If by "they" you mean "China's communist party," then you're right. If you instead meant "the people of China," you are wrong on many levels.
"We also have the right never to use their search engines"
But they do not have the right to use alternatives.
"Aren't rights wonderful?"
Only when you have them. "National sovereignty" is a legal fiction that is based on (and should take a back seat to) personal sovereignty. A government has no rights except those granted to it by the people.
"By allowing them to create their own technologies to do so we allow them to create superior products theoretically..."
Except there's a good chance they won't because they're intentionally hampering their ability to find information. And anybody that believes that technology and culture have nothing to do with each other has another thing coming to them. If Beijing intends to try to take advantage of Western technology without adopting facets of Western culture, they'll always be playing second fiddle.
"I feel really sad to see this kind of comment posted by Americans and supported by American moderators. It certainly damage the diversity of our society,"
I don't like people disagreeing with me. It damages our diversity.
While I disagree with the poster's conclusions, he does make valid points and has documented sources.
"Oh, that never happens in this ethical capitalisitic society!"
I'm not going to argue that that never happens in the United States, but I will argue that the United States does attempt to do something about it, even if nothing more than lip service. Even ignoring actions by the federal government (sanctions, etc.) consider the damage that was done to companies like Nike when it came to light that they were using child labor. As a result, companies that do business primarly in the US can be very skiddish about their public relations vis a vis human rights like that, almost to a fault.
I'd have to agree that investing in the PRC immediately after the Tiananmen Massacre strikes me as being extremely callous and indifferent about human rights and civil liberties.
"So Chinese in Hong Kong rather unite with China then be with Britain or independent, so what?!"
Consider that Hong Kong was British for longer than Puerto Rico was American. Now compare Hong Kong's definitive desire to reunite with China (as opposed to independence, or whatever other options were on the table) to the way Puerto Rico still can't make up its mind. And the Puerto Ricans are hanging on relatively insignifigant issues like the loss of their own contestants in international competitions, as opposed to a loss of civil liberties.
And before you get into cultural differences between Puerto Rico and the rest of the United States, ask the Canadians why they don't want to join the United States.
"How is Chinese pride so different from Arab pride, religious pride or the ridiculous god damn amount of "patriotism" in the US?"
I'm tempted to say "apples and oranges." Consider how everything in that list except what you describe as "Chinese pride" is hopelessly balkanized. The Arabs were united under shear force of Ottoman arms, Christians have been violently disagreeing with each other since the division of the Roman Empire (with more and more divisions popping up throughout the millenia), and your anti-war stance will get you drastically different reactions in different parts of the United States (and you won't get arrested for protesting the war in and of itself).
Yet the integration of Tibet into the PRC was so popular in Taiwan that the issue made its way into the island's constitution? Issues don't make it into constitutions unless the vast majority feel the same way about it.
"All groups of people are equally stupid."
So you're as stupid as the original poster? Or are you going to try to throw all sorts of stipulations into that statement now?
"It's one thing to demonize the Chinese government. But quite another to insult the race and culture of all Chinese people."
So you're saying it's OK to blast Beijing for saying "economic prosperity first, civil liberties a distant second," but it's not OK to say anything bad about the Chinese people (both within and without the PRC) for blithely going along with it? That sounds like hypocrisy.
"But I won't make the assumptions that such a stereotype is valid nor will I prejudge other westerners on it."
You sure don't have any problems with lumping all us "God damn patriotic Americans" all in one boat, however. You know, the ones you sarcasticly referred to as "kind-heard and naive folks." You seemed OK with putting all Arabs under one classification as well. Perhaps you really are "equally stupid" as the original poster.
You think that's the only disturbing thing they do? Try watching Central China TV International on DirecTV some time. I'm not sure what's more disturbing: some of what they call "news," or the way everybody speaks with American accents and are obviously pandering to the American audience.
"Did you know that the entire U.S. electrical grid could be powered by less than 150,000 modern wind turbines?"
