It's my understanding that anti-trust cases are brought against monopolies when their business practices to maintain their monopoly are to the detriment of the consumers. At least part of that detriment is the way Microsoft spends more of its attention on squelching competitors than on making a stable, secure product. If Microsoft was forced to focus on good coding (or at least suffer the battery of lawsuits that would start up when they didn't), they couldn't continue to focus on their illegal business practices.
We all want Microsoft to be held accountable but the little guy should be free, right? Then make this accountability the punishment that Microsoft has to suffer due to the guilty verdict in the anti-trust case.
"but are you so sure of your statement, and, if so, why?"
Yes, because Bush and Putin are getting along better than even Reagan and Gorbachev did in Iceland, and anybody else with ICBM capabilities doesn't have the number of boosters, warheads, or nerve to go against the US arsenal.
I swear, Slashdot could post the most mundane story about space exploration, and it still draws the same old complaints about this and that, the usual space trolls. I'm just going to respond to them all here for future linkage.
1.) If you have difficulty understanding exploration for it's own sake then you aren't "all for exploration."
2.) If we knew of all the ways we could use and develop (insert name of celesial body here), then we wouldn't need to explore it, now would we?
3.) Yes there are people dying in (insert Third World country here) of (insert Horseman of Apocalypse here). The reasons for these deaths are purely political in nature. Money is not the solution to all problems just as it isn't the root of all evil. If anything it becomes a scapegoat for the real causes of strife. I don't see how not spending the money on space exploration and letting Congress (of all people) spend it on (choice of one or more of the following: junkets, political campaigns, television commercials, Jesse Jackson, economic incentives, UN resolution, Jimmy Carter, "peace-keeping" expedition) to "make the world a better place" is really going to change a damned thing. (Name of two opposing ethnic, religious, or political groups here) need to talk to each other, and dangling money in front of their noses isn't going to get them to do that, it will just get them to chase that money.
4.) As for education reform, go talk to your state and local governments. If you don't know why you should be talking to them instead of the federal government, then you are an example of how badly we need education reform.
5.) Do you have any idea how small a percentage of the federal budget is spent on space exploration?
6.) We are NOT on the verge of nuclear war! At worst, the only countries on the verge of nuking each other are (names of two nuclear powers that didn't sign non-proliferation agreements)! And they aren't the ones sending up these probes, are they?
7.) With all the problems there are in the world today... why would you want to live in the world today? (name of celestial body) looks like a damned good alternative to me!
No, you're not all for exploration. If you were, then you'd understand that exploration is a reason to do it in its own right. If you need to have a reason to "explore," that means you're against it and looking for a better reason to get you up off your ass.
With that being said, lots and lots of real estate that's easier to launch from (in both the surface-to-orbit and extra-solar senses of the words), as well as both known and unknown natural resources. Oh, and no tree-huggers if you want to get industrial up there.
"our cable bill for extended Basic just went up to $50/month."
Something like that happened to me as well, except they also yanked HBO 2 off of the extented basic as they upped the price. It was about that time I took notice of the various deals DirecTV was offering. $30-something for gobs more channels, as well as deals on hardware (which you own instead of rent) and installation.
If Philips gets strict about their ownership of the CD-DA patent and logo, what might the RIAA do in response? I can only think of two different possibilities:
1.) Forsake the CD logo and "reverse engineer" the CD-DA technology to make something that works in genuine CD players. After all, how many of you checked to make sure that it was a genuine CD-DA disk you were buying and not some cheak, shiny knock-off?
2.) Revert to some other technology they have more control over. For example, DVD audio is a bit of a red herring right now, but if push comes to shove, the RIAA people could just buy out the technology behind it and start pushing it. Other ideas might be resuscitating DATs or they could even just tinker with minicasettes just enough to make them proprietary.
I looked at the linked-to Reuters article written before this news happened, and next to it there was a nice picture of some Japanese booth babes holding a Japanese Xbox (mmm... booth babes...). I clicked on it out of curiousity, and I found this (emphasis mine):
Microsoft's Xbox special edition is unveiled at Xbox Conference 2002 in Tokyo, January 11, 2002. Microsoft Corp. said Friday it will launch its Xbox video game console in Japan on February 22 for $263 with a starting lineup of 12 games and a smaller controller for the Japanese market.
