Except that all of their Internet access flows through one central point. Which makes it extremely easy to block anything.
First, from some of the other responses I see here, the Saudi princes are not putting the talent and effort needed to win this sort of game into their internet filter. If they can keep the ignoramuses from seeing things that upset them, they probably don't care about the workarounds devised by their small population of geeks. (Except to learn how to do it when _they_ want to see pr0n!)
Second, one of the big problems with the much less ambitious filter programs sold in the USA is that their site blocking blocks lots of innocent bystanders. Wondering why that antique car site is blocked? It's probably not because the software overreacted to the description of an old station wagon as a "woody", but because it's hosted off an IP address that also sells porn. (Or something even more offensive to the filter vendors, like a Democratic party site.) So if the Sauds did seriously try to block tunneling, they would wind up taking out great swaths of the internet, until they also ensured that Saudi engineers could not look up data sheets on the internet, etc. Which is fine with me -- if you want to live in the 8th century, you don't need high tech. How long the Saud subjects would take it before they decided to do something about their gov't consigning them to the arse end of history is another matter...
Jerf, you're right, no one is _really_ a moral relativist. If someone claims to be one, you can be sure that they'll consider imposing fundamentalist Christian morality by force to be _absolutely_ immoral... (On the other hand, I consider religion-based-legislation immoral because it is unamerican, unconstitutional, and brain-dead. But I am definitely not a moral relativist. I believe that western European, and specifically american culture & legal systems are morally superior to every other group, except possibly for some that were too moral to survive. But we could do better...)
Just one thing about your screed: only at the end of a very long rant do you note the existence of publishers. But it is publishers that donate big bucks to "the best Congress money can buy", and that keep getting the best of the changes in copyright law, to the disadvantage of both users and creators.
Copyright is a brilliant compromise. When it ran for 14 years (and most items covered by it were relatively long-lived: books, sheet music, newspapers and magazines), then copyright was a brilliant compromise. Every change since then (at least in the USA) has been tilted against the users. To keep copyright on a book for 75 years after the writer's death is ridiculous -- no one writes in hopes that his grandchildren can retire on the royalties! To have a long-running copyright on computer software is more than ridiculous. And finally, the DCMA breaks the original bargain entirely, by giving copyright holders the power to make all copies of the work unreadable before the copyright expires. (Likewise, movie copyrights have contributed to the loss of many old films -- if the studio didn't bother to copy them onto lasting media, nobody else could either.)
Finally, there are really 3 parties to copyrights. There is the creator, the user/viewer/reader/listener, and the publisher. The publisher creates nothing, but does perform certain services in return for 90% of the money. This split seems rather unfair, especially as it has stayed constant even in the CD age when the production cost approaches zero. Copyright laws do include some balancing of the rights of the creators and publishers. For instance, unless it is a "work for hire" (which is a true corporate creation), the publisher doesn't own the copyright, but can only rent it for a limited time, eventually it goes back to the creator. But as corporations become more and more blatant at buying what they want from Congress, even this little bit of balance is in danger. Take what happened to musicians as a warning.
(For those born yesterday: some congressional staffer, just before leaving for a new career in the record industry, snuck a clause changing all music to "work for hire" into a bill at the end of session, and it was voted in without being read. Eventually the musicians got Congress to pass another bill giving them their rights back, since no corporation was willing to come out and defend their IP-grab in public. Yet. But AFAIK, every new song on any major-label CD published in one year belongs to the record companies for 95 years, never to the creators.)
CP/M isn't DR-DOS and according to the articles only CP/M is open-sourced at this time. However, there are quite a few similarities; everyone copied the ideas in CP/M (D.R. apparently didn't sue unless you also copied the code itself), so the first releases of PC/MS-DOS were at least 75% a CPM work-alike.
Yes, it is good news for embedded system developers. CP/M is a pretty good OS for 8 & 16 bit systems, and being open-sourced makes it easier to adapt it to a system that lacks some of the desktop hardware (e.g., Flash chip instead of disk drive, a few buttons instead of keyboard, undersized display).
