.... that they just cancelled this scheme because Microsoft has recieved a $50 billion contract from the Bush administration for a much improved system. The scheme involves a sensor, in the form of a spike, that will be implanted into the skull of all American schoolchildren from the age of 6 with a pneumatic nail gun. The 6 cm long probe extends into the inner brain and links the human mind to the internet over a SSL connection. According to a spokesman of the Total Information Awareness Office This new aera of cooperation between Microsoft and IAO will greatly enhance the effectiveness of TIAS (Total Information Awareness System) and revolutionize the ability of the US govt to fight domestic US terrorism. Using the system to fight international terrorism might prove difficutl though not impossible since all vistors to the USA will be required to be implanted in customs and it might also be possible to make economic or military aid contingent upon the complete implanting of citizenry of nations who wish to recieve such economic/military incentives, direct military invention migh also be an option when dealing with "rougue states". Microsoft spokesmen on the other hand have been reluctant to comment on allegations by internet news site/discussion forum www.Slashdot.org that this is just another step in the corporations ultimate quest to poke its nose into the private thougts of all humankind with its evil hardware/software and thereby achieve world domination.
If you havent noticed by now I will be kind and tell you, That was a sarcastic rant!
Even the Porn industry has a certain small sliver of dignity. Internet commercials, and most other commercials for that matter, only really become a benchmark of below the belt Advertising tactics when they are used by Lawyers, those annoying debt reduction companies and... ummm... oh yes Viagra salesmen.
I suppose authoritarianism will help China kick Microsoft in the crothc on the OS front but it is not the root cause of Microsofts declining influence in that country. Most governments in Europe to some extent are contemplating Linux. Not because it is so stable or because it is free or because they are such "fuzzy feely" OSS fans but simply because Linux is more secure. Fewer and fewer people trust Microsoft not to build back doors into its operating system for US intelligence services. Germany is following a similar path for example and the Germans have been doing just as bad a job at hiding their mistrust of Microsoft as the Chinese. It is above all security and problems with liscensing and the cost factor that will drive any migration to Linux along. The best part of such an evolution would be that government employees who today choose windows because they use it at work will in the future, if Linux becomes common in government use, choose Linux to use at home. And that will expand the customer/user base.
And I sincerely hope neither nation is a legion of grammar Nazis who gut people over typos. How did this get modded up to 5?
P.S. If you are itching to slap me over using the N word please take the time to notice that you have just been bitten in the back side by sarcasm, I have karma to burn.
I too a look at the doubters photos and found most of their argumentation to be quite weak. The only photos that really stuck out, at least to my mind, were photos where cross hair patterns, placed on a plate between the shutter and the film om the astronauts cameras disappear behind the astronauts or other objects.
I meant my statement to indicate the furthest that I would go in accepting the doubters argumentation. I can see, if I try really hard, how NASA MIGHT have been tempted to "help photography along" ie. retouch photos if they got a bunch of not very good material back. NASA would not be the first one to fall into that pit. What would you do if you just spent an obscene amount of money on a moon landing and all you had to show for it was bad photographic material? That being said I will consider every alternative other than even minimal retouching of NASA photos. I find it simply too hard to beleive that the USA and its Govt. would risk the colosal humiliation that a faked moonlanding would inevitably bring with it.
I might be willing to swallow the concept of NASA doctoring photographs because the actual material from the moon was too lousy for grade-A propaganda. That might explain some of the admittedly very strange flaws in official NASA photos that people have pointed out.
But the idea of moon landings not taking place is pretty idiotic. The US govt/NASA would have had to have been pretty stupid to fake the moon landings. After all they had to expect the Russians, or somebody else, would either go there sooner or later or send probesx to verify or just out of pure curiosity and they would look to be huge fools if no traces of landings were found.
I have only loosely kept track of this debate as well, mainly because anthropology was what I wanted to do for a living before I found out that Software Engineers, unlike Anthropologists can actually live off what they get paid.:)
As for the Israeli matter I wrote of that because I vaguely remembered a huge mudfight about it some years ago. Especially the Mt. Carmel remains. But that polite argument is nothing compared the borderline "shitstorm" (pardon my French, but that letter exchange is hard to discribe other wise) that has been raised about the Portugese remains (aka. Lagar Velho #1). Which is also why I usually prefer to stay out of this debate.
Oh, as to your PS I think it's been pretty well settled for decades that Cro Magnon is Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
Funny that expression is still used, I keep bumping into it one in a while?!? Some people like to live in the past I suppose.
That has been debated! Scientists tend to be pigheaded about their pet theories and thus the subject of Homo Sapient/Neandertalis hybrids has become the cause of full blown trench warfare among scientists.
