I've never ever seen the inside of a Chinese home, that doesn't mean that there aren't several hundred million of them, does it?
As for not having any reason to pay for some "unknown" web browser unless it has some amazing features, well, have you considered that the very reason that people do pay for Opera, when there are plenty of free alternatives available, is because it does what it does amazingly well?
Opera ads are now Google ads, so they're text rather than graphics ads. Hardly distracting unless you're an ADD sufferer or something.
Not meaning to flame you or anything, but your comment is typical of many that I see any time Opera is mentioned on Slashdot: "I tried Opera x many years ago and it didn't do y properly or I didn't like the way it does z". In almost every case, I find that y and z were either something trivial that a quick change in the preferences could have fixed or something that was changed several versions ago.
You wouldn't try to talk about the Mac platform in an informed manner if you'd used nothing more current than System 7, so why do the same with Opera?
Seriously, I think I could count the number of valid issues that people actually have with Opera's current feature set or user interface with the fingers of one hand after I'd had four of them shot off...
There's a similar page for MSIE. Are you going to say that that means Google embraces MSIE too?
It's not like Google favours one browser over another. And, even if it did, so what? I don't know about you, but I don't pick what weh browser I use based on the recommendations of one website or another, I pick what web browser I used based upon more tangible and relevant criteria, such as its feature set, speed, user interface, ease of use, etc.
For me that means Opera 7.54 (although I'll soon be installing the second beta of version 7.60). And, yes, I have tried all the alternatives, including Firefox.
It must be you. When I just searched for that phrase I got entirely relevant results. Three of the first four were as follows:
Shakespeare - To be, or not to be: that is the question ART OF EUROPE. William Shakespeare - To be, or not to be (from Hamlet 3/1). To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis... www.artofeurope.com/shakespeare/sha8.htm - 4k - Cached - Similar pages
William Shakespeare William Shakespeare 1564-1616. tobeornottobe.com. www.tobeornottobe.com/ - 2k - Cached - Similar pages
To Be or Not to Be (1942) To Be or Not to Be (1942) - Cast, Crew, Reviews, Plot Summary, Comments, Discussion, Taglines, Trailers, Posters, Photos, Showtimes, Link to Official Site, Fan... www.imdb.com/Title?0035446 - 42k - Cached - Similar pages
The five test criteria were relevance (the raleigh test), speed, the look (cleanliness of returned results), the obscure fact search, and the question (the time in Sydney).
If you can't count to five yourself, or double-check basic facts, well, that's really sad.
For one thing, PalmOS has got a much simpler and more elegant user interface than its rival (Why the hell would anyone think that a desktop metaphor is suitable for a PDA?) and for another it's far faster than it too.
When I'm looking up an address or want to enter a quick note then I don't want to have to navigate through a menu system to get there first and wait while everything happens.
The key advantage PocketPCs have over Palms is the Microsoft factor: just as it has with other markets (eg, web browsers), Microsoft has leveraged its dominance in one market (desktop OS) to achieve success in another.
To suggest that PocketPCs are intrinsically superior to equivalent Palm models is hilarious.
If I were a tad more paranoid, I'd suggest that your comment and one or two others like it I've seen posted about this story were classic cases of astroturfing.
I'm not talking about the right to have a job, I'm talking about the right to not have your employer exploit you in a manner that is condoned by law: there's a big difference between the two.
The exemption that you're referring to excludes people in the entertainment industry, because it is specifically designed to cover essential workers, such as a company's IT staff, and not non-essential workers, such as someone writing the AI for a game. Besides, from what I've read it's clear that not everyone at EA earns above the magic exemption barrier.
And even if they did, requiring staff to work 10-12 hour days, 7 days a week isn't only counterproductive, it's dangerous to their long-term health: I'm sorry, but it's the 21st century, and companies shouldn't be working their employees into the ground anywhere in the world, let alone in California.
I don't care if someone is paid $10/hr or $45/hr, they still have rights, and those rights include decent, respectful working practices.
Thanks for that, but you really need to get your £:$ conversions up to date.
The $ has tanked vs other currencies over the last year or so and it's at £1.00:$1.84 right now, and it's been weaker than that recently.
So £546 million for six months equates to £1,092 million per year, or $2,009 million.
And if we're talking about per second profits, that's £1,092,000,000/(365*24*60*60) or £1,092,000,000/31,536,000, which is £34 per second.
