You know what completely utterlyblows my mind? It is that you Americans seem so utterly incapable of learning from your own history and mistakes. Even Bush, who has spent the past 4 years denying that Iraq was another Vietnam finally admitted it last week, in a fit of desperation to try avoiding what has become pretty obvious to every one else: Iraq is lost. The only way of preventing total genocide in Iraq is divinding the country into 3 and trying to pacify the Turks into not invading Kurdistan. The lesson form Vietnam: You cannot win a guerilla war if the population does not support you. You can of course just kill everyone, but it'll be hard pissing on the Russians, Chinese and Indians about their human rights when you're busy doing a little genocide yourself.
What does this have to do with Iran? Your CIA and the British MI6 engineered a coup in 1955 overthrowing the elected Iranian government with the Shah, who was widley hated and despised. In 1978 the Iranians revolted and threw him out and let Khomeini back in. Then, in 1979 a bunch of Iranian students held a bunch of Americans hostage at the US embasssy in Teheran for some 400 days. The US messed up a rescue attempt and has been trying to topple the Iranian governemnt ever since, firstly by funding Saddam's WMD programmes and then by encouraging him to invade Iran in 1980. In that bloody mess of a war, some 600,000 Iranians died fighting, literaly, for their country (unlike the invasion and following war in Iraq which was no threat to the US). Saddam used US sponsored and condoned nerve gas on Iranian soliders (and his own people). The US covertly sold F-14 parts to the Iranians in order to fund the murderous Contra counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua, thereby making Yet Another Unneeded Enemy(TM).
During the Iran-Iraq war the US Navy shot down an Iranian civillian airliner. The US refused to apologise for the deaths of some 290 civillians and has never done so. Most Iranians, even the liberal student types that your own right wing conservatives would be calling traitors if they were American, think that the US is responsible for most of the bloodshed that has befallen Iran in the last 50 years or so.
Now, Iran, after decades of verbal abuse (and its own batshit crazy governments, but I'll get to that soonish) and sanctions saw the invasion of Iraq and assumed that Bush and his cabal of lunatics would be crazy enough to do that to Iran too. So they started developing nuclear weapons, because the US despite its constant posturing, is really shit scared of anyone with the same weapons that it has (see North Korea for an example). The US has been screaming about the threat to Israel^America, etc etc etc ever since and making claims about starting a war, making attacks etc. The Iranian government is batshit crazy and unpopular inside Iran, and young people long for more freedom. Your governments constant provocation has pretty successfully suffocated any possibility of that happening.
Congratulations, you've made Yet Another Unneeded Enemy(TM). You have successfully provoked the Iranians into hating the very breaths you take, so that you, you dumbass fucking moron article author, can make claims about aiding the enemy. Fantastic.
P.S. Remember the Nicaraguans, the other Unneeded Enemy. Recently they had an election and one of the people running was a Guy called Ortega, who ran the country while the US tried with a very dirty and bloody war to topple him in the 80s. The US sent a number of threats down there openly telling the Nicaraguans not to vote for Ortega. The Nicraguans told you to get fucked and voted for him anyway. See the pattern? The US has done this with Russia (the bonehead Orange revolution in the Ukraine which has since turned out to be an utter farce, putting missiles up against the Russian border), China (economic threats, currency threats, warnings about the Chinese military ad nauseam) and others. You managed to piss the Russians off so badly, that they have recently restarted long range bomber patrols to test th
The Bible doesn't say anything at all about life forms on other planets. Intelligent life I might have issues with, but microbes? No problem there. Do you mean the Bible of the Jews and Christians or the Koran? The Tongva people's creation myth? Or what about the Hopi? And who are we to ignore the Hindu world creation epos?
That article is worth its weight in raw platinum. The guy from Alfresco sound like one of the most open, decent and honest management types I've ever heard give an interview. The interview raised so many points that get discussed over and over and over here on slashdot, such as the need for sales people to be mediated by engineers so as not to give false expectations, such as the feeling that the propietry software models are not working very well because they are simply too expensive and place too much risk on the customer. He also notes how SuSE went south after the Microsoft-Novell deal, this directly from data on his own product.
