi the speech said "go build a nuke quickly before we invade'.
Bush is absolute proof of he fact that leadership matters. He is an utter ignoramous and utterly incompetent. His lack of skills necessary for office are only matched by his inflated sense of self importance. He has no character, he is not a leader. He is dishonest, untruthful and a bully. When his leadership was put to the test his choice was to read my pet goat.
Umm, you realize most of the Jews who went there went to avoid being killed (this admittedly was a minority), persecuted, or discriminated against elsewhere? And you realize that Hitler and his Final Solution led to the creation of Israel, right?,
Israel was only created after the second world war had been won and the NAZI party utterly destroyed.
Should German attrocities against Jews be justification for Zionist attrocities against Palestinians?
Shamir and his crew were oputright terrorists, every bit as indiscriminate in their murders as Arafat.
At the time the US helped to create Israel the Jim Crow laws were still in force in the US south. One of the reasons that the supporters of those laws supported the creation of Israel was to ship Jews off to Israel rather than to have them in the US.
It is not a history in which any side comes off well.
If that is correct that wmds are that easy to build, we should acknowledge that and adapt to the threat.
Simply put, if we did keep quiet the terrorists would eventually figure it out anyways. Security through obscurity doesnt work. open source anti terrorism.
Actually Nuclear devices are relatively easy to build compared to the problem of obtaining the enriched uranium or plutonium required. So they are well within the capability of most medium capability industrial nations. Fortunately they are well outside the capabilities of terrorist groups.
As for the biological and chemical weapons, they plain do not work. The Tokyo subway sarin gas attack showed their limitations. Even in the most densely occupied public spaces you could imagine the attack killed far fewer people than the Oaklahoma bombing.
Saddam used chemical weapons to some effect against civilians and both sides in the Iran/Iraq war used chemical weapons. But they were being used as a substitute for conventional munitions. It is rather easier to make chlorine in a hurry than Semtex or for that matter nitro-glycerine. Saddam used the chemical weapons against civilians because he wanted the buildings left intact.
Also take a look at the emails where Al Zawahiri is asking idiotic questions about less than $23,000 that was keeping the office going for several months. The staff are all on half pay, puchase of a fax machine requires approval from the organization head. This is not an organization that has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free cash as many journalists have been reporting. The 9/11 plot was done on a shoestring.
The other issue that seems to keep the Al Qaeda loonies from using chemical weapons is that they are clearly a dishonorable weapon. One of the factors that hit Al Qaeda hard is the fact that their attack on the US was against civilians. Then when faced with US troops Al Qaeda and the Taleban both ran rather than stand and fight.
We have known from day #1 that the Arab terrorists attempting to attack America hate us for specific reasons: kicking Sadaam Hussein out of Kuwait; propping up and supporting financially and militarily the country of Israel.
As a matter of history Bin Laden wanted to kick Saddam out of Kewait himself. One of the reasons that Fahd did not want him to do that was that if he had been successful Bin Laden would have first set himself up as ruler, then set about taking over Saud and Iraq.
Bin Laden is utterly irrelevant in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. It is one of the issues he uses to attract and energize followers but it is like the GOP opposition to gay marriage, they really could not give a hoot about the issue but it makes a handy wedge. Bin Laden's real complaint is that the US is not likely to allow him to take over Saudi Arabia and replace the corrupt house of Saud with a looney theocracy.
Make no mistake about it. If we hadn't been supporting Israel for the last two generations the neighboring Muslims would have killed every single Jew there.
Again not true since the US did not actually start supporting Israel until the early 60s. During the Suez affair the US was actually opposing Israel and the UK. The close connection of US/Israeli interests is actually much more recent dating to the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
From a military perspective Israel could probably survive. But from an economic perspective the Israeli economy would not last very long without US support.
Make no mistake about it. If we hadn't been supporting Israel for the last two generations the neighboring Muslims would have killed every single Jew there. That's their goal. Elimination of the jews. Period. So okay, we acknowledge it. Now what? Are we going to stand by and watch the billion Muslims destroy the sixty million Jews?