If wind were more efficient and/or powerful than fossil fuels, we'd still see cargo ships rigged with sails.
Too low-tech? Modify a diesel-electric ship with a windmill ("sailing" with the wind may be a little tricky, but nothing a little tacking can't handle). Come back when it's only 10% more expensive to operate than using the diesel generators alone. While you're at it, cover the deck with photovoltaic cells and try those out as well. If it supposedly works for stationary power generation, it should also work on 300+ meter ships. The generators involved are of the same scale.
Nineteenth-century coal-fired steamers were cheaper and easier to use than sailing ships, even when you consider they had to carry thousands of tons of coal on top of the weight of the boilers. And fossil-fuel technology has progressed by leaps and bounds since then. If these alternative energy sources were actually more viable than fossil fuels, capitalism dictates that they would have taken over by now.
Think of it as Fermi's Paradox for energy production.
"And you believe a guy whose family is heavily invested in the oil industry?"
Well, considering how back in late January the Bush Administration rejoined the Internationa Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project (details of the move here), the one that the Clinton Administration pulled out of in 1998, I'd say "yes."
"Tritium decays by emitting a low energy electron so if you're carrying a big chunk in your pocket it might sterlize you at worst"
Of course, this is all moot. The word "tritium" doesn't happen anywhere in the press release. It looks like they were doing deuterium-deuterium fusion. No radioisotopes or free neutrons involved.
I am not a physicist, but I've almost got a degree and I know how to use Google.
First off, as someone else mentioned, deuterium isn't radiactive. Tritium is, but the whole idea of a D-T reactor is to quickly fuse it to a deuterium atom to form harmless helium.
On top of that, as I'm sure you know, hydrogen is lighter than air (including isotopes like deuterium and tritium). Any tritium that escapes from the reactor is going to do its damndest to rise up out of earth's atmosphere. While I suppose it's possible that some of it may bond with something else on its way up, I really don't think that's something to be worrying about.
At any rate, you seem to be confusing "neutrons" with "radiation." Neutrons in and of themselves are harmless little buggers that don't really do anything. Sometimes they find an atomic nucleus they bump into and join it. This extra neutron may make that atom a radioisotope (ie. make it give off radiation), or it may not. For example, the control rods used to control nuclear reactors are generally made out of carbon, because stable carbon-12 can accept a free neutron and become stable carbon-13, no worse for the wear. (Sure, C-13 can accept yet another neutron and become radioactive C-14, but that's negligible because C-13 is already obnoxiously rare.) So put a little graphite around your fusion reactor and you won't notice the difference.
The real problem with fission reactors is that they give off radiation in and of themselves. For example, when uranium-235 is smacked hard with a neutron, it breaks down into 3 loose neutrons as well as an atom each of krypton-90 and barium-143, both of which are radioisotopes. Each krypton-90 atom and each barium-143 atom will give off four beta particles before settling down as zirconium-90 and neodymium-143, respectively.
Beta particles are high-speed (ie. high-energy), loose electrons. "High-speed" means you need something dense to drain their kinetic energy, and "electron" means that you need something really dense, both because they're small and because an atom's outer electron shell will deflect anything but a direct hit (like charges repel). Normally, to stop beta radiation, you'd use lead and lots of it. This is why fission reactors are so heavy and bulky. If you don't shield yourself from beta particles, they will impact and break links in DNA molecules in your cells, disrupting those cells and potentially causing cancer. This is what happened to Marie Curie.
Because the fusion process doesn't give off anywhere near the kind of hard radiation you get from fission left-overs, fusion is inherently cleaner to use and safer to operate.
"But tritium is still radioactive!" you say. Nowhere near as much as the barium and krypton isotopes I mentioned. While krypton-90's half-life is around 32 seconds and barium-143's is something like 14 seconds, hydrogen-3's half life is a little over 12 years. And again: The point is to consume them before they get that chance.