So now I'm damned curious as to why the Xbox (which is brand new period, not just in Japan) costs over 10% less in Japan when it's made by an American company and probably imported across that great big body of water called the Pacific. Are the giant gaijin controllers us Yanks are forced to use that much more expensive? Is there a secret Microsoft tax in the US we don't know about? Does Microsoft charge more because they already know how gullible the average American consumer is?
Because getting something into the center of a gravity well is deceptively difficult. Any little mistake and, instead of plunging into the sun, you whiz on by in a highly eccentric or hyperbolic orbit. If it were easy to get something to fall into the sun, there'd be a lot less comets in the solar system than there are now.
" The alpha version of the x86-based OS is available for download and boots off the 110 MB bootable CD."
This is yet another reason why more people should buy and use 8 cm CD-Rs. Sure, currently they're more expensive than the normal sized ones, but think of the money you'd be losing anyway in unused megs.
Well, that, and the way a fast 8 cm CD-RW would nudge Zip drives (and maybe even floppies) out of the market...
"If you want to talk about history, explore the economic situations that the US manufactured in the 30s that gave rise to the expansionist elements of the Japanese imperialists. Look honestly at US policies regarding hard goods such as steel and the like and you'll find that, like China today, the US's aggressive postures created a situation where the extremists could thrive, and the Divine Wind could drive a normally xenophobic people into world-conquering frenzy."
Yes, we were cutting back on steel and oil into Japan in the 1930's. Now, was that because we're generally not nice people, or do you think that maybe, just maybe this has something to do with the way they were an aggressor forcefully expanding their empire into mainland Asia since 1932?
"their imperialist "protection" of "Manchukuo" (now echoed in Afganistan?)"
Hrm... dissidents in Manchuria disrupting a rail line going through Manchuria, causing the Japanese to decide to deploy troops, and state-sponsored dissidents in Afghanistan launching an attack on US soil and killing thousands of civillians? Yeah, I can see all the similarities there... WTF?
""Country Bumpkins" don't care enough about that fangled Internet thing to demand Broadband."
And that seems to be a big mistake on the providers' part from my POV. For various reasons I'm living in the middle of the Louisiana swamps, nothing around for miles until you start driving towards New Orleans (if you can call that "civilization"). And yet when I go to get my hair cut at the local barber shop, every time so far the internet makes its way into conversation. I e-mailed this. I found that on the web. Hell, one of the barbers kept up on campaign speech videoes back in 2000. Fishin', shootin' and downloadin'.
And there ain't no broadband out here. No way, no how. On top of that, you need the "expanded local" option on your phone line to reach just about any ISP's dial-up service. I could either spend an arm and a leg for two-way satellite, or the same two limbs for ISDN.
Oh, and funny you mention Tauzin-Dingle. We're all Tauzin's constituants. Go find his website at house.gov and have a look for yourself at the person the locals feel best represent them. And they use the internet!
"but rather because the demands were
not made in a way that made it reasonable for
Hirohito to accept them. At the same time, the
social structure of Japan was such that while
the Emperor had not declared the war effort
over, the country would fight a useless
impossible battle to defend their country."
I would have gotten into that, but I got distracted away from the computer by stuff. Part of the problem is that each side more or less viewed the other as uncivlized barbarians. At the very least, I don't think the Allies would have accepted the somewhat-less-than-unconditional surrender they got until after they saw first-hand how strong Japanese convictions were on the matter.
On the other side of the lines, I don't think the Japanese could trust the gaijins to keep their word on those conditions to surrender until after they saw the Allied willingness not to destroy them outright with impunity. After all, they surrender so easily, how much honor could they have?
"If the US had listened to the advice of its
own anthrolopologists employed at the time to
study japanese culture (see, for example The Chrysanthemum and the Sword), surrender
could have been obtained with no further bloodshed at all."
If the Japanese military listened to their own experts, they would have seen that Pearl Harbor was a Bad Idea (tm), and that the Americans wouldn't be so soft as to be willing to roll over and surrender the Pacific after an initial, crippling blow.
(Aside: Kinda makes me wonder if bin Laden had similar such people voicing concerns like these, or if he just had yes-men like in recently-released videoes.)