What the schools should get is cash. Many of them already have good computers sitting around barely used, because they don't have the staff needed to fully utilize them. So obviously what they should do with most of it is hire people who know how to administer the computers. I'd recommend, hire a competent Linux admin, send him out calling corporations to beg for donations of their old (too small for Windows Xtra Pbloated) computers, and spend $100 for a Red Hat (or whatever) CD...
With Microsoft's offer:
1) They pay $200K cash and give away $900K (list price) software to places that probably wouldn't have been able to afford to buy it anyhow. After tax deductions, MS is $ ahead. Some punishment!
2) Note that software to hardware costs are nowhere near an 11/2 ratio yet. So to actually use all the software, the schools have to come up with more computers, and not weak old computers either...
3) To get much use out of the software and hardware, they need people they don't have the money to hire.
4) If any of this stuff does somehow get used, it will help lock in MS's monopoly.
The really bad news is, I still don't rate this as the worst class-action settlement of 2001, at least not if the Iomega settlement was in 2001. In that settlement, for selling defective drives that ate your cartridges and data, Iomega got to mail their customers coupons good for small discounts on Iomega products. That is, you got burned by defective products -- and your remedy is to get 20% off on buying more of the same products! Is that a penalty or a marketing plan?
Why would a judge approve something like this? Gov't of the (poor & middleclass) people, by the rich people, for the rich people...
You are wrong. A gas can be liquified by compression only below a certain temperature. For H2, that temperature is something like 20 or 30 kelvin. That's really, really cold, requiring quite special refrigeration equipment, and AFAIK that's not portable, or even movable without a large forklift. Rocket fuel tanks are cooled by venting off the evaporating gasses, and pumping more in until the hoses have to be unhooked just before ignition. (I don't know if they vacuum the escaping hydrogen back to the liquifier plant, or just let the wind carry it away and watch that the concentration doesn't reach the explosive level...)
A laptop would not be fueled with liquid hydrogen. It boils at about 20 kelvin (-253C or - 423F). In portable sizes, the only way to keep a tank that cool is by letting some of the liquid evaporate and carry off the heat as it leaks in. Since there isn't much room inside a laptop for insulation around the tank, I expect the hydrogen would evaporate away even faster than a laptop battery runs down.
It would be compressed gaseous hydrogen. I'm not sure about what pressure would be best -- the higher the pressure, the smaller the tank, but also the thicker the walls have to be and the more hazardous it is if it ruptures.
More likely, by the time this gets to real world applications it will run on butane. (Butane is a gas at room temperature and pressure, but it turns liquid at room temperature and moderate pressures that even unreinforced plastic can hold.)
I'd think the biggest problem with a mini-turban would be getting your head inside the little-bitty thing. Maybe we could experiment with Osama Bin Laden and some C-clamps when we catch him?;-)
I agree about the economics of lunar mining, _if_ getting materials to Earth is the goal. On the other hand, if you want to do some really large-scale construction in space or on the moon, mining materials that don't have to be launched against Earth's gravity and through Earth's atmosphere might make sense.
On the third hand (if you are a fan of The Mote in God's Eye) why mess with the moon, which has just enough gravity to be a nuisance, when there are all those asteroids out there? Some of them seem to be made primarily of iron-nickel (alloy steel) just waiting for someone to pull up with a big mirror to melt them and a set of molds to cast them into useful shapes. Or alternately, melt the whole asteroid, stick a very long blow-pipe up the middle, and blow it up into a big hollow sphere like blowing a glass bottle.
Of course, you've got to think really, really big. Maybe even bigger than the Reagan-Bush budget deficits....
