Well, that's an interesting little tidbit buried in the other article from a week or so ago, about what specifically was getting cut - reallocation of funding to manned missions means (if the Shuttle can be safe and get the job done) Hubble gets another servicing mission.
I know that'll make a lot of people's desktop backgrounds happy.
Unfortunately, the relatively small amount of money they were planning on spending on the Keck Outriggers got cut. Now, I'm biased since I work at Keck occasionally, but one big difference between Keck (which NASA JPL runs along with UCal and CalTech) and, say, a space station or solar-system probe is that most people never will never get to actually see the solar-system probe - or, for that matter, any of the other things that got cut - up close.
Anybody* is free to fly over to Hawaii, catch a flight to Hilo or Kona, rent a Jeep, drive to the top of Mauna Kea, and walk right into Keck's visitor gallery, and even into part of one of the telescope domes, from 10-4 any weekday. Kinda helps remind people that NASA isn't all just stuff that's millions of miles away.
* Offer limited to people who are not on the no-fly list, who can afford airfare and car rental, and who have a valid driver's license. Void where prohibited by law. We assume no responsibility for any damages caused by your inability to breathe or function properly at 13700 feet MSL. Give me a yell if you're coming, okay?
Sure we can!:) Bush just has to get up and make a rousing speech about how we will not let China corner the world market on Evil, and how, having beaten the last Evil Empire, that title rightfully belongs to US!
(They're not necessarily more or less evil than we are... they're just... "differently evil.")
So OS/2 has REXX, a solid kernel, excellent multitasking, and low systems requirements.
Good. But not unique. And a $259 price tag makes it considerably more expensive than Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.
So... for the people who don't want to run Windows, but want to use a PC, maybe a nice OS/2 emulation layer for Linux? Maybe IBM could donate the documentation and money necessary to sponsor a FOSS developer for a year or something.
The mom and stepdad of a 14-year-old boy were, um, not amused to see a 30-year-old guy their son had met on MySpace. At 11:30 PM. In their son's bed. And he'd brought a gay porn DVD and 2 gay porn magazines with him, how thoughtful. Of course, since Hawaii raised its age of consent from 14 to 16 a few years back, said 30-year-old is now in deep shit, and will probably stay so for a "nui loa" time.
I think you may be tarring all Western people with an overly broad brush when you say that they don't realize China is opening up more and more.
Yes, a lot of us still see China as having problems when it comes to things like human rights, religious freedom, and... I guess "learning to be a well-behaved 900-pound gorilla.";)
But China has definitely become more economically open, and honestly, that aspect of things is where people in the West can see the most evidence that isn't media-moderated. Chinese investment in American companies, property and products. American investment in Chinese companies, property and products. Partnerships. And so on.
If you need to be further reassured that your fears are unwarranted (as, to a lesser extent, was your tone), I offer the following logic:
We are Slashdotters. Ergo, we know a bit about technology. It follows that we know more than a little about, say, IBM. Not all of us like everything IBM does, but few of us disrespect IBM. Fewer still think that IBM is... foolish. IBM recently sold its PC business to Lenovo, which is in China. People are still having sex.* Oh, and buying ThinkPads. Got sidetracked, sorry.
Do I need to go any further? Didn't think so.
China, the US, and a whole lot of other countries have, from time to time, gotten stuck with leaders who are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, Byzantine, conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystopic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, abrasive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, clueless, and generally Not Good.* It could be said that China had such leaders at some, if not all, points during the latter half of the 20th century. It could also be said that the US has drawn the short bus, er, straw, to begin the 21st.
However, leaders do not a population make. The few hundred utter pricks in power do not, in fact, speak for hundreds of millions of their subjects.:)
Oh, and I do need to point out, since you mentioned the UN... that the Kuomintang government, which fled to Taiwan, originally represented China in the UN. Until the mainland Maoist government disputed this, claimed that it represented them, not the other way around, and got them thrown out of the UN. Taiwan has been trying to join the UN as an unrelated nation for the last 15 years, but China's clout (and security-council veto) make it look unlikely that this will ever happen. Wikipedia's article on "China and the United Nations" has all the details.
_The Chinese Government_ runs over its own citizens with tanks when they protest.
Erm... I... hate to break it to you but, well, most governments of powerful, well-armed countries are perfectly willing to roll out the armor if there's unrest.
Of course, in the US, we're enlightened and use Armored Personnel Carriers with only machine-guns on them. They do much less damage to buildings than tanks, if someone accidentally pulls the trigger. My father drove one during the 1967 Newark riots, in which 20+ people were killed, 700+ injured and well over a thousand arrested in less than a week.
