Is this fee required? I thought that it was only if you wanted to have dedicated servers so your commercial app doesn't have to compete with the rabble for the limited google maps bandwidth.
The laternative might be to use Yahoo Maps' new API. I haven't played with it much yet, because I don't want to install any plugins to use it. But lots of folks probably will. This book would be better if it was more even-handed and presented info on yahoo as well.
Still, I'll probably buy it. But not on dead tree, but when the price hits $20 for an ebook I'll spring.
Wow, yet another USA basher. Well let me tell you, it's easy to pick on the US, but it's boring. The stereotype of the Ugly American has been out-of-date for some time. Like any other country we have our share of redneck, creeps, and moral policeman. We've also got a really good share of geniuses, saints, and everyday people who don't particularly care for a world empire, yet think it's really crappy when other people in the world can't enjoy the things that we so love about the USA, namely the freedoms we enjoy, and sometimes this desire gets the US into mucky military missions. Oh, yes, these freedoms are limited, they have to be constantly defended, but even when I disagree with their methods, I find that even a lot of the Bush-loving rednecks out there have, in a very abstract sense, some of the same desires as me. What I am trying to say here is that Americans are fundamentally good people. I haven't been to a lot of other countries, but the only other country that I can say I feel the same about, through personal experience, is Germany.
I am sure I am going to get a lot flack from the USA haters out there, calling me an apologist from Bush. Just so you know, I didn't cote for him, but neither did I vote Democrat.
Thank you very much! It makes me disgusted how little respect the politicians here in Cambridge have for national immigration laws. Since we have the apologists for criminal behavior of one type (in city offices) and another (defending illegal wiretaps by Washinton), and to a smaller extent everywhere in between, we're on the brink of a nation beyond the reach of law. Yes, we're a banana republic in formation.
Well this is good...less competition from India in high tech is good for the rest of us.
Seriously, though, I think in a sense the Indian government is right. They have much more pressing problems.
I think the people in the US should first try to solve problems at home. There's still vast areas of the US without access to broadband. In today's content-right Internet, nothing is as much of a turn-off to Internet adoption as having to use a "56k" modem (it's in quotes becuase users hardly ever see that even that low speed).
I also think that computer education needs to change. There needs to be much less emphasis on training users how to write the next MySpace and more on solving problems around the town they live: more data collection, analysis, computer process control, etc. Get Joe's auto-body and the Hill Dairy to take advantage of modern computer technology.
Let me start off by saying what many others have been saying here, but is worthy of my saying "Hear Ye!" - Debian Stable really is a good idea. There are machines that I maintain which are remote, and crashing them would be a really bad idea. They run just fine as they are, and in fact if it weren't for the need for security updates I would never update the software. That is what STABLE means! Not only is it thoroughly tested, but unless there's a really good reason to update the package, the maintainers DON'T. There's not enough of this thinking in the world, and I laud the Debian community for having the forethought to have the STABLE branch. It proves there's a lot of SysAdmins contributing input, as opposed to programmers wanting the newest shinyest things.
Where I think there is room for improvement is the number of branches, and possibly their names. "testing" sounds a lot less stable than it actually is. Perhaps 'testing' could be split into "production" and "testing", with "production" being what MOST people will use...something that we're pretty sure is going to work, that is reasonably recent, etc. Testing would become a release that people would run in order to help the debian community test, or in the case where they had to have the latest feature. Unstable would be the hackers playground, most likely run in virtual machines, with the latest and greatest stuff. "stable" would remain what it is, "For when it absolutely positively has to be up for a year"
This is probably not something in 'mainstream' legal culture, but there is a legal theory that you can use the Uniform Commercial Code to your advantage. See http://www.worldnewsstand.net/freedom/ucc4.htm Basically, you sign a document (such as a check) with "Without Prejudice UCC 1-207" and you are able to protect yourself from 'hidden clauses' and 'hidden contracts'. I had a rubber stamp made for my checks, and this is how I sign them, it is recommended. I have never had to try this in court. It may not be of real legal value, but it was only a couple of dollars for the stamp and it may end up saving me a lot in the long run. Yes, I did read the part in the referenced article where in court you have to prove you know what that part of the UCC is about, and you can be sure I will have it all memorized if I ever have to go to court.