Like I said, they've shelled out a lot recently on acquisitions and other stuff, so a profit of £34 per second is hardly anything that they'll be crying about.
It's dropped because they've spent money on acquisitions and on upgrading their infrastructure. Just last month they spent £1 billion (might have been $1 billion: I'm not that sure off the top of my head) on buying into the US market.
European telcos are losing money? Funny, because BT makes a profit of about £100 (~$190) every second. If that's what you call losing money then please help me lose some by donating all of yours to me right away.
BitTorrent was intentionally designed not to hide IP addresses as its developer, Bram Cohen, openly acknowledges. That's because his goal wasn't to develop a P2P tool that could be used to share content illegally but to develop a P2P tool that reduced bandwidth for legally shared content, such as Linux ISOs, etc.
OK, blame Europeans for everything that happened up until 1776 if you must but what about since then? At what point does America accept responsibility for its own actions? Which of Britain, France or Spain is to blame for the US's attitude towards gays in its military?
Religious intolerance? Arguably the most religiously intolerant country in the Western world is the US: you're OK if you're Christian, because it's Christian dogma that runs the show. Care to name how many US Presidents haven't been Christian? Or how many current Congressmen are of a different faith? If you're not a Christian then you're practically unelectable. I won't even go into how Muslims (and, through ignorance, Hindus, Sihks and others with darker skin) are treated in America today.
Seperation of church and state? In a country where the President boasts of making policy decisions like invading another country because it's what God told him to do? Where civil rights and scientific freedoms are increasingly based upon moral codes dictated by the religious right? What a joke.
The reason for me original response was this blind ignorance that rights never get trampled on in the US when the exact opposite is the case: it happened in the past and it's happening today.
This wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for the fact that the US consistently champions itself as "the land of the free" and defender of an individual's rights: European nations don't feel the need for showboating their forms of democracies in quite the same manner and when it comes to personal freedoms they certainly don't say one thing but do another as the US has recently become so adept at doing.
Bottom line is this: if you're going to talk about how utopian your country is when it comes to freedom then that freedom must apply to everyone and it must come as advertised without any provisos or exceptions.
d) It would give 99 percent of the people wanting to see the movie a better shot at the best seats for the first week.
Really, do you think that George Lucas is concerned about the $50 million you might cost him in your scenario? According to Forbes, the guy is worth $3 billion, and that estimation was calculated before the original trilogy was released on DVD. Even if Episode III was panned by the critics and early audiences he'd still make his money and then some from the deal he has in place with 20th Century Fox, merchandising, etc.
Debt? The guy could probably fund the movie ten times over without having to raid his savings account.
Stay away for two weeks if it gives you a warm fuzzy glow inside. Just don't pretend that it'll make a blind bit of difference to how Lucas does business or interacts with his audience.
Well, completely wrong is perhaps a bit harsh: ownership of mobile phones is lower in the US than it is in many developing world nations, precisely because a mobile phone is preferable to landline for the reasons that you give but you miss the point that the ownership of mobile phones is far lower in the US than most other developed world nations too.
And it's not all about natural geography or lack of an existing landline infrastructure: mobile phone usage in Scandinavian countries such as Finland and Sweden is fantastic. In fact, if I remember correctly, in Finland over 90 percent of the people have a mobile phone.
As for mobile phones being expensive, well, that's free market capitalism working for you. In Britain, where caller party pays like almost everywhere else (ie, if you call me then you foot the bill and it doesn't cost me a thing), I have a pay as you go mobile phone that cost me £35 (~$75) to buy, and which costs me pennies a day to use and with no contract whatsoever. And it's as reliable as anything else, plus it's portable. (Of course, if I wanted to use my mobile phone more extensively, then I have a range of options available to me from the various UK operators.)
From the anecdotal evidence that keeps cropping up on Slashdot and elsewhere, it very much seems to me that mobile phone ownership being synonymous with costing heaven and earth is an American phenomenon.
Another topic where half the posts will be comments that contain nothing but jingoism and nationalist comments rather than examine China's genuine potential for growth.
Remember people, this is the world's biggest nation (by population), with the real potential to be the world's biggest manufacturer and the world's biggest marketplace. And, remember, that that potential is starting to be realised: China already has a import surplus of billions with most Western countries, including the US, and China is now starting to become a real consumer culture in its own right.
They may have given everyone else a head-start but then so did Japan and Germany post-WWII, and look at how powerful their economies have become.