But enaugh about the bonfies of (scientific) vanity. Geneticists claim they have extracted Homo Sapiens Neandertalis DNA from fossils. Now..... some of the people who evaluated these results claim that interbreeding was impossible or at best extremely unlikely. Critics of this assertion point out that if Camels and Guanacos (30-40 million years of genetic isolation) can produce viable hybrid offspring the same should be the case with Homo Sapiens Sapiens and and Homo Sapiens Neandertalis where the Genetic isolation was much, much, smaller. This seems to be born out by evidence from Israel (debated) and especially new discoveries in Portugal . Some of the aversion to the possibility of Neandertal/Cromagnong hybrids seems to be almost Eugenic with some people which is probably due to the Neandertals undeserved reputation of being a primitive hominid when, at least in my humble opinion, they fully deserve the title "Sapiens". Personally I would not be at all disappointed to find I had some Neandertal DNA. There is a legion of worse possibilities when it comes to embarrasing ancestors than Neandertals. Feel free to make fun of me for saying that, I'm sure some of you can will not be able to resist it.
Ps. I am not an anthropologist and I may be misusing the term Homo Sapiens Sapiens, these hominids are also sometimes referred to as Homo Sapiens Cromagnon.
That is true, I like anime for that reason as well. Difference is that I am a European and from my point of view Japanese material is a good alternative to the flood of US made Formula films and sitcoms that we are drowning in over here. Dont get me wrong, I am not against American TV material, some of it is really good. I like the New Star Trek series, Six Feet under, Farscape and of course FUTURAMA. But too much of the US stuff is just mass manufactured blurb without caracter. Kind of a visual counterpart to the infamous "Replicator food" they are always complaining about on the Enterprise. These Anime films make a great change in the monotony of bad sitcoms and action films. I wish more original programming like this would find its way onto my television screen. Definetly more Asian material and perhaps some E-European material as well and not just Anime mind you but regular films and series as well.
It is not just education that is an issue when the discussion turns to giving people access to the internet. Alot of the benefits of a network infrastructure are not bandwidth intensive. I saw a documentary recently about Indian rice farmers being able to break out of the grip of local businessmen who used isolation to get good prices on rice since the farmers had no way of finding out what prices were being offered by other merchants in the region. What happened to change that was one guy with an old PC and a 28.8 modem setting up shop and selling price lists for all kinds of crops in cities in the vicinity or ever brokering deals online. All of a sudden an illiterate farmer could get upto 40% more money for his oxcart full of rice or any other crop for that matter and even sell it instantly over the net in exchange for a few rupees to the broker. These Indian farmers are people who we westerners are all to often tempted to assume that they "come out of the middle ages" and yet it took them less than 5 minutes flat to discover the advantages of online auctions. Cultural barriers to the introduction of new technology are often overestimated.
If I remember correctly the Chinese adopted LINUX because of the Open Source system which guarantees that there are no CIA,NSA... etc... back doors in the code, and even if there are backdoords a codereview will find them. One of the main motivations would thus have been that they did not trust Microsoft to stand up to the pressure to integrate backdoors for US security/intelligence services in their Windows dialects. Germany is following a similar trend. Although they keep ranting on about cost cutting, word has it, that a condsiderably larger part of the real reason than the German Govt. would like to admit in public is a desire for increased security. And Germany is not alone in this either, I suspect that more countries will take a second look at LINUX now that G. W. Bush Jr. is in the White House ensuring that the worlds trust in the USAs trustworthyness has reached a new low point. It would appear that the xerox spycam episode and how it was used to spy on enemies as well as allies has not been entirely forgotten after all. You can of course gripe about this being ancient history but there are more recent examples, such as the NSA abusing the ECHELON system for industrial espionage. Not that I as a European am pissed about this sort of thing, we do industrial espionage over here too. It is a grand old tradition as old as humanity and occasionally we over here in the old world even manage to sc*ew US companies in the b*tt just like the US Govt sc*ewed Airbus. I bet you are now tempted to write me off as an anti Microsoft NUTTER, but I fail to see why we should make it easy for the USA to sabotage our industry or read our private files off our hard disk. Lets face it, it is alot harder to keep the NSAs nose out of ones data with M$ Windows (notice I put the fashioable $ sign in the Microsoft ancronym) than it is to protect ones privacy under LINUX.
It is probably good for the economy for the same reason as it is good for the economy to decalare highly educated professionals as useless relics because they have passed 40 years of age. It is really funny to read an analysis by some Wallstreet bozo claiming a company is stagnant and not "young and dynamic" anymore based on the facts that the average age of the employees is a bit high and that a search on a select collection of online job indexes revealed that they are not constantly hiring alot of new people. The net result is that people looking for a job get rejected becaue they are too old or respond to a job advertisement that turns out to be an "Opportunity for an unpaid praktikum period" (like anybody wants to work unpaid for a few monts) which is another way of saying "we just advertised that job because management wants to fool the stock analysts into thinking we are a "young and dynamic" company so we brought you all this way to an interview to make you an offer we know you will refuse. Perhaps the management methods you describe are the legacy of the 1980s jukbond kings and takeover pirates?
To be fair to managers, not all of them are complete gits. To for a technology company to suceed it is not enaugh for it to be run by a 24 carat geek with a high as it gets IQ and who loves to hakck code etc... I have seen a number of companies end up living of 2-3 projects, often all of these projects are financed by the same sposor and when that sponsor needs to downsize... Well what you get then is what the Germans are getting now, as Siemens, BMW, MBB and others cancel projects and we see 45000 bankrupcys happen in one year, which in Germany is a post WWII record. What is really needed is a bunch of geeks, marketing people and managers working together. Then and only then will a company do well. If you take a look at alot of those companies he cites as examples of companies who have not been managed to death it is either because their leadersip is well balaced in these three departments or because they happen to have a leader who has a flair for more than just the tecchnical side but also marketing and management.
