the RGB Mars series has its heart in the right place. It has excellent technology, and is first-rate hard SF in that regard. It also introduced a very interesting set of conflicts.
The Big Earth/Small Mars conflict is fairly interesting, although these themes are not in any way new. It's only real innovation is that it was on top of the very latest and hippest anti-corporate/sustainable-economics ideology. Although this could have been more immaginative, its very much fulfilling one of the major roles of good SF; namely, exploring and explaining current social/political trends in the context of their future development.
The other, and substantially more interesting conflict in this series is the fight between the Reds and the Greens. In this case, the Reds are the environmentalists, who want to keep Mars in its pristine, wild state, unspoiled by terraforming. They want to study Mars as it is rather than bending Mars to the wants and desires of Humanity. This theme fulfills the ultimate role of good SF, in taking some future problem, and exploring how humanity will react to it.
This said, I never finished Blue Mars. I've been about 3/4 through the book for two years now, and although I've left the bookmark at my current spot in the book, I'm probably never going to try and finish it. The simple problem is that there's no real story line any more. In being overly-realistic, KSR is getting bogged down in fairly mundane day-to-day soap-opera behavior - petty rivalries between people, and long descriptions of what people do for entertainment and employment - without any substantial unifying thread for all the characters. Its gotten to a point that its just telling the stories of a bunch of distantly related people who might or might not interact, but there is no compelling world-spanning conflict at this stage. In short, by this point in the novel, people are still fairly active, but there's really nothing at stake.
Still, Red Mars, at least, is quite a good read, and its up to the individual to decide how far they want to go before they feel they've gotten through the important bits of the story line.
And for a really first-rate old-school SF treatment of Mars, check out the Issac Azimov compilation called The Martian Way and Other Stories.
Would we prosecute an individual who created and sold a product used to suppress the same principles held dear by his home country? Of course we would; we'd nail that seditious, un-patriotic bastard to a wall.
What you mean 'we' Kemosabe? If you mean America, we might hold them civilly responsible for damages, assuming that American courts decided they had jurisdiction. However, unless there's a US law stating that 'No individual shall sell to anybody that violates US civil rights,' they'd not be criminally liable. And if an individual were civilly responsible, then a corporation would be equally responsible.
If it were true that no one in the US could do business with another country for violating US civil rights as defined by our constitution, no one would be able to do business with most of Europe, because the UK's near-total ban on gun ownership by its subjects is a clear violation of the right to keep and bear arms. Of course, the US doesn't worry about such things, unless they're used egregiously.
China has much bigger civil rights violations than the Great Firewall of China. Just ask the guy in front of the tank. Selling them filtering software is no more criminal than selling it to an American library (it's the library's fault for using it, or the legislature's fault for requiring it).
This will not be proof that NASA went to the moon. Photographic evidence isn't proof anymore. Anything can be faked. Otherwise, we'd have to believe that Burt did, in fact, meet with Osama bin Laden.
The irrefrickinfutable evidence of the moon landings is the rock samples. They don't have evidence of re-entry, so they aren't meteorites. Chemically, these things just didn't come from earth. They don't have enough water in them. Everything on earth, no matter how dry an environment it comes from, contains a fair amount of water. Even the rocks of the Antarctic Dry Valleys, where there's been no precipitation have some water in hydrated compounds in the rocks. Same for deep-crustal and even mantle rocks brought to the surface by vulcanism.
Fact is, the moon rocks may or may not have come from the moon, but they sure as hell came from somewhere and they didn't enter the earth's atmosphere on their own.
My company uses Websense. My work revolves around providing mapping data for locations all over the world for wireless network planning apps. As you can imagine, I have to deal with maps written in Spanish, French, Portugese, Russian, Arabic, and a number of other languages. I also have to deal with customers and vendors who speak various languages. So for a long time I used babelfish pretty regularly. Then my company started using Websense. Websense classifies almost all translation sites as 'Anonymizer/Translator' which is a no-no because 'it can be used to defeat filtering'.