IIRC, President Bush mentioned in his recent State of the Union address funding research into alternative energy sources in general and fusion in particular. Now that Sandia has made some new headway, will we start seeing more money flowing into the DoE and Sandia?
I personally can't wait until the Middle East once again becomes a red herring...
"It's a BB-sized capsule of silicon that not only emits neutrons"
So not only do I have to have to think about liquid-cooled case designs, I have to start building my cases out of lead? Sheesh! With all that hassle, it's almost worth going back to Intel.
"It doesn't matter if the Japanese were unwilling to surrender or not."
To the millions of Chinese, Koreans, etc. still oppressed by occupying Japanese troops on the mainland it sure as hell mattered.
"There was no reason to go into Japan and conquer the island."
Only if you are of the opinion that nothing that happens outside of our borders doesn't matter in the least...
"They were no longer a serious threat to the United States."
... which you apparently are.
I apparently didn't make it clear enough in my original post. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor partly because the US was aiding the Chinese in resisting the invasion of the 1930's. If we had just left the main islands alone, we would have been exactly where we had started, complete with pending Japanese attack. And the position of the Chinese in 1945 would have looked remarkably like the situation of the Shi'ia in southern Iraq in 1991.
"We could have just left them there without the 'surrender'."
So not only would you rather the Japanese continue to butcher civillians on the Asian mainland, you'd rather maintain the status quo of the US submarine blockade, letting all of Japan starve to death as well?
(Of course, that wouldn't have lasted long. It would only have been a matter of time before the Japanese troops on the Asian mainland were able to mount a counter-offensive.)
"The nukes were a warning to the Soviets."
Must have been, because history has shown that it sure as hell didn't scare off the Japanese army. Japan wouldn't exist today if Hirohito weren't able to hold on to enough power to surrender.
"We could have just left the Japanese there pissed off at losing the war (or not even believing it)."
I'm sorry, you seem to be of the opinion that there were no Japanese off of the main islands by August 1945. You have forgotten that the whole point of the "island hopping" strategy was to take control only of those islands that are stratiegicly valuable (much like the way coalition side-stepped most of the cities in southern Iraq until later). Not only was the brunt of the Japanese army still running around Asia, the Japanese still had the majority of their Pacific conquests.
" And we bombed hospitals and schools in Hiroshima/Nagasaki."
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were on the list of potential targets because they held military value (industrial centers, shipyards, etc.). If we wanted to nuke Japanese civillians just for the hell of it, we would have hit Kyoto.
And Japanese civillians died even in conventional bombing because they had the habit of building their homes practically on top of the factories/bases being bombed.
The diamonds we see in jewelery are far from the only diamonds out there. After a diamond is mined, only a certain few are good enough quality for that, and the vast majority are considered "industrial grade," for use in cutting tools, etc.
AFAIK, man-made diamonds are never good enough for jewelery and are alwasys considered industrial grade.
On top of that, most of the price of diamond jewelery comes not necessarily from the stone but the skill that went into crafting it. The person shaping the stone has to deal with not only trying to carve the hardest stone known to man (where those "industrial grade" diamonds show their usefullness), but one mistake pretty much ruins the stone entirely.
"there was no reason to use it against Japan, as they were already defeated."
They didn't surrender after our submarine blockade. They didn't surrender after the first atomic bomb. They didn't surrender after the second atomic bomb. They didn't surrender after the Soviet Union declared war on them.
We're talking about a country that had been raping and pillaging China since before Hitler came to power, let alone before he decided to follow suit in Poland. We're talking about a country that tested biological weapons on unwitting Chinese civillians (heck, you can just about credit Japan with inventing biological weapons to begin with). We're talking about a country that was passing out bamboo spears to school children to defend their shores, even after Nagasaki. Their civillians were so brainwashed that they'd rather throw themselves off of cliffs than surrender to the white demons. Did you know the Japanese military passed out white sheets to their soldiers (to "protect them from the atomic bomb"), instructing each foot soldier to take out at least one tank before they die.
