You're trying to do the impossible. For at least 30 years, people have adovcated the "paperless office." It has reached a mythic status. It's just that: a myth. People always want to print. Hard copies allow annotations. Forms do not. Paper can be changed on the fly. Forms can not. Paper is portable. Forms are not. Even with laptops, you're still tied to the laptop. Paper can be folded up, and carried in pockets. Paper is collaborative. Computers aren't. Only one person can use a terminal. There's no rapid interaction among the group. That's why meetings and phone calls are still used even though email is practically ubiquitous.
Anyone that advocates rigid computer forms over flexible paper, doesn't understand how paper is used in society. I could go on and on, but there's no need. An entire book has already been written about this.
And before you anyone cries "luddite," the book was written by a cognitive psycologist at Hewlett-Packard, and a senior Microsoft researcher in interactive systems. Hardly luddites, and arguably an ironic position for them to take given their employment.
Gazing upon BestBuys shelves, noticing the implications of the covers to games, I noticed that a considerable number of games were based off of some movie. All the movies suck. If it were exciting to make music, they'd probably have a game based off of Britney Spears and then turn around and think that people aren't interested in gaming becuase noone wants to purchase the Britney Spears Dance game.
The Shanghiers speak, amazingly enough, Shanghaiese (Shanghaihua in Mandarin (lit. "Shanghai Speech")).
Being a tonal language, "ning" could mean any number of things. The excellent hanzi dictionary, zhongwen.comlists six different meanings for "ning". It is important to note that zhongwen uses standard Mandarin (putonghua) pronouciation and not Shanghaiese. How much variation there is between the two I don't know. The only thing even close to slang for testicles is "lemons", and I doubt that's right. I would think iit was a proper noun.
FWIW standard Mandarin is really close to what is spoken in Beijing, but not exactly. Beijingers tend to end some words with 'r'. (e.g. "dian" becomes "diar" ("a little bit" or "hour") and kinda flat-vowel/whine some other words (e.g. "na" becomes "nei", "zhe" becomes "zhei" ("this" and "that")). When I asked my Chinese (meaning both the foriegn language and the nationality) TA about it, she said "You want to use the standard Mandarin. You don't want to sound like you're from Beijing!" When asked why, she said, "They're stuck up. Like New Yorkers." I said it was fine with me, as long as I didn't sound like a hick.
Ni de zhongwen ke jieshu le. (Hopefully that says, "Your Chinese lesson has ended.":) )
I had a private office. Of course it was because one of the profs retired and my PI was going to stick me and a player to be named later into it, but then never got around to actually naming that player...
Students in China did not "die for freedom" in Tian'an men Square. This is a Western myth. They were mere puppets, and their strings were being pulled by crime organizations and Western governments. Quite simply, the Western governments wished to topple the Chinese government, just like they did to the USSR.
You were taught that by the same ones who sent tanks in, and killed the unarmed civilians right? Yeah. A very believable group no doubt.
Wow, you are so wrong and misguided it isn't even funny. The Korean War was fought because the UN (read USA) forces were encroaching far too close to our borders; in fact some border towns on our side were bombed. We had no choice but to intervene given the circumstances of the UN invasion of North Korea. The UN was there to overturn the communist government, and were essentially encroaching on our borders; who knew if they would push their advantage into China or not?
Well sense that wasn't the purpose for the war, it would seem that would be a remote possibility. Mao, wanting his own satelite states like Stalin, decided to jump into the war to protect North Korea after they were being routed after starting a war of aggression in June 25, 1950.
Several US generals were certainly in favor of it; of course this is not what actually happened but hindsight is almost 20/20.
You apparently don't know that the military is under civilian command in the United States. The army can whine all they want, but they're ultimately powerless, There were always those that wanted to continue wars to remove potential threats. Patton wanting to continue World War II against the Soviet Union for one, but they never have much clout.
The war against India was not imperialistic at all; it was a border dispute that India was getting too agressive about; we attacked them, taught them a lesson, and backed out. If we were so imperialistic, why don't we hold any Indian territory today? In fact those same territories that were under dispute then are still under dispute now.
Well given that China is still in disputed territory, one could argue that China is holding Indian territory today.