Firstly, nice to see you using the Anonymous Coward option for what it was designed for: letting people freely spout whatever they want to free from persecution. Ironically, it's that sort of anonymity and protection of freedom of expression that the PATRIOT ACT essentially undermines.
Having said that, I do prefer it if people are willing to stand up and be counted when voicing a viewpoint that's diametrically opposed to my own. If nothing else, it makes it easier to track a conversation back and forth if I know which messages are being posted by which individual. Funny though, there are some out there that would say that standing up and being counted just makes it easier to weed out unwanted voices of dissent, as many a political prisoner throughout history could testify.
Secondly, it's nice to see you skim over those parts of my post that you don't feel like addressing, presumably because you have no way of rationalising away those forms of unfair discrimination and abuses of power.
Yeah, ignore the fact that a country theoretically built on the principle that "all men are created equal" was practically built with the blood, sweat and tears of a subjugated people. Ignore the fact that the Constitution valued the life of a negro slave as 3/5ths of a man, or that the freed slaves never did get their 40 acres and a mule in compensation.
Ignore the fact that, as recently as a couple of generations ago, blacks couldn't drink from the same water fountain as whites, that blacks had to give up their seats to whites, that blacks couldn't share the same classrooms as whites and that lynchings were a way of life.
Ignore the fact that as badly as black Americans have been treated, that native American peoples have been treated far worse, from the days of Plymouth Rock to Custer to today.
Ignore the fact that a woman doing the same job as a man who's equal to her in every other aspect other than their genders is likely to be earning less than her male counterpart, and is far less likely to be promoted than her male colleague.
Ignore the fact that being gay in the US military is akin to being unfit for service. As if a gay man is any less capable of firing a rifle, driving a tank or flying a plane.
Ignore the fact that the 43rd President of the United States would actively seek to take rights away from people based purely on their sexuality, even where those rights have been specifically granted to them by one or more of the States.
Ignore the fact that nothing more than a person's ethnicity has been used in the past to justify their imprisonment. Japanese Americans and others who spent most of World War II illegally imprisoned in internment camps clearly didn't have any rights.
Ignore the fact that a person's beliefs, however privately they may be held, have been reason enough to hound them unendlessly. Ignore the fact that McCarthyism ever existed and, to put it mildly, that it flew in the face of free speech.
Ignore the fact that post-September 11th, hundreds of Americans of Middle Eastern descent were interned without any legal representation or even access to their families whatsoever. And, whatever you do, ignore Camp X-Ray and everything that's gone on there.
Ignore the racial and religious McCarthyism that's going on right now, where people are routinely discriminated against because their skin is the wrong colour or because of their faith.
And above all, ignore any point that espouses a viewpoint that you disagree with.
I made a list in response to comments by someone who clearly didn't believe that innocents could be unfairly targetted in the US. I made a list to educate him that, unfortunately, innocents can and have been unfairly targetted in the US several times.
The land of the free isn't supposed to be the land of the free for most of the people, it's meant to be the land of the free for all of the people.
If you're so uncomfortable with a short list of examples of your country's failings then you really need to examine why it is you feel the need to defend the indefensible.
This would be the same country that was built on slavery, that had racial segregation and which treated blacks as second class citizens until only a few decades ago, that still treats its indigenous peoples as worse than second class citizens in many aspects, that has clear sexual discrimination in the workplace (women still earn less than men), that has clear homophobic discrimination in government (gays in the military), that has a President that wants to discriminate further against gays (gay marriage), that has illegal internment of anyone with even partial Japanese heritage (during WWII) and McCarthyism (when freedom of expression went out the window) in its recent past and has now resorted to illegal internment and religious McCarthyism again.
Yeah, because nothing could ever be shown to have been held unfairly against anyone at anytime in America's recent history, could it?
No, I think that you'll find that the English translation "cosmonaut" of the much older Russian word is what you're talking about: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was talking about cosmonauts in his native Russian in the 19th century.
Check history more thoroughly before you make silly, easily disproven statements.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never ever seen the inside of a Chinese home, that doesn't mean that there aren't several hundred million of them, does it?
As for not having any reason to pay for some "unknown" web browser unless it has some amazing features, well, have you considered that the very reason that people do pay for Opera, when there are plenty of free alternatives available, is because it does what it does amazingly well?