What was really funny was that I didn't figure out that was the problem for a long time, because a database error (or just stupidity on their part) meant that every time I was denied access to it, it said it was blocked as a 'Sex' site. I figured they'd just made a mistake and not meant to block it at all, so I spent a couple of weeks trying to get it fixed before they finally told me that they meant to block it the whole time.
I live in perpetual fear of the time I call 'The Coming of the Great Google Blackout' when they realize that Google's 'cache' can serve as a 'proxy avoidance system.' If they block Google, I'll never be able to find information on local mapping datums, data sources, or just about anything else I do with the net at work. When they do that, about the only thing I'll be able to use the net for is wasting company time reading/..
I read "Republican Nation" as not a Nation run by "The Republicans" but a Nation that is a Republic
I think if he'd meant that he'd have used a little 'r'. Though the Good Thing capitolization scheme has muddied those waters.
If he really is tying all this on the GOP, I'd point out two things. One, National Review is widely recognized as a Right Wing rag, and is edited by one Wm. F. Buckley, so there's dissent on both left and right on this one. Two, what party does Senator Disney belong to? (That's a rhetorical question. He's a Democrat.)
And as far as not proposing a solution, that may not be as big a deficiency as you'd think. Remember that Big Copyright is trying to persuade everyone that copying is theft, and every bit as morally repugnant as bording a killing the crew and passengers of a ship on the high-seas to take away all their possessions (piracy). They are attempting to portray themselves as victims of a horrible crime. They are also trying to say that their property rights give them absolute control over the use of their 'products'.
Therefore, to fire some broadsides at the idea that copyright is a fundamental, rather than derivative right is a useful tool in the policy battle. To do so in a Right-leaning forum such as NR will also get the word out to people that might not otherwise hear it. Many of the people on the 'free-as-in-speech' side of the discussion also feel the semi-socialist 'profit is wrong' impulse. Therefore, folks on the right tend to dismiss them as simple anti-corporatism for the sake of anti-corporatism, which they won't cotton to. While the populist right wing won't pay much more attention to the arguments in this column than to one in Mother Jones, the intellectual right (your folks who know who Milton Friedman is and who have at least some passing knowledge of the actual concepts laid down in the Bill of Rights, beyond just the 2nd Amendment) are potentially useful allies. Freedom and openness are part of their ideology, because they are necessary for free trade and competitive business, which they're all about.
Swaying these people to the side of light is a Good Thing.
This here is the time to start thinking about everything science fiction has ever told us
Yeah. If the life-form is single-cellular or even simple multicellular, I can't imagine any ethical objection other than the rather tired 'you're playing god!' Its hardly like you're creating a thinking/feeling organism that will then be exploited cruelly. However, a little sci-fi wisdom might be used.
When creating an artificial lifeform, especially single-celled, its difficult to be absolutely certain you aren't going to run into 'Jurassic Park Syndrome' where it turns out to be more dangerous than people thought, and run amok killing the tourists. Sci-fi solution? Put it on a space station at one of the unstable Lagrange points. Then, unless the people enter a code every 20 hours or so, the whole thing is programed to fire a little rocket, pop out of the Lagrange point and completely out of Earth's gravity well, possibly then entering a sun-crossing orbit. Thus if they create a 'we'll kill earth' situation, they end up being cooked pretty thoroughly in a nice big fusion furnace.
I've traveled by train in London, Switzerland, Central Europe (Hungary, Slovakia, Poland), France (Eurostar via the Chunnel), Japan, and the US.
Japan's rail network is pretty damned excellent. Same with Switzerland (and Switzerland's pretty cheap, too, for such an expensive country). Eurostar is pretty good, but the UK side makes such a production of checking in and boarding the train that its almost as inconvenient as taking a plane (except that Waterloo station is a lot easier to get to than Heathrow, and it puts you out in the Metro network when you get to Paris, rather than way the hell out at DeGaul).
The one time I've used inter-city rail in the US - the Silver Meteor from South Carolina to Florida - it took as long as a car trip, cost more, and was no more comfortable.
