Dear Anonymous Coward, your analogy is incorrectly applied.
Instead, imagine the United States claiming that Cuba is part of the United States, because the United States never officially recognized Cuba after the revolution.
Taiwan has never been part of People's Republic of China. The People's Republic of China has failed to take Taiwan by force several times after 1949. Many brave Taiwanese have died protecting Taiwan from the Chinese People's Liberation Army.
Now, Taiwan has a democratically-elected president via nation-wide popular vote, independent judicial system, legislature, and maintains military forces sufficient to protect its borders.
Off topic a bit but Chinese history is filled with civil wars that destroy lives and bring economic ruin. Most of those wars include aim to unite China.
Most people in Taiwan (or their ancestors) moved out of China to escape war and poverty. The sooner Chinese people learn to value peaceful prosperity and resist expansionist temptations, the better for China and her neighbors.
Taiwan is a generally accepted* de facto sovereign nation. However, most other national governments (including the United States) decline to "officially" recognize Taiwan as fully sovereign. On going attempts by China to refute the sovereignty of Taiwan are perceived as pretext for Chinese economic warfare and military action against Taiwan.
For a balanced view, it is important to realize that anti-matter physics have yielded substantial medical and non-military benefits already. Many people probably already encountered various applications of this technology without realizing it.
For example, Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a very useful clinical and medical research tool for brain and cardiac functional imaging. See:
Positron Emission Tomography
I agree with your observation. That's why we have been working on a free (GPL) project for the past 5 years to fill this gap.
Our project is called OIO and implemented using Zope/Python. You can either use PostgreSQL or Oracle as the DBMS backend. By creating web-forms through browser-based wizards, the OIO system builds the database tables for you. There are also data mining and report-generation modules. Screenshots [
OIO Reporting module
|
screenshots
OIO forms editor
]
Open source / free software systems require a 100% free software stack going all the way down to the operating system. This infrastructure includes development environments, tools, libraries and takes a lot of time and effort to develop.
As this infrastructure (=foundation) becomes increasingly useful, more and more "novice-user" applications can occur. Open source systems include many projects and individuals with diverse interests and talents. I am sure many will be interested in creating user-friendly applications.
The open source software stack has been getting taller - it will increasingly get into the novice-user space. At the same time, it has been getting wider, covering more and more applications. Most importantly, it is really not critical how fast this occurs, the crucial idea is that we can build upon other people's previous work.
Re:self cleaning windows
on
Lotus Nanotech
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Activglass is hydrophilic (ref), not hydrophobic - as in the lotus leaf!
So, ActivGlass does not "repel" water or faciliate water beads, it spreads water evenly on the glass surface. The two technologies are entirely different, but may have similar applications. I would think that a hydrophobic surface would work better - since the longer water sticks to the surface, more additional flying dirt will be captured by the water!
It all boils down to what you need and how much it costs. If all I need is a few minutes of "super-computing" time a month, it may indeed be more cost-effective to use time share. Even there, one could learn from how cellular telephone service companies market their "time sharing" wireless service. Probably something like 500 minutes per month for $30 and $0.50 each additional minute.
On the other hand, if the computing time-share service is aimed at organizations that need lots of super-computing, I would guess that it will have to be significantly cheaper to "rent" than to "own". This type of model does work - but only if there is sufficient cost differential. What the desktop PC did was to wipe out the cost advantage of renting/time share for nearly all daily computational needs. The remaining market for "shared" computing is really quite small (and will be increasing small as desktop computing power increase). I wonder how long it will take IBM to recover the 10B investment.
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Dear Anonymous Coward, your analogy is incorrectly applied.
Instead, imagine the United States claiming that Cuba is part of the United States, because the United States never officially recognized Cuba after the revolution.
Taiwan has never been part of People's Republic of China. The People's Republic of China has failed to take Taiwan by force several times after 1949. Many brave Taiwanese have died protecting Taiwan from the Chinese People's Liberation Army.
Now, Taiwan has a democratically-elected president via nation-wide popular vote, independent judicial system, legislature, and maintains military forces sufficient to protect its borders.
Off topic a bit but Chinese history is filled with civil wars that destroy lives and bring economic ruin. Most of those wars include aim to unite China.
Most people in Taiwan (or their ancestors) moved out of China to escape war and poverty. The sooner Chinese people learn to value peaceful prosperity and resist expansionist temptations, the better for China and her neighbors.
Here is an editorial from Taiwan that gives some perspective on this issue:
Taiwan SovereigntyTaiwan is a generally accepted* de facto sovereign nation. However, most other national governments (including the United States) decline to "officially" recognize Taiwan as fully sovereign. On going attempts by China to refute the sovereignty of Taiwan are perceived as pretext for Chinese economic warfare and military action against Taiwan.
*for example, per Wikipedia's "Countries of the World"For a balanced view, it is important to realize that anti-matter physics have yielded substantial medical and non-military benefits already. Many people probably already encountered various applications of this technology without realizing it.
For example, Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a very useful clinical and medical research tool for brain and cardiac functional imaging. See: Positron Emission Tomography
I agree with your observation. That's why we have been working on a free (GPL) project for the past 5 years to fill this gap.
Our project is called OIO and implemented using Zope/Python. You can either use PostgreSQL or Oracle as the DBMS backend. By creating web-forms through browser-based wizards, the OIO system builds the database tables for you. There are also data mining and report-generation modules. Screenshots [ OIO Reporting module | screenshots OIO forms editor ]
As this infrastructure (=foundation) becomes increasingly useful, more and more "novice-user" applications can occur. Open source systems include many projects and individuals with diverse interests and talents. I am sure many will be interested in creating user-friendly applications.
The open source software stack has been getting taller - it will increasingly get into the novice-user space. At the same time, it has been getting wider, covering more and more applications. Most importantly, it is really not critical how fast this occurs, the crucial idea is that we can build upon other people's previous work.
So, ActivGlass does not "repel" water or faciliate water beads, it spreads water evenly on the glass surface. The two technologies are entirely different, but may have similar applications. I would think that a hydrophobic surface would work better - since the longer water sticks to the surface, more additional flying dirt will be captured by the water!
It already can serve as a Debian installation CD - and is arguably THE EASIEST Debian distro to install.
LinuxWorld has an article about this capability: here
The Knoppix-as-Debian-install-cd howto: here
It all boils down to what you need and how much it costs. If all I need is a few minutes of "super-computing" time a month, it may indeed be more cost-effective to use time share. Even there, one could learn from how cellular telephone service companies market their "time sharing" wireless service. Probably something like 500 minutes per month for $30 and $0.50 each additional minute.
On the other hand, if the computing time-share service is aimed at organizations that need lots of super-computing, I would guess that it will have to be significantly cheaper to "rent" than to "own". This type of model does work - but only if there is sufficient cost differential. What the desktop PC did was to wipe out the cost advantage of renting/time share for nearly all daily computational needs. The remaining market for "shared" computing is really quite small (and will be increasing small as desktop computing power increase). I wonder how long it will take IBM to recover the 10B investment.