Opera ads are now Google ads, so they're text rather than graphics ads. Hardly distracting unless you're an ADD sufferer or something.
Not meaning to flame you or anything, but your comment is typical of many that I see any time Opera is mentioned on Slashdot: "I tried Opera x many years ago and it didn't do y properly or I didn't like the way it does z". In almost every case, I find that y and z were either something trivial that a quick change in the preferences could have fixed or something that was changed several versions ago.
You wouldn't try to talk about the Mac platform in an informed manner if you'd used nothing more current than System 7, so why do the same with Opera?
Seriously, I think I could count the number of valid issues that people actually have with Opera's current feature set or user interface with the fingers of one hand after I'd had four of them shot off...
There's a similar page for MSIE. Are you going to say that that means Google embraces MSIE too?
It's not like Google favours one browser over another. And, even if it did, so what? I don't know about you, but I don't pick what weh browser I use based on the recommendations of one website or another, I pick what web browser I used based upon more tangible and relevant criteria, such as its feature set, speed, user interface, ease of use, etc.
For me that means Opera 7.54 (although I'll soon be installing the second beta of version 7.60). And, yes, I have tried all the alternatives, including Firefox.
...where you have to wait at least one hour and 57 minutes between seeing a story once and seeing it again...
It must be you. When I just searched for that phrase I got entirely relevant results. Three of the first four were as follows:
...
...
Shakespeare - To be, or not to be: that is the question
ART OF EUROPE. William Shakespeare - To be, or not to be (from Hamlet
3/1). To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis
www.artofeurope.com/shakespeare/sha8.htm - 4k - Cached - Similar pages
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare 1564-1616. tobeornottobe.com.
www.tobeornottobe.com/ - 2k - Cached - Similar pages
To Be or Not to Be (1942)
To Be or Not to Be (1942) - Cast, Crew, Reviews, Plot Summary, Comments, Discussion,
Taglines, Trailers, Posters, Photos, Showtimes, Link to Official Site, Fan
www.imdb.com/Title?0035446 - 42k - Cached - Similar pages
The five test criteria were relevance (the raleigh test), speed, the look (cleanliness of returned results), the obscure fact search, and the question (the time in Sydney).
If you can't count to five yourself, or double-check basic facts, well, that's really sad.
PalmOS is nowhere near as clunky as Windows CE.
For one thing, PalmOS has got a much simpler and more elegant user interface than its rival (Why the hell would anyone think that a desktop metaphor is suitable for a PDA?) and for another it's far faster than it too.
When I'm looking up an address or want to enter a quick note then I don't want to have to navigate through a menu system to get there first and wait while everything happens.
The key advantage PocketPCs have over Palms is the Microsoft factor: just as it has with other markets (eg, web browsers), Microsoft has leveraged its dominance in one market (desktop OS) to achieve success in another.
To suggest that PocketPCs are intrinsically superior to equivalent Palm models is hilarious.
If I were a tad more paranoid, I'd suggest that your comment and one or two others like it I've seen posted about this story were classic cases of astroturfing.
I'm not talking about the right to have a job, I'm talking about the right to not have your employer exploit you in a manner that is condoned by law: there's a big difference between the two.
The exemption that you're referring to excludes people in the entertainment industry, because it is specifically designed to cover essential workers, such as a company's IT staff, and not non-essential workers, such as someone writing the AI for a game. Besides, from what I've read it's clear that not everyone at EA earns above the magic exemption barrier.
And even if they did, requiring staff to work 10-12 hour days, 7 days a week isn't only counterproductive, it's dangerous to their long-term health: I'm sorry, but it's the 21st century, and companies shouldn't be working their employees into the ground anywhere in the world, let alone in California.
I don't care if someone is paid $10/hr or $45/hr, they still have rights, and those rights include decent, respectful working practices.
Warcraft III can already run over a LAN. So where's the fire?
Even better than that, you'll be able to go there and browse the dupe-free Slashdot of the very, very distant future.
Oh, I've just seen that the £549 million was for the second quarter, not for half a year, so you can double the figures I've just calculated.
£68 profit per second: they're hardly "losing money" like the AC that I originally replied to was suggesting.
Thanks for that, but you really need to get your £:$ conversions up to date.
The $ has tanked vs other currencies over the last year or so and it's at £1.00:$1.84 right now, and it's been weaker than that recently.
So £546 million for six months equates to £1,092 million per year, or $2,009 million.