The guy sounds like he would be a real pleasure to work for.
Or they are people who, Oh don't know - run a useful and popular free-to-use Web resource and need to raise some income to maintain the service. Shocking idea isn't it? WTF? USEFUL and POPULAR??????? Have you actually read that site? I don't block ads and I normally sure as fuck would not visit that dungheap of a site.
I notice, by the way that you are posting on a free ad-funded Web site. Slashdot doesn't try to sell me religious fanaticism and far right wing bullshit.
1.Ever heard of Google? No one blocks their ads because they're not intrusive. 2.Blocking ads is not only done by Firefox, dumbass. There are adblockers for every single browser out there. Block 'em all, so that no one will visit your site. Excellent business model there, fuckhead. 3.You're a dumb motherfucker if there ever was one.
Personally, I think a whole load of people on slashdot know what whois is. That said, my email to him was to express my deep regret that the Romans didn't kill ALL the fucking Christians when they had the chance.
And you calling him an arrogant ass, while having religious quotes in your sig makes you look like a fundamentalist nutsack with spittle foaming your lips.
This is something that I thought about over the years: how to get a focal plane of sorts to exist in 3D. It seems that the obvious answer was to focus lasers on points in a gas filled volume of space. I'm pretty sure that this will, in ten or so years, finally give us working holographic displays. At the moment, I must assume that the power consumption must be very high in order to ionise the gas. Perhaps placing this system in a glass box with gasses that are more easily ionised might be cheaper? I also wonder how the problems of colour and gradiation will be solved, but I'm pretty sure they will be.
John Carroll the author of the FUD piece, who literally spent years doing trolling the ZDNet talkback forums back in the day in support of Microsoft, so much so that, lo and behold, he was then given a column of his own to write Microsoft FUD articles, and was eventually, in 2005 awarded with a job at Microsoft, something he's been hoping for for years (only took him something like 7 years). The guy is the biggest shill for Microsoft I have ever seen. He was praising VB and ASP as being superior to Java (no lie, look it up in the archives at ZDNet) back when the whole.Net circus was still a wet fart in BillG's pants. It is HIS JOB to paint Microsoft in a favourable light and as being better than anything else.
Does anyone really expect Microsoft to continue development of Silverlight for Mac and/or Linux after Silverlight has killed Flash? After Microsoft killed Internet Explorer for Mac and Windows Media Player for Mac (not that they even remotely considered maknig any of that available on Linux)? You trust them? You trust some guy who has been praising Microsoft exclusively to the detriment of all else for almost a decade?
I'm not an American and therefore can't vote, but my personal opinion (and it's not the evil, liberal foreigner crap) is that, of all of the current crowd of goons running for president, Hillary Clinton would be, by far, the best, and very possibly one of the best presidents you've ever had.
Of all of the current candidates, left and right, she is the only one who has consistently, from what I can tell, maintained her positions, even if they weren't always popular. For instance when she was discussing lobbyists with bloggers at the DailyKos, she didn't pander to the popular opinion then. She has, I think, a fairly clear idea of what she wants and what her platform is. She isn't naive (Obama's bullshit about Pakistan was enough to disqualify him), and she has, by virtue of her years with Bill and a state senator, a decent amount of experience. She doesn't have wacky shit like Romney or Giulliani, and she isn't scared of dissenting opinion, which, given the facsist crap that is happening in yuor country, should be a breath of fresh air for everyone.
In fact the only thing that really is not in her favour is that there are one fuck of a lot of Americans that are somehow terrified of women, who spend a whole bunch of energy making hysterical, wildly paranoid prophecies about how bad she would be. I find it difficult to believe that anything could be worse than the incompetent evil clowns in power right now, but there you have it.
Cheers, Karl, you're a lucky man. In earlier, more civilsed times, you would have had to have fallen on your sword for failing the 2006 elections as badly as you did.
If you're lucky, you won't get beaten up by one of the many people you've managed to directly harm, or the untold thousands you've managed to indeirectly harm.