Again completely failing to understand the situation. The issue for the Palestinians is that in 1948 the majority of them were forced out of what became Israel by what the serbs called ethnic cleansing. Then after the 1967 war the remaining Palestinian territories were invaded by Israel which has occupied them since and has been illegally attempting to annex them through the settler movement.
Most of the Palestinians are Muslim but a significant minority are actually Christian.
The problem with Israel is that you can't have a democratic Jewish state any more than you can have a democratic white people's state or a democratic Christian state. There is a whole rack of discriminatory legislation that makes Arab Israeli citizens second class. For example only Jews are allowed to build in Jerusalem. Palestinans simply do not get building permission.
Israel has turned itself ito an appartheid state. Unfortunately for them there is no Nelson Mandela, Arafat is more of a Mugabwe type.
Sure Isreal can hold onto the occupied territories indefinitely, sure the Jim Crow discrimination against Palestinians can be maintained. But it can't do that and be a democracy.
This is why even Sharon has seen the need to withdraw from the Gaza strip and parts of the West Bank.
Sure folk can argue that dismantling the Jim Crow discrimination against Palestinians in Israel would be 'giving in to terrorists'. But would it have been wrong to end Jim Crow in the US South if the civil rights movement had been violent?
In the end the obvious solution is to annex the West Bank and Gaza and grant citizenship to everyone who lives there. Sure it will no longer be a 'Jewish' state, but it will be better than what there is today.
Then NeXT would have vanished in the first year or so. Making hardware was criticially important to getting mind share. NeXT and Be made computers, if only for a little while, and they got a lot of attention. GEM, VisiOn, and several other attempts at a software-only play hardly made a blip on the radar.
Vastly more copies of GEM shipped than copies of NeXT step. It was the O/S on the Atari machines. It was a hugely popular O/S at the time and made a much bigger impact than Be ever did.
The big problem with NeXT was the price of the machines, it was twice the cost that the market segment would bear. A large amount of that cost was the result of unnecessary use of custom hardware where commodity would have worked fine. The magnesium cube and magneto-optical disk were only symptoms. Steve Jobs is the kind of guy who would specify a non-standard screw thread pitch.
Incidentally, GEM was killed by legal harassment from Apple.
So, you can't diffuse laser light and still have it visible over long distances, which means if your looking for it you can expect a point source and you have to be looking directly at it.
This whole scheme sounds to me like that scheme some guy had to make the moon turn red by pointing laser pens at it.
The big problem here is the atmosphere, and that is not a neutral propagation medium. When you go through several miles of it anything other than the brightest light is going to disappear.
To make the scheme work you probably would want to forget lasers and use a natural light source such as a star and construct some form of blind in space to modulate the light from a pulsar or the like.
OK its a pretty far out scheme, but no more so than the giant laser scheme. Its like suggesting building a land link from the mainland to Hawaii. Is a bridge more farfetched than a tunnel?
You seem to forget that at the time the PC came out there was no Mac, no Lisa. IBM did not go to see Microsoft for the O/S, they wanted Microsoft BASIC which Microsoft supplied to both Apple and Commodore. IBM expected to buy the O/S from Digital Research but Gary was out wind surfing.
The big issue was the one raised in the first post. Apple would have had to give up hardware to become the dominant O/S player. The PC manufacturing world chose Microsoft windows for one reason, Microsoft was not IBM. There was no way Compaq or any other clone maker was going to let IBM define the hardware and software platform, not after they declared their intention to take the market proprietary with the microchannel architecture.
The other reason that Apple could not be a player was that between the launch of the Mac and the launch of Windows the Mac O/S pretty much ossified. Apple saw it as job done, finished. There was no forward movement. All the research dollars went into whacky stuff like the Newton and Dylan. It took the launch of Windows 95 for Apple to pull itself together, kick the deadweight out of the executive suite and bring back Steve.