I mean, the government gets whatever it wants, because it has all the power. It has all the power because it has all the guns, and that is especially true in the UK.
The government has power because we the people give it power. The governments gets things it wants and we don't want because we the people do not stop the government from getting what the government wants before it is too late. I am constantly amazed by how the majority groups with in Nations, Trade unions and Political organizations neglect to make use of their democratic rights to govern them selves and get rolled over by a small but determined minority that makes excellent use of its democratic rights. I have actually seen unpopular legislation passed in an unnamed national assembly just because half of the majorities MPs were stuck gossiping at the watercooler when the vote was called and being absent they could not stand up and be counted. If we keep expecting to exercise our democratic right to influence government after bills we dont like have been passed because we were to lazy to show up to vote or too brain-dead to speak up we will have a hard time ahead of us. It would be so much easyer if people opposed legislations that robs them of their rights BEFORE it is passed. Sort of like putting on the FLAK jacket BEFORE you get shot
I am not pigholing anyone. I shell out more money myself since I always buy products with an ecostamp. I have just seen too many European and American armchair enviromentalists shoulder their picket signs and merrily see to it that a couple of thousand people somewhere in Scandinavia, Greenland, Canada or Africa have to go witout a job to pacify their own guilty consience; only to see these same so called enviromentalists discrard their high and lofty ideals as soon as it ist THEY who have to pay more for their food or suffer in some way. For every person like us who is willing to pay more for Enviromentally friendly products there are 10 people whos concern for the enviroment ends at the clasp of their own wallet. Case in point the German "Green" party who has changed its tune considerably since the came into the government
Another thing I watched with a certain amount of sarcastic amusement was for example Greenpeace and its save the whales campaign. They went after Little Iceland who was just about the only country in the world to issue quotas on Whaling ships based on Scientific studys of population size. At the same time Greenpeace ignored large Pirate fleets of whalers who unlike the Icelanders and the Norwegians were killing large numbers of endangered species completely without control including animals that were had not even reached reproductive age. In Norway and Iceland you can actually end up doing hard time if you get cought catching fish under reproductive age. Examples of this sort of lynchmob behavior among enviromentalist groups are Legion, example of some or the other misguided Enviromentalist group going after somebody without even bothering to check their facts and sometimes and this includes Greenpeace, falsifying and fabricting evidence if they can't find any. Sadly enough the people who really know what they are talking about in matters enviroment regularly get shouted down by the Industrial lobby as well as the Fundamentalist Eviromentalists like Greenpeace.
That really gets on my nerves too. Take that whole Save the Whales thing. It is easy to be an enviromentalist when you are just trying to forbid a bunch of Scandinavian Rednecks from killing some whales or shooting a few sealinos because they are so cute. It is even easyer to jump all over African or Pakistani tribesmen for shooting mountain sheep. But when it comes to the Germans, French English or Americans paying 3% more for the Kg of meat so an animal can be kept in a pen that is not full of filth and so narrow the animal can not even lie down with the result that it gnaws the skin off its neighbors shoulders crazed with the monotony of its existance that is an outrage. In the idealism of most enviromentalists ends at the point where they have to pay for their ideals in hard or $$$.
A detachment of special forces is pinned down by enemy fire. The bad guys have found a bug in the special forces target tracking software that allows them to confuse it, maybe by putting out heat sources that are right on the threshold of what is flagged as a target by the software. The good guys fix their program in the field, correct the bug and reinstall. The DRM agent rejects the new software and prints a little message: You have tried to run unlicensed software on this processor.
He underestimates the military, take the Marines for example, they are men who solve problems by eliminating their causes. After the first instance of this happening the word will spread quickly in the software developer community of how a bunch of angry Marines showed up at Microsoft HQ (DMRP division) and rammed armed stick grenades up the developers Rectums before pulling all the pins with a string (Paralell processing).
It may interest you to know that only about 4% of American oil comes from the Gulf, let alone Iraq. 80% is produced domestically and most of the remaining comes from South America and Africa. Hence it's ludicrous to suggest that an American attack on Iraq will raise local oil prices.
Let me explain again. He claimed 80% of the USA's oil production is DOMESTIC. 100% total - 80% US domestic=20% imported He then went on to claim that of these 20% that are imported only 1/4 come from the gulf. Which supposedly is the reason why Bush wants to go to war in the Gulf, not for the USA who does not need gulf oil, and supposedly hardly imports any, but for the USA's unfortunate allies.
The reason I cited those figures is to show that domestic production DOES NOT satisfy 80% of the USA's oil consumption like he claimed but rather only c.a. 45% according to those EIA figrues an that another 45% are or rather were covered in 1996 by imports. Today, unless things have changed in the US Domestic Oil industry, imports should outstrip domestic production by a good margin.
....fairly close to that 50-60% you don't seem to want to know about.