This racist-baiting story might be appropriate for some 'sensitive' tabloids and lefty web sites. It doesn't belong on slashdot. I really hope this isn't a vanguard of The New Slashdot. If this is what Slashdot is going to become, thousands of readers will disappear. As will advertisers.
I am very skeptical about this. It really defies common sense. If you were to tell me I was related to Atilla the hun, I might think its possible (I am over European heritage). But if you were to tell me that a very japanese person was related to a pure aboriginal australian as recently as 5000 years ago, I very much doubt it. There are obscure corners of the gene pool that just don't mix very much.
What makes this study even more suspect is the proclamations of 'brotherhood', blah blah blah that seem to want to try to create 'world peace'. I wonder if someone had a desired outcome and built an experiment to reach those results.
Fully when I see this...MSIE 90%, Mozilla/Firefox 9%, others 1% - gee it sort of leaves out some very important browsers. I am no Apple fanboy (In fact, I rather abhor Apple as a company and media phenomenon) but there's NO WAY that Apple is down at the bottom with Safari. Apple has about 10% of the market for PCs (more in some areas) and I am sure that most of them us Safari. Every Apple owner I know does. So why do we keep on seeing these BOGUS statistics?
Well, that's good to know. I had done rough calculations of what taxes I'd pay in the US (in Massachusetts) vs. Ireland...and found out that Ireland was about the same in taxes...but of course they have national health care! I am pretty sure that the quality of health care in Ireland is less than in Boston (Boston has the best hospitals in the world. I am not just rooting for the local team here...it's an observation of many people around the world). I know Germany has higher taxes than Ireland (probably because Germany pays more into the EU than it gets back out. How much longer will Germany tolerate this?), but it's nice to know that the equation still balances out in favor of Germany.
One of the other things I like about Germany is that violent crime is very low. This is something that Mexico, Phillipines, Ukraine can't even come close with. But there are still parts of the US that have less violent crime than parts of Germany (Vermont vs. Hamburg, for instance).
I don't agree with some comments that Apple is concerned with the quality of labor as opposed to the cost. I don't have the facts in front of me to cite, but from talking to people who have worked in, lived in, and done business with both India and China, what I see is that the low cost of labor is the ONLY thing those countries have going for them. I talked to a fellow who did assembly line automation consulting, and he spoke of how horrible labor-intensive Chinese factories are. The labor there is only one fifth as efficient as the US, but one tenth the price. I didn't hear similar comparisons about India, but I did hear that, outside of the major cities, $5,000 a year (well, the equivalent in rupees) was a comfortable salary to raise a family on. The cities (Bombay, (Mumbai), specifically, weren't as expensive as the US but still much higher than rural areas and small cities.
Evidently, what keeps some Indians in the United States is the much higher standard of living here in terms of public life and public infrastructure. That is to say, the roads are paved, the garbage is picked up, the police aren't completely corrupt, etc. Even though they could 'live like kings' if they took the dollars they made in the US and went back to India, they don't want to be around the filth and misery that is much of India. Again, I am heavily paraphrasing what I've heard, so take this with a lump of salt.
And it's true that certain things cost much, much more in India. For instance, much computer equipment. Some people make a living just by buying stuff in the US and getting it through India customs avoiding tarriff. Another huge expense is the cost of Internet connections. I read something somewhere that the cost of a VOIP phone line/Internet connection in an Indian call center is higher than the cost of the worker answering the phone!
Personally, if I were outsourcing from the US I'd seriously consider a country often overlooked - Germany! The quality of work, the work ethic, the infrastructure, and the education are all very high. Many, if not most, of the younger population of Germany speak English to some extent. A good portion of these are quite fluent. In Eastern Germany (meaning the former GDR), wages are low, real estate is really cheap, even in the cities, and the government has many incentives for businesses willing to employ a number of people (AMD is building another chip foundry is Dresden, Porsche and BMW have recently built factories in Leipzig). The disadvantage of Germany is that taxes are pretty high. But they're not as bad as some countries, and there's evidence that they at least won't be going up anytime soon.
Think about this...if they really ARE busting up huge spam operations, and costing them lots of money, what do they expect these spammers to do? Many of these people are connected with one sort of organized crime gang or another. You don't extort $400,000 from a mobster, even if he is on another continent, and expect that you and your faily will be safe.