One thing that no one mentions when discussing rail traffic is other countries' use of rail freight. There's typically a lot of discussion of 'In Japan or in Europe, X percentage of all passenger traffic is carried by rail, but in the US, only a tiny fraction of that number use rail.' While this is true, and to some extent lamentable, no one ever factors in the relative percentages of freight-by-rail.
In the US, the freight rail network is actually fairly advanced. I know from discussions with an English co-worker, who admits to being a bona fide trainspotter, that the UK rail networks carry a fraction of the freight that the US network carries. A much larger percentage of British freight is carried by lorry. Trucking in the US is also well developed, but still faces very stiff competition from rail.
So to claim that the US ignores rail at the behest of Big Oil or Big Airlines - or what ever other Big Corporate Boogie-Man is meant to be greasing the palms of our Elected Officials - is Big Hooey. Rail is important in the US. We just use it differently.
There are some areas where high-speed rail would make a difference. The North-East Corridor is already getting it, but it will be some time before its really up-to-snuff, especially with the cost-overruns and mainanence problems the Acela line's been facing. California (where commuter rail is already in use in the Bay Area, and maybe elsewhere) is another good app. Farthest 'Out There' is my idea for a high-speed rail diamond in Texas. There's a lot of traffic, passenger and otherwise, on I-35, I-45, and I-10 between Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. I go from Dallas to Austin several times a year, and I friggin HATE that stretch of I-35. I'd pay good money for a rail solution. Air travel (Southwest flies that route cheaply) would be a good option, but the hassle of airports on either end means I don't want to mess with it. But rail would be OK. I could catch a bus to the DART light-rail line, down to Union Station, pick up the high-speed rail from there to Austin (it could also serve Waco and Temple/Fort Hood).
I just wish there were, like, really rich people who were willing to fund interesting stuff like word.com or suck.com . . .
Amen. From Salon's article on their own troubles in the internet economy:
Let us observe a moment of silence for the likes of Suck, Hotwired, Feed, Word and APBNews.com, all of which got out the electric cables, yelled "Clear" and zapped the flat-lining carcass of American journalism. They are gone, but will be remembered long after the likes of In Style, Us, Maxim and the era's other newsstand hood ornaments.
I still go back and read old suck.com articles when its a slow news day on/.. Salon isn't quite a replacement, especially now that they've stopped running Camile Paglia's column.
True, but the Whole Foods crowd is going to be eating 'organic' foods anyway, so they'd be keeping their production well away from GM farms, regardless.
I do remember that millet gets eaten a fair amount in Africa, and that it can be a problem because, while its more drought-tolerant than the more common western staples, it's missing some key nutrients (niacin, maybe?) or has them in forms that cannot be digested. So when the other crops fail there people are eating it and still getting sick.
There actually IS a good chance that the soybeans could become contaminated, simply because the reproductive pollen may have the chemicals produced by the genetically modified plant. It's an absorbancy effect, as I understand.
Right, the drugs themselves could get to the neighboring soy, but the title of this article, "Drug Making Genes Added To Corn Jump To Soya" can best be described as wildly inaccurate and misleading. When people actually read these postings, or read the article with a critical eye, they figure out that the genes haven't jumped, and that the contamination was of a very different variety. However, the folks that just read the front-page-version of the/. posting will be left thinking that there are mutant soybeans lurking out there. Don't stop drinking your Silk on account of this story.
The other problem is that every time this kind of breathless doom-and-gloom headline gets out there into popular mythology (with the accompanying "Naw, man, its true - I saw it on Slashdot!"), it dramatically lowers the signal-to-noise ratio in any discussion. If I'm trying to caution my over-eager friend on the legitimate dangers that can be posed by genetic manipulations, I have to spend the first 30 minutes defending against the "Aw, there's nothing wrong - that thing about the mutant soybeans was BS! Those anti-GM types are just a bunch of morons." It makes rational discussion difficult.
Cross-pollenation occurs between plants of the same species. Cross-pollentation is where the pollen of two different corn plants of two different lineages are intentionally introduced to each other. This is the same idea as people marrying somebody from the next town over, rather than their cousin.