That... depends on whom you ask, and how you define "a part of."
Yes, Tibet first came under Chinese control 700 years ago, when it was conquered by the Yuan Dynasty of the Mongol Empire. (Prior to that it was off doing its own little mountainous thing, one would presume... so the fact that it is under Chinese control seems to fly in the face of your prior assertion that China doesn't invade people. But anyway.)
That said, there have been periods since then during which China had little if any control over Tibet, and prior to the Cultural Revolution, even when it had control, it apparently chose not to exercise that control very much.
So there are some people who see things differently. And there are some people who feel that China's control, particularly in the last several decades, has had a... detrimental effect on people in Tibet, as far as certain cultural or religious freedoms might be concerend.
It's not surprising that there are misunderstandings, there are a lot of people in the world with many different views. These sorts of things happen.
"The Chinese don't have anything similar to the Guantanamo base, where alleged terrorists are held, without being given status as prisoners of war, without the right to a lawyer, in order to interrogate them with torture off American soil."
Are you qualified and authorized to make that statement? How familiar are you with how China deals with its dissident groups, like, say, Falun Gong? Most of the outside world does not know what China does or does not have in that regard, because China is not exactly forthcoming about such matters. Amnesty International notes that a lot of secrecy surrounds China's judicial system, and believes that annual figures showing over 3,000 executions may actually represent one-third or less of all those carried out.
"The Chinese don't invade countries, going all against the UN, without a single thread of evidence for the alleged cause, like it happened in Iraq ("Weapons of mass destruction") and has it happened in Vietnam."
For much of history, certainly, this was true. And in the 20th century, China itself was sadly subjected to invasion and foreign occupation. However, I seem to recall China having... erm... "assimilated," shall we say, a little country called Tibet. And I can't imagine what large, powerful neighboring country might have been supplying the Viet Minh... can you? Oh, and there's that little dispute about Taiwan, I suppose.
"I think it is time the Americans start to realize that AMERICA is today's Nazi regime, NOT China."
A lot of us realize this. A lot of us also realize that while America may be today's superpower, China is most likely tomorrow's. And we also realize (although you may not) that there's very significant cross-investment between the two countries, and that most of the "bad" things about each of the two tend to be closely related to the other.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting, if a bit impolite, dialogue.
The challenge of trying to have both power/profit and ethics is hardly a new one - it's been around probably as long as there have been people.
In the United States, where so many people are very committed to capitalism, it may rear its head more than in some other types of social or economic systems, but I see it everywhere I go.
"What pays best" and "What is best" simply aren't always the same thing, after all.
Personally, I've made choices on both sides of the divide, when there's been one. I got tired of picking things that paid well but made me feel dirty, after a while... but that's probably why I'm neither corporate nor congressional!
I got DSL over six years ago, and have spent close to $100 a month, between telco local loop and ISP charges, ever since. I did this primarily because I wanted to be able to host web sites, email, and other services on a home Linux box. DSL availability even had a big impact on where we chose to live last time we moved.
For the last few years, though, it's been more of an albatross. I don't need or want my own MX that badly any more, what with Gmail (and now the Gmail for domains thing). I can host a really really large number of web sites, with email for each domain, for probably something like $25 a month.
So... at some point in the future, all the stuff hosted "in-house" (ha ha, it's really in a house!) will wind up sitting at a real hosting place (much of it already has) with real bandwidth, yadda yadda. And maybe we'll have broadband, or maybe we won't... it won't really matter that much.
Sure it is, if you're going for a really high degree of granularity. Town-by-town climate change, just where along the coastline that hurricane is going to hit, or whatever. Modeling on the larger scale is probably a lot more feasible given their resources.
But then, there are plenty of people doing larger-scale modeling. And there have been, for years. And it's not like they keep their results secret. So we can just Google them.
(Insert gratuitous "Doesn't anybody use Google anymore?")
I think the idea of selling music players preloaded with music is really, really great. Totally. But I don't think you need to cannibalize your existing business to do it.
Note that six of the top ten are iPods. (The others are lower-price, and probably lower-profit, items.)
(You might also note that seven of the top ten items on your company's "Top Sellers" page for computers happen to be Apple products. See a trend?)
You, of all people, know that people want iPods. And you're more than happy to sell them to them. Lots and lots and lots of them.
Soooo... I hope you're also talking to Apple about this idea. Yes, their DRM doesn't really work well with the idea of a new portable device showing up with music on it that's not on the user's computer... but then, does anyone's?