6.0 DoubleSpace compression 6.2 DoubleSpace replaced with DriveSpace due to a bug in DoubleSpace 6.21 DriveSpace removed due to lawsuit claiming Microsoft stole it from another company 6.22 Compression added back, perhaps under a new name. I don't know what it was, I never bothered "upgrading" to 6.21.
The movies are worse. They're not just worse, they're completely uninspired remakes. It's obvious that Hollywood is "leveraging assets" by dusting off what ever trademarks they own. I fully expect to see a remake of Convoy going head to head one weekend against a crappy tv to movie conversion of BJ and the Bear.
I'll see your good movies and counter them with what I can just come up off the top of my head.
Cry Wolf The Longest Yard (the crappy remake of the crappy 70s movie) Herbie: Fully Loaded (the crappy remake of the 60s movie) Dukes of Hazard (movie from crappy 60s tv show) Stealth Bewitched (movie from crappy 70s tv show) The Amityville Horror (remake of crappy 70s movie) The Fog (remake of crappy of 70s movie) Are We There Yet? The Island (It's a green screen chase movie) Star Wars: Episode III (face it, it wasn't that good. It just didn't suck as hard as the last two.) Land of the Dead Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy The Ring Two (The remake of the foriegn senseless sequel) Dark Water (the remake of the formumatic Japanese horror flick. (Yes, the wet girl with the long black hair in her face is scary. WE GET IT!)) xXx: State of the Union
And that's not even counting the remakes of the "Bad News Bears," "Guess Who['s Coming for Dinner]," and "Charlie and the Choclate Factory," nor unreleased craptaculars like "Saw 2"
I'd also like to point out that IMDB now lists porn, and there's a whole lot of it.
Finally that meme about videogames being bigger than movies isn't exactly true. It compares games + peripherals + strategy guides compared to box office returns. The numbers are inflated on the game side. Games are big, they're just not as big as some would have you believe.
Everyone knows the high quality of ORA's technical books, but what about their travel books? I only know of them through the old ORA printed catalogs of the mid 90s. I've always assumed that the travel books would be to an equally high standard, but I've never actually seen one. If anyone has, I'd love to hear about them.
I'll tell you who cares... my wife. She cares a lot about how much money I make. That's one reason she has sex with me. Money makes her feel comfortable and secure. So comfortable that she'll do anything to keep me around... and I mean anything. And, I like that.
You're either a liar, or you have one damn shallow wife.
The only thing that you *might* get sued for is attempted (i.e., not actual) copyright infringement - but then, it's not clear whether an unsuccessful attempt to infringe on someone else's copyright is something you can be sued for at all, and the matter is furthermore complicated by the fact that you could, in this case, still argue that it was entrapment (probably not legal, either, if it's not the police doing it - and even then, it's not at all clear), etc.
It's not entrapment. No one forced you to download the material. It's a sting. No, law enforcement doesn't have it initiate the sting. Everything is fine as as long as the sting is being performed within the law and to law enforcement standards. If your IP and track it back to you, you and everyone on the swarm, could be charged with conspiracy for criminal infringement. The conspirators don't have to know each other. They just have to come together for a common criminal enterprise. Rapid illegal distribution of copyrighted material is a such an act.
I imagine the the actual answer is a mundane, mainstream gameboards are square (e.g. chess, checkers, chutes and ladders, etc.) Personally, I never liked hexmaps, since it destroys one of the cardinal directions. Also square grids with diagonal movement give you eight adjacent squares (which is how civ works) and a hexgrid only gives you six.
Well Helen Lovejoy, it's because there's no way of determining what the image is of. Even if you could determine that there was a person-shaped thing in the image, how do you know if it's a real person or a maniquen, or a painting of a person that never existed? If it is a naked child, how do you know that it is lewd and obscene or fine art? There isn't a way. And that's why no one makes a system that does that.
--- If wishes were horses, we'd all be knee deep in horseshit.
He neither conceived the idea of a robot nor built any.
False. From UTexas RRR (and many of the "forward" parts of his books):
The word 'robotics' was first used in Runaround, a short story published in 1942, by Isaac Asimov (born Jan. 2, 1920, died Apr. 6, 1992). I, Robot, a collection of several of these stories, was published in 1950.
Uh... True. And your quote doesn't support your statement.