The night before Emperor Hirohito announced his intent to surrender, the Japanese army staged a coup to keep him from surrendering! And it damn near worked!
And after all that, it still took upwards of a month of haggling to get them to sign the surrender treaty. What should we have done, held hands around a campfire and sing songs?
""InformationWeek is running a story by Fred Langa which gives an overview of the ways to create a true-Legacy-free computer. Finally we can have a PC not based on twenty year old technology.""
That doesn't do a damn thing about my collection of peripherals based on "twenty year-old technology." I've got a USB 1.1 controller built-in to my motherboard and a USB 2.0 daughter board. What's next? IEEE 1394? Heck no, I need a serial controller with a PCI interface (I've only seen ISA, and people like you make it almost impossible to find a modern motherboard with ISA interfaces), because I only have two RS-232 ports and four devices to plug into them.
You know what else would be nice? A game card. I have nearly a dozen different kinds of joysticks and game pads, and only one of them is USB-only. I could probably get along fine with my Gravis GRiP, but that only works in Windows 95 (!). Why? Because Gravis had to jump on the new technology bandwagon, going all USB and forasking their older technology.
Paralell ports I'm fine with. Luckily, I only have a scanner to plug into it.
But other than "because it's cool!" why should I spend money on a "legacy-free" computer?
Slashdot Mirror
"It is their country."
If by "they" you mean "China's communist party," then you're right. If you instead meant "the people of China," you are wrong on many levels.
"We also have the right never to use their search engines"
But they do not have the right to use alternatives.
"Aren't rights wonderful?"
Only when you have them. "National sovereignty" is a legal fiction that is based on (and should take a back seat to) personal sovereignty. A government has no rights except those granted to it by the people.
"By allowing them to create their own technologies to do so we allow them to create superior products theoretically..."
Except there's a good chance they won't because they're intentionally hampering their ability to find information. And anybody that believes that technology and culture have nothing to do with each other has another thing coming to them. If Beijing intends to try to take advantage of Western technology without adopting facets of Western culture, they'll always be playing second fiddle.
Ooh! Ooh! I get to play devil's advocate again!
"I feel really sad to see this kind of comment posted by Americans and supported by American moderators. It certainly damage the diversity of our society,"
I don't like people disagreeing with me. It damages our diversity.
While I disagree with the poster's conclusions, he does make valid points and has documented sources.
"Oh, that never happens in this ethical capitalisitic society!"
I'm not going to argue that that never happens in the United States, but I will argue that the United States does attempt to do something about it, even if nothing more than lip service. Even ignoring actions by the federal government (sanctions, etc.) consider the damage that was done to companies like Nike when it came to light that they were using child labor. As a result, companies that do business primarly in the US can be very skiddish about their public relations vis a vis human rights like that, almost to a fault.
I'd have to agree that investing in the PRC immediately after the Tiananmen Massacre strikes me as being extremely callous and indifferent about human rights and civil liberties.
"So Chinese in Hong Kong rather unite with China then be with Britain or independent, so what?!"
Consider that Hong Kong was British for longer than Puerto Rico was American. Now compare Hong Kong's definitive desire to reunite with China (as opposed to independence, or whatever other options were on the table) to the way Puerto Rico still can't make up its mind. And the Puerto Ricans are hanging on relatively insignifigant issues like the loss of their own contestants in international competitions, as opposed to a loss of civil liberties.
And before you get into cultural differences between Puerto Rico and the rest of the United States, ask the Canadians why they don't want to join the United States.
"How is Chinese pride so different from Arab pride, religious pride or the ridiculous god damn amount of "patriotism" in the US?"
I'm tempted to say "apples and oranges." Consider how everything in that list except what you describe as "Chinese pride" is hopelessly balkanized. The Arabs were united under shear force of Ottoman arms, Christians have been violently disagreeing with each other since the division of the Roman Empire (with more and more divisions popping up throughout the millenia), and your anti-war stance will get you drastically different reactions in different parts of the United States (and you won't get arrested for protesting the war in and of itself).