It seems like there was a general lack of respect on both sides of the conflict that only a climatic battle for the islands could solve. It could have been some big meat-grinder of a campaign, churning out some unknown number of military and civillian casualties until (or if) one both sides lost the stomach to carry on, or it could have involved the unveiling of some new super-weapon that has enough destructive potential to give both sides a reason to take a step back and look at what's happening. In our history, the latter happened.
... and it still took a month for the formal signing of the surrender...
A general mistrust and misunderstanding of both sides leading to some pretty ugly conflicts. It happened to the US and the USSR in the 1920's, it happened here in WWII, it seems to have happened between the US and the Muslim world, and it may even be happening between the US and the PRC.
"What Europe is doing is just what the First Continental Congress did before the Revolutionary War, unifying the governments for the benefit of all members. There aren't any nasty rogue states in Western and Central Europe anymore, so why not?"
Aside from the way that the 13 colonies had similar heritages, histories, a common language, and a more-or-less united vision of what a good government should be, the EU gives me the heebie-jeebies not because of the prospects of a united Europe, but who's doing the uniting. For example, this is from the same people who gave us France...
That, and I have trouble seeing the EU being anything but an extreme. Either something so fractured and balkanized (heck, this is where we get the term "Balkanized") as to make the UN seem like a united front, or an uber-police-state. Neither is all that healthy.
Yes. Promoted when it worked, fired when they got busted (gotta have a scape-goat, and he makes a pretty good one with the newer, promoted job title...).
"Isn't it interesting that Bohr was frightened that the Nazis would have such a weapon only to see it used to butcher Japanese civilians five years later by "the good guys"?"
What's more horrible, the US building and using an atomic bomb, or school children being trained to defend Tojo's Japan with bamboo spears? Doesn't the fact that it required not one but TWO nuclear attacks before the Japanese decided to surrender give you pause about possible justifications?
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
1.) The US submarine force had what was essentially a total blockade of resource-poor Japan since May. They face destruction by slow starvation. No surrender.
2.) The first bomb in early August (after three months of the previously-mentioned blockade). Three days go by with no surrender.
3.) The second bomb. Still no surrender.
4.) The Soviet Union delcares war on Japan and starts a big land-grab in Asia. They now face a potential invation from two fronts (one of which all too willing to feed an army into the meat-grinder that the Japanese are trying to turn their islands into)
So what's the next step? For the Japanese army, the next step was a coup, an effort to depose Hirohito's government and prevent him from airing a surrender announcement. After all, how many more bombs could the US drop? Can't be more than one or two...
There is a misconception about Japan that still persists to this day (as can be seen in your opinion) that they have Western ideals and a Western way of thinking. This is not true today and it sure as hell wasn't true in the 1940's. Just because defeat is inevitible isn't necesarily reason for them to surrender.
"Now ask yourself if germany could've done the same..."
That depends entirely on two things:
1.) Are we talking about Germany as it was on the map before they invaded Poland, or are we talking about Germany and all the other European countries that were either Axis powers (Italy, Romania, etc.) and/or occupied by the Germans? In other words, just Germany, or "Fortress Europe?"
2.) Just that, or do we toss in a hypothetical victory in the Eastern Front? The Soviet Union/Russia has a LOT of untapped (still) resources.
Also don't forget that the Nazis had the "advantages" of slave labor and an essentially command economy (and the Soviets would have been used to it anyway if they got taken over), while the US had to pretty much buy all this stuff on the open market (with a little nudge here and there).
I'm sorry, I don't care what the rest of you say about HP and reverse Polish notation, the TI-92+ is a thing of shear beauty, and I for one am glad that they're making a sequel. My TI-92+ was worth the money alone in both the cost of a book of integration tables as well as the time and effort of flipping through it.
Symbollic integration is a beautiful thing and it came in damned handy in my Partial Differential Equations class. Thank you, TI, for making LaPlace transforms easier to handle.
And before you all jump on my back, I'm not saying I can't do the integrals myself (I did them just fine on all the tests, thank you very much), but it kept the homework from consuming months of my life.
So bad-mouth TI's stuff all you want, I'm still probably going to get this bad boy as soon as it comes out (still have quantum mechanics classes ahead of me).
Slashdot Mirror
"from the that's-one-earth-rotation dept."