I never denied that around half of the USA's oil consumption is covered by imports, I tried to prove it.
It may interest you to know that only about 4% of American oil comes from the Gulf, let alone Iraq. 80% is produced domestically and most of the remaining comes from South America and Africa. Hence it's ludicrous to suggest that an American attack on Iraq will raise local oil prices.
Hmmm.....
This is from the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy
Darn treehuggers? Well, this link is even more interesting they are the EIA (Energy Information Administration), their Website is even labeled "Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government" coool!
Check out figure 51, a little more than 20% imports...
A simple Google search seems to indicate that most people seem to quote between 50 and 60% net oil import for the US and not 20%. Domestic US supply is on the decline and imports are on the rise. I also think that a little more than a quarter of the US imported oil comes from the Gulf Region or other middle eastern sources.
Stop being a git, all he was saying is that if it were possible to replace gasoline with alcohol (and perhaps hydrogen as well) there would still be a VERY significant reduction in emissions. That is assuming that the distilling and burining of a standard unit amount of sugarcane does not generate more CO2 than the same unit amount of live sugarcane plants can absorb during their life cycle. And even they can't Alcohol will still beat Gasoline in terms of emissions. Rejecting a partial solution because it is not the definitive universal solution to all of mankinds problems is an old sport among enviromentalists but it just makes them look like fools. As for disel, there have been similar, and relatively sucessful, attempts at producing a "Bio Diesel" to whome the same principle applies as alcohol as a gasolilne substitute, the plants from whom the Bio Diesel fuel is made absorb the CO2 released by burn and processing. That only leaves burining Coal and other fossil fuels to generate Electicity which can be reduced significantly if the worlds governments were not such political cowards and too firmly committed to ensuring the interests of industry to promote energy efficiency. If you take a look at what is happening in Europe to reduce emissions from electic powerplats you will find that magical new technologies like cold fusion play no part in it. The proposed redcutions over the next 20-30 years will be reached by means of a patchwork of measures to increase energy efficiency and by burning a large number of alternative fuels to coal, gas and oil. It wont eliminate Coal, oil and gas!!! But alternative fuels and energy efficiency can still reduce our reliance on fossil fuels very significantly. The more we reduce reliance on fossil fuels the more real the become the prospect of getting rid of the political baggage that comes with constantly poking around in middle eastern politics and propping up tyrannical rulers in that part of the world in the interest of keeping the flow of oil uninterrupted. As far as I am concerned, if this works out and reduces or even eliminates (Utopia) the need for Gasoline that is only a good thing even if it is not a magic bullet.
Dosen't Israel have prior art on that? Both in the Eichmann case and when they sent their agents abroad in the 70's to kill Palestinians (including a poor Moroccan fellow snuffed by mistake) involved in the 1972 Munich Olympic affair?? I am no NeoNazi Jewhater nor am I trying to start a flamewar. It just struck me that enforcing your law on other peoples sovreign territory without their prior consent or knowledge is not a new idea nor was the practice invented by the US Govt. I am shure one can find older examples than these if one digs a bit.
Knowing the Germans they will produce a system that is so Peculiarly German it can not interact with anything else. In most of the rest of Europe where I have been the predominant form of payment is Plastic Credit Cards. In the Scandinavan countries you can even pay (electronically) for a Taxi with a VISA card. Here in Germany Credit cards are little known and frowned upon and only major shopping centers take them. The Germans use Money Cards with chips on them, you stick it into a auomatic bank machine and load the chip with cash, then you better not stick the card in your back trouser pocket. Because if the card gets bent too hard the contacts from the chip in the card to the interface on the card surface can get torn and, say, 200 Euros are trapped on your chipcard and lost.
Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"
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In principle you are right but a monopoly can still maintain it self for a long time. Take a look at Microsoft and how it maintains its monopoly by killing of competitive efforts at birth. It does this with Lawsuits, by restricting other companies ability to compete by constantly changing fileformats, blatantly sabotaging threatening efforts like Java for example and so on and so on...... It is by no means a forgone conclusion that a monopoly will fall quickly beacuse of Creative Destruction. A monopoly can still causa a long period of total innovative stagnagtion. What is really ironic about Microsoft is that what will eventually make a major contribution to bringing that monopoly down is highly likely LINUX which is not a commercial product but rather a Popular movement. Which makes LINUX the proverbial square peg in Schumpeter's round mold because in all the years of trying the entire computer industry did not achieve what a bunch of hackers, geeks and yahoos did in their spare time with LINUX.
Re:You /. people really like the word "monopoly"
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In a free market system, monopolies NATURALLY result from good business practices
And in a free market system technological innovation, development and low prices NATURALLY result from competition. You seem to be arguing that the one offering the best services will eventually triumph over the competition and be the only one left on the market. This is sometimes true, but it does not mean that monopolies are always the best thing for a free market system. Once a monopoly is achieved it causes stagnation because of the absence of competition. Monopolies are very profitable and the monopolist is better off jacking up prices and keeping production costs low at the expense of quality.