But lets suppose that some of the spammers they piss off aren't the violent type. Many of these spammers have connections to the computer underground, where they buy up zombie networks, etc. They have ready access to DoS utilities and zero-day sploits. I can see that these will most liekly be aimed at GoDaddy and will take out their servers, causing much pain to the innocent bystanders. Consumers don't tolerate downtime in DNS, for whatever reason, and will flee en masse.
So, for a variety of reasons, GoDaddy has made a very bad business decision with this policy. I don't think that the money they'll make in extortion will offset the money they'll lose when everyone else leaves. Not to mention, the fingers they'll lose for each domain they hijack from the Mob.
I don't trust spam lists to be accurate. If had recurring problems with SPEWS which have never been resolved. What if godaddy starts to steal domains who are listed in SPEWS? Or what if there's a problem with my web hosting service? No way am I going to be offline while trying to sort this out. Thank god my problem domain isn't on godaddy, but plenty of other ones are (yea, I collect them...lots of people do), and I will be moving them off, or at least moving them when their going to expire. This is bad business practice, really, who made them judge jury and executioner?
I was pissed off about the whole.eu fiasco, I got NONE of the domains I wanted because I used godaddy. This is the final straw.
Wow! That's a pretty good summary of the problems with discerning Global Warming. It's a problem with science in general, as well. There's a real emotional/group-think factor in the scientific community that goes a lot deeper than most people are willing to admit. Just try mentioning 'abiogenesis' at a party of scientists and see if you are still invited to future ones. Around here in Massachusetts, it's tantamount to showing up in KKK robes. There's a few prominent figures who have spoken against the orthodoxy in the past, but these are quickly ground to bits by the popular press, and often the scientific press as well. I wonder if there will ever be a return to the basic honesty that made for such greate scientific progress in the past.
So supermarket discount cards are for shopper tracking and demographics. So what? Isn't that obvious? Maybe you should ask why paper coupons exist (the anonymous type) exist in the first place. That's a little less obvious. I can tell you if you care.
But back to the cards: if you are so concerned with your privacy, just get multiple cards and keep them guessing.
What I'd like to know if ATMs already record the serial numbers of the bills they dispense, and make these available to Investigating Authorities. Because if they don't currently, you know they eventually will.
The US isn't the only country which thinks it can extend its laws around the world: France does (stoppign auctions for nazi memoribilia), Austria does (prosecution for holocaust denial made in the united states), and Belgium does (war crimes, no matter where committed, can be tried in Belgium). In the end, it's the sheer force of the ability of a country to reach out and grab someone. Might makes right. Renditions.
Shivetya, you could be right, if the plant is built in a 'liberal' area like the coastal US or parts of Europe. The only thing the French can do for progress is accept nuclear power (Why the Germans and Italians have rejected it escaped me). But I bet Poland and Lithuania will be the countries which end up building a number of nuclear power plants, be they fusion or fission. They know what it's like to be cold there, with the Russians not wiling to sell you gas at reduced prices because your not in the Warsaw Pact any longer and not having the large amounts of cash that western europe does. Mistrusting Russia and seeing a big export market for electricity, aluminum, and steel, it would make sense.
I am a doctor, but I don't play one on TV. That aside, I've always thought that the so-called 'eye of the needle' is the most interesting part of evolution. What I mean by that is: When there are severe constraints on the survival of a species which happen over a few short generations (i.e. climate changes), remarkable changes can occur. In short, evolution proceeds quickly. If the environmental changes are too catestrophic, the species cannot change and becomes extinct. If the climate changes are too slow, then the gene pool that makes it through the eye of the needle is too large and there's too much opportunity for the changes to be diluted when the survival pressure is released.
For instance this happened in northern Europe when the climate became a lot colder over a few hundred years. I remember reading this was about 7000 years ago, but I might be wrong on the date. Drastic genetic changes in humans resulted. I wonder if they were made more drastic by isolation from other groups of humans due to the climate change (glaciers?) But the changes weren't so drastic as to create a new species, but a new race.
We don't need to save children in the undeveloped world. We need them to die. There's too many of them, and we're seeing the results of overpopulation. Oh, yes, I am a big meanie. It's true - if I were them, I'd feel differently - and maybe the undeveloped world will have the last laugh when we run out of oil.