A much more interesting question is what would have happened if NeXT had not got the crazy idea of making its own hardware systems and had come out as a 100% software O/S from the start. The NeXT box had some really funky stuff but it was light years ahead of MacOS or Windows at the time. I would have been really interested in getting into it if it had not been obvious that an education O/S pitched at that price point was a sure fire looser.
If you put Clive Sinclair and Steve Jobs together and took the median you might get something useful. Clive Sinclair could have defined the personal computer market if he had put a real floppy drive and a real keyboard on the QL. Steve Jobs could have done likewise if he had spent less time thinking about the correct shade of black for his magnesium cube and instead made something affordable in a plastic case.
...as charging gun manufacturers with murder when a gun is used to kill someone. Just because vehicles are used as "get-away cars" in bank robberies should we outlaw automobiles?
There is a principle in law that the duty to act to prevent harm is dependent on three factors, the cost of preventing the harm, the expectation that harm would be caused and the harm that resulted. Basically if cost of preventing the harm is less than the expectation times the amount there is a duty of care.
In the case of automobiles the expectation of harm is actually very low, almost no cars are used for getaways as a proportion of those made, there is no feasible means of making a car so that it cannot be used in a getaway, the cost of the harm is not even that great - monetary loss of a few tens of thousands of dollars per incident.
In the case of guns it is very easy to see how liability could arise. A company selling a standard hunting rifle marketting to hunters is unlikely to end up facing liability. But a company that sells a barely legal AK-47 clone designed to be easily converted to full automatic firing, advertising through flyers posted in crack houses... that is a different matter entirely. Equally the manufacturer of the plastic gun designed to foil metal detectors. It is very easy to see how a legal liability can and is created here - court cases have been won in several states and rightly so.
In the case of P2P companies I think that it is entirely reasonable that if a P2P company ships a spyware trojan with their code that they be held liable for the cost of the fraud committed with that trojan since the expectation that they be used for that puspose is very very high. In fact it is hard to see how spyware has a legitimate business model so the expectation of harm becomes almost a certainty.
Sure there are people who want to believe that P2P schemes are used for applications other than spreading trojans and piracy. There are people who want to believe that reading my pet goat and drifting off to space for 7 minutes is an example of fine leadership when the country is attacked. There are people who think Harken, Haliburton and Enron are fine, honest companies which would never be involved in corrupt accounting practices despite the fact that all have paid huge fines for doing so. There are those that think that Gore went to court to stop the count in Florida, not Bush. There are those who think that it is merely coincidence that the terror alerts appear whenever Bush suffers a dip in the polls and it would be convenient for the media to change topic. There are people who believe that gay marriage is a greater threat to the country than Al Qaeda.
In short something like 50% of the US population who vote are Republicans.
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The political motivation right now is strong as this is an issue Bush polls better on than Kerry and the race is too close to call, so you cannot discount that this may have been in whole or part a polictical exercise. What with the timing (3 days after the DNC) as well, I put the chances of a political driving force at around 50%
If you want people to take a security warning seriously you do not add a campaign pitch to the end of it which is what Ridge did, claiming that the report is due to the magnificent leadership of Dufus etc.
If the warning is a complete fake (as seems very likely) it is bad, but if this is a genuine warning then the campaign commercial is even worse. Ridge must know how these warnings are being interpreted and what his little campaign ad would do for their credibility.
It now turns out that the information the warning is based on is four years old and pre-dates 9/11 and the invasion of afghanistan. Methinks that it very unlikely that plans have not been adapted since, not least because the security at the building will have changed. so it does look very much like Bush and co are playing politics with national security here.
I've heard some RETARDED statements on/. before, but this near takes the cake. DNS using XML?
Whatever you are smoking, I want some - 'cause it's clearly some REALLY GOOD SHIAT!
Oh Microsoft has already proposed as much in UDDI and the second attempt to insert XML records into the DNS this year is now well under way.
Ontologies, you mean - I think you'll find that this is part of the effort.