My main concern is what about foreign (non-earth based) microrganisms? There are plausible theories that life on Earth started with microorganisms from space, probably hitchhiking on meteors. Not to worry about new invaders. If it can survive lunar conditions, it can survive being blasted off the moon by a meteor impact, and entry into earth's atmosphere, so we've already been exposed to it, again and again. Competing successfully with the native earth life is a whole different matter -- an organism that is saddled with the vacuum- and radiation-proofing needed to survive in space is not going to compete where fast growth and high reproduction rates are the keys to species survival.
this sounds like a suspiciously marginal improvement. Actually, it sounds like a marketdroid making a complete hash of what the engineers told him. And also like Intel trying to catch up to other companies that have been playing with SOI (Silicon On Insulator) for many years...
Do you have any idea what it takes to get the surfadces flat enough? How long it takes to design a coating, and what sort of processes it takes to apply it?
It's not easy -- but it is a bulk process, and once you get a smooth layer it's done. Modern chipmaking requires first an almost perfect silicon crystal something like 12" across, sliced and polished into wafers flatter than a magnetic platter. Then you add an even more precise and even coating of etch resist, expose it to UV light through a mask, then precisely etch it at submicron line widths. Repeat coating and etching several times, interspersed with other difficult to control processes like planting dopants. Chipmaking is bound to be more expensive...
Of course, magnetic disk drives also have a high fixed cost (motor, bearings, head positioners, etc.), so the ability to make higher-capacity drives without raising the price doesn't translate very well into making the same capacity drives for less. So the price will probably never drop below $50, and you should be able to get at least 64MB of solid-state disk for less. That's so big that under DOS 3.3 you have to partition it into two logical drives. 8-) Get rid of the bloatware, don't use inherently large data files (audio, video, or many still pictures), and maybe solid-state disks would be cost-effective.
In addition to his 1945 idea about communications satellites, Arthur C. Clarke was probably also the first to describe something like a PDA. Imperial Earth has a quite detailed description of a hand-held device for voice, mail, and video communications, appointments, etc. Where it differs significantly from present-day devices, I suspect the technology is just not there yet. I'm not sure about the publication date but IIRC I read it in the 70's.
Jerry Pournelle (www.jerrypournelle.com, byte.com) knew L. Ron Hubbard in the 1950's. Dianetics was an alternate form of psychology. At that time psychology was about as scientific as 18th century medicine (think bleeding for everything), and according to Jerry dianetics was possibly better and certainly no worse than the accepted forms. (At least it didn't have Freud's own deep neuroses as a foundation.) But the medical establishment reacted very negatively to the competition of dianetics and were well on their way to getting it shut down. By re-casting it as a religion called "scientology", laws against practicing medicine without a witch-doctor license didn't apply.
Scientology's cultish history since then has been rather at odds with such an origin. It seems to be run by people who take Hubbard's science-fictional genesis story very seriously...
Please spell that properly: "needleless injection." A "needless injection" is when you are going to Thule, Greenland and they give you shots for tropical diseases...
Globalization doesn't always make sense. If you are ordering pizza, for instance, it would probably work a lot better to go straight to (say) internetpizza.kalkaska.mi.us than to go to internetpizza.com and hope that this web site would link to the correct store. It ought to be possible to build a geographically aware national or international site, but in my experience, usually where I live is not in their system, and their attempts to find someplace nearby are off by 200 miles...
There's a lot of middle ground here. First off, being an employee in the USA isn't that bad a deal. Minimum wage here = about the 99th percentile in most of the world. It is possible to be mostly capitalist, reasonably free, and much more egalitarian -- Sweden for instance -- but reducing the wealth of the highly successful doesn't seem to have enriched the rest of the Swedes. (True, there aren't any poor people in Sweden -- but there are hardly any poor people of Swedish descent in the USA either. A culture of clean living and hard work certainly helps both individual and national prosperity.)
It is definitely true that we've got an entrenched hereditary corporate head/political class in the USA. As for the corporations, even the "self-made" men like Gates generally started out richer than 90% of Americans. As for politics -- last year both party's presidential nominations apparently went by inheritance, because neither Dubya nor Bore had any other qualifications. And the winner was --- the guy whose father put the most "justices" on the Supreme Court. But if you think our castes rigid, try being a Chinese kid whose father is in disfavor... Under the Chinese system, Bush Sr would have stayed in office until ready to hand it off to Bush Jr. Clinton wouldn't have mounted a challenge, because instead of earning an Oxford scholarship, he would have been kicked out of high-school to become a farm laborer.