Of course, if I were employed to dream up nightmare conspiracy theories, I might come up with one that the reason why the industrialized world is sending all this free food & medecine to the undeveloped world is to wean them off of their own methods of production, however weak they are, and make them dependant on us (slashdot users? no. I mean the industrial world). Once that has happened, they can be controlled by threats of removing that food. Or, even better, we just pull the plug, wait a year for the corpses to rot, and move on in and build Starbucks and "green" housing, and "restore the jungle".
Scientists should be wary about trying to genetically modify humans with the knowledge gained from these experiments.
Thinking of a "cancer gene" is misleading. Imagine a net of rubber bands all knotted togethor. Changing one gene will "stretch a rubber band" differently possibly affect all the other aspects of the organism, often unpredictably.
This cancer gene could be the one that also gives humans a soul. We can't tell with a mouse, of course, because they only speak in pips and squeaks, but scientists should know all the risks involved with creating such a possible genetic enhancement.
You're a moron, Mr. Rifkin. Seriously, though, this is the type of comment that lies outside of answering, outside of science, and beyond reason. You can't win an argument with someone like this, and it's not even worth trying. It's a religious matter. For much of human history, such thoughts set the policies of governments. Then, we discovered reason and science. But the pendulum seems to swinging back the other way again.
Some of you may know that RMS (Richard Stallman, GNU hero) suffers from bad RSI. He has to hire people to type the code he dictates. This could be really useful for him. Maybe he'll be a bit less angry when he can code again.
SPEWS is a good example of idiotic spam filtering. They list my site as a spammer because I hosted DNS for a netblock that was grabbed and abused by a spammer. I spent some time on Use(less)Net trying to correct the situation, and was met with suspicion, paranoia, and abuse.
There's only one place that my site regularly exchanges email with that uses SPEWS, and I know exactly who to talk to for the fix. The problem is, it keeps on happening every couple of months. What a Pain in the Ass.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this fee required? I thought that it was only if you wanted to have dedicated servers so your commercial app doesn't have to compete with the rabble for the limited google maps bandwidth.
The laternative might be to use Yahoo Maps' new API. I haven't played with it much yet, because I don't want to install any plugins to use it. But lots of folks probably will. This book would be better if it was more even-handed and presented info on yahoo as well.
Still, I'll probably buy it. But not on dead tree, but when the price hits $20 for an ebook I'll spring.
Wow, yet another USA basher. Well let me tell you, it's easy to pick on the US, but it's boring. The stereotype of the Ugly American has been out-of-date for some time. Like any other country we have our share of redneck, creeps, and moral policeman. We've also got a really good share of geniuses, saints, and everyday people who don't particularly care for a world empire, yet think it's really crappy when other people in the world can't enjoy the things that we so love about the USA, namely the freedoms we enjoy, and sometimes this desire gets the US into mucky military missions. Oh, yes, these freedoms are limited, they have to be constantly defended, but even when I disagree with their methods, I find that even a lot of the Bush-loving rednecks out there have, in a very abstract sense, some of the same desires as me. What I am trying to say here is that Americans are fundamentally good people. I haven't been to a lot of other countries, but the only other country that I can say I feel the same about, through personal experience, is Germany.
I am sure I am going to get a lot flack from the USA haters out there, calling me an apologist from Bush. Just so you know, I didn't cote for him, but neither did I vote Democrat.
Thank you very much! It makes me disgusted how little respect the politicians here in Cambridge have for national immigration laws. Since we have the apologists for criminal behavior of one type (in city offices) and another (defending illegal wiretaps by Washinton), and to a smaller extent everywhere in between, we're on the brink of a nation beyond the reach of law. Yes, we're a banana republic in formation.
Well this is good...less competition from India in high tech is good for the rest of us.
Seriously, though, I think in a sense the Indian government is right. They have much more pressing problems.
I think the people in the US should first try to solve problems at home. There's still vast areas of the US without access to broadband. In today's content-right Internet, nothing is as much of a turn-off to Internet adoption as having to use a "56k" modem (it's in quotes becuase users hardly ever see that even that low speed).