Man, when the Chinese land on Mars, or the Europeans, with their Aurora programme, that nation is the one with big bragging rights cojones for much of this century. You have NO idea how much Apollo earned for the US in terms of respect, and thereby also economic terms. If the Europeans/Russians/Chinese/vanuatu get there first, they will be looked up to by just about everyone else, including the US (although there will be a lot of teeth gnashing and sour grapes since the US is if anything, a terrible loser)
My god, even Apple, of all things, is cheaper than this. Microsoft, you listening? you can get one on Google pretty easily here, just undercut the bastards by 40%.
The pressure on mysql to constantly offer new features, instead of focusing on mysql's strengths, which is highspeed, a decent group of features and simplicity to maintain and operate is going to cost mysql in the long run. This is only the start. The new features in mysql 5+ such as stored procedures, triggers, functions etc are very poorly implemented and come nowhere near the full implementations of databases like Oracle and Postgresql. The result is that DBAs and developers who like mysql for its easy maintenance and speed end up being disillusioned when problems start cropping up.
I don't think many places would switch to Postgresql, since the administration side is more complex and therefore more costly, but I can see shops weighing the pros and cons of switching to postgresql, since that DB has an excellent reputation.
So where excatly, does this stop. I was born with disolcated hips, which is inheritable, and now have artificial hips on both sides. Here in mother fucking switzerland, which btw, is more capitalistic than the USA, my medical insurance had a clause which specifically stated that nothing to do with my hips would be paid by them. The hip operations were finally paid for by charity, because I just don't have that kind of money. Not only that, but one of the operations was botched and I was unable to sue for malpractice. One of the conditions of having the operations.
That was 12 years ago. Since then, Switzerland has joined civilisation and it is no longer permissible for insurances here to exclude hereditary diseases. Thank god (or your favourite other diety)
So when I read stuff like this, my blood pressure goes through the roof, my collesterol turns into fatty gel, my blood sugar turns astronomic, my BMI goes over 90 and I want to smoke a carton of cigarettes, I get so angry.
I want to know if they will stop with these unhealthy and possibly hereditary conditions, or if they will then possibly start to try and slip in other clauses like skin-colour, any illnesses whatsoever etc?
The Valerie Plame leak investigation has NOTHING in common with this case. Your Government was breaking the law by wiretapping without warrants. The fact that Bush excused the whole thing does NOT make it any more legal.
You Republican morons sometimes make me want to weep, you're so fucking dumb. Do you think Bush and his cronies give a flying fuck about you, mr "I'm too dumb to understand the law"? Do you have megabucks to pay for their coke parties and cheap women? No? Well then, they don't give a flying fuck whether you live or die, apart from the knlowledge that you continue to make excuses for them, no matter what they fucking do.
So, if you're a big GB fan, why don't you just admit it? Your post is not about how moral the guy is, it's about making excuses for the fact that the corrupt sons of bitches you and your buddies voted in are abusing as many laws as they possibly can. For fuck's sake, your Attorney General lied to Congress. Your motherfucking buddies tried to impeach Clinton for lying about getting his dick sucked, and now you're snivelling about this shit. I suppose you would have had the FBI whistle blower on the 911 investigation harassed and shot too?
Fuck off, really, Take your shit and just fuck off.
So, if the current Russian, Byelorussian, Iranian or Chinese governments harass and arrest whistle blowers or general dissenters, then it's "Un-Democratic". If the US of fucking holier than thou A does it, then its "hurting the country" (AG "Slick Al" Gonzales - FTFA)?
You know what the difference between those afore mentioned countries and the USA is? In those other countries they don't bother trying to tell you how democratic they are.
For this to work it is absolutely critical that the US make this an international project, open to inspection and participation. While many might feel that the Chinese and Russians and Europeans can get lost and should not be offered participation, it is almost guaranteed that if the USA puts nuclear weapons into space without international control and participation, then the others will fear that the USA is planning to do an Iraq on them and will react by placing their own nuclear weapons in orbit, and what is more important, those will probably not be pointed away from the earth. The result will be a dangerous arms race.
sadly, with the current US government not exactly giving the impression of stability, trustworthiness or inttelligence, I fear that exactly that will happen.