He didn't conceive of the idea of a robot. The idea of mechanized labor has been around for centuries in one form or another. He didn't even come up with the name 'robot.' All he did was take Karel Capek's word, "robot" and added the greek suffix '-ics' to it invent a word that means "the science of robots." He could have just as easily invented "robotology." The reason he didn't use "robotology" is because it sounds stupid, and he had an ear for the English language. Also the fact that the robots were made of "electronics" should not be forgotten.
Simply creating a word for something is not the same as inventing it. No more than simply intoning "perpetual motion machine" revokes the second law of thermodynamics, or "hyperspace jump" allows one to travel faster than the speed of light.
He was a visionary, seeing events that would come about nearly half a century later.
He wrote stories that a lot of people that went on to do actual science liked. Maybe he inspired some of them, but he didn't forsee events. His stories reflect the naivete of the day. Giant computers that solve the world's problems on 30 rolls of punch tape. Atomic power flying cars. Robot waiters. Statistical mathematics that accurately predicted the future. Azimov forsaw the glorious-far-off-year-of-2002 that the Jetsons live in. Not the world of today, or even 30 years ago.
Computers were in their infancy; nothing more than a novelty that would barely fir into a room, much less a human-sized head... Building one was quite out of the question.
Also, he was chemist, not an electrical engineer or mathemetician, but more than anything he was a science fiction writer. No more. No less.
Of course, if the past Olympics, Asian Games, and other efforts are any indication, many Koreans are trying to disregard the directions altogether - most refer to the country as "Korea," no bloody North, South, C, or D.
Well that's because in the past Olympics and Asian Games the North and South Koreans fielded a unified team. Before you can give any insights, you have to understand the basic facts.
It's okay to do business in communist China where they have plenty of nukes and seem quite willing to go nuts on us at any moment and we decry their terrible human rights record. But it's not alright to do business in communist Cuba where they couldn't realistically harm a fly without foreign help.
That's because the expatriot Chinese dissidents aren't concentrated enough to actually effect elections, unlike the the expatriot Cubans in Miami. At least that's the conventional wisdom.
And yeah, the same thing is often done in the states that happened in China (which doesn't justify what happened in China as Yahoo! should have some base set of ethics and morals for their company to run by and those shouldn't be given up just because it's the way things are in a certain region) -
There's alot of "the same thing happens in the US" going around here, but that's a disingenous statement. There's a huge difference between the Chinese and American governments. This man, Shi Tao, is being imprisoned for 10 years for telling how Bejing wanted the Tiananmen aniversary reported. HIs crime was politcal speech. That doesn't happen in the US. To conflate the two governments and their tactics is to do an incredible disservice to dissients that are risking their lives in truly totalitarian regimes.
but the difference is that the Chinese are godless communists. It's okay of an (all but officially) Christian Republic democracy does so.
That's right! And that's why the US must be tough on communism by having the embargo on Cuba!:P
Battle of the Planets (C'mon, Futurama's in there!)
"And using his birdarang, the bad guys are meerly knocked out. That's why we showed the glint from it's razor sharp edges!"
My favorite scene is from the episode airliners are being captured by a giant robotic centepede. This bad guy makes a veiled thread about the life of this little boy, all the while stroking a brown gun shaped blob.
I'm saying that internal economics was the primary cause for the collapse of the Soviet Union, and communist regimes throughout eastern Europe. I don't think that's really under dispute here.
It sounds like you're sayint that Reagan's poilicies was the little extra that was needed to shove them to emergening democracies. If this is the what you are saying, then I disagree. Reagan's policy towards the USSR was primarily an unprecedented peacetime millitary build up. That really isn't a pushing democracy.
Ultimately a cultural change, which a change from totalitarianism to democracy is, needs to come from within. You can't impose democracy on those that aren't prepared for it, or in some cases, don't want it. (The "one man, one vote, one time" problem.) A society needs to be free to express themselves in order for democacy to take root. Gorbechev's policies of glastnost and perestroika allowed the population the see the outside world, recognize how bad off they were, and then begin to express their dissatisfaction in an orderly way. (As opposed to violent uprisings.) The years of "openness" along with freedoms of assembly, speech, and religion, the right to strike, and multicandidate elections were what sealed the fate of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin was popularly elected, that's why the populous rallied around him during the attempted coup. They tasted freedom, and they didn't want it taken away.
it also turns each star in multi-star systems into planets, in systems where stars orbit each other.