The pollen of a corn plant, cannot, under any circumstances, land on a soybean flower and create a seed. Two different species cannot create viable offspring unless they are very closely related (where they produce a cross-species hybrid, such as a mule), and even then these offspring are always infertile.
Genetic Modification still has to follow the laws of biology. No matter what the source of the genes, you can't just put two species in close proximity and have genes cross from one to the other. You really do have to have all that spiffy lab equipment and clever people with test-tubes and droppers and microscopes and so forth.
The genes of the corn plants did not contaminate the soy.
So what's the fuss about? Well, those corn plants were producing diabetes and diahorrea drugs. These drugs are probably not something that you really want healthy people taking, as it could possibly have adverse effects. The soy was planted in feilds that contained the GM corn previously. A few of the seeds left over from the previous planting sprouted when the soy was planted. Now it is entirely possible that these corn plants could still be producing these drugs. This is relatively harmless in the wild where they won't be coming into contact with people, but when they're growing in the middle of food-plants, its possible the soy could absorb some of the drugs, simply due to their proximity. This is a legitimate concern, not becuase of some possible 'genetic contamination', but the more mundane but infinitely more plausible pharmecuetical contamination. You won't get soybeans that produce the chemicals themselves, but they might pick up the chemicals from the nearby corn.
The reason that the food manufacturers are upset about using food-plants for pharmaceuticals is that you don't want people eating corn that's been producing diabetes drugs. Eating a tortilla which messes with your insulin levels would be a Bad Thing. There's no reason these drugs couldn't be produced in, say, millet, which nobody on this continent eats as a food. Therefore, nobody accidentally takes drug-millet and makes cornbread from it, becuase nobody eats it anyway. You still wouldn't want to grow soy in that field the next season, though, for the reasons put forth above.
I'd kinda like to see the/. editors put in a little addendum correcting the article submission a bit on that score. Its not that there's not legitimate cause for concern, but lets make sure that we've got the right concerns before we go off half-cocked./.ers rightly complain about FUD coming from Wintel supporters. We should be equally careful not to spread unwarranted FUD regarding other subjects.
I've more or less given up on ever using my name. I'm one of the better modern sculptors of the 1950s/60s, the originator of the Melissa Virus, the husband of the chick who drove her kids into the lake in SC, mission director for some one of NASA's probe missions (I forget which one, although I know it was not to Uranus, to pre-empt the jokes), and my boss's boss when I worked summers at the DuPont plant in college.
Interestingly, McDonald's had to get special dispensation from the government of Quebec to be allowed to have their name in the possessive for their restaurants in that Province. It's illegal there for us plebs.
One of the biggest bits of interface cruft that I've had to deal with is the C:\ drive-naming scheme. I'm sure it made some form of sense when QDOS was being put together. But we've clearly moved beyond that now.
I use ArcView (a crufty bit of GIS software in its own right) on a daily basis, and share ArcView files with the other folks in my lab. ArcView allows a user to save his map-work to a single file that references multiple databases. Unfortunately, it references all the database files with the letter-based paths. Of course, if I pass that file to somebody else on a different machine, they have to have the exact same drive letters to be able to open the files. This means that I can't save anything on my own hard-drive, since it will always be C: or D:, and they will have to map it somewhere in the G: to Z: range.
Further, this imposes a limit of 26 total mapped drives. Now, for some things, it is possible to use the \\host\sharename method to address files, but many software packages do not allow use of the 'network neighborhood' when browsing for files, so this doesn't work too well under many circumstances.
I think Zoop engaging in a little irony there. The National Security Advisor and Secretary of State aren't white either. I think what our bright young friend was trying to say was that the voting Democratic 'for the poor children who are starving in the streets, the racially discriminated, the handicapped, and the gun violence victims,' was a little specious, given that minorities are represented at the top levels of government, that gun control has not necessarily correlated with crime-reduction, and that top-level Democrats are all about whoring themselves to Hollywood at the little guy's expense (not only Hollings, but also Gore - who killed DAT to get the 'parental advisory stickers for his wife, Tipper).