Yet the integration of Tibet into the PRC was so popular in Taiwan that the issue made its way into the island's constitution? Issues don't make it into constitutions unless the vast majority feel the same way about it.
"All groups of people are equally stupid."
So you're as stupid as the original poster? Or are you going to try to throw all sorts of stipulations into that statement now?
"It's one thing to demonize the Chinese government. But quite another to insult the race and culture of all Chinese people."
So you're saying it's OK to blast Beijing for saying "economic prosperity first, civil liberties a distant second," but it's not OK to say anything bad about the Chinese people (both within and without the PRC) for blithely going along with it? That sounds like hypocrisy.
"But I won't make the assumptions that such a stereotype is valid nor will I prejudge other westerners on it."
You sure don't have any problems with lumping all us "God damn patriotic Americans" all in one boat, however. You know, the ones you sarcasticly referred to as "kind-heard and naive folks." You seemed OK with putting all Arabs under one classification as well. Perhaps you really are "equally stupid" as the original poster.
You think that's the only disturbing thing they do? Try watching Central China TV International on DirecTV some time. I'm not sure what's more disturbing: some of what they call "news," or the way everybody speaks with American accents and are obviously pandering to the American audience.
"literaly, not one single day in the year where there is no wind or sun in enough parts of the world."
And the amount of acreage this would require doesn't bother you? Have you considered what the price of all that real estate would be?
"But how often is there going to be a gas cloud that acts as a perfect lens for whatever you want to look at?"
Um... what don't you want to look at?
"What does "post-pc" mean?"
It means you can print postage from you PC.
"Cloning-- can be abused to build "organ farms""
Clonus: The MST3K Horror
"Solar and wind power however have the problem that you'll invariably find a day when you can't move due to lack of sunlight/wind."
And those problems don't apply to stationary power generation because why?
"Did you know that the entire U.S. electrical grid could be powered by less than 150,000 modern wind turbines?"
If wind were more efficient and/or powerful than fossil fuels, we'd still see cargo ships rigged with sails.
Too low-tech? Modify a diesel-electric ship with a windmill ("sailing" with the wind may be a little tricky, but nothing a little tacking can't handle). Come back when it's only 10% more expensive to operate than using the diesel generators alone. While you're at it, cover the deck with photovoltaic cells and try those out as well. If it supposedly works for stationary power generation, it should also work on 300+ meter ships. The generators involved are of the same scale.
Nineteenth-century coal-fired steamers were cheaper and easier to use than sailing ships, even when you consider they had to carry thousands of tons of coal on top of the weight of the boilers. And fossil-fuel technology has progressed by leaps and bounds since then. If these alternative energy sources were actually more viable than fossil fuels, capitalism dictates that they would have taken over by now.
Think of it as Fermi's Paradox for energy production.
"And you believe a guy whose family is heavily invested in the oil industry?"
Well, considering how back in late January the Bush Administration rejoined the Internationa Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor project (details of the move here), the one that the Clinton Administration pulled out of in 1998, I'd say "yes."
"Tritium decays by emitting a low energy electron so if you're carrying a big chunk in your pocket it might sterlize you at worst"
Of course, this is all moot. The word "tritium" doesn't happen anywhere in the press release. It looks like they were doing deuterium-deuterium fusion. No radioisotopes or free neutrons involved.
"beta emitter which can't penetrate human skin."
I thought it was alpha radiation that couldn't make it through skin.
I am not a physicist, but I've almost got a degree and I know how to use Google.
First off, as someone else mentioned, deuterium isn't radiactive. Tritium is, but the whole idea of a D-T reactor is to quickly fuse it to a deuterium atom to form harmless helium.
On top of that, as I'm sure you know, hydrogen is lighter than air (including isotopes like deuterium and tritium). Any tritium that escapes from the reactor is going to do its damndest to rise up out of earth's atmosphere. While I suppose it's possible that some of it may bond with something else on its way up, I really don't think that's something to be worrying about.