I would certainly like to see some reforms in American politics, and in the structure of corporations. And there's historical precedence for this. The "ruling class" became too arrogant and blatant about 1880. This spawned a great reform movement, which forced the elite to keep a rather low profile for almost a century. If you can get the sheeple to focus on a few facts about their national leaders now, it will happen again. For instance: (1) Neither the President nor Congress now really understands military affairs, because their parents used political influence and money to keep them out of Vietnam combat. (2) We've now got a President who, without considerable family influence, wouldn't have been considered for the lowest management positions in those corporations that paid his campaign expenses. (3 arrests. History of alcoholism. Won't talk about other drugs. Wasted his life until he was 40. Management? ROTFL. Janitor's assistant, maybe, if we're really desperate.)
They're so desperate for porn that they'll sit around in a filthy sh*thole waiting for it to download over a _shared_ 56K line? Now I really feel sorry for the Chinese people.;-)
"elitist snob." Why thank you, I thought I was just a northern Michigan redneck. I grew up on a farm, I've done jobs like that and worse, but not for long -- joined the Air Force, worked hard and stayed out of trouble, and they paid for my BSEE.
I do know that not everyone has the brains to follow that path, but there are adequate opportunities even for the not so bright. The one adult around here who does mow lawns and shovel sidewalks for a living seems to be pretty prosperous -- even though he is both mentally and physically handicapped. And I know plenty of people who are smarter and healthier than him, but aren't making (or keeping) as much money. Poverty in this country is not due to lack of opportunity, but to lack of responsibility.
First, here they don't shoot you for trying to find a way around the filters.
Second, here anyone that has a real job can afford a private internet connection that is not censored (unless you ask for censorship). In China, an uncensored connection is illegal, period.
Third, "harms the reputation of a state organ" is not a censored category here. (The lack of selectivity of the @#$%^&* filters is another issue -- but if you can ever prove that a filter vendor deliberately blocked a political site, you definitely should be able to either get that damned law overturned in court, or sue the vendor into bankruptcy...)
(5) Making falsehoods...
(7)... or distorting the truth to slander people
8) Injuring the reputation of state organs;
In other words, TELLING THE TRUTH is also illegal when it injures the reputation of gov't agencies. For instance, mentioning that the reason the elementary school exploded was that they had the kiddies making fireworks to be sold at a profit (true story, AFAIK)...
What happens to the passengers in your skycar when the onboard computer goes offline? Think of it as evolution in action -- those that ride in an airplane controlled by Windows die...
The year was 1975, Bill Gates and co. begain porting BASIC (where did they get the source?) to the Altair
To squeeze BASIC into 8K of memory, they must have been writing in assembly language -- and since there were no previous 8080 BASIC interpreters, or even any microcomputer hardware capable of supporting a BASIC interpreter, I'd think they wrote the source themselves. Much of that job is in planning, data diagramming, and flowcharting, and parts of that could have come out of computer science textbooks, published docs on mainframe BASIC's, and information that hackers would freely swap. However, compressing it down to fit in 8K was quite an accomplishment and must have involved some genuine originality...
They also wrote an Altair simulator to run on the college mainframes, so they could get started before the Altair prototype was actually built. I'd expect that many pieces of that program were adapted from other simulators. In those days, simulator programs were more likely to be written as college projects, or for fun, than for profit, and most hackers would be happy to show off their code to anyone interested...
The slow delivery & cost of Altair BASIC caused the first burst of software piracy, not open source.... Open source already existed (without a name), and unless Gates & company spent their college years wearing blinders they damn well know it.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, the vatican may be an exception. But it greatly differs from the average theocracy in that the entire population _chose_ to be there.