To sum up, tear-jerking in support of the Democratic Party has been met by a cynical laugh.
Third party voting is about the only form of protest that politicians pay attention to. Take Johnny Foo, a hypothetical right-leaning person whose main political interests lie in limited government spending and strong defense of civil liberties. He's sufficiently in favor of free-market concepts and low tax burdens that he's typically leaning more Republican than Democratic.
However, the Republican candidate in his state, or even the overall Republican party have not been holding up the civil liberties end. Mr. Foo is therefore unhappy with his normal candidate. So he votes for the Libertarian candidate, who has no chance of winning.
Under the current 'Plurality vote' scenario, the Libertarian gets the vote, and the Republican loses it. If enough people have done so, then a significant number of votes are taken away from the Republicans. If this loses him the race, then the Republican strategists know they need to do more to shore up their support from the libertarian wing of thier party. So measures like the CDA, while probably still getting proposed, now might get less top level support, so they tend not to get out of commitee.
Under the 'Instant Runoff system' the Libertarian gets the vote until its clear that he's eliminated, then the Republican gets the vote right back. The Republicans say, 'Oh, the Libertarians got some votes, but its OK, becuase we can rely on their runoff votes!' So nothing changes. No one ever siphons off their votes, so why should they care if the Libertarians are pissed off?
What happened in France was not, indeed, a massive shift to the right. It was a massive collapse on the left! The various left-leaning parties had run out of ideas, and their voters were pissed off about it. They stayed home in droves, and no candidate showed enough leadership to get much of a vote. So enter captain nutjob (that's LePen, if you couldn't guess) - who's still pleasing his base of malcontents upset about immigration - continues to get his 17% of the vote (IIRC he got fewer total votes than last election, but due to voter apathy this was a slightly higher percentage of the vote) and gets into the runoff. Well, you can bet that the French left will be a hellova lot stronger about getting their message out next time.
This is actually a good thing. It allows a spirited minority to occasionally come to power. However, they aren't likely to stay there unless they can convince people that they have the right plan for the country.
As the article said, this is exactly how Lincoln got the presidency in the US. (for those outside the US, it was the election of Lincoln on an anti-slavery ticket that started the American Civil War in 1860) The abolitionists of the fledgeling Republican party were not in a national majority, but since they put forward a strong campaign against a divided and demoralized Democratic party, they won through. This is how change is typically effected in a 'republican' democracy (as opposed to 'parliamentary' democracy, which typically runs on a coalition basis, with Britain as a notable exception).
Its not antidemocratic. Quite the contrary, its healthy. It tells those who lose on a divided ticket that they'd better get their act together, or they can expect a long, cold, unhappy time as the opposition party.
Read the article next time ... (snip) 6. There is no indication that the potential employer even had the woman's phone number.
From the cnet article: "Carter and her potential employer had exchanged telephone messages about the position.... the email was to be the next link in the chain." Sauce for the goose, eh? That sentence was in the same paragraph as the one you quoted.
Perhaps you will be that "mathematical instance."
Or me. How does a lawyer protect me? The point here is that infallibility is impossible, even for doctors, and certainly for ISPs. Every doctor who sees sick people will make a mistake. Sue them or not, you can't make a perfect doctor.
A doctor can kill patient after patient through malpractice... -- and since no one sues, his incompetence doesn't come to light.
A review/oversight board brings it to light. If a patient or patient's family makes a compaint, it gets investigated. The courts, and jurors who have no experience or education from which to evaluate the facts of a case, are ill-prepared to handle such cases.
Lost a loved one? Tough. Lump it.
Everyone loses loved ones. People die. Bad things happen. But its not a free ticket to sue everyone who had contact with them.