I also think that computer education needs to change. There needs to be much less emphasis on training users how to write the next MySpace and more on solving problems around the town they live: more data collection, analysis, computer process control, etc. Get Joe's auto-body and the Hill Dairy to take advantage of modern computer technology.
Thanks for the info...it's so nice to find out that something I want already exists.
Let me start off by saying what many others have been saying here, but is worthy of my saying "Hear Ye!" - Debian Stable really is a good idea. There are machines that I maintain which are remote, and crashing them would be a really bad idea. They run just fine as they are, and in fact if it weren't for the need for security updates I would never update the software. That is what STABLE means! Not only is it thoroughly tested, but unless there's a really good reason to update the package, the maintainers DON'T. There's not enough of this thinking in the world, and I laud the Debian community for having the forethought to have the STABLE branch. It proves there's a lot of SysAdmins contributing input, as opposed to programmers wanting the newest shinyest things.
Where I think there is room for improvement is the number of branches, and possibly their names. "testing" sounds a lot less stable than it actually is. Perhaps 'testing' could be split into "production" and "testing", with "production" being what MOST people will use...something that we're pretty sure is going to work, that is reasonably recent, etc. Testing would become a release that people would run in order to help the debian community test, or in the case where they had to have the latest feature. Unstable would be the hackers playground, most likely run in virtual machines, with the latest and greatest stuff. "stable" would remain what it is, "For when it absolutely positively has to be up for a year"
This is probably not something in 'mainstream' legal culture, but there is a legal theory that you can use the Uniform Commercial Code to your advantage. See http://www.worldnewsstand.net/freedom/ucc4.htm Basically, you sign a document (such as a check) with "Without Prejudice UCC 1-207" and you are able to protect yourself from 'hidden clauses' and 'hidden contracts'. I had a rubber stamp made for my checks, and this is how I sign them, it is recommended. I have never had to try this in court. It may not be of real legal value, but it was only a couple of dollars for the stamp and it may end up saving me a lot in the long run. Yes, I did read the part in the referenced article where in court you have to prove you know what that part of the UCC is about, and you can be sure I will have it all memorized if I ever have to go to court.
Nobody say the L-word. Just don't say it.
Q: Why do the English drink warm beer?
A: Because they have Lucas refrigerators!
This racist-baiting story might be appropriate for some 'sensitive' tabloids and lefty web sites. It doesn't belong on slashdot. I really hope this isn't a vanguard of The New Slashdot. If this is what Slashdot is going to become, thousands of readers will disappear. As will advertisers.
I am very skeptical about this. It really defies common sense. If you were to tell me I was related to Atilla the hun, I might think its possible (I am over European heritage). But if you were to tell me that a very japanese person was related to a pure aboriginal australian as recently as 5000 years ago, I very much doubt it. There are obscure corners of the gene pool that just don't mix very much.
What makes this study even more suspect is the proclamations of 'brotherhood', blah blah blah that seem to want to try to create 'world peace'. I wonder if someone had a desired outcome and built an experiment to reach those results.
Fully when I see this...MSIE 90%, Mozilla/Firefox 9%, others 1% - gee it sort of leaves out some very important browsers. I am no Apple fanboy (In fact, I rather abhor Apple as a company and media phenomenon) but there's NO WAY that Apple is down at the bottom with Safari. Apple has about 10% of the market for PCs (more in some areas) and I am sure that most of them us Safari. Every Apple owner I know does. So why do we keep on seeing these BOGUS statistics?
Well, that's good to know. I had done rough calculations of what taxes I'd pay in the US (in Massachusetts) vs. Ireland...and found out that Ireland was about the same in taxes...but of course they have national health care! I am pretty sure that the quality of health care in Ireland is less than in Boston (Boston has the best hospitals in the world. I am not just rooting for the local team here...it's an observation of many people around the world). I know Germany has higher taxes than Ireland (probably because Germany pays more into the EU than it gets back out. How much longer will Germany tolerate this?), but it's nice to know that the equation still balances out in favor of Germany.
One of the other things I like about Germany is that violent crime is very low. This is something that Mexico, Phillipines, Ukraine can't even come close with. But there are still parts of the US that have less violent crime than parts of Germany (Vermont vs. Hamburg, for instance).