It's about four minutes longer than one earth rotation. Shame on you!
It's my understanding that anti-trust cases are brought against monopolies when their business practices to maintain their monopoly are to the detriment of the consumers. At least part of that detriment is the way Microsoft spends more of its attention on squelching competitors than on making a stable, secure product. If Microsoft was forced to focus on good coding (or at least suffer the battery of lawsuits that would start up when they didn't), they couldn't continue to focus on their illegal business practices.
We all want Microsoft to be held accountable but the little guy should be free, right? Then make this accountability the punishment that Microsoft has to suffer due to the guilty verdict in the anti-trust case.
"but are you so sure of your statement, and, if so, why?"
Yes, because Bush and Putin are getting along better than even Reagan and Gorbachev did in Iceland, and anybody else with ICBM capabilities doesn't have the number of boosters, warheads, or nerve to go against the US arsenal.
I swear, Slashdot could post the most mundane story about space exploration, and it still draws the same old complaints about this and that, the usual space trolls. I'm just going to respond to them all here for future linkage.
1.) If you have difficulty understanding exploration for it's own sake then you aren't "all for exploration."
2.) If we knew of all the ways we could use and develop (insert name of celesial body here), then we wouldn't need to explore it, now would we?
3.) Yes there are people dying in (insert Third World country here) of (insert Horseman of Apocalypse here). The reasons for these deaths are purely political in nature. Money is not the solution to all problems just as it isn't the root of all evil. If anything it becomes a scapegoat for the real causes of strife. I don't see how not spending the money on space exploration and letting Congress (of all people) spend it on (choice of one or more of the following: junkets, political campaigns, television commercials, Jesse Jackson, economic incentives, UN resolution, Jimmy Carter, "peace-keeping" expedition) to "make the world a better place" is really going to change a damned thing. (Name of two opposing ethnic, religious, or political groups here) need to talk to each other, and dangling money in front of their noses isn't going to get them to do that, it will just get them to chase that money.
4.) As for education reform, go talk to your state and local governments. If you don't know why you should be talking to them instead of the federal government, then you are an example of how badly we need education reform.
5.) Do you have any idea how small a percentage of the federal budget is spent on space exploration?
6.) We are NOT on the verge of nuclear war! At worst, the only countries on the verge of nuking each other are (names of two nuclear powers that didn't sign non-proliferation agreements)! And they aren't the ones sending up these probes, are they?
7.) With all the problems there are in the world today... why would you want to live in the world today? (name of celestial body) looks like a damned good alternative to me!
No, you're not all for exploration. If you were, then you'd understand that exploration is a reason to do it in its own right. If you need to have a reason to "explore," that means you're against it and looking for a better reason to get you up off your ass.
With that being said, lots and lots of real estate that's easier to launch from (in both the surface-to-orbit and extra-solar senses of the words), as well as both known and unknown natural resources. Oh, and no tree-huggers if you want to get industrial up there.
"from the no-not-that-kind-of-minicomputer dept."
Then who needs you, anyway? I'd rather have something to fill up my garage that I can host god-knows-what on. So who needs ya?
... you see the letters "MSX" and immediately think of an old Japanese computer platform.
With a population density like yours, I don't blame you for nationalizing your television.
Then I guess the next question is "Who is the Japanese equivalent of the FTC and how does one report these things to them?"
"our cable bill for extended Basic just went up to $50/month."
Something like that happened to me as well, except they also yanked HBO 2 off of the extented basic as they upped the price. It was about that time I took notice of the various deals DirecTV was offering. $30-something for gobs more channels, as well as deals on hardware (which you own instead of rent) and installation.
If Philips gets strict about their ownership of the CD-DA patent and logo, what might the RIAA do in response? I can only think of two different possibilities:
1.) Forsake the CD logo and "reverse engineer" the CD-DA technology to make something that works in genuine CD players. After all, how many of you checked to make sure that it was a genuine CD-DA disk you were buying and not some cheak, shiny knock-off?
2.) Revert to some other technology they have more control over. For example, DVD audio is a bit of a red herring right now, but if push comes to shove, the RIAA people could just buy out the technology behind it and start pushing it. Other ideas might be resuscitating DATs or they could even just tinker with minicasettes just enough to make them proprietary.