I have read every single book William Gibson wrote, until I got to Pattern Recognition, which was so bland that I simply gave up on William Gibson. His newest Book I will not read for the same reason. And it's not just that book, but his books have become steadily less edgy, and steadily more yuppy pseudo intellectual ever since the Idoru series, which started off well, but really got terribly bad towards the last book, All Tomorrow's Parties.
There was none of that low life, poor man, minute graphic detail, bundled with a climatic story which made Neuromancer, Burning Chrome and Count Zero so good.
I wondered why that was for a long time, and then, while reading William Gibson's blog, some years ago, after Pattern Recognition came out, where William Gibson was describing his iBook, and there was a photo of him in an expensive coat, looking very much the North Eastern intellectual, I realised that that which had made William Gibson's early works so good was his own financial desperation, social dislocation and the trauma of his childhood. In effect, he was writing his dreams into his works.
Now, a lot of writers do this, and he probably still does, but he made a fantastic amount of money with Neuromancer, Count Zero and Johnny Mnemonic and is now a settled writer with a comfortable home, a family of his own (both of his parents died when he was young and he ran off to Canada to avcid Vietnam) and no longer has any burning issues or needs. And it colours his work. Now he no longer has a poor man's escapist dreams.
It has very little to do with predicting the future.
This speaks legions to me, and it says Apple is not only going to turn the iPhone into a a cool smartphone, but they will also start selling games with it. IT has enough horsepower and screen real estate to take on the PSP..... and the DS, with the multi touch interface.
If it works and sells, Sony is going to shit big square bricks, Steve Ballmer is single handedly going to cause a world chair shortage, and Nintendo is going to be most challenged. Anything you can do with the DS, you can do with the iPhone.
Slashdot Mirror
You know what completely utterlyblows my mind? It is that you Americans seem so utterly incapable of learning from your own history and mistakes. Even Bush, who has spent the past 4 years denying that Iraq was another Vietnam finally admitted it last week, in a fit of desperation to try avoiding what has become pretty obvious to every one else: Iraq is lost. The only way of preventing total genocide in Iraq is divinding the country into 3 and trying to pacify the Turks into not invading Kurdistan. The lesson form Vietnam: You cannot win a guerilla war if the population does not support you. You can of course just kill everyone, but it'll be hard pissing on the Russians, Chinese and Indians about their human rights when you're busy doing a little genocide yourself.
What does this have to do with Iran? Your CIA and the British MI6 engineered a coup in 1955 overthrowing the elected Iranian government with the Shah, who was widley hated and despised. In 1978 the Iranians revolted and threw him out and let Khomeini back in. Then, in 1979 a bunch of Iranian students held a bunch of Americans hostage at the US embasssy in Teheran for some 400 days. The US messed up a rescue attempt and has been trying to topple the Iranian governemnt ever since, firstly by funding Saddam's WMD programmes and then by encouraging him to invade Iran in 1980. In that bloody mess of a war, some 600,000 Iranians died fighting, literaly, for their country (unlike the invasion and following war in Iraq which was no threat to the US). Saddam used US sponsored and condoned nerve gas on Iranian soliders (and his own people). The US covertly sold F-14 parts to the Iranians in order to fund the murderous Contra counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua, thereby making Yet Another Unneeded Enemy(TM).
During the Iran-Iraq war the US Navy shot down an Iranian civillian airliner. The US refused to apologise for the deaths of some 290 civillians and has never done so. Most Iranians, even the liberal student types that your own right wing conservatives would be calling traitors if they were American, think that the US is responsible for most of the bloodshed that has befallen Iran in the last 50 years or so.
Now, Iran, after decades of verbal abuse (and its own batshit crazy governments, but I'll get to that soonish) and sanctions saw the invasion of Iraq and assumed that Bush and his cabal of lunatics would be crazy enough to do that to Iran too. So they started developing nuclear weapons, because the US despite its constant posturing, is really shit scared of anyone with the same weapons that it has (see North Korea for an example). The US has been screaming about the threat to Israel^America, etc etc etc ever since and making claims about starting a war, making attacks etc. The Iranian government is batshit crazy and unpopular inside Iran, and young people long for more freedom. Your governments constant provocation has pretty successfully suffocated any possibility of that happening.