Slashdot Mirror
.... that they just cancelled this scheme because Microsoft has recieved a $50 billion contract from the Bush administration for a much improved system. The scheme involves a sensor, in the form of a spike, that will be implanted into the skull of all American schoolchildren from the age of 6 with a pneumatic nail gun. The 6 cm long probe extends into the inner brain and links the human mind to the internet over a SSL connection. According to a spokesman of the Total Information Awareness Office This new aera of cooperation between Microsoft and IAO will greatly enhance the effectiveness of TIAS (Total Information Awareness System) and revolutionize the ability of the US govt to fight domestic US terrorism. Using the system to fight international terrorism might prove difficutl though not impossible since all vistors to the USA will be required to be implanted in customs and it might also be possible to make economic or military aid contingent upon the complete implanting of citizenry of nations who wish to recieve such economic/military incentives, direct military invention migh also be an option when dealing with "rougue states". Microsoft spokesmen on the other hand have been reluctant to comment on allegations by internet news site/discussion forum www.Slashdot.org that this is just another step in the corporations ultimate quest to poke its nose into the private thougts of all humankind with its evil hardware/software and thereby achieve world domination.
... Karma to burn
If you havent noticed by now I will be kind and tell you, That was a sarcastic rant!
Even the Porn industry has a certain small sliver of dignity. Internet commercials, and most other commercials for that matter, only really become a benchmark of below the belt Advertising tactics when they are used by Lawyers, those annoying debt reduction companies and ... ummm ... oh yes Viagra salesmen.
I suppose authoritarianism will help China kick Microsoft in the crothc on the OS front but it is not the root cause of Microsofts declining influence in that country. Most governments in Europe to some extent are contemplating Linux. Not because it is so stable or because it is free or because they are such "fuzzy feely" OSS fans but simply because Linux is more secure. Fewer and fewer people trust Microsoft not to build back doors into its operating system for US intelligence services. Germany is following a similar path for example and the Germans have been doing just as bad a job at hiding their mistrust of Microsoft as the Chinese. It is above all security and problems with liscensing and the cost factor that will drive any migration to Linux along. The best part of such an evolution would be that government employees who today choose windows because they use it at work will in the future, if Linux becomes common in government use, choose Linux to use at home. And that will expand the customer/user base.
And I sincerely hope neither nation is a legion of grammar Nazis who gut people over typos. How did this get modded up to 5?
P.S. If you are itching to slap me over using the N word please take the time to notice that you have just been bitten in the back side by sarcasm, I have karma to burn.
I too a look at the doubters photos and found most of their argumentation to be quite weak. The only photos that really stuck out, at least to my mind, were photos where cross hair patterns, placed on a plate between the shutter and the film om the astronauts cameras disappear behind the astronauts or other objects.
I meant my statement to indicate the furthest that I would go in accepting the doubters argumentation. I can see, if I try really hard, how NASA MIGHT have been tempted to "help photography along" ie. retouch photos if they got a bunch of not very good material back. NASA would not be the first one to fall into that pit. What would you do if you just spent an obscene amount of money on a moon landing and all you had to show for it was bad photographic material? That being said I will consider every alternative other than even minimal retouching of NASA photos. I find it simply too hard to beleive that the USA and its Govt. would risk the colosal humiliation that a faked moonlanding would inevitably bring with it.
I might be willing to swallow the concept of NASA doctoring photographs because the actual material from the moon was too lousy for grade-A propaganda. That might explain some of the admittedly very strange flaws in official NASA photos that people have pointed out.
But the idea of moon landings not taking place is pretty idiotic. The US govt/NASA would have had to have been pretty stupid to fake the moon landings. After all they had to expect the Russians, or somebody else, would either go there sooner or later or send probesx to verify or just out of pure curiosity and they would look to be huge fools if no traces of landings were found.
I have only loosely kept track of this debate as well, mainly because anthropology was what I wanted to do for a living before I found out that Software Engineers, unlike Anthropologists can actually live off what they get paid. :)
As for the Israeli matter I wrote of that because I vaguely remembered a huge mudfight about it some years ago. Especially the Mt. Carmel remains. But that polite argument is nothing compared the borderline "shitstorm" (pardon my French, but that letter exchange is hard to discribe other wise) that has been raised about the Portugese remains (aka. Lagar Velho #1). Which is also why I usually prefer to stay out of this debate.
Oh, as to your PS I think it's been pretty well settled for decades that Cro Magnon is Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
Funny that expression is still used, I keep bumping into it one in a while?!? Some people like to live in the past I suppose.
That has been debated! Scientists tend to be pigheaded about their pet theories and thus the subject of Homo Sapient/Neandertalis hybrids has become the cause of full blown trench warfare among scientists.