And if we're talking about per second profits, that's £1,092,000,000/(365*24*60*60) or £1,092,000,000/31,536,000, which is £34 per second.
Like I said, they've shelled out a lot recently on acquisitions and other stuff, so a profit of £34 per second is hardly anything that they'll be crying about.
It's dropped because they've spent money on acquisitions and on upgrading their infrastructure. Just last month they spent £1 billion (might have been $1 billion: I'm not that sure off the top of my head) on buying into the US market.
European telcos are losing money? Funny, because BT makes a profit of about £100 (~$190) every second. If that's what you call losing money then please help me lose some by donating all of yours to me right away.
And this crap is modded insightful? How sad.
BitTorrent was intentionally designed not to hide IP addresses as its developer, Bram Cohen, openly acknowledges. That's because his goal wasn't to develop a P2P tool that could be used to share content illegally but to develop a P2P tool that reduced bandwidth for legally shared content, such as Linux ISOs, etc.
OK, blame Europeans for everything that happened up until 1776 if you must but what about since then? At what point does America accept responsibility for its own actions? Which of Britain, France or Spain is to blame for the US's attitude towards gays in its military?
Religious intolerance? Arguably the most religiously intolerant country in the Western world is the US: you're OK if you're Christian, because it's Christian dogma that runs the show. Care to name how many US Presidents haven't been Christian? Or how many current Congressmen are of a different faith? If you're not a Christian then you're practically unelectable. I won't even go into how Muslims (and, through ignorance, Hindus, Sihks and others with darker skin) are treated in America today.
Seperation of church and state? In a country where the President boasts of making policy decisions like invading another country because it's what God told him to do? Where civil rights and scientific freedoms are increasingly based upon moral codes dictated by the religious right? What a joke.
The reason for me original response was this blind ignorance that rights never get trampled on in the US when the exact opposite is the case: it happened in the past and it's happening today.
This wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for the fact that the US consistently champions itself as "the land of the free" and defender of an individual's rights: European nations don't feel the need for showboating their forms of democracies in quite the same manner and when it comes to personal freedoms they certainly don't say one thing but do another as the US has recently become so adept at doing.
Bottom line is this: if you're going to talk about how utopian your country is when it comes to freedom then that freedom must apply to everyone and it must come as advertised without any provisos or exceptions.
d) It would give 99 percent of the people wanting to see the movie a better shot at the best seats for the first week.
Really, do you think that George Lucas is concerned about the $50 million you might cost him in your scenario? According to Forbes, the guy is worth $3 billion, and that estimation was calculated before the original trilogy was released on DVD. Even if Episode III was panned by the critics and early audiences he'd still make his money and then some from the deal he has in place with 20th Century Fox, merchandising, etc.
Debt? The guy could probably fund the movie ten times over without having to raid his savings account.
Stay away for two weeks if it gives you a warm fuzzy glow inside. Just don't pretend that it'll make a blind bit of difference to how Lucas does business or interacts with his audience.
Well, completely wrong is perhaps a bit harsh: ownership of mobile phones is lower in the US than it is in many developing world nations, precisely because a mobile phone is preferable to landline for the reasons that you give but you miss the point that the ownership of mobile phones is far lower in the US than most other developed world nations too.
And it's not all about natural geography or lack of an existing landline infrastructure: mobile phone usage in Scandinavian countries such as Finland and Sweden is fantastic. In fact, if I remember correctly, in Finland over 90 percent of the people have a mobile phone.
As for mobile phones being expensive, well, that's free market capitalism working for you. In Britain, where caller party pays like almost everywhere else (ie, if you call me then you foot the bill and it doesn't cost me a thing), I have a pay as you go mobile phone that cost me £35 (~$75) to buy, and which costs me pennies a day to use and with no contract whatsoever. And it's as reliable as anything else, plus it's portable. (Of course, if I wanted to use my mobile phone more extensively, then I have a range of options available to me from the various UK operators.)
From the anecdotal evidence that keeps cropping up on Slashdot and elsewhere, it very much seems to me that mobile phone ownership being synonymous with costing heaven and earth is an American phenomenon.
Another topic where half the posts will be comments that contain nothing but jingoism and nationalist comments rather than examine China's genuine potential for growth.
Remember people, this is the world's biggest nation (by population), with the real potential to be the world's biggest manufacturer and the world's biggest marketplace. And, remember, that that potential is starting to be realised: China already has a import surplus of billions with most Western countries, including the US, and China is now starting to become a real consumer culture in its own right.