No, because stars are already defined. Stars undergo fusion, or underwent fusion in the past. Planets do not.
what about systems where there is no star, only a gas giant or other non-star massive object? would such a system have no planets at all under your definition?
Well they wouldn't orbit a star, so they couldn't be planets. Depending on the type of interstellar object, conceivabliy they could be moons of a rogue planet, but for sake of argument we'll assume it's a brown dwarf.
I honestly don't have answer for that. I guess you could call them planetoids, but I don't find that particulary appealing. Ideally neologism based on ancient greek or latin could be created that would be a synonym for planet (i.e. "wander"), but not "planet". I'll punt and say "satellites", and be thankful that isn't the question be posed.:)
Well "round" is would be ellipsoid, since a sphere is just a special case of an ellipsoid. The roughness wouldn't be that much, since if it's too rough, it wouldn't be an ellipsoid!:) Solving your "baseball" problem is equally easy. The object must have enough mass that its own gravity forces it into an ellipsoid. A baseball doesn't have enough mass, so it it's not a planet.
Orbits a star or stars. Enough mass so that its gravity forces it into a spherical or an ellipsoid shape.
This defintion does make large astroids like Ceres a planet. Personally, I don't necessarily have a problem with this, but I don't really care. If you want to remove these you can add:
Must be a "free standing" object (i.e. not in a belt)
If you're dead set against Pluto, you can add:
Orbital inclination must be close to the orbital plane.
I not be an astronomer or an astrophysicist, but I really don't see what's so hard about defining a planet. Whatever the Powers That Be(tm) decide, it should be based on physics and not legislation. (e.g. "mass in excess of x metric tons")
Slashdot Mirror
You're trying to do the impossible. For at least 30 years, people have adovcated the "paperless office." It has reached a mythic status. It's just that: a myth. People always want to print. Hard copies allow annotations. Forms do not. Paper can be changed on the fly. Forms can not. Paper is portable. Forms are not. Even with laptops, you're still tied to the laptop. Paper can be folded up, and carried in pockets. Paper is collaborative. Computers aren't. Only one person can use a terminal. There's no rapid interaction among the group. That's why meetings and phone calls are still used even though email is practically ubiquitous.
Anyone that advocates rigid computer forms over flexible paper, doesn't understand how paper is used in society. I could go on and on, but there's no need. An entire book has already been written about this.
And before you anyone cries "luddite," the book was written by a cognitive psycologist at Hewlett-Packard, and a senior Microsoft researcher in interactive systems. Hardly luddites, and arguably an ironic position for them to take given their employment.
Gazing upon BestBuys shelves, noticing the implications of the covers to games, I noticed that a considerable number of games were based off of some movie. All the movies suck. If it were exciting to make music, they'd probably have a game based off of Britney Spears and then turn around and think that people aren't interested in gaming becuase noone wants to purchase the Britney Spears Dance game.
They made such a game. Only it's a dancing game.
The Shanghiers speak, amazingly enough, Shanghaiese (Shanghaihua in Mandarin (lit. "Shanghai Speech")).
:) )
Being a tonal language, "ning" could mean any number of things. The excellent hanzi dictionary, zhongwen.com lists six different meanings for "ning". It is important to note that zhongwen uses standard Mandarin (putonghua) pronouciation and not Shanghaiese. How much variation there is between the two I don't know. The only thing even close to slang for testicles is "lemons", and I doubt that's right. I would think iit was a proper noun.
FWIW standard Mandarin is really close to what is spoken in Beijing, but not exactly. Beijingers tend to end some words with 'r'. (e.g. "dian" becomes "diar" ("a little bit" or "hour") and kinda flat-vowel/whine some other words (e.g. "na" becomes "nei", "zhe" becomes "zhei" ("this" and "that")). When I asked my Chinese (meaning both the foriegn language and the nationality) TA about it, she said "You want to use the standard Mandarin. You don't want to sound like you're from Beijing!" When asked why, she said, "They're stuck up. Like New Yorkers." I said it was fine with me, as long as I didn't sound like a hick.
Ni de zhongwen ke jieshu le. (Hopefully that says, "Your Chinese lesson has ended."
I had a private office. Of course it was because one of the profs retired and my PI was going to stick me and a player to be named later into it, but then never got around to actually naming that player...
I like the office. The office is my friend.