But enaugh about the bonfies of (scientific) vanity. Geneticists claim they have extracted Homo Sapiens Neandertalis DNA from fossils. Now..... some of the people who evaluated these results claim that interbreeding was impossible or at best extremely unlikely. Critics of this assertion point out that if Camels and Guanacos (30-40 million years of genetic isolation) can produce viable hybrid offspring the same should be the case with Homo Sapiens Sapiens and and Homo Sapiens Neandertalis where the Genetic isolation was much, much, smaller. This seems to be born out by evidence from Israel (debated) and especially new discoveries in Portugal . Some of the aversion to the possibility of Neandertal/Cromagnong hybrids seems to be almost Eugenic with some people which is probably due to the Neandertals undeserved reputation of being a primitive hominid when, at least in my humble opinion, they fully deserve the title "Sapiens". Personally I would not be at all disappointed to find I had some Neandertal DNA. There is a legion of worse possibilities when it comes to embarrasing ancestors than Neandertals. Feel free to make fun of me for saying that, I'm sure some of you can will not be able to resist it.
Ps. I am not an anthropologist and I may be misusing the term Homo Sapiens Sapiens, these hominids are also sometimes referred to as Homo Sapiens Cromagnon.
That is true, I like anime for that reason as well. Difference is that I am a European and from my point of view Japanese material is a good alternative to the flood of US made Formula films and sitcoms that we are drowning in over here. Dont get me wrong, I am not against American TV material, some of it is really good. I like the New Star Trek series, Six Feet under, Farscape and of course FUTURAMA. But too much of the US stuff is just mass manufactured blurb without caracter. Kind of a visual counterpart to the infamous "Replicator food" they are always complaining about on the Enterprise. These Anime films make a great change in the monotony of bad sitcoms and action films. I wish more original programming like this would find its way onto my television screen. Definetly more Asian material and perhaps some E-European material as well and not just Anime mind you but regular films and series as well.
It is not just education that is an issue when the discussion turns to giving people access to the internet. Alot of the benefits of a network infrastructure are not bandwidth intensive. I saw a documentary recently about Indian rice farmers being able to break out of the grip of local businessmen who used isolation to get good prices on rice since the farmers had no way of finding out what prices were being offered by other merchants in the region. What happened to change that was one guy with an old PC and a 28.8 modem setting up shop and selling price lists for all kinds of crops in cities in the vicinity or ever brokering deals online. All of a sudden an illiterate farmer could get upto 40% more money for his oxcart full of rice or any other crop for that matter and even sell it instantly over the net in exchange for a few rupees to the broker. These Indian farmers are people who we westerners are all to often tempted to assume that they "come out of the middle ages" and yet it took them less than 5 minutes flat to discover the advantages of online auctions. Cultural barriers to the introduction of new technology are often overestimated.
If I remember correctly the Chinese adopted LINUX because of the Open Source system which guarantees that there are no CIA,NSA... etc... back doors in the code, and even if there are backdoords a codereview will find them. One of the main motivations would thus have been that they did not trust Microsoft to stand up to the pressure to integrate backdoors for US security/intelligence services in their Windows dialects. Germany is following a similar trend. Although they keep ranting on about cost cutting, word has it, that a condsiderably larger part of the real reason than the German Govt. would like to admit in public is a desire for increased security. And Germany is not alone in this either, I suspect that more countries will take a second look at LINUX now that G. W. Bush Jr. is in the White House ensuring that the worlds trust in the USAs trustworthyness has reached a new low point. It would appear that the xerox spycam episode and how it was used to spy on enemies as well as allies has not been entirely forgotten after all. You can of course gripe about this being ancient history but there are more recent examples, such as the NSA abusing the ECHELON system for industrial espionage. Not that I as a European am pissed about this sort of thing, we do industrial espionage over here too. It is a grand old tradition as old as humanity and occasionally we over here in the old world even manage to sc*ew US companies in the b*tt just like the US Govt sc*ewed Airbus. I bet you are now tempted to write me off as an anti Microsoft NUTTER, but I fail to see why we should make it easy for the USA to sabotage our industry or read our private files off our hard disk. Lets face it, it is alot harder to keep the NSAs nose out of ones data with M$ Windows (notice I put the fashioable $ sign in the Microsoft ancronym) than it is to protect ones privacy under LINUX.
It is probably good for the economy for the same reason as it is good for the economy to decalare highly educated professionals as useless relics because they have passed 40 years of age. It is really funny to read an analysis by some Wallstreet bozo claiming a company is stagnant and not "young and dynamic" anymore based on the facts that the average age of the employees is a bit high and that a search on a select collection of online job indexes revealed that they are not constantly hiring alot of new people. The net result is that people looking for a job get rejected becaue they are too old or respond to a job advertisement that turns out to be an "Opportunity for an unpaid praktikum period" (like anybody wants to work unpaid for a few monts) which is another way of saying "we just advertised that job because management wants to fool the stock analysts into thinking we are a "young and dynamic" company so we brought you all this way to an interview to make you an offer we know you will refuse. Perhaps the management methods you describe are the legacy of the 1980s jukbond kings and takeover pirates?
To be fair to managers, not all of them are complete gits. To for a technology company to suceed it is not enaugh for it to be run by a 24 carat geek with a high as it gets IQ and who loves to hakck code etc... I have seen a number of companies end up living of 2-3 projects, often all of these projects are financed by the same sposor and when that sponsor needs to downsize... Well what you get then is what the Germans are getting now, as Siemens, BMW, MBB and others cancel projects and we see 45000 bankrupcys happen in one year, which in Germany is a post WWII record. What is really needed is a bunch of geeks, marketing people and managers working together. Then and only then will a company do well. If you take a look at alot of those companies he cites as examples of companies who have not been managed to death it is either because their leadersip is well balaced in these three departments or because they happen to have a leader who has a flair for more than just the tecchnical side but also marketing and management.