I don't agree with some comments that Apple is concerned with the quality of labor as opposed to the cost. I don't have the facts in front of me to cite, but from talking to people who have worked in, lived in, and done business with both India and China, what I see is that the low cost of labor is the ONLY thing those countries have going for them. I talked to a fellow who did assembly line automation consulting, and he spoke of how horrible labor-intensive Chinese factories are. The labor there is only one fifth as efficient as the US, but one tenth the price. I didn't hear similar comparisons about India, but I did hear that, outside of the major cities, $5,000 a year (well, the equivalent in rupees) was a comfortable salary to raise a family on. The cities (Bombay, (Mumbai), specifically, weren't as expensive as the US but still much higher than rural areas and small cities.
Evidently, what keeps some Indians in the United States is the much higher standard of living here in terms of public life and public infrastructure. That is to say, the roads are paved, the garbage is picked up, the police aren't completely corrupt, etc. Even though they could 'live like kings' if they took the dollars they made in the US and went back to India, they don't want to be around the filth and misery that is much of India. Again, I am heavily paraphrasing what I've heard, so take this with a lump of salt.
And it's true that certain things cost much, much more in India. For instance, much computer equipment. Some people make a living just by buying stuff in the US and getting it through India customs avoiding tarriff. Another huge expense is the cost of Internet connections. I read something somewhere that the cost of a VOIP phone line/Internet connection in an Indian call center is higher than the cost of the worker answering the phone!
Personally, if I were outsourcing from the US I'd seriously consider a country often overlooked - Germany! The quality of work, the work ethic, the infrastructure, and the education are all very high. Many, if not most, of the younger population of Germany speak English to some extent. A good portion of these are quite fluent. In Eastern Germany (meaning the former GDR), wages are low, real estate is really cheap, even in the cities, and the government has many incentives for businesses willing to employ a number of people (AMD is building another chip foundry is Dresden, Porsche and BMW have recently built factories in Leipzig). The disadvantage of Germany is that taxes are pretty high. But they're not as bad as some countries, and there's evidence that they at least won't be going up anytime soon.
Think about this...if they really ARE busting up huge spam operations, and costing them lots of money, what do they expect these spammers to do? Many of these people are connected with one sort of organized crime gang or another. You don't extort $400,000 from a mobster, even if he is on another continent, and expect that you and your faily will be safe.
But lets suppose that some of the spammers they piss off aren't the violent type. Many of these spammers have connections to the computer underground, where they buy up zombie networks, etc. They have ready access to DoS utilities and zero-day sploits. I can see that these will most liekly be aimed at GoDaddy and will take out their servers, causing much pain to the innocent bystanders. Consumers don't tolerate downtime in DNS, for whatever reason, and will flee en masse.
So, for a variety of reasons, GoDaddy has made a very bad business decision with this policy. I don't think that the money they'll make in extortion will offset the money they'll lose when everyone else leaves. Not to mention, the fingers they'll lose for each domain they hijack from the Mob.
I don't trust spam lists to be accurate. If had recurring problems with SPEWS which have never been resolved. What if godaddy starts to steal domains who are listed in SPEWS? Or what if there's a problem with my web hosting service? No way am I going to be offline while trying to sort this out. Thank god my problem domain isn't on godaddy, but plenty of other ones are (yea, I collect them...lots of people do), and I will be moving them off, or at least moving them when their going to expire. This is bad business practice, really, who made them judge jury and executioner?
.eu fiasco, I got NONE of the domains I wanted because I used godaddy. This is the final straw.
I was pissed off about the whole
Wow! That's a pretty good summary of the problems with discerning Global Warming. It's a problem with science in general, as well. There's a real emotional/group-think factor in the scientific community that goes a lot deeper than most people are willing to admit. Just try mentioning 'abiogenesis' at a party of scientists and see if you are still invited to future ones. Around here in Massachusetts, it's tantamount to showing up in KKK robes. There's a few prominent figures who have spoken against the orthodoxy in the past, but these are quickly ground to bits by the popular press, and often the scientific press as well. I wonder if there will ever be a return to the basic honesty that made for such greate scientific progress in the past.
I'd say it was because of RMS' bodily odor, but then I remembered that this was France we're talking about.