But if you asked, I bet they'd be willing to help you set up some sweet bundles of iPods and high-ticket iTunes Music Store cards, with a nice margin built in for you. After all, you move a lot of kit for them.
And maybe Steve and Bono would even let you be on stage with them sometime. Wouldn't that be neat?
Everybody outside Australia will want a copy because it's been banned in Australia.
"Oooh! Look at me! I'm doing something that would be illegal in Australia!"
Um... no. It doesn't quite work that way. Apologies to any Aussies, but aside from having cute koalas, funny bouncy kangaroos, Crocodile Dundee, and Nemo, and a whole lot of things that sort of emulate UK things (what with the whole Commonwealth thing, and the UK actually being a powerful nation and all that, and thus worth emulating if you're into that sort of thing) which in turn sort of emulate American things (reiterate powerful-nation bit), Australia just doesn't figure into the cultural zeitgeist of the northern hemisphere that strongly. And it rather specifically doesn't figure into that zeitgeist within the US, where people may remember Men At Work and Midnight Oil, but are less likely than their European counterparts to remain unconfused at the mention of either Minogue sister or Yahoo Serious.;)
Also, we've got plenty of laws of our own to violate. I should've honeymooned in South Carolina, where antimiscegenation laws were still on the books for 2 years after my wedding.:)
Slashdot Mirror
This can solve America's problems too... we've got plenty of politicians, so our supply of bullshit is endless.
Well, that's an interesting little tidbit buried in the other article from a week or so ago, about what specifically was getting cut - reallocation of funding to manned missions means (if the Shuttle can be safe and get the job done) Hubble gets another servicing mission.
I know that'll make a lot of people's desktop backgrounds happy.
Unfortunately, the relatively small amount of money they were planning on spending on the Keck Outriggers got cut. Now, I'm biased since I work at Keck occasionally, but one big difference between Keck (which NASA JPL runs along with UCal and CalTech) and, say, a space station or solar-system probe is that most people never will never get to actually see the solar-system probe - or, for that matter, any of the other things that got cut - up close.
Anybody* is free to fly over to Hawaii, catch a flight to Hilo or Kona, rent a Jeep, drive to the top of Mauna Kea, and walk right into Keck's visitor gallery, and even into part of one of the telescope domes, from 10-4 any weekday. Kinda helps remind people that NASA isn't all just stuff that's millions of miles away.
* Offer limited to people who are not on the no-fly list, who can afford airfare and car rental, and who have a valid driver's license. Void where prohibited by law. We assume no responsibility for any damages caused by your inability to breathe or function properly at 13700 feet MSL. Give me a yell if you're coming, okay?
Sure we can! :) Bush just has to get up and make a rousing speech about how we will not let China corner the world market on Evil, and how, having beaten the last Evil Empire, that title rightfully belongs to US!
(They're not necessarily more or less evil than we are... they're just... "differently evil.")
So OS/2 has REXX, a solid kernel, excellent multitasking, and low systems requirements.
Good. But not unique. And a $259 price tag makes it considerably more expensive than Windows, Mac OS X or Linux.
So... for the people who don't want to run Windows, but want to use a PC, maybe a nice OS/2 emulation layer for Linux? Maybe IBM could donate the documentation and money necessary to sponsor a FOSS developer for a year or something.
I used to code in REXX in 1989.
It was pretty handy for scripting, useful as "glue" between different things and all that.
By 1989 standards, mind you.
I think modern things (like AppleScript/Automator) can probably do everything REXX could ever do, and more, while being more readable to us humans.
(Oh, and yes, I'm looking forward to the inevitable increase in MAKE MONEY WHILE YOU SLEEP ads, now.)
So the famous step:
2. ???
Should actually be
2. Sleep
The mom and stepdad of a 14-year-old boy were, um, not amused to see a 30-year-old guy their son had met on MySpace. At 11:30 PM. In their son's bed. And he'd brought a gay porn DVD and 2 gay porn magazines with him, how thoughtful. Of course, since Hawaii raised its age of consent from 14 to 16 a few years back, said 30-year-old is now in deep shit, and will probably stay so for a "nui loa" time.
Linkage:
Police arrest man found in teen's bed, Honolulu Star-Bulletin
Man Accused Of Luring Teen On MySpace.com, KITV-4
Man accused of using internet website to meet teen, KHON-2
Hawaii Too Soft On Online Predators?, KGMB-9
Man, 30, indicted in sex assault on teen, Honolulu Advertiser
That... depends on whom you ask, and how you define "Ireland." ;)
I think you may be tarring all Western people with an overly broad brush when you say that they don't realize China is opening up more and more.