No, I happen to know what the word originally meant, a system of being. I think it was ludicrous when the AI world started to make claims of that type in the 1970s and it is ridiculous to keep repeating the mistake now.
A vocabulary of shared terms is a perfectly reasonable term of art to use and one that does not involve any claims that could be fairly described as blasphemous.
Before I finished reading the headline to her my wife interrupted to say 'you are not getting one.'
140" is only 12' which in widescreen would make it 10.6' by 5' which is not all that large for a cinema screen. There have been digital projectors that size for ages. But I suspect that the screen is actually academy ratio so it would be 9' x 7'
Yes this hack is cheaper but I saw it 7 years ago when Tom Knight did it at MIT.
As far as the resolution goes anything over about 3000x2000 would be wasted. You can't sit very close to a screen that size.
I would be more interested in something like a wrap arround screen for the total immersion experience. Should be possible to do a 180 degree screen well with 4 projectors.
"Now XML has gone nowhere except as a set of popular libraries for cross-language data serialization..."
If there was a sentence in the article that proved it was rubbish this would be it. XML is not just slightly popular, it is now the defacto structured data representation. There is no competitor, there is simply no other format that is used in new protocol standards. Within ten years the DNS will have migrated to an XML format.
RDF on the other hand is a not very good idea to start with that has not exactly improved with the years. All RDF is in principle is typed set theory logic, so instead of trying to define a new set of semantics why not simply import Z or VDM wholesale?
Second problem with RDF is that it is really hard for a grad student to write an operational or denotational semantics for a programming language, a field that has only been worked on solidly for thrity years or so. So now we are expected to be defining semantics for everything???
The way that semantics get attached to syntax is through use. Use in this case means a program. I don't know that there is any RDF application out there that is likely to go much of anywhere soon.
I think that the way to get to a semantic web is completely different. You start from XML documents rather than attempt to change what the world chose for syntax. You build simple operational vocabularies of common terms for use in catalogues and make it really easy for people to categorize their work within those catalogues. You take as your starting premise that any structure of knowledge is going to be a work in progress.
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Rubbish, they managed to hold the Olympics without any TV money or sponsorship before WWII. The only reason the Olympics are ridiculously expensive is because countries build all new stadiums to bring them to their country.
NBC have not mentioned the real reason that the olympics have been so badly attended this year. The tickets are ridiculously expensive, even more expensive than Formula One. Like 200 Euro for a day in the stands. So multiply that by ten days and you have spent $2500 per person on the tickets alone.
It does not need to be this expensive. They could use existing facilities instead of building new.
I was refering to the "Swift Boat Veterans for Bush", the Karl Rove outfit run by a Nixon goon whose purpose is smearing Kerry.
They have just been proven to be liars. Their advert makes the claim that there was no enemy fire when Kerry won his Bronze star for saving a soldier after his boat hit a mine. Only problem with this claim is that Washington Post just pulled a FOIA on the military records of the 'witness' in the film. Guess what? Thirty years ago he had said that bullets had been flying all over the place.
So when was this guy lying? Thirty years ago when he had no reason to tell a lie or today when his lie would serve the Bush campaign?
Who is paying these "Swift Boat Veterans for Bush" for these smears and how much? It is a fair question since we now know that the whole troopergate smear against Clinton was perjured accounts bought and promoted by Scaife.
No but they are proven to be complete fucking liars.
If we have a repeat of that at the Republican National Convention, those images shown on TV will turn off many "swing" voters and they'll end up voting against Senator Kerry in no time flat.
If there was a repeat of the Chicago situation voters would turn on the incumbent for failing to keep order, same way that they turned on LBJ and his party in '68.
I suspect that there are large numbers of Republicans thinking as you do and are planning ways of making the situation turn violent, but it would be a real bad mistake.
Rove thought that he had a masterstroke when he had his little Top Gun stunt on the USS Lincoln. When I saw the pictures I thought 'we just saw George W. Bush loose the election'. Now they are planning a 13 minute attack ad against Kerry as the centrepiece of their convention. I hope that people convince the networks to give the Kerry campaign equal time to rebutt it.