Congratulations, you've made Yet Another Unneeded Enemy(TM). You have successfully provoked the Iranians into hating the very breaths you take, so that you, you dumbass fucking moron article author, can make claims about aiding the enemy. Fantastic.
P.S. Remember the Nicaraguans, the other Unneeded Enemy. Recently they had an election and one of the people running was a Guy called Ortega, who ran the country while the US tried with a very dirty and bloody war to topple him in the 80s. The US sent a number of threats down there openly telling the Nicaraguans not to vote for Ortega. The Nicraguans told you to get fucked and voted for him anyway. See the pattern? The US has done this with Russia (the bonehead Orange revolution in the Ukraine which has since turned out to be an utter farce, putting missiles up against the Russian border), China (economic threats, currency threats, warnings about the Chinese military ad nauseam) and others. You managed to piss the Russians off so badly, that they have recently restarted long range bomber patrols to test th
The Bible doesn't say anything at all about life forms on other planets. Intelligent life I might have issues with, but microbes? No problem there.
Do you mean the Bible of the Jews and Christians or the Koran? The Tongva people's creation myth? Or what about the Hopi? And who are we to ignore the Hindu world creation epos?
That article is worth its weight in raw platinum. The guy from Alfresco sound like one of the most open, decent and honest management types I've ever heard give an interview. The interview raised so many points that get discussed over and over and over here on slashdot, such as the need for sales people to be mediated by engineers so as not to give false expectations, such as the feeling that the propietry software models are not working very well because they are simply too expensive and place too much risk on the customer. He also notes how SuSE went south after the Microsoft-Novell deal, this directly from data on his own product.
The guy sounds like he would be a real pleasure to work for.
Or they are people who, Oh don't know - run a useful and popular free-to-use Web resource and need to raise some income to maintain the service. Shocking idea isn't it?
WTF? USEFUL and POPULAR???????
Have you actually read that site?
I don't block ads and I normally sure as fuck would not visit that dungheap of a site.
I notice, by the way that you are posting on a free ad-funded Web site.
Slashdot doesn't try to sell me religious fanaticism and far right wing bullshit.
1.Ever heard of Google? No one blocks their ads because they're not intrusive.
2.Blocking ads is not only done by Firefox, dumbass. There are adblockers for every single browser out there. Block 'em all, so that no one will visit your site. Excellent business model there, fuckhead.
3.You're a dumb motherfucker if there ever was one.
Personally, I think a whole load of people on slashdot know what whois is. That said, my email to him was to express my deep regret that the Romans didn't kill ALL the fucking Christians when they had the chance.
And you calling him an arrogant ass, while having religious quotes in your sig makes you look like a fundamentalist nutsack with spittle foaming your lips.
This is something that I thought about over the years: how to get a focal plane of sorts to exist in 3D. It seems that the obvious answer was to focus lasers on points in a gas filled volume of space. I'm pretty sure that this will, in ten or so years, finally give us working holographic displays. At the moment, I must assume that the power consumption must be very high in order to ionise the gas. Perhaps placing this system in a glass box with gasses that are more easily ionised might be cheaper? I also wonder how the problems of colour and gradiation will be solved, but I'm pretty sure they will be.
And I suppose those "different languages" wouldn't happen to be C#, now would they?
John's employer didn't pay for large amounts of advertising space on ZDNet.
John Carroll the author of the FUD piece, who literally spent years doing trolling the ZDNet talkback forums back in the day in support of Microsoft, so much so that, lo and behold, he was then given a column of his own to write Microsoft FUD articles, and was eventually, in 2005 awarded with a job at Microsoft, something he's been hoping for for years (only took him something like 7 years). The guy is the biggest shill for Microsoft I have ever seen. He was praising VB and ASP as being superior to Java (no lie, look it up in the archives at ZDNet) back when the whole .Net circus was still a wet fart in BillG's pants. It is HIS JOB to paint Microsoft in a favourable light and as being better than anything else.