Except that all of their Internet access flows through one central point. Which makes it extremely easy to block anything.
First, from some of the other responses I see here, the Saudi princes are not putting the talent and effort needed to win this sort of game into their internet filter. If they can keep the ignoramuses from seeing things that upset them, they probably don't care about the workarounds devised by their small population of geeks. (Except to learn how to do it when _they_ want to see pr0n!)
Second, one of the big problems with the much less ambitious filter programs sold in the USA is that their site blocking blocks lots of innocent bystanders. Wondering why that antique car site is blocked? It's probably not because the software overreacted to the description of an old station wagon as a "woody", but because it's hosted off an IP address that also sells porn. (Or something even more offensive to the filter vendors, like a Democratic party site.) So if the Sauds did seriously try to block tunneling, they would wind up taking out great swaths of the internet, until they also ensured that Saudi engineers could not look up data sheets on the internet, etc. Which is fine with me -- if you want to live in the 8th century, you don't need high tech. How long the Saud subjects would take it before they decided to do something about their gov't consigning them to the arse end of history is another matter...
Jerf, you're right, no one is _really_ a moral relativist. If someone claims to be one, you can be sure that they'll consider imposing fundamentalist Christian morality by force to be _absolutely_ immoral... (On the other hand, I consider religion-based-legislation immoral because it is unamerican, unconstitutional, and brain-dead. But I am definitely not a moral relativist. I believe that western European, and specifically american culture & legal systems are morally superior to every other group, except possibly for some that were too moral to survive. But we could do better...)
Just one thing about your screed: only at the end of a very long rant do you note the existence of publishers. But it is publishers that donate big bucks to "the best Congress money can buy", and that keep getting the best of the changes in copyright law, to the disadvantage of both users and creators.
Copyright is a brilliant compromise. When it ran for 14 years (and most items covered by it were relatively long-lived: books, sheet music, newspapers and magazines), then copyright was a brilliant compromise. Every change since then (at least in the USA) has been tilted against the users. To keep copyright on a book for 75 years after the writer's death is ridiculous -- no one writes in hopes that his grandchildren can retire on the royalties! To have a long-running copyright on computer software is more than ridiculous. And finally, the DCMA breaks the original bargain entirely, by giving copyright holders the power to make all copies of the work unreadable before the copyright expires. (Likewise, movie copyrights have contributed to the loss of many old films -- if the studio didn't bother to copy them onto lasting media, nobody else could either.)
Finally, there are really 3 parties to copyrights. There is the creator, the user/viewer/reader/listener, and the publisher. The publisher creates nothing, but does perform certain services in return for 90% of the money. This split seems rather unfair, especially as it has stayed constant even in the CD age when the production cost approaches zero. Copyright laws do include some balancing of the rights of the creators and publishers. For instance, unless it is a "work for hire" (which is a true corporate creation), the publisher doesn't own the copyright, but can only rent it for a limited time, eventually it goes back to the creator. But as corporations become more and more blatant at buying what they want from Congress, even this little bit of balance is in danger. Take what happened to musicians as a warning.
(For those born yesterday: some congressional staffer, just before leaving for a new career in the record industry, snuck a clause changing all music to "work for hire" into a bill at the end of session, and it was voted in without being read. Eventually the musicians got Congress to pass another bill giving them their rights back, since no corporation was willing to come out and defend their IP-grab in public. Yet. But AFAIK, every new song on any major-label CD published in one year belongs to the record companies for 95 years, never to the creators.)
CP/M isn't DR-DOS and according to the articles only CP/M is open-sourced at this time. However, there are quite a few similarities; everyone copied the ideas in CP/M (D.R. apparently didn't sue unless you also copied the code itself), so the first releases of PC/MS-DOS were at least 75% a CPM work-alike.
Yes, it is good news for embedded system developers. CP/M is a pretty good OS for 8 & 16 bit systems, and being open-sourced makes it easier to adapt it to a system that lacks some of the desktop hardware (e.g., Flash chip instead of disk drive, a few buttons instead of keyboard, undersized display).