George W. Bush is an incompetent, corrupt, manipulative, lying, coward. He can think up schemes but he fails to execute. Remember when the Spanish government tried to claim that the Al Qaeda attacks were byu ETA and that a vote against them would be a vote for terrorism? People saw right through that and voted the government out. I think they will see through whatever schemes Rove and his agent provocateurs think up.
When Bush was tested he spent 7 minutes reading My Pet Goat.
At last, proof positive that Rush Limbaugh is dangerous to people's health.
Oh don't forget the upper class elitist snobbery. The whole point about the rules requiring players to be amateurs was to keep out anyone who had to work for their living.
What you are saying basically is that it takes a Brit to rip the piss out of a bunch of pompous clap-trap. You Americans have always done terribly in the piss ripping event. And don't think that sending Jon Stewart off to get coaching from John Cleese is going to get you anything better than the bronze and then only if you are really lucky and draw the Germans in the first round.
Its only a game you know. And don't pretend that you haven't watched the beach volleyball and wondered if they could go back to the original rules and do it nude.
It is pretty suspicious when any company comes along with a technology that is an order of magnitude better than the state of the art. In this case the state of the art is about 10Gb and they are claiming 4 orders of magnitude better.
Why would the disk be removable for that amount of storage? Surely keeping the heads free of dust would make you want to seal the thing up. Why the incredibly precise price range when we know that every new technology starts high then drops in price?
If the technology was real you could charge $20K for a device easily. You would also find that at this point you had to use some pretty expensive electronics to keep up with the necessary data rates. 100Tb takes a heck of a lot of time to move along a firewire or USB2.0 connection.
Getting the beam size small is not all you need to do. At the beam size they claim you would have to do quite a bit to avoid the effects of vibration etc.
I have a spare dish and LNB. Before I put it up does anyone know if the canadian stations are encrypted?
Yes, they would do what they always do and get the feed from the BBC.
Since what NBC is doing is being made available to other nations' media outlets through a content sharing relationship, a lower quality USA feed would effect a lot of smaller nations' TV outlets.
You mean that they would see more than the US competitor out in 6th place?
The NBC coverage would appear to be the exact opposite, trite jingoistic nationalism interspersed with occasional glimpses of actual events.
They seem to be slightly better this time round than last when there would be like 40 minutes of comentary and 15 minutes of ads every hour. But even so you know that NBC is not going to show any event unless the US has won.
Case in point NBC keep showing arial shots of a curiously complete Parthenon, its actually a copy down in Georgia but they don't mention that.
BTW did you know that the olympic torch relay was actually thought up by the NAZIs for their Olympics?
What do you mean by that? For example in what way would New York City be inadequate?
Do you mean exclusively for Jewish people?
Do you mean that non-Jewish people should have exactly the same rights? If not why not?
Do you mean that a Palestinian who was born within the borders of Israel has an equal right to live there? If not how can you claim that there are equal rights without resorting to sophistry?
The problem with your trite slogan is that the reality is that Israel has become an apartheid state, a state where non-Jews are discriminated against and your slogan is given as justification at each step.
but let's not justify current Palestinian terrorism based on actions of Jewish settlers from a bygone era
Both sides attack civilians, both sides violate the laws of war, both sides are guilty.
More than half of the settlements were created after the Oslo peace accords. Israel broke its side of that bargain long before the second Intifada.
Iran is an advanced industrialized country with engineering as their core economic base. Every step of the oil production process requires engineering skills.
Even so Iran has been unable to build a bomb to date despite a huge influx of resources since the idiotic axis of evil speech. Translated into Farsi the speech said "go build a nuke quickly before we invade'.
Bush is absolute proof of he fact that leadership matters. He is an utter ignoramous and utterly incompetent. His lack of skills necessary for office are only matched by his inflated sense of self importance. He has no character, he is not a leader. He is dishonest, untruthful and a bully. When his leadership was put to the test his choice was to read my pet goat.