This ISP made a mistake. She should certainly be compensated in some form. But to hold the ISP responsible for the salary she might have made is pushing it too far. How many others were also in contention for the spot? When my company has been looking to hire people, we don't contact them one-at-a-time. We'll try and interview as many as possible. Also, if we really wanted somebody, and they didn't respond to an email, we'd follow up with a phone-call; we wouldn't give up unless we had somebody else just as qualified that we'd give the job to. My guess is this was far from a sure thing. At most she should be compensated for the value of the contract (it was not a full-time job) divided by her chances of getting it.
Even then, I think its a bit of a stretch to hold an ISP responsible for the potential monetary value of each email going through their system. She should not be paid 65K because of one email. I assume (ICBW) that this was a personal email account, not a business email account. Most ISPs have more expensive services for small businesses. They're more expensive because they have to be mission critical. If you're doing business by email, and if one email could lose you $65k, you should be paying more than me, who's not really doing anything critical with it. I'd just as soon pay the lower rates and take my chances. But since I'm knowingly doing so, I also shouldn't get my drawers in an uproar because I then lose out if I get in a tiff with them and refuse to pay my bill.
Now that said, I do think that the other element in her lawsuit, the change in policy to have emails to suspended accounts bounce rather than stick makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, most of the 'facts' in this case are coming from the aggreived party, so there may be some spin. One question is wether she had told Inter.net that she was cancelling the account, or had simply stopped calling them. That's not clear from her account of the situation (or I missed it). It makes a big difference. It's plausible that their thinking was that the billing dispute would eventually be resolved, and that the account would be re-activated. In which case she then gets all the email that she'd recieved in that time. Some people would probably prefer that, although I wouldn't.
On another note, not all ISPs do the black-hole thing. I've got at&t broadband, and managed to forget to pay a bill while I was on vacation this summer. When my account was suspended, my email account started bouncing messages. I found out because I'd sent an email to my roomate (different address on the same account) and it'd bounced. So I was able to settle up and not lose any emails, although I was still incommunicado til then. They suck other ways, but that's not one of them.
This is true. I've seen relatively little anime, and mostly on Adult Swim/Toonami. I'm typically unimpressed. DBZ is largely just ridiculous, and MSG seems to be Transformers/Battle of the Planets with a more pretensious story line. That could be editing, or just that I chose bad episodes to start with, but I quickly gave up on it.
Bebop is pretty cool, and I'm looking forward to an unedited, undubbed viewing of the DVDs a friend of mine got. It's got a flair that is missing from many of CN's titles. Similar, but a bit more juvenile is Outlaw Star.
And while I would never claim it wasn't also ridiculous, I dig the Tenchi Muyo OVA. I went out on a limb and got the DVD collection, and watched the dubbed version. Christ-on-a-pony was that edited down, and the dubbed translation is much tamer and less explicit than the subtitles.
While visiting a friend in SF a while back, I got a chance to see the San Jose PBS station's anime block. That night they were showing Lain, which is a fairly odd show that puts characters and story above flashy animation and noisy fights. This sort of thing is something adults probably COULD get into.
Don't expect the animation to look beter than the computer aided stuff of The Simpsons or '90s era batman. Its a different style, and seamless motion is less important than more general look-and-feel considerations.
The national rankings of "Reporters without Borders" were measures of freedom of the press, not freedom of speech.
Free Press != Free Speech
If only "journalists" are protected by free press laws, then all manner of censoring and abuse can go on that would never create a blip on the free press index.
That's not to say that the RWB index is useless, but you need to understand what it was saying. The US could certainly use some renewed focus on civil liberties, now that we've had some time to digest the post 9/11 world.
The EU is working towards expanding eastwards. Poland, Hungary, The Czech Republic, the Balkans, Turkey, the Baltic states IIRC. The list is long, and the citizens add up quickly.
Yeah, once you factor in the eastern europeans and so forth, the EU will be closer to the 600-700M mark, while even the high-end projections of the US will be closer to 550.
By the way, have the Turks ever gotten rid of capitol punishment? I know that was a sticking point with them for a while.
Anyhow, if it comes to a pissing match in 2050 about who has the largest population, I wouldn't make any bets yet.