I mean, the government gets whatever it wants, because it has all the power. It has all the power because it has all the guns, and that is especially true in the UK.
The government has power because we the people give it power. The governments gets things it wants and we don't want because we the people do not stop the government from getting what the government wants before it is too late. I am constantly amazed by how the majority groups with in Nations, Trade unions and Political organizations neglect to make use of their democratic rights to govern them selves and get rolled over by a small but determined minority that makes excellent use of its democratic rights. I have actually seen unpopular legislation passed in an unnamed national assembly just because half of the majorities MPs were stuck gossiping at the watercooler when the vote was called and being absent they could not stand up and be counted.
If we keep expecting to exercise our democratic right to influence government after bills we dont like have been passed because we were to lazy to show up to vote or too brain-dead to speak up we will have a hard time ahead of us. It would be so much easyer if people opposed legislations that robs them of their rights BEFORE it is passed. Sort of like putting on the FLAK jacket BEFORE you get shot
I am not pigholing anyone. I shell out more money myself since I always buy products with an ecostamp. I have just seen too many European and American armchair enviromentalists shoulder their picket signs and merrily see to it that a couple of thousand people somewhere in Scandinavia, Greenland, Canada or Africa have to go witout a job to pacify their own guilty consience; only to see these same so called enviromentalists discrard their high and lofty ideals as soon as it ist THEY who have to pay more for their food or suffer in some way. For every person like us who is willing to pay more for Enviromentally friendly products there are 10 people whos concern for the enviroment ends at the clasp of their own wallet. Case in point the German "Green" party who has changed its tune considerably since the came into the government
Another thing I watched with a certain amount of sarcastic amusement was for example Greenpeace and its save the whales campaign. They went after Little Iceland who was just about the only country in the world to issue quotas on Whaling ships based on Scientific studys of population size. At the same time Greenpeace ignored large Pirate fleets of whalers who unlike the Icelanders and the Norwegians were killing large numbers of endangered species completely without control including animals that were had not even reached reproductive age. In Norway and Iceland you can actually end up doing hard time if you get cought catching fish under reproductive age. Examples of this sort of lynchmob behavior among enviromentalist groups are Legion, example of some or the other misguided Enviromentalist group going after somebody without even bothering to check their facts and sometimes and this includes Greenpeace, falsifying and fabricting evidence if they can't find any. Sadly enough the people who really know what they are talking about in matters enviroment regularly get shouted down by the Industrial lobby as well as the Fundamentalist Eviromentalists like Greenpeace.
That really gets on my nerves too. Take that whole Save the Whales thing. It is easy to be an enviromentalist when you are just trying to forbid a bunch of Scandinavian Rednecks from killing some whales or shooting a few sealinos because they are so cute. It is even easyer to jump all over African or Pakistani tribesmen for shooting mountain sheep. But when it comes to the Germans, French English or Americans paying 3% more for the Kg of meat so an animal can be kept in a pen that is not full of filth and so narrow the animal can not even lie down with the result that it gnaws the skin off its neighbors shoulders crazed with the monotony of its existance that is an outrage. In the idealism of most enviromentalists ends at the point where they have to pay for their ideals in hard or $$$.
Deos fortioribus adesse!
-- Cornelius Tacitius, Histories bk. 4, ch. 17.
A detachment of special forces is pinned down by enemy fire. The bad guys have found a bug in the special forces target tracking software that allows them to confuse it, maybe by putting out heat sources that are right on the threshold of what is flagged as a target by the software. The good guys fix their program in the field, correct the bug and reinstall. The DRM agent rejects the new software and prints a little message: You have tried to run unlicensed software on this processor.
He underestimates the military, take the Marines for example, they are men who solve problems by eliminating their causes. After the first instance of this happening the word will spread quickly in the software developer community of how a bunch of angry Marines showed up at Microsoft HQ (DMRP division) and rammed armed stick grenades up the developers Rectums before pulling all the pins with a string (Paralell processing).
It may interest you to know that only about 4% of American oil comes from the Gulf, let alone Iraq. 80% is produced domestically and most of the remaining comes from South America and Africa. Hence it's ludicrous to suggest that an American attack on Iraq will raise local oil prices.
....fairly close to that 50-60% you don't seem to want to know about.
Let me explain again. He claimed 80% of the USA's oil production is DOMESTIC. 100% total - 80% US domestic=20% imported He then went on to claim that of these 20% that are imported only 1/4 come from the gulf. Which supposedly is the reason why Bush wants to go to war in the Gulf, not for the USA who does not need gulf oil, and supposedly hardly imports any, but for the USA's unfortunate allies.
The reason I cited those figures is to show that domestic production DOES NOT satisfy 80% of the USA's oil consumption like he claimed but rather only c.a. 45% according to those EIA figrues an that another 45% are or rather were covered in 1996 by imports. Today, unless things have changed in the US Domestic Oil industry, imports should outstrip domestic production by a good margin.