Israel was only created after the second world war had been won and the NAZI party utterly destroyed.
Should German attrocities against Jews be justification for Zionist attrocities against Palestinians?
Shamir and his crew were oputright terrorists, every bit as indiscriminate in their murders as Arafat.
At the time the US helped to create Israel the Jim Crow laws were still in force in the US south. One of the reasons that the supporters of those laws supported the creation of Israel was to ship Jews off to Israel rather than to have them in the US.
It is not a history in which any side comes off well.
Actually Nuclear devices are relatively easy to build compared to the problem of obtaining the enriched uranium or plutonium required. So they are well within the capability of most medium capability industrial nations. Fortunately they are well outside the capabilities of terrorist groups.
As for the biological and chemical weapons, they plain do not work. The Tokyo subway sarin gas attack showed their limitations. Even in the most densely occupied public spaces you could imagine the attack killed far fewer people than the Oaklahoma bombing.
Saddam used chemical weapons to some effect against civilians and both sides in the Iran/Iraq war used chemical weapons. But they were being used as a substitute for conventional munitions. It is rather easier to make chlorine in a hurry than Semtex or for that matter nitro-glycerine. Saddam used the chemical weapons against civilians because he wanted the buildings left intact.
Also take a look at the emails where Al Zawahiri is asking idiotic questions about less than $23,000 that was keeping the office going for several months. The staff are all on half pay, puchase of a fax machine requires approval from the organization head. This is not an organization that has hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free cash as many journalists have been reporting. The 9/11 plot was done on a shoestring.
The other issue that seems to keep the Al Qaeda loonies from using chemical weapons is that they are clearly a dishonorable weapon. One of the factors that hit Al Qaeda hard is the fact that their attack on the US was against civilians. Then when faced with US troops Al Qaeda and the Taleban both ran rather than stand and fight.
As a matter of history Bin Laden wanted to kick Saddam out of Kewait himself. One of the reasons that Fahd did not want him to do that was that if he had been successful Bin Laden would have first set himself up as ruler, then set about taking over Saud and Iraq.
Bin Laden is utterly irrelevant in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. It is one of the issues he uses to attract and energize followers but it is like the GOP opposition to gay marriage, they really could not give a hoot about the issue but it makes a handy wedge. Bin Laden's real complaint is that the US is not likely to allow him to take over Saudi Arabia and replace the corrupt house of Saud with a looney theocracy.
Make no mistake about it. If we hadn't been supporting Israel for the last two generations the neighboring Muslims would have killed every single Jew there.
Again not true since the US did not actually start supporting Israel until the early 60s. During the Suez affair the US was actually opposing Israel and the UK. The close connection of US/Israeli interests is actually much more recent dating to the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
From a military perspective Israel could probably survive. But from an economic perspective the Israeli economy would not last very long without US support.
Make no mistake about it. If we hadn't been supporting Israel for the last two generations the neighboring Muslims would have killed every single Jew there. That's their goal. Elimination of the jews. Period. So okay, we acknowledge it. Now what? Are we going to stand by and watch the billion Muslims destroy the sixty million Jews?
Again completely failing to understand the situation. The issue for the Palestinians is that in 1948 the majority of them were forced out of what became Israel by what the serbs called ethnic cleansing. Then after the 1967 war the remaining Palestinian territories were invaded by Israel which has occupied them since and has been illegally attempting to annex them through the settler movement.
Most of the Palestinians are Muslim but a significant minority are actually Christian.
The problem with Israel is that you can't have a democratic Jewish state any more than you can have a democratic white people's state or a democratic Christian state. There is a whole rack of discriminatory legislation that makes Arab Israeli citizens second class. For example only Jews are allowed to build in Jerusalem. Palestinans simply do not get building permission.
Israel has turned itself ito an appartheid state. Unfortunately for them there is no Nelson Mandela, Arafat is more of a Mugabwe type.
Sure Isreal can hold onto the occupied territories indefinitely, sure the Jim Crow discrimination against Palestinians can be maintained. But it can't do that and be a democracy.