Either way, they can still get what they want.
Did I mention there were booth babes involved?
Because getting something into the center of a gravity well is deceptively difficult. Any little mistake and, instead of plunging into the sun, you whiz on by in a highly eccentric or hyperbolic orbit. If it were easy to get something to fall into the sun, there'd be a lot less comets in the solar system than there are now.
"Apparently, the negative public reaction to n'sync's appearence in episode 2 has caused lucas to drop their cameo."
Judging by the cult-ish following of his movies, I thought George Lucas was in the business of making public opinion, not bowing to it.
" The alpha version of the x86-based OS is available for download and boots off the 110 MB bootable CD."
This is yet another reason why more people should buy and use 8 cm CD-Rs. Sure, currently they're more expensive than the normal sized ones, but think of the money you'd be losing anyway in unused megs.
Well, that, and the way a fast 8 cm CD-RW would nudge Zip drives (and maybe even floppies) out of the market...
It stands to reason that if Japan can make solar-pumped lasers and have a few nuclear reactors around, they could make nuke-pumped x-ray lasers.
"If you want to talk about history, explore the economic situations that the US manufactured in the 30s that gave rise to the expansionist elements of the Japanese imperialists. Look honestly at US policies regarding hard goods such as steel and the like and you'll find that, like China today, the US's aggressive postures created a situation where the extremists could thrive, and the Divine Wind could drive a normally xenophobic people into world-conquering frenzy."
Yes, we were cutting back on steel and oil into Japan in the 1930's. Now, was that because we're generally not nice people, or do you think that maybe, just maybe this has something to do with the way they were an aggressor forcefully expanding their empire into mainland Asia since 1932?
"their imperialist "protection" of "Manchukuo" (now echoed in Afganistan?)"
Hrm... dissidents in Manchuria disrupting a rail line going through Manchuria, causing the Japanese to decide to deploy troops, and state-sponsored dissidents in Afghanistan launching an attack on US soil and killing thousands of civillians? Yeah, I can see all the similarities there... WTF?
""Country Bumpkins" don't care enough about that fangled Internet thing to demand Broadband."
And that seems to be a big mistake on the providers' part from my POV. For various reasons I'm living in the middle of the Louisiana swamps, nothing around for miles until you start driving towards New Orleans (if you can call that "civilization"). And yet when I go to get my hair cut at the local barber shop, every time so far the internet makes its way into conversation. I e-mailed this. I found that on the web. Hell, one of the barbers kept up on campaign speech videoes back in 2000. Fishin', shootin' and downloadin'.
And there ain't no broadband out here. No way, no how. On top of that, you need the "expanded local" option on your phone line to reach just about any ISP's dial-up service. I could either spend an arm and a leg for two-way satellite, or the same two limbs for ISDN.
Oh, and funny you mention Tauzin-Dingle. We're all Tauzin's constituants. Go find his website at house.gov and have a look for yourself at the person the locals feel best represent them. And they use the internet!
"but rather because the demands were
not made in a way that made it reasonable for
Hirohito to accept them. At the same time, the
social structure of Japan was such that while
the Emperor had not declared the war effort
over, the country would fight a useless
impossible battle to defend their country."
I would have gotten into that, but I got distracted away from the computer by stuff. Part of the problem is that each side more or less viewed the other as uncivlized barbarians. At the very least, I don't think the Allies would have accepted the somewhat-less-than-unconditional surrender they got until after they saw first-hand how strong Japanese convictions were on the matter.
On the other side of the lines, I don't think the Japanese could trust the gaijins to keep their word on those conditions to surrender until after they saw the Allied willingness not to destroy them outright with impunity. After all, they surrender so easily, how much honor could they have?
"If the US had listened to the advice of its
own anthrolopologists employed at the time to
study japanese culture (see, for example The Chrysanthemum and the Sword), surrender
could have been obtained with no further bloodshed at all."
If the Japanese military listened to their own experts, they would have seen that Pearl Harbor was a Bad Idea (tm), and that the Americans wouldn't be so soft as to be willing to roll over and surrender the Pacific after an initial, crippling blow.
(Aside: Kinda makes me wonder if bin Laden had similar such people voicing concerns like these, or if he just had yes-men like in recently-released videoes.)