What the schools should get is cash. Many of them already have good computers sitting around barely used, because they don't have the staff needed to fully utilize them. So obviously what they should do with most of it is hire people who know how to administer the computers. I'd recommend, hire a competent Linux admin, send him out calling corporations to beg for donations of their old (too small for Windows Xtra Pbloated) computers, and spend $100 for a Red Hat (or whatever) CD...
With Microsoft's offer:
1) They pay $200K cash and give away $900K (list price) software to places that probably wouldn't have been able to afford to buy it anyhow. After tax deductions, MS is $ ahead. Some punishment!
2) Note that software to hardware costs are nowhere near an 11/2 ratio yet. So to actually use all the software, the schools have to come up with more computers, and not weak old computers either...
3) To get much use out of the software and hardware, they need people they don't have the money to hire.
4) If any of this stuff does somehow get used, it will help lock in MS's monopoly.
The really bad news is, I still don't rate this as the worst class-action settlement of 2001, at least not if the Iomega settlement was in 2001. In that settlement, for selling defective drives that ate your cartridges and data, Iomega got to mail their customers coupons good for small discounts on Iomega products. That is, you got burned by defective products -- and your remedy is to get 20% off on buying more of the same products! Is that a penalty or a marketing plan?
Why would a judge approve something like this? Gov't of the (poor & middleclass) people, by the rich people, for the rich people...
You are wrong. A gas can be liquified by compression only below a certain temperature. For H2, that temperature is something like 20 or 30 kelvin. That's really, really cold, requiring quite special refrigeration equipment, and AFAIK that's not portable, or even movable without a large forklift. Rocket fuel tanks are cooled by venting off the evaporating gasses, and pumping more in until the hoses have to be unhooked just before ignition. (I don't know if they vacuum the escaping hydrogen back to the liquifier plant, or just let the wind carry it away and watch that the concentration doesn't reach the explosive level...)
A laptop would not be fueled with liquid hydrogen. It boils at about 20 kelvin (-253C or - 423F). In portable sizes, the only way to keep a tank that cool is by letting some of the liquid evaporate and carry off the heat as it leaks in. Since there isn't much room inside a laptop for insulation around the tank, I expect the hydrogen would evaporate away even faster than a laptop battery runs down.
It would be compressed gaseous hydrogen. I'm not sure about what pressure would be best -- the higher the pressure, the smaller the tank, but also the thicker the walls have to be and the more hazardous it is if it ruptures.
More likely, by the time this gets to real world applications it will run on butane. (Butane is a gas at room temperature and pressure, but it turns liquid at room temperature and moderate pressures that even unreinforced plastic can hold.)
I'd think the biggest problem with a mini-turban would be getting your head inside the little-bitty thing. Maybe we could experiment with Osama Bin Laden and some C-clamps when we catch him? ;-)
It's spelled "turbine".
I agree about the economics of lunar mining, _if_ getting materials to Earth is the goal. On the other hand, if you want to do some really large-scale construction in space or on the moon, mining materials that don't have to be launched against Earth's gravity and through Earth's atmosphere might make sense.
On the third hand (if you are a fan of The Mote in God's Eye) why mess with the moon, which has just enough gravity to be a nuisance, when there are all those asteroids out there? Some of them seem to be made primarily of iron-nickel (alloy steel) just waiting for someone to pull up with a big mirror to melt them and a set of molds to cast them into useful shapes. Or alternately, melt the whole asteroid, stick a very long blow-pipe up the middle, and blow it up into a big hollow sphere like blowing a glass bottle.
Of course, you've got to think really, really big. Maybe even bigger than the Reagan-Bush budget deficits....