Does anyone really expect Microsoft to continue development of Silverlight for Mac and/or Linux after Silverlight has killed Flash? After Microsoft killed Internet Explorer for Mac and Windows Media Player for Mac (not that they even remotely considered maknig any of that available on Linux)? You trust them? You trust some guy who has been praising Microsoft exclusively to the detriment of all else for almost a decade?
You have to be joking, right?
I'm not an American and therefore can't vote, but my personal opinion (and it's not the evil, liberal foreigner crap) is that, of all of the current crowd of goons running for president, Hillary Clinton would be, by far, the best, and very possibly one of the best presidents you've ever had.
Of all of the current candidates, left and right, she is the only one who has consistently, from what I can tell, maintained her positions, even if they weren't always popular. For instance when she was discussing lobbyists with bloggers at the DailyKos, she didn't pander to the popular opinion then. She has, I think, a fairly clear idea of what she wants and what her platform is. She isn't naive (Obama's bullshit about Pakistan was enough to disqualify him), and she has, by virtue of her years with Bill and a state senator, a decent amount of experience. She doesn't have wacky shit like Romney or Giulliani, and she isn't scared of dissenting opinion, which, given the facsist crap that is happening in yuor country, should be a breath of fresh air for everyone.
In fact the only thing that really is not in her favour is that there are one fuck of a lot of Americans that are somehow terrified of women, who spend a whole bunch of energy making hysterical, wildly paranoid prophecies about how bad she would be. I find it difficult to believe that anything could be worse than the incompetent evil clowns in power right now, but there you have it.
Cheers, Karl, you're a lucky man. In earlier, more civilsed times, you would have had to have fallen on your sword for failing the 2006 elections as badly as you did.
If you're lucky, you won't get beaten up by one of the many people you've managed to directly harm, or the untold thousands you've managed to indeirectly harm.
I'm sorry you got modded down, because your post has a certain poetic elegance to it.
And if the French hadn't helped during the American revolutionary war, you would still be an English colony, so fuck off.
Man, when the Chinese land on Mars, or the Europeans, with their Aurora programme, that nation is the one with big bragging rights cojones for much of this century. You have NO idea how much Apollo earned for the US in terms of respect, and thereby also economic terms. If the Europeans/Russians/Chinese/vanuatu get there first, they will be looked up to by just about everyone else, including the US (although there will be a lot of teeth gnashing and sour grapes since the US is if anything, a terrible loser)
My god, even Apple, of all things, is cheaper than this. Microsoft, you listening? you can get one on Google pretty easily here, just undercut the bastards by 40%.
The pressure on mysql to constantly offer new features, instead of focusing on mysql's strengths, which is highspeed, a decent group of features and simplicity to maintain and operate is going to cost mysql in the long run. This is only the start. The new features in mysql 5+ such as stored procedures, triggers, functions etc are very poorly implemented and come nowhere near the full implementations of databases like Oracle and Postgresql. The result is that DBAs and developers who like mysql for its easy maintenance and speed end up being disillusioned when problems start cropping up.
I don't think many places would switch to Postgresql, since the administration side is more complex and therefore more costly, but I can see shops weighing the pros and cons of switching to postgresql, since that DB has an excellent reputation.
So where excatly, does this stop. I was born with disolcated hips, which is inheritable, and now have artificial hips on both sides. Here in mother fucking switzerland, which btw, is more capitalistic than the USA, my medical insurance had a clause which specifically stated that nothing to do with my hips would be paid by them. The hip operations were finally paid for by charity, because I just don't have that kind of money. Not only that, but one of the operations was botched and I was unable to sue for malpractice. One of the conditions of having the operations.
That was 12 years ago. Since then, Switzerland has joined civilisation and it is no longer permissible for insurances here to exclude hereditary diseases. Thank god (or your favourite other diety)
So when I read stuff like this, my blood pressure goes through the roof, my collesterol turns into fatty gel, my blood sugar turns astronomic, my BMI goes over 90 and I want to smoke a carton of cigarettes, I get so angry.