It seems like there was a general lack of respect on both sides of the conflict that only a climatic battle for the islands could solve. It could have been some big meat-grinder of a campaign, churning out some unknown number of military and civillian casualties until (or if) one both sides lost the stomach to carry on, or it could have involved the unveiling of some new super-weapon that has enough destructive potential to give both sides a reason to take a step back and look at what's happening. In our history, the latter happened.
... and it still took a month for the formal signing of the surrender...
A general mistrust and misunderstanding of both sides leading to some pretty ugly conflicts. It happened to the US and the USSR in the 1920's, it happened here in WWII, it seems to have happened between the US and the Muslim world, and it may even be happening between the US and the PRC.
"What Europe is doing is just what the First Continental Congress did before the Revolutionary War, unifying the governments for the benefit of all members. There aren't any nasty rogue states in Western and Central Europe anymore, so why not?"
Aside from the way that the 13 colonies had similar heritages, histories, a common language, and a more-or-less united vision of what a good government should be, the EU gives me the heebie-jeebies not because of the prospects of a united Europe, but who's doing the uniting. For example, this is from the same people who gave us France...
That, and I have trouble seeing the EU being anything but an extreme. Either something so fractured and balkanized (heck, this is where we get the term "Balkanized") as to make the UN seem like a united front, or an uber-police-state. Neither is all that healthy.
"was he fired - or promoted?"
Yes. Promoted when it worked, fired when they got busted (gotta have a scape-goat, and he makes a pretty good one with the newer, promoted job title...).
"Isn't it interesting that Bohr was frightened that the Nazis would have such a weapon only to see it used to butcher Japanese civilians five years later by "the good guys"?"
What's more horrible, the US building and using an atomic bomb, or school children being trained to defend Tojo's Japan with bamboo spears? Doesn't the fact that it required not one but TWO nuclear attacks before the Japanese decided to surrender give you pause about possible justifications?
I've said it before and I'll say it again:
1.) The US submarine force had what was essentially a total blockade of resource-poor Japan since May. They face destruction by slow starvation. No surrender.
2.) The first bomb in early August (after three months of the previously-mentioned blockade). Three days go by with no surrender.
3.) The second bomb. Still no surrender.
4.) The Soviet Union delcares war on Japan and starts a big land-grab in Asia. They now face a potential invation from two fronts (one of which all too willing to feed an army into the meat-grinder that the Japanese are trying to turn their islands into)
So what's the next step? For the Japanese army, the next step was a coup, an effort to depose Hirohito's government and prevent him from airing a surrender announcement. After all, how many more bombs could the US drop? Can't be more than one or two...
There is a misconception about Japan that still persists to this day (as can be seen in your opinion) that they have Western ideals and a Western way of thinking. This is not true today and it sure as hell wasn't true in the 1940's. Just because defeat is inevitible isn't necesarily reason for them to surrender.
"Now ask yourself if germany could've done the same..."
That depends entirely on two things:
1.) Are we talking about Germany as it was on the map before they invaded Poland, or are we talking about Germany and all the other European countries that were either Axis powers (Italy, Romania, etc.) and/or occupied by the Germans? In other words, just Germany, or "Fortress Europe?"
2.) Just that, or do we toss in a hypothetical victory in the Eastern Front? The Soviet Union/Russia has a LOT of untapped (still) resources.
Also don't forget that the Nazis had the "advantages" of slave labor and an essentially command economy (and the Soviets would have been used to it anyway if they got taken over), while the US had to pretty much buy all this stuff on the open market (with a little nudge here and there).
I'm sorry, I don't care what the rest of you say about HP and reverse Polish notation, the TI-92+ is a thing of shear beauty, and I for one am glad that they're making a sequel. My TI-92+ was worth the money alone in both the cost of a book of integration tables as well as the time and effort of flipping through it.
Symbollic integration is a beautiful thing and it came in damned handy in my Partial Differential Equations class. Thank you, TI, for making LaPlace transforms easier to handle.
And before you all jump on my back, I'm not saying I can't do the integrals myself (I did them just fine on all the tests, thank you very much), but it kept the homework from consuming months of my life.
So bad-mouth TI's stuff all you want, I'm still probably going to get this bad boy as soon as it comes out (still have quantum mechanics classes ahead of me).