Students in China did not "die for freedom" in Tian'an men Square. This is a Western myth. They were mere puppets, and their strings were being pulled by crime organizations and Western governments. Quite simply, the Western governments wished to topple the Chinese government, just like they did to the USSR.
You were taught that by the same ones who sent tanks in, and killed the unarmed civilians right? Yeah. A very believable group no doubt.
Nationalism is a very dangerous thing.
Wow, you are so wrong and misguided it isn't even funny. The Korean War was fought because the UN (read USA) forces were encroaching far too close to our borders; in fact some border towns on our side were bombed. We had no choice but to intervene given the circumstances of the UN invasion of North Korea. The UN was there to overturn the communist government, and were essentially encroaching on our borders; who knew if they would push their advantage into China or not?
Well sense that wasn't the purpose for the war, it would seem that would be a remote possibility. Mao, wanting his own satelite states like Stalin, decided to jump into the war to protect North Korea after they were being routed after starting a war of aggression in June 25, 1950.
Several US generals were certainly in favor of it; of course this is not what actually happened but hindsight is almost 20/20.
You apparently don't know that the military is under civilian command in the United States. The army can whine all they want, but they're ultimately powerless, There were always those that wanted to continue wars to remove potential threats. Patton wanting to continue World War II against the Soviet Union for one, but they never have much clout.
The war against India was not imperialistic at all; it was a border dispute that India was getting too agressive about; we attacked them, taught them a lesson, and backed out. If we were so imperialistic, why don't we hold any Indian territory today? In fact those same territories that were under dispute then are still under dispute now.
Well given that China is still in disputed territory, one could argue that China is holding Indian territory today.
Well America, pulls the "There's only one China, BUT Taiwan is our friend and we will defend it in the event of an invasion, and we will make all the bilateral agreements we want with it, and recognize the validity of its passports, and deal with its government, and allow them all the embassies they want just as long as they don't call them 'Taiwanese embassies' but rather 'Taipei Economic and Cultural Offices', and oh yeah they better not bring their flags to the Olympics or even call themselves Taiwan," line. This also known as not stating the obvious, that Taiwan is and has been an independent nation in everything but name since Communist Revolution. The Chinese know it. The Taiwanese know it. The Americans know it. The entire world knows it. However if anyone mentions that an elephant is the room, then people are going to have to die.
6.0 DoubleSpace compression
6.2 DoubleSpace replaced with DriveSpace due to a bug in DoubleSpace
6.21 DriveSpace removed due to lawsuit claiming Microsoft stole it from another company
6.22 Compression added back, perhaps under a new name. I don't know what it was, I never bothered "upgrading" to 6.21.
Ishtar is good movie!
They're not singers. They're songwriters.
The movies are worse. They're not just worse, they're completely uninspired remakes. It's obvious that Hollywood is "leveraging assets" by dusting off what ever trademarks they own. I fully expect to see a remake of Convoy going head to head one weekend against a crappy tv to movie conversion of BJ and the Bear.
I'll see your good movies and counter them with what I can just come up off the top of my head.
Cry Wolf
The Longest Yard (the crappy remake of the crappy 70s movie)
Herbie: Fully Loaded (the crappy remake of the 60s movie)
Dukes of Hazard (movie from crappy 60s tv show)
Stealth
Bewitched (movie from crappy 70s tv show)
The Amityville Horror (remake of crappy 70s movie)
The Fog (remake of crappy of 70s movie)
Are We There Yet?
The Island (It's a green screen chase movie)
Star Wars: Episode III (face it, it wasn't that good. It just didn't suck as hard as the last two.)
Land of the Dead
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Ring Two (The remake of the foriegn senseless sequel)
Dark Water (the remake of the formumatic Japanese horror flick. (Yes, the wet girl with the long black hair in her face is scary. WE GET IT!))
xXx: State of the Union
And that's not even counting the remakes of the "Bad News Bears," "Guess Who['s Coming for Dinner]," and "Charlie and the Choclate Factory," nor unreleased craptaculars like "Saw 2"
I'd also like to point out that IMDB now lists porn, and there's a whole lot of it.
Finally that meme about videogames being bigger than movies isn't exactly true. It compares games + peripherals + strategy guides compared to box office returns. The numbers are inflated on the game side. Games are big, they're just not as big as some would have you believe.