At any rate, you seem to be confusing "neutrons" with "radiation." Neutrons in and of themselves are harmless little buggers that don't really do anything. Sometimes they find an atomic nucleus they bump into and join it. This extra neutron may make that atom a radioisotope (ie. make it give off radiation), or it may not. For example, the control rods used to control nuclear reactors are generally made out of carbon, because stable carbon-12 can accept a free neutron and become stable carbon-13, no worse for the wear. (Sure, C-13 can accept yet another neutron and become radioactive C-14, but that's negligible because C-13 is already obnoxiously rare.) So put a little graphite around your fusion reactor and you won't notice the difference.
The real problem with fission reactors is that they give off radiation in and of themselves. For example, when uranium-235 is smacked hard with a neutron, it breaks down into 3 loose neutrons as well as an atom each of krypton-90 and barium-143, both of which are radioisotopes. Each krypton-90 atom and each barium-143 atom will give off four beta particles before settling down as zirconium-90 and neodymium-143, respectively.
Beta particles are high-speed (ie. high-energy), loose electrons. "High-speed" means you need something dense to drain their kinetic energy, and "electron" means that you need something really dense, both because they're small and because an atom's outer electron shell will deflect anything but a direct hit (like charges repel). Normally, to stop beta radiation, you'd use lead and lots of it. This is why fission reactors are so heavy and bulky. If you don't shield yourself from beta particles, they will impact and break links in DNA molecules in your cells, disrupting those cells and potentially causing cancer. This is what happened to Marie Curie.
Because the fusion process doesn't give off anywhere near the kind of hard radiation you get from fission left-overs, fusion is inherently cleaner to use and safer to operate.
"But tritium is still radioactive!" you say. Nowhere near as much as the barium and krypton isotopes I mentioned. While krypton-90's half-life is around 32 seconds and barium-143's is something like 14 seconds, hydrogen-3's half life is a little over 12 years. And again: The point is to consume them before they get that chance.
IIRC, President Bush mentioned in his recent State of the Union address funding research into alternative energy sources in general and fusion in particular. Now that Sandia has made some new headway, will we start seeing more money flowing into the DoE and Sandia?
I personally can't wait until the Middle East once again becomes a red herring...
"It's a BB-sized capsule of silicon that not only emits neutrons"
So not only do I have to have to think about liquid-cooled case designs, I have to start building my cases out of lead? Sheesh! With all that hassle, it's almost worth going back to Intel.
Almost.
To the millions of Chinese, Koreans, etc. still oppressed by occupying Japanese troops on the mainland it sure as hell mattered.
"There was no reason to go into Japan and conquer the island."
Only if you are of the opinion that nothing that happens outside of our borders doesn't matter in the least...
"They were no longer a serious threat to the United States."
... which you apparently are.
I apparently didn't make it clear enough in my original post. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor partly because the US was aiding the Chinese in resisting the invasion of the 1930's. If we had just left the main islands alone, we would have been exactly where we had started, complete with pending Japanese attack. And the position of the Chinese in 1945 would have looked remarkably like the situation of the Shi'ia in southern Iraq in 1991.
"We could have just left them there without the 'surrender'."
So not only would you rather the Japanese continue to butcher civillians on the Asian mainland, you'd rather maintain the status quo of the US submarine blockade, letting all of Japan starve to death as well?
(Of course, that wouldn't have lasted long. It would only have been a matter of time before the Japanese troops on the Asian mainland were able to mount a counter-offensive.)
"The nukes were a warning to the Soviets."
Must have been, because history has shown that it sure as hell didn't scare off the Japanese army. Japan wouldn't exist today if Hirohito weren't able to hold on to enough power to surrender.
"We could have just left the Japanese there pissed off at losing the war (or not even believing it)."