My main concern is what about foreign (non-earth based) microrganisms? There are plausible theories that life on Earth started with microorganisms from space, probably hitchhiking on meteors. Not to worry about new invaders. If it can survive lunar conditions, it can survive being blasted off the moon by a meteor impact, and entry into earth's atmosphere, so we've already been exposed to it, again and again. Competing successfully with the native earth life is a whole different matter -- an organism that is saddled with the vacuum- and radiation-proofing needed to survive in space is not going to compete where fast growth and high reproduction rates are the keys to species survival.
this sounds like a suspiciously marginal improvement. Actually, it sounds like a marketdroid making a complete hash of what the engineers told him. And also like Intel trying to catch up to other companies that have been playing with SOI (Silicon On Insulator) for many years...
Do you have any idea what it takes to get the surfadces flat enough? How long it takes to design a coating, and what sort of processes it takes to apply it?
It's not easy -- but it is a bulk process, and once you get a smooth layer it's done. Modern chipmaking requires first an almost perfect silicon crystal something like 12" across, sliced and polished into wafers flatter than a magnetic platter. Then you add an even more precise and even coating of etch resist, expose it to UV light through a mask, then precisely etch it at submicron line widths. Repeat coating and etching several times, interspersed with other difficult to control processes like planting dopants. Chipmaking is bound to be more expensive...
Of course, magnetic disk drives also have a high fixed cost (motor, bearings, head positioners, etc.), so the ability to make higher-capacity drives without raising the price doesn't translate very well into making the same capacity drives for less. So the price will probably never drop below $50, and you should be able to get at least 64MB of solid-state disk for less. That's so big that under DOS 3.3 you have to partition it into two logical drives. 8-) Get rid of the bloatware, don't use inherently large data files (audio, video, or many still pictures), and maybe solid-state disks would be cost-effective.
In addition to his 1945 idea about communications satellites, Arthur C. Clarke was probably also the first to describe something like a PDA. Imperial Earth has a quite detailed description of a hand-held device for voice, mail, and video communications, appointments, etc. Where it differs significantly from present-day devices, I suspect the technology is just not there yet. I'm not sure about the publication date but IIRC I read it in the 70's.
Jerry Pournelle (www.jerrypournelle.com, byte.com) knew L. Ron Hubbard in the 1950's. Dianetics was an alternate form of psychology. At that time psychology was about as scientific as 18th century medicine (think bleeding for everything), and according to Jerry dianetics was possibly better and certainly no worse than the accepted forms. (At least it didn't have Freud's own deep neuroses as a foundation.) But the medical establishment reacted very negatively to the competition of dianetics and were well on their way to getting it shut down. By re-casting it as a religion called "scientology", laws against practicing medicine without a witch-doctor license didn't apply.
Scientology's cultish history since then has been rather at odds with such an origin. It seems to be run by people who take Hubbard's science-fictional genesis story very seriously...
Please spell that properly: "needleless injection." A "needless injection" is when you are going to Thule, Greenland and they give you shots for tropical diseases...
Globalization doesn't always make sense. If you are ordering pizza, for instance, it would probably work a lot better to go straight to (say) internetpizza.kalkaska.mi.us than to go to internetpizza.com and hope that this web site would link to the correct store. It ought to be possible to build a geographically aware national or international site, but in my experience, usually where I live is not in their system, and their attempts to find someplace nearby are off by 200 miles...
There's a lot of middle ground here. First off, being an employee in the USA isn't that bad a deal. Minimum wage here = about the 99th percentile in most of the world. It is possible to be mostly capitalist, reasonably free, and much more egalitarian -- Sweden for instance -- but reducing the wealth of the highly successful doesn't seem to have enriched the rest of the Swedes. (True, there aren't any poor people in Sweden -- but there are hardly any poor people of Swedish descent in the USA either. A culture of clean living and hard work certainly helps both individual and national prosperity.)