Everyone knows the high quality of ORA's technical books, but what about their travel books? I only know of them through the old ORA printed catalogs of the mid 90s. I've always assumed that the travel books would be to an equally high standard, but I've never actually seen one. If anyone has, I'd love to hear about them.
There's girls. There's just not many, and even fewer attractive ones, and those that are attractive tend to be foreign.
I'll tell you who cares... my wife. She cares a lot about how much money I make. That's one reason she has sex with me. Money makes her feel comfortable and secure. So comfortable that she'll do anything to keep me around... and I mean anything. And, I like that.
You're either a liar, or you have one damn shallow wife.
The only thing that you *might* get sued for is attempted (i.e., not actual) copyright infringement - but then, it's not clear whether an unsuccessful attempt to infringe on someone else's copyright is something you can be sued for at all, and the matter is furthermore complicated by the fact that you could, in this case, still argue that it was entrapment (probably not legal, either, if it's not the police doing it - and even then, it's not at all clear), etc.
It's not entrapment. No one forced you to download the material. It's a sting. No, law enforcement doesn't have it initiate the sting. Everything is fine as as long as the sting is being performed within the law and to law enforcement standards.
If your IP and track it back to you, you and everyone on the swarm, could be charged with conspiracy for criminal infringement. The conspirators don't have to know each other. They just have to come together for a common criminal enterprise. Rapid illegal distribution of copyrighted material is a such an act.
I imagine the the actual answer is a mundane, mainstream gameboards are square (e.g. chess, checkers, chutes and ladders, etc.) Personally, I never liked hexmaps, since it destroys one of the cardinal directions. Also square grids with diagonal movement give you eight adjacent squares (which is how civ works) and a hexgrid only gives you six.
Squares rule.
Well Helen Lovejoy, it's because there's no way of determining what the image is of. Even if you could determine that there was a person-shaped thing in the image, how do you know if it's a real person or a maniquen, or a painting of a person that never existed? If it is a naked child, how do you know that it is lewd and obscene or fine art? There isn't a way. And that's why no one makes a system that does that.
---
If wishes were horses, we'd all be knee deep in horseshit.
False. From UTexas RRR (and many of the "forward" parts of his books):
The word 'robotics' was first used in Runaround, a short story published in 1942, by Isaac Asimov (born Jan. 2, 1920, died Apr. 6, 1992). I, Robot, a collection of several of these stories, was published in 1950.
Uh... True. And your quote doesn't support your statement.
He didn't conceive of the idea of a robot. The idea of mechanized labor has been around for centuries in one form or another. He didn't even come up with the name 'robot.' All he did was take Karel Capek's word, "robot" and added the greek suffix '-ics' to it invent a word that means "the science of robots." He could have just as easily invented "robotology." The reason he didn't use "robotology" is because it sounds stupid, and he had an ear for the English language. Also the fact that the robots were made of "electronics" should not be forgotten.
Simply creating a word for something is not the same as inventing it. No more than simply intoning "perpetual motion machine" revokes the second law of thermodynamics, or "hyperspace jump" allows one to travel faster than the speed of light.
He was a visionary, seeing events that would come about nearly half a century later.
He wrote stories that a lot of people that went on to do actual science liked. Maybe he inspired some of them, but he didn't forsee events. His stories reflect the naivete of the day. Giant computers that solve the world's problems on 30 rolls of punch tape. Atomic power flying cars. Robot waiters. Statistical mathematics that accurately predicted the future. Azimov forsaw the glorious-far-off-year-of-2002 that the Jetsons live in. Not the world of today, or even 30 years ago.
Computers were in their infancy; nothing more than a novelty that would barely fir into a room, much less a human-sized head... Building one was quite out of the question.
Also, he was chemist, not an electrical engineer or mathemetician, but more than anything he was a science fiction writer. No more. No less.
Of course, if the past Olympics, Asian Games, and other efforts are any indication, many Koreans are trying to disregard the directions altogether - most refer to the country as "Korea," no bloody North, South, C, or D.
Well that's because in the past Olympics and Asian Games the North and South Koreans fielded a unified team. Before you can give any insights, you have to understand the basic facts.
Actually, what I don't understand is this:
:P
It's okay to do business in communist China where they have plenty of nukes and seem quite willing to go nuts on us at any moment and we decry their terrible human rights record. But it's not alright to do business in communist Cuba where they couldn't realistically harm a fly without foreign help.