So supermarket discount cards are for shopper tracking and demographics. So what? Isn't that obvious? Maybe you should ask why paper coupons exist (the anonymous type) exist in the first place. That's a little less obvious. I can tell you if you care.
But back to the cards: if you are so concerned with your privacy, just get multiple cards and keep them guessing.
What I'd like to know if ATMs already record the serial numbers of the bills they dispense, and make these available to Investigating Authorities. Because if they don't currently, you know they eventually will.
The US isn't the only country which thinks it can extend its laws around the world: France does (stoppign auctions for nazi memoribilia), Austria does (prosecution for holocaust denial made in the united states), and Belgium does (war crimes, no matter where committed, can be tried in Belgium). In the end, it's the sheer force of the ability of a country to reach out and grab someone. Might makes right. Renditions.
Shivetya, you could be right, if the plant is built in a 'liberal' area like the coastal US or parts of Europe. The only thing the French can do for progress is accept nuclear power (Why the Germans and Italians have rejected it escaped me). But I bet Poland and Lithuania will be the countries which end up building a number of nuclear power plants, be they fusion or fission. They know what it's like to be cold there, with the Russians not wiling to sell you gas at reduced prices because your not in the Warsaw Pact any longer and not having the large amounts of cash that western europe does. Mistrusting Russia and seeing a big export market for electricity, aluminum, and steel, it would make sense.
I am a doctor, but I don't play one on TV. That aside, I've always thought that the so-called 'eye of the needle' is the most interesting part of evolution. What I mean by that is: When there are severe constraints on the survival of a species which happen over a few short generations (i.e. climate changes), remarkable changes can occur. In short, evolution proceeds quickly. If the environmental changes are too catestrophic, the species cannot change and becomes extinct. If the climate changes are too slow, then the gene pool that makes it through the eye of the needle is too large and there's too much opportunity for the changes to be diluted when the survival pressure is released.
For instance this happened in northern Europe when the climate became a lot colder over a few hundred years. I remember reading this was about 7000 years ago, but I might be wrong on the date. Drastic genetic changes in humans resulted. I wonder if they were made more drastic by isolation from other groups of humans due to the climate change (glaciers?) But the changes weren't so drastic as to create a new species, but a new race.
We don't need to save children in the undeveloped world. We need them to die. There's too many of them, and we're seeing the results of overpopulation. Oh, yes, I am a big meanie. It's true - if I were them, I'd feel differently - and maybe the undeveloped world will have the last laugh when we run out of oil.
Of course, if I were employed to dream up nightmare conspiracy theories, I might come up with one that the reason why the industrialized world is sending all this free food & medecine to the undeveloped world is to wean them off of their own methods of production, however weak they are, and make them dependant on us (slashdot users? no. I mean the industrial world). Once that has happened, they can be controlled by threats of removing that food. Or, even better, we just pull the plug, wait a year for the corpses to rot, and move on in and build Starbucks and "green" housing, and "restore the jungle".
Thinking of a "cancer gene" is misleading. Imagine a net of rubber bands all knotted togethor. Changing one gene will "stretch a rubber band" differently possibly affect all the other aspects of the organism, often unpredictably.
This cancer gene could be the one that also gives humans a soul. We can't tell with a mouse, of course, because they only speak in pips and squeaks, but scientists should know all the risks involved with creating such a possible genetic enhancement.
You're a moron, Mr. Rifkin. Seriously, though, this is the type of comment that lies outside of answering, outside of science, and beyond reason. You can't win an argument with someone like this, and it's not even worth trying. It's a religious matter. For much of human history, such thoughts set the policies of governments. Then, we discovered reason and science. But the pendulum seems to swinging back the other way again.
Some of you may know that RMS (Richard Stallman, GNU hero) suffers from bad RSI. He has to hire people to type the code he dictates. This could be really useful for him. Maybe he'll be a bit less angry when he can code again.
SPEWS is a good example of idiotic spam filtering. They list my site as a spammer because I hosted DNS for a netblock that was grabbed and abused by a spammer. I spent some time on Use(less)Net trying to correct the situation, and was met with suspicion, paranoia, and abuse.
There's only one place that my site regularly exchanges email with that uses SPEWS, and I know exactly who to talk to for the fix. The problem is, it keeps on happening every couple of months. What a Pain in the Ass.