;)
:)
Yes, a lot of us still see China as having problems when it comes to things like human rights, religious freedom, and... I guess "learning to be a well-behaved 900-pound gorilla."
But China has definitely become more economically open, and honestly, that aspect of things is where people in the West can see the most evidence that isn't media-moderated. Chinese investment in American companies, property and products. American investment in Chinese companies, property and products. Partnerships. And so on.
If you need to be further reassured that your fears are unwarranted (as, to a lesser extent, was your tone), I offer the following logic:
We are Slashdotters.
Ergo, we know a bit about technology.
It follows that we know more than a little about, say, IBM.
Not all of us like everything IBM does, but few of us disrespect IBM.
Fewer still think that IBM is... foolish.
IBM recently sold its PC business to Lenovo, which is in China.
People are still having sex.* Oh, and buying ThinkPads. Got sidetracked, sorry.
Do I need to go any further? Didn't think so.
China, the US, and a whole lot of other countries have, from time to time, gotten stuck with leaders who are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, Byzantine, conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystopic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, abrasive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, clueless, and generally Not Good.* It could be said that China had such leaders at some, if not all, points during the latter half of the 20th century. It could also be said that the US has drawn the short bus, er, straw, to begin the 21st.
However, leaders do not a population make. The few hundred utter pricks in power do not, in fact, speak for hundreds of millions of their subjects.
* If you don't know already, ask Google.
(Michael Jackson and Bubbles!)
Oh, and I do need to point out, since you mentioned the UN... that the Kuomintang government, which fled to Taiwan, originally represented China in the UN. Until the mainland Maoist government disputed this, claimed that it represented them, not the other way around, and got them thrown out of the UN. Taiwan has been trying to join the UN as an unrelated nation for the last 15 years, but China's clout (and security-council veto) make it look unlikely that this will ever happen. Wikipedia's article on "China and the United Nations" has all the details.
I really hope you're not trying to present yourself as somehow objective on the grounds that you're not from either China or the US yourself.
'Cause, um, well, you know... your URL is on Slashdot.
And photos of you and your Chinese wife (tai hao kan, by the way, my compliments!) are on your page.
Kinda destroys the whole impression of "Oh, Nik's not really taking sides."
Hao de?
Plonk.
_The Chinese Government_ runs over its own citizens with tanks when they protest.
Erm... I... hate to break it to you but, well, most governments of powerful, well-armed countries are perfectly willing to roll out the armor if there's unrest.
Of course, in the US, we're enlightened and use Armored Personnel Carriers with only machine-guns on them. They do much less damage to buildings than tanks, if someone accidentally pulls the trigger. My father drove one during the 1967 Newark riots, in which 20+ people were killed, 700+ injured and well over a thousand arrested in less than a week.
Tibet has been a part of China for 700 years.
That... depends on whom you ask, and how you define "a part of."
Yes, Tibet first came under Chinese control 700 years ago, when it was conquered by the Yuan Dynasty of the Mongol Empire. (Prior to that it was off doing its own little mountainous thing, one would presume... so the fact that it is under Chinese control seems to fly in the face of your prior assertion that China doesn't invade people. But anyway.)
That said, there have been periods since then during which China had little if any control over Tibet, and prior to the Cultural Revolution, even when it had control, it apparently chose not to exercise that control very much.
So there are some people who see things differently. And there are some people who feel that China's control, particularly in the last several decades, has had a... detrimental effect on people in Tibet, as far as certain cultural or religious freedoms might be concerend.
It's not surprising that there are misunderstandings, there are a lot of people in the world with many different views. These sorts of things happen.
"The Chinese don't have anything similar to the Guantanamo base, where alleged terrorists are held, without being given status as prisoners of war, without the right to a lawyer, in order to interrogate them with torture off American soil."
Are you qualified and authorized to make that statement? How familiar are you with how China deals with its dissident groups, like, say, Falun Gong? Most of the outside world does not know what China does or does not have in that regard, because China is not exactly forthcoming about such matters. Amnesty International notes that a lot of secrecy surrounds China's judicial system, and believes that annual figures showing over 3,000 executions may actually represent one-third or less of all those carried out.
"The Chinese don't invade countries, going all against the UN, without a single thread of evidence for the alleged cause, like it happened in Iraq ("Weapons of mass destruction") and has it happened in Vietnam."
For much of history, certainly, this was true. And in the 20th century, China itself was sadly subjected to invasion and foreign occupation. However, I seem to recall China having... erm... "assimilated," shall we say, a little country called Tibet. And I can't imagine what large, powerful neighboring country might have been supplying the Viet Minh... can you? Oh, and there's that little dispute about Taiwan, I suppose.