They may have given everyone else a head-start but then so did Japan and Germany post-WWII, and look at how powerful their economies have become.
Firstly, nice to see you using the Anonymous Coward option for what it was designed for: letting people freely spout whatever they want to free from persecution. Ironically, it's that sort of anonymity and protection of freedom of expression that the PATRIOT ACT essentially undermines.
Having said that, I do prefer it if people are willing to stand up and be counted when voicing a viewpoint that's diametrically opposed to my own. If nothing else, it makes it easier to track a conversation back and forth if I know which messages are being posted by which individual. Funny though, there are some out there that would say that standing up and being counted just makes it easier to weed out unwanted voices of dissent, as many a political prisoner throughout history could testify.
Secondly, it's nice to see you skim over those parts of my post that you don't feel like addressing, presumably because you have no way of rationalising away those forms of unfair discrimination and abuses of power.
Yeah, ignore the fact that a country theoretically built on the principle that "all men are created equal" was practically built with the blood, sweat and tears of a subjugated people. Ignore the fact that the Constitution valued the life of a negro slave as 3/5ths of a man, or that the freed slaves never did get their 40 acres and a mule in compensation.
Ignore the fact that, as recently as a couple of generations ago, blacks couldn't drink from the same water fountain as whites, that blacks had to give up their seats to whites, that blacks couldn't share the same classrooms as whites and that lynchings were a way of life.
Ignore the fact that as badly as black Americans have been treated, that native American peoples have been treated far worse, from the days of Plymouth Rock to Custer to today.
Ignore the fact that a woman doing the same job as a man who's equal to her in every other aspect other than their genders is likely to be earning less than her male counterpart, and is far less likely to be promoted than her male colleague.
Ignore the fact that being gay in the US military is akin to being unfit for service. As if a gay man is any less capable of firing a rifle, driving a tank or flying a plane.
Ignore the fact that the 43rd President of the United States would actively seek to take rights away from people based purely on their sexuality, even where those rights have been specifically granted to them by one or more of the States.
Ignore the fact that nothing more than a person's ethnicity has been used in the past to justify their imprisonment. Japanese Americans and others who spent most of World War II illegally imprisoned in internment camps clearly didn't have any rights.
Ignore the fact that a person's beliefs, however privately they may be held, have been reason enough to hound them unendlessly. Ignore the fact that McCarthyism ever existed and, to put it mildly, that it flew in the face of free speech.
Ignore the fact that post-September 11th, hundreds of Americans of Middle Eastern descent were interned without any legal representation or even access to their families whatsoever. And, whatever you do, ignore Camp X-Ray and everything that's gone on there.
Ignore the racial and religious McCarthyism that's going on right now, where people are routinely discriminated against because their skin is the wrong colour or because of their faith.
And above all, ignore any point that espouses a viewpoint that you disagree with.
I made a list in response to comments by someone who clearly didn't believe that innocents could be unfairly targetted in the US. I made a list to educate him that, unfortunately, innocents can and have been unfairly targetted in the US several times.
The land of the free isn't supposed to be the land of the free for most of the people, it's meant to be the land of the free for all of the people.
If you're so uncomfortable with a short list of examples of your country's failings then you really need to examine why it is you feel the need to defend the indefensible.
Nice to see that the truth is now considered flamebait.
Remember, if you can't refute someone's facts then you can always throw as much mud at them as you can find until people start forgetting the truth.
This would be the same country that was built on slavery, that had racial segregation and which treated blacks as second class citizens until only a few decades ago, that still treats its indigenous peoples as worse than second class citizens in many aspects, that has clear sexual discrimination in the workplace (women still earn less than men), that has clear homophobic discrimination in government (gays in the military), that has a President that wants to discriminate further against gays (gay marriage), that has illegal internment of anyone with even partial Japanese heritage (during WWII) and McCarthyism (when freedom of expression went out the window) in its recent past and has now resorted to illegal internment and religious McCarthyism again.
Yeah, because nothing could ever be shown to have been held unfairly against anyone at anytime in America's recent history, could it?
No, I think that you'll find that the English translation "cosmonaut" of the much older Russian word is what you're talking about: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was talking about cosmonauts in his native Russian in the 19th century.
Check history more thoroughly before you make silly, easily disproven statements.
Hey, look people, a flying monkey!