That's because the expatriot Chinese dissidents aren't concentrated enough to actually effect elections, unlike the the expatriot Cubans in Miami. At least that's the conventional wisdom.
And yeah, the same thing is often done in the states that happened in China (which doesn't justify what happened in China as Yahoo! should have some base set of ethics and morals for their company to run by and those shouldn't be given up just because it's the way things are in a certain region) -
There's alot of "the same thing happens in the US" going around here, but that's a disingenous statement. There's a huge difference between the Chinese and American governments. This man, Shi Tao, is being imprisoned for 10 years for telling how Bejing wanted the Tiananmen aniversary reported. HIs crime was politcal speech. That doesn't happen in the US. To conflate the two governments and their tactics is to do an incredible disservice to dissients that are risking their lives in truly totalitarian regimes.
but the difference is that the Chinese are godless communists. It's okay of an (all but officially) Christian Republic democracy does so.
That's right! And that's why the US must be tough on communism by having the embargo on Cuba!
Battle of the Planets (C'mon, Futurama's in there!)
"And using his birdarang, the bad guys are meerly knocked out. That's why we showed the glint from it's razor sharp edges!"
My favorite scene is from the episode airliners are being captured by a giant robotic centepede. This bad guy makes a veiled thread about the life of this little boy, all the while stroking a brown gun shaped blob.
God I hate 70s Hanna-Barbera.
I am the grandparent.
I'm saying that internal economics was the primary cause for the collapse of the Soviet Union, and communist regimes throughout eastern Europe. I don't think that's really under dispute here.
It sounds like you're sayint that Reagan's poilicies was the little extra that was needed to shove them to emergening democracies. If this is the what you are saying, then I disagree. Reagan's policy towards the USSR was primarily an unprecedented peacetime millitary build up. That really isn't a pushing democracy.
Ultimately a cultural change, which a change from totalitarianism to democracy is, needs to come from within. You can't impose democracy on those that aren't prepared for it, or in some cases, don't want it. (The "one man, one vote, one time" problem.) A society needs to be free to express themselves in order for democacy to take root. Gorbechev's policies of glastnost and perestroika allowed the population the see the outside world, recognize how bad off they were, and then begin to express their dissatisfaction in an orderly way. (As opposed to violent uprisings.) The years of "openness" along with freedoms of assembly, speech, and religion, the right to strike, and multicandidate elections were what sealed the fate of the Soviet Union. Yeltsin was popularly elected, that's why the populous rallied around him during the attempted coup. They tasted freedom, and they didn't want it taken away.
To follow up my own post, even the IAU is stumped on what to call objects orbiting brown dwarfs.
it also turns each star in multi-star systems into planets, in systems where stars orbit each other.
:)
No, because stars are already defined. Stars undergo fusion, or underwent fusion in the past. Planets do not.
what about systems where there is no star, only a gas giant or other non-star massive object? would such a system have no planets at all under your definition?
Well they wouldn't orbit a star, so they couldn't be planets. Depending on the type of interstellar object, conceivabliy they could be moons of a rogue planet, but for sake of argument we'll assume it's a brown dwarf.
I honestly don't have answer for that. I guess you could call them planetoids, but I don't find that particulary appealing. Ideally neologism based on ancient greek or latin could be created that would be a synonym for planet (i.e. "wander"), but not "planet". I'll punt and say "satellites", and be thankful that isn't the question be posed.
Well "round" is would be ellipsoid, since a sphere is just a special case of an ellipsoid. The roughness wouldn't be that much, since if it's too rough, it wouldn't be an ellipsoid! :) Solving your "baseball" problem is equally easy. The object must have enough mass that its own gravity forces it into an ellipsoid. A baseball doesn't have enough mass, so it it's not a planet.
Orbits a star or stars.
Enough mass so that its gravity forces it into a spherical or an ellipsoid shape.
This defintion does make large astroids like Ceres a planet. Personally, I don't necessarily have a problem with this, but I don't really care. If you want to remove these you can add:
Must be a "free standing" object (i.e. not in a belt)
If you're dead set against Pluto, you can add:
Orbital inclination must be close to the orbital plane.
I not be an astronomer or an astrophysicist, but I really don't see what's so hard about defining a planet. Whatever the Powers That Be(tm) decide, it should be based on physics and not legislation. (e.g. "mass in excess of x metric tons")