"I think it is time the Americans start to realize that AMERICA is today's Nazi regime, NOT China."
A lot of us realize this. A lot of us also realize that while America may be today's superpower, China is most likely tomorrow's. And we also realize (although you may not) that there's very significant cross-investment between the two countries, and that most of the "bad" things about each of the two tend to be closely related to the other.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting, if a bit impolite, dialogue.
The challenge of trying to have both power/profit and ethics is hardly a new one - it's been around probably as long as there have been people.
In the United States, where so many people are very committed to capitalism, it may rear its head more than in some other types of social or economic systems, but I see it everywhere I go.
"What pays best" and "What is best" simply aren't always the same thing, after all.
Personally, I've made choices on both sides of the divide, when there's been one. I got tired of picking things that paid well but made me feel dirty, after a while... but that's probably why I'm neither corporate nor congressional!
I got DSL over six years ago, and have spent close to $100 a month, between telco local loop and ISP charges, ever since. I did this primarily because I wanted to be able to host web sites, email, and other services on a home Linux box. DSL availability even had a big impact on where we chose to live last time we moved.
For the last few years, though, it's been more of an albatross. I don't need or want my own MX that badly any more, what with Gmail (and now the Gmail for domains thing). I can host a really really large number of web sites, with email for each domain, for probably something like $25 a month.
So... at some point in the future, all the stuff hosted "in-house" (ha ha, it's really in a house!) will wind up sitting at a real hosting place (much of it already has) with real bandwidth, yadda yadda. And maybe we'll have broadband, or maybe we won't... it won't really matter that much.
He Claimed up until the Day they announced it that Apple will never do a Video Ipod.
:)
No, no, that was Steve Jobs.
Dvorak has a reality distortion field too, but he's got it on backwards, so it only distorts reality for him, obviously.
They have the only BSD OS that's actually gaining market share? ;)
(ducks tomatoes from *BSD crowd)
You can read a lot of his other work, as well as more information on this subject, on his web site at www.yakov.com. Hope this helps.
Sure it is, if you're going for a really high degree of granularity. Town-by-town climate change, just where along the coastline that hurricane is going to hit, or whatever. Modeling on the larger scale is probably a lot more feasible given their resources.
But then, there are plenty of people doing larger-scale modeling. And there have been, for years. And it's not like they keep their results secret. So we can just Google them.
(Insert gratuitous "Doesn't anybody use Google anymore?")
Dear Mr. Bezos (can I call you Jeff?),
I think the idea of selling music players preloaded with music is really, really great. Totally. But I don't think you need to cannibalize your existing business to do it.
Take a look at your company's "Top Sellers" page for electronics.
Note that six of the top ten are iPods. (The others are lower-price, and probably lower-profit, items.)
(You might also note that seven of the top ten items on your company's "Top Sellers" page for computers happen to be Apple products. See a trend?)
You, of all people, know that people want iPods. And you're more than happy to sell them to them. Lots and lots and lots of them.
Soooo... I hope you're also talking to Apple about this idea. Yes, their DRM doesn't really work well with the idea of a new portable device showing up with music on it that's not on the user's computer... but then, does anyone's?
But if you asked, I bet they'd be willing to help you set up some sweet bundles of iPods and high-ticket iTunes Music Store cards, with a nice margin built in for you. After all, you move a lot of kit for them.
And maybe Steve and Bono would even let you be on stage with them sometime. Wouldn't that be neat?
I think you mean, as far as you know Amazon isn't selling their own brand of hardware player.
...smaller than a Nomad. ...no support for OGG Vorbis. ...I forget the other "fault" that was noted when the iPod debuted. ;)
"Oooh! Look at me! I'm doing something that would be illegal in Australia!"
Um... no. It doesn't quite work that way. Apologies to any Aussies, but aside from having cute koalas, funny bouncy kangaroos, Crocodile Dundee, and Nemo, and a whole lot of things that sort of emulate UK things (what with the whole Commonwealth thing, and the UK actually being a powerful nation and all that, and thus worth emulating if you're into that sort of thing) which in turn sort of emulate American things (reiterate powerful-nation bit), Australia just doesn't figure into the cultural zeitgeist of the northern hemisphere that strongly. And it rather specifically doesn't figure into that zeitgeist within the US, where people may remember Men At Work and Midnight Oil, but are less likely than their European counterparts to remain unconfused at the mention of either Minogue sister or Yahoo Serious.
Also, we've got plenty of laws of our own to violate. I should've honeymooned in South Carolina, where antimiscegenation laws were still on the books for 2 years after my wedding.