I want to know if they will stop with these unhealthy and possibly hereditary conditions, or if they will then possibly start to try and slip in other clauses like skin-colour, any illnesses whatsoever etc?
The Valerie Plame leak investigation has NOTHING in common with this case. Your Government was breaking the law by wiretapping without warrants. The fact that Bush excused the whole thing does NOT make it any more legal.
You Republican morons sometimes make me want to weep, you're so fucking dumb. Do you think Bush and his cronies give a flying fuck about you, mr "I'm too dumb to understand the law"? Do you have megabucks to pay for their coke parties and cheap women? No? Well then, they don't give a flying fuck whether you live or die, apart from the knlowledge that you continue to make excuses for them, no matter what they fucking do.
So, if you're a big GB fan, why don't you just admit it? Your post is not about how moral the guy is, it's about making excuses for the fact that the corrupt sons of bitches you and your buddies voted in are abusing as many laws as they possibly can. For fuck's sake, your Attorney General lied to Congress. Your motherfucking buddies tried to impeach Clinton for lying about getting his dick sucked, and now you're snivelling about this shit. I suppose you would have had the FBI whistle blower on the 911 investigation harassed and shot too?
Fuck off, really, Take your shit and just fuck off.
So, if the current Russian, Byelorussian, Iranian or Chinese governments harass and arrest whistle blowers or general dissenters, then it's "Un-Democratic". If the US of fucking holier than thou A does it, then its "hurting the country" (AG "Slick Al" Gonzales - FTFA)?
You know what the difference between those afore mentioned countries and the USA is? In those other countries they don't bother trying to tell you how democratic they are.
For this to work it is absolutely critical that the US make this an international project, open to inspection and participation. While many might feel that the Chinese and Russians and Europeans can get lost and should not be offered participation, it is almost guaranteed that if the USA puts nuclear weapons into space without international control and participation, then the others will fear that the USA is planning to do an Iraq on them and will react by placing their own nuclear weapons in orbit, and what is more important, those will probably not be pointed away from the earth. The result will be a dangerous arms race.
sadly, with the current US government not exactly giving the impression of stability, trustworthiness or inttelligence, I fear that exactly that will happen.
I have read every single book William Gibson wrote, until I got to Pattern Recognition, which was so bland that I simply gave up on William Gibson. His newest Book I will not read for the same reason. And it's not just that book, but his books have become steadily less edgy, and steadily more yuppy pseudo intellectual ever since the Idoru series, which started off well, but really got terribly bad towards the last book, All Tomorrow's Parties.
There was none of that low life, poor man, minute graphic detail, bundled with a climatic story which made Neuromancer, Burning Chrome and Count Zero so good.
I wondered why that was for a long time, and then, while reading William Gibson's blog, some years ago, after Pattern Recognition came out, where William Gibson was describing his iBook, and there was a photo of him in an expensive coat, looking very much the North Eastern intellectual, I realised that that which had made William Gibson's early works so good was his own financial desperation, social dislocation and the trauma of his childhood. In effect, he was writing his dreams into his works.
Now, a lot of writers do this, and he probably still does, but he made a fantastic amount of money with Neuromancer, Count Zero and Johnny Mnemonic and is now a settled writer with a comfortable home, a family of his own (both of his parents died when he was young and he ran off to Canada to avcid Vietnam) and no longer has any burning issues or needs. And it colours his work. Now he no longer has a poor man's escapist dreams.
It has very little to do with predicting the future.
I recently saw an ad for an embedded game developer.... by apple. Requiring many years of experience etc yadda yadda yadda.
Here's the apple game dev ad.
This speaks legions to me, and it says Apple is not only going to turn the iPhone into a a cool smartphone, but they will also start selling games with it. IT has enough horsepower and screen real estate to take on the PSP..... and the DS, with the multi touch interface.
If it works and sells, Sony is going to shit big square bricks, Steve Ballmer is single handedly going to cause a world chair shortage, and Nintendo is going to be most challenged. Anything you can do with the DS, you can do with the iPhone.
Most, most interesting.