I'm sorry, you seem to be of the opinion that there were no Japanese off of the main islands by August 1945. You have forgotten that the whole point of the "island hopping" strategy was to take control only of those islands that are stratiegicly valuable (much like the way coalition side-stepped most of the cities in southern Iraq until later). Not only was the brunt of the Japanese army still running around Asia, the Japanese still had the majority of their Pacific conquests.
" And we bombed hospitals and schools in Hiroshima/Nagasaki."
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were on the list of potential targets because they held military value (industrial centers, shipyards, etc.). If we wanted to nuke Japanese civillians just for the hell of it, we would have hit Kyoto.
And Japanese civillians died even in conventional bombing because they had the habit of building their homes practically on top of the factories/bases being bombed.
"just let the current cycle forever. No degradation whatsoever."
*cough* entropy *cough*
" What better way to say "forever" than with a diamond?"
You say "forever," I say "second law of thermodynamics."
"Remember, the next time you buy a diamond for your sweetie, slave (and probably child) labor, blood, sweat and tears literally goes into each one."
Says the person typing on a fossil fuel powered computer...
The diamonds we see in jewelery are far from the only diamonds out there. After a diamond is mined, only a certain few are good enough quality for that, and the vast majority are considered "industrial grade," for use in cutting tools, etc.
AFAIK, man-made diamonds are never good enough for jewelery and are alwasys considered industrial grade.
On top of that, most of the price of diamond jewelery comes not necessarily from the stone but the skill that went into crafting it. The person shaping the stone has to deal with not only trying to carve the hardest stone known to man (where those "industrial grade" diamonds show their usefullness), but one mistake pretty much ruins the stone entirely.
"there was no reason to use it against Japan, as they were already defeated."
They didn't surrender after our submarine blockade. They didn't surrender after the first atomic bomb. They didn't surrender after the second atomic bomb. They didn't surrender after the Soviet Union declared war on them.
We're talking about a country that had been raping and pillaging China since before Hitler came to power, let alone before he decided to follow suit in Poland. We're talking about a country that tested biological weapons on unwitting Chinese civillians (heck, you can just about credit Japan with inventing biological weapons to begin with). We're talking about a country that was passing out bamboo spears to school children to defend their shores, even after Nagasaki. Their civillians were so brainwashed that they'd rather throw themselves off of cliffs than surrender to the white demons. Did you know the Japanese military passed out white sheets to their soldiers (to "protect them from the atomic bomb"), instructing each foot soldier to take out at least one tank before they die.
The night before Emperor Hirohito announced his intent to surrender, the Japanese army staged a coup to keep him from surrendering! And it damn near worked!
And after all that, it still took upwards of a month of haggling to get them to sign the surrender treaty. What should we have done, held hands around a campfire and sing songs?
Bah!
""InformationWeek is running a story by Fred Langa which gives an overview of the ways to create a true-Legacy-free computer. Finally we can have a PC not based on twenty year old technology.""
That doesn't do a damn thing about my collection of peripherals based on "twenty year-old technology." I've got a USB 1.1 controller built-in to my motherboard and a USB 2.0 daughter board. What's next? IEEE 1394? Heck no, I need a serial controller with a PCI interface (I've only seen ISA, and people like you make it almost impossible to find a modern motherboard with ISA interfaces), because I only have two RS-232 ports and four devices to plug into them.
You know what else would be nice? A game card. I have nearly a dozen different kinds of joysticks and game pads, and only one of them is USB-only. I could probably get along fine with my Gravis GRiP, but that only works in Windows 95 (!). Why? Because Gravis had to jump on the new technology bandwagon, going all USB and forasking their older technology.
Paralell ports I'm fine with. Luckily, I only have a scanner to plug into it.
But other than "because it's cool!" why should I spend money on a "legacy-free" computer?
If government spending on something isn't an indication that that something is dying, I don't know what is.
"There is nothing fundamentally wrong with legacy components."
Yes, there is something "wrong" with legacy components. You can't easily establish DRM on standardized and established technology.