I never denied that around half of the USA's oil consumption is covered by imports, I tried to prove it.
It may interest you to know that only about 4% of American oil comes from the Gulf, let alone Iraq. 80% is produced domestically and most of the remaining comes from South America and Africa. Hence it's ludicrous to suggest that an American attack on Iraq will raise local oil prices.
Hmmm.....
This is from the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy
Darn treehuggers? Well, this link is even more interesting they are the EIA (Energy Information Administration), their Website is even labeled "Official Energy Statistics from the U.S. Government" coool!
Check out figure 51, a little more than 20% imports...
A simple Google search seems to indicate that most people seem to quote between 50 and 60% net oil import for the US and not 20%. Domestic US supply is on the decline and imports are on the rise. I also think that a little more than a quarter of the US imported oil comes from the Gulf Region or other middle eastern sources.
Stop being a git, all he was saying is that if it were possible to replace gasoline with alcohol (and perhaps hydrogen as well) there would still be a VERY significant reduction in emissions. That is assuming that the distilling and burining of a standard unit amount of sugarcane does not generate more CO2 than the same unit amount of live sugarcane plants can absorb during their life cycle. And even they can't Alcohol will still beat Gasoline in terms of emissions.
Rejecting a partial solution because it is not the definitive universal solution to all of mankinds problems is an old sport among enviromentalists but it just makes them look like fools. As for disel, there have been similar, and relatively sucessful, attempts at producing a "Bio Diesel" to whome the same principle applies as alcohol as a gasolilne substitute, the plants from whom the Bio Diesel fuel is made absorb the CO2 released by burn and processing. That only leaves burining Coal and other fossil fuels to generate Electicity which can be reduced significantly if the worlds governments were not such political cowards and too firmly committed to ensuring the interests of industry to promote energy efficiency. If you take a look at what is happening in Europe to reduce emissions from electic powerplats you will find that magical new technologies like cold fusion play no part in it. The proposed redcutions over the next 20-30 years will be reached by means of a patchwork of measures to increase energy efficiency and by burning a large number of alternative fuels to coal, gas and oil. It wont eliminate Coal, oil and gas!!! But alternative fuels and energy efficiency can still reduce our reliance on fossil fuels very significantly. The more we reduce reliance on fossil fuels the more real the become the prospect of getting rid of the political baggage that comes with constantly poking around in middle eastern politics and propping up tyrannical rulers in that part of the world in the interest of keeping the flow of oil uninterrupted. As far as I am concerned, if this works out and reduces or even eliminates (Utopia) the need for Gasoline that is only a good thing even if it is not a magic bullet.
Dosen't Israel have prior art on that? Both in the Eichmann case and when they sent their agents abroad in the 70's to kill Palestinians (including a poor Moroccan fellow snuffed by mistake) involved in the 1972 Munich Olympic affair?? I am no NeoNazi Jewhater nor am I trying to start a flamewar. It just struck me that enforcing your law on other peoples sovreign territory without their prior consent or knowledge is not a new idea nor was the practice invented by the US Govt. I am shure one can find older examples than these if one digs a bit.
Now... Lets go and watch some Karma evaproate.
Knowing the Germans they will produce a system that is so Peculiarly German it can not interact with anything else. In most of the rest of Europe where I have been the predominant form of payment is Plastic Credit Cards. In the Scandinavan countries you can even pay (electronically) for a Taxi with a VISA card. Here in Germany Credit cards are little known and frowned upon and only major shopping centers take them. The Germans use Money Cards with chips on them, you stick it into a auomatic bank machine and load the chip with cash, then you better not stick the card in your back trouser pocket. Because if the card gets bent too hard the contacts from the chip in the card to the interface on the card surface can get torn and, say, 200 Euros are trapped on your chipcard and lost.
In principle you are right but a monopoly can still maintain it self for a long time. Take a look at Microsoft and how it maintains its monopoly by killing of competitive efforts at birth. It does this with Lawsuits, by restricting other companies ability to compete by constantly changing fileformats, blatantly sabotaging threatening efforts like Java for example and so on and so on...... It is by no means a forgone conclusion that a monopoly will fall quickly beacuse of Creative Destruction. A monopoly can still causa a long period of total innovative stagnagtion. What is really ironic about Microsoft is that what will eventually make a major contribution to bringing that monopoly down is highly likely LINUX which is not a commercial product but rather a Popular movement. Which makes LINUX the proverbial square peg in Schumpeter's round mold because in all the years of trying the entire computer industry did not achieve what a bunch of hackers, geeks and yahoos did in their spare time with LINUX.
In a free market system, monopolies NATURALLY result from good business practices
And in a free market system technological innovation, development and low prices NATURALLY result from competition. You seem to be arguing that the one offering the best services will eventually triumph over the competition and be the only one left on the market. This is sometimes true, but it does not mean that monopolies are always the best thing for a free market system. Once a monopoly is achieved it causes stagnation because of the absence of competition. Monopolies are very profitable and the monopolist is better off jacking up prices and keeping production costs low at the expense of quality.