This is why even Sharon has seen the need to withdraw from the Gaza strip and parts of the West Bank.
Sure folk can argue that dismantling the Jim Crow discrimination against Palestinians in Israel would be 'giving in to terrorists'. But would it have been wrong to end Jim Crow in the US South if the civil rights movement had been violent?
In the end the obvious solution is to annex the West Bank and Gaza and grant citizenship to everyone who lives there. Sure it will no longer be a 'Jewish' state, but it will be better than what there is today.
It was a language that Apple spent many millions developing then killed. It was big in the AI community and the Lisp world.
Vastly more copies of GEM shipped than copies of NeXT step. It was the O/S on the Atari machines. It was a hugely popular O/S at the time and made a much bigger impact than Be ever did.
The big problem with NeXT was the price of the machines, it was twice the cost that the market segment would bear. A large amount of that cost was the result of unnecessary use of custom hardware where commodity would have worked fine. The magnesium cube and magneto-optical disk were only symptoms. Steve Jobs is the kind of guy who would specify a non-standard screw thread pitch.
Incidentally, GEM was killed by legal harassment from Apple.
This whole scheme sounds to me like that scheme some guy had to make the moon turn red by pointing laser pens at it.
The big problem here is the atmosphere, and that is not a neutral propagation medium. When you go through several miles of it anything other than the brightest light is going to disappear.
To make the scheme work you probably would want to forget lasers and use a natural light source such as a star and construct some form of blind in space to modulate the light from a pulsar or the like.
OK its a pretty far out scheme, but no more so than the giant laser scheme. Its like suggesting building a land link from the mainland to Hawaii. Is a bridge more farfetched than a tunnel?
The big issue was the one raised in the first post. Apple would have had to give up hardware to become the dominant O/S player. The PC manufacturing world chose Microsoft windows for one reason, Microsoft was not IBM. There was no way Compaq or any other clone maker was going to let IBM define the hardware and software platform, not after they declared their intention to take the market proprietary with the microchannel architecture.
The other reason that Apple could not be a player was that between the launch of the Mac and the launch of Windows the Mac O/S pretty much ossified. Apple saw it as job done, finished. There was no forward movement. All the research dollars went into whacky stuff like the Newton and Dylan. It took the launch of Windows 95 for Apple to pull itself together, kick the deadweight out of the executive suite and bring back Steve.
A much more interesting question is what would have happened if NeXT had not got the crazy idea of making its own hardware systems and had come out as a 100% software O/S from the start. The NeXT box had some really funky stuff but it was light years ahead of MacOS or Windows at the time. I would have been really interested in getting into it if it had not been obvious that an education O/S pitched at that price point was a sure fire looser.
If you put Clive Sinclair and Steve Jobs together and took the median you might get something useful. Clive Sinclair could have defined the personal computer market if he had put a real floppy drive and a real keyboard on the QL. Steve Jobs could have done likewise if he had spent less time thinking about the correct shade of black for his magnesium cube and instead made something affordable in a plastic case.
There is a principle in law that the duty to act to prevent harm is dependent on three factors, the cost of preventing the harm, the expectation that harm would be caused and the harm that resulted. Basically if cost of preventing the harm is less than the expectation times the amount there is a duty of care.
In the case of automobiles the expectation of harm is actually very low, almost no cars are used for getaways as a proportion of those made, there is no feasible means of making a car so that it cannot be used in a getaway, the cost of the harm is not even that great - monetary loss of a few tens of thousands of dollars per incident.
In the case of guns it is very easy to see how liability could arise. A company selling a standard hunting rifle marketting to hunters is unlikely to end up facing liability. But a company that sells a barely legal AK-47 clone designed to be easily converted to full automatic firing, advertising through flyers posted in crack houses... that is a different matter entirely. Equally the manufacturer of the plastic gun designed to foil metal detectors. It is very easy to see how a legal liability can and is created here - court cases have been won in several states and rightly so.