It is definitely true that we've got an entrenched hereditary corporate head/political class in the USA. As for the corporations, even the "self-made" men like Gates generally started out richer than 90% of Americans. As for politics -- last year both party's presidential nominations apparently went by inheritance, because neither Dubya nor Bore had any other qualifications. And the winner was --- the guy whose father put the most "justices" on the Supreme Court. But if you think our castes rigid, try being a Chinese kid whose father is in disfavor... Under the Chinese system, Bush Sr would have stayed in office until ready to hand it off to Bush Jr. Clinton wouldn't have mounted a challenge, because instead of earning an Oxford scholarship, he would have been kicked out of high-school to become a farm laborer.
I would certainly like to see some reforms in American politics, and in the structure of corporations. And there's historical precedence for this. The "ruling class" became too arrogant and blatant about 1880. This spawned a great reform movement, which forced the elite to keep a rather low profile for almost a century. If you can get the sheeple to focus on a few facts about their national leaders now, it will happen again. For instance: (1) Neither the President nor Congress now really understands military affairs, because their parents used political influence and money to keep them out of Vietnam combat. (2) We've now got a President who, without considerable family influence, wouldn't have been considered for the lowest management positions in those corporations that paid his campaign expenses. (3 arrests. History of alcoholism. Won't talk about other drugs. Wasted his life until he was 40. Management? ROTFL. Janitor's assistant, maybe, if we're really desperate.)
They're so desperate for porn that they'll sit around in a filthy sh*thole waiting for it to download over a _shared_ 56K line? Now I really feel sorry for the Chinese people. ;-)
"elitist snob." Why thank you, I thought I was just a northern Michigan redneck. I grew up on a farm, I've done jobs like that and worse, but not for long -- joined the Air Force, worked hard and stayed out of trouble, and they paid for my BSEE.
I do know that not everyone has the brains to follow that path, but there are adequate opportunities even for the not so bright. The one adult around here who does mow lawns and shovel sidewalks for a living seems to be pretty prosperous -- even though he is both mentally and physically handicapped. And I know plenty of people who are smarter and healthier than him, but aren't making (or keeping) as much money. Poverty in this country is not due to lack of opportunity, but to lack of responsibility.
First, here they don't shoot you for trying to find a way around the filters.
Second, here anyone that has a real job can afford a private internet connection that is not censored (unless you ask for censorship). In China, an uncensored connection is illegal, period.
Third, "harms the reputation of a state organ" is not a censored category here. (The lack of selectivity of the @#$%^&* filters is another issue -- but if you can ever prove that a filter vendor deliberately blocked a political site, you definitely should be able to either get that damned law overturned in court, or sue the vendor into bankruptcy...)
(5) Making falsehoods ...
... or distorting the truth to slander people
(7)
8) Injuring the reputation of state organs;
In other words, TELLING THE TRUTH is also illegal when it injures the reputation of gov't agencies. For instance, mentioning that the reason the elementary school exploded was that they had the kiddies making fireworks to be sold at a profit (true story, AFAIK)...
What happens to the passengers in your skycar when the onboard computer goes offline? Think of it as evolution in action -- those that ride in an airplane controlled by Windows die...
The year was 1975, Bill Gates and co. begain porting BASIC (where did they get the source?) to the Altair
To squeeze BASIC into 8K of memory, they must have been writing in assembly language -- and since there were no previous 8080 BASIC interpreters, or even any microcomputer hardware capable of supporting a BASIC interpreter, I'd think they wrote the source themselves. Much of that job is in planning, data diagramming, and flowcharting, and parts of that could have come out of computer science textbooks, published docs on mainframe BASIC's, and information that hackers would freely swap. However, compressing it down to fit in 8K was quite an accomplishment and must have involved some genuine originality...
They also wrote an Altair simulator to run on the college mainframes, so they could get started before the Altair prototype was actually built. I'd expect that many pieces of that program were adapted from other simulators. In those days, simulator programs were more likely to be written as college projects, or for fun, than for profit, and most hackers would be happy to show off their code to anyone interested...
The slow delivery & cost of Altair BASIC caused the first burst of software piracy, not open source.... Open source already existed (without a name), and unless Gates & company spent their college years wearing blinders they damn well know it.