In the case of P2P companies I think that it is entirely reasonable that if a P2P company ships a spyware trojan with their code that they be held liable for the cost of the fraud committed with that trojan since the expectation that they be used for that puspose is very very high. In fact it is hard to see how spyware has a legitimate business model so the expectation of harm becomes almost a certainty.
Sure there are people who want to believe that P2P schemes are used for applications other than spreading trojans and piracy. There are people who want to believe that reading my pet goat and drifting off to space for 7 minutes is an example of fine leadership when the country is attacked. There are people who think Harken, Haliburton and Enron are fine, honest companies which would never be involved in corrupt accounting practices despite the fact that all have paid huge fines for doing so. There are those that think that Gore went to court to stop the count in Florida, not Bush. There are those who think that it is merely coincidence that the terror alerts appear whenever Bush suffers a dip in the polls and it would be convenient for the media to change topic. There are people who believe that gay marriage is a greater threat to the country than Al Qaeda.
In short something like 50% of the US population who vote are Republicans.
If you want people to take a security warning seriously you do not add a campaign pitch to the end of it which is what Ridge did, claiming that the report is due to the magnificent leadership of Dufus etc.
If the warning is a complete fake (as seems very likely) it is bad, but if this is a genuine warning then the campaign commercial is even worse. Ridge must know how these warnings are being interpreted and what his little campaign ad would do for their credibility.
It now turns out that the information the warning is based on is four years old and pre-dates 9/11 and the invasion of afghanistan. Methinks that it very unlikely that plans have not been adapted since, not least because the security at the building will have changed. so it does look very much like Bush and co are playing politics with national security here.
Impeachment is too good for these people.
Oh Microsoft has already proposed as much in UDDI and the second attempt to insert XML records into the DNS this year is now well under way.
No, I happen to know what the word originally meant, a system of being. I think it was ludicrous when the AI world started to make claims of that type in the 1970s and it is ridiculous to keep repeating the mistake now.
A vocabulary of shared terms is a perfectly reasonable term of art to use and one that does not involve any claims that could be fairly described as blasphemous.
News to me.
Z has the usual Goedel issues concerning omega consistency and completeness, but it was shown to be consistent by Mike Spivey ten years back.
As for it being any different to VDM in this regard, I can't see why that would be the case, the schemes are pretty much alike.
Before I finished reading the headline to her my wife interrupted to say 'you are not getting one.'
140" is only 12' which in widescreen would make it 10.6' by 5' which is not all that large for a cinema screen. There have been digital projectors that size for ages. But I suspect that the screen is actually academy ratio so it would be 9' x 7'
Yes this hack is cheaper but I saw it 7 years ago when Tom Knight did it at MIT.
As far as the resolution goes anything over about 3000x2000 would be wasted. You can't sit very close to a screen that size.
I would be more interested in something like a wrap arround screen for the total immersion experience. Should be possible to do a 180 degree screen well with 4 projectors.
If there was a sentence in the article that proved it was rubbish this would be it. XML is not just slightly popular, it is now the defacto structured data representation. There is no competitor, there is simply no other format that is used in new protocol standards. Within ten years the DNS will have migrated to an XML format.
RDF on the other hand is a not very good idea to start with that has not exactly improved with the years. All RDF is in principle is typed set theory logic, so instead of trying to define a new set of semantics why not simply import Z or VDM wholesale?
Second problem with RDF is that it is really hard for a grad student to write an operational or denotational semantics for a programming language, a field that has only been worked on solidly for thrity years or so. So now we are expected to be defining semantics for everything???
The way that semantics get attached to syntax is through use. Use in this case means a program. I don't know that there is any RDF application out there that is likely to go much of anywhere soon.
I think that the way to get to a semantic web is completely different. You start from XML documents rather than attempt to change what the world chose for syntax. You build simple operational vocabularies of common terms for use in catalogues and make it really easy for people to categorize their work within those catalogues. You take as your starting premise that any structure of knowledge is going to be a work in progress.