Amen. Ever read any of the 1950 projections of what the world would be like in 2000? We still have oil, there aren't any bases on the moon, and there are a lot fewer than 12 billion people. And we're not eating soylent green.
Still, regardless of who's bigger, there will be some demographic shifts that will make the US look even more distinct from Europe.
And of course, continued population growth may be more of a curse than a blessing. Especially when oil really does start running out.
Of course getting back on topic, by then, net statistics between the two will be largely identical, although there will probably only be two main languages in the US/Canada market (the French Canadians will be a fairly small subculture compared to Anglophone Canadians/Americans and American Hispanics) compared to a much wider linguistic variety in the EU, which will make the Norteamericano market remain a bit more unified.
Actually I meant small population and had Sweden and S Korea in mind (I know the ROK is much larger than Sweden, too, but still small relative to the US). Japan, a rather large country by population but small by area is another outlier in my argument.
I was only talking about the EU. Not the continent. I don't know the overall figures, but the current EU population is around 500M, IIRC. The US is up around 280M right now. And the birth-rate in the US is back around replacement, while Europe is shrinking (down near 1.6). Add to that much higher immigration in the US, and its not hard to see the US overtaking a smaller Europe. However this does not include Eastern Europe, or the Balkans, except Greece.
Since Europe is still larger than the Gringo-land by a fair amount, a somewhat smaller per-capita net usage stat will put the total number of users ahead of the US. Its still only in small countries with a concerted effort to push the internet that net usage per-capita tops the US. And that may only be in broadband - I don't remember off the top of my head.
The US, between immigration and a rebounding birth-rate, will outstrip the population of Europe before 2050, if current trends hold. But net usage should be around 99% by then throughout the developed world.
Are you thinking of The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness?
I'd certainly place The Dispossessed in a dual hard-sf/new-wave slot. Hard SF in that it adheres to scientific possibility pretty well, with no 'fuzzy' science like telepathy or super-advanced technology inserted solely for wiz-bang coolness. And of course New Wave for its exploration of an entire world. However, I saw no fantasy elements, so I'd bet that he's thinking of either The Left Hand of Darkness or The Lathe of Heaven. I haven't read either (largely because The Dispossessed took so much effort to slog through: I respect the ideas in the book, but the book was way dry for my taste), but I'm familiar with the basic premise of The Lathe of Heaven and it would seem to fit with the concept of a magical realism, where there are elements (telepathy, magic, precognition, etc) which violate known scientific law, but which is treated according to rational, self-consistent rules within the universe in question. I think today's audience kinda expects some of that. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer treats magic and the supernatural as adhering to rules which can be understood, even though they are somewhat mystical.
This is patently untrue. For example, in the article, they point out that personal mail coming to you through the company's mail room is not subject to search or opening. This would be a direct violation of federal law in the US. Similarly, in many states it is illegal to monitor or record phone calls without the express permission of both parties in the call, regardless of who owns the telephone. So when you say 'However, to expect that what you do within the walls of your company is private is laughable,' not only is it not laughable, it is in many cases a matter of law. If they want to set up a camera to monitor wether you're working, that's their business, but they can't screen your mail. So it is hardly unreasonable to think that a certain modicum of privacy could be protected in web use.
My company also has as part of their acceptable IT use policy that the internet can be used for certain amounts of personal business that cannot be conducted outside of business hours. This includes personal banking, bill paying, and other such activities. If we assume that they then have the right to spy on anything we do, then they can spy on our personal finances, medical history, or whatever. By allowing us expressly in their IT policy to use the web for personal business, they've put themselves in a position where we have a demonstable expectation of privacy. Of course, this is not true in the case of every company, and even the US Mail is not private in cases of companies that deal with national security or other sensitive activities.
Slashdot Mirror
the RGB Mars series has its heart in the right place. It has excellent technology, and is first-rate hard SF in that regard. It also introduced a very interesting set of conflicts.
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The Big Earth/Small Mars conflict is fairly interesting, although these themes are not in any way new. It's only real innovation is that it was on top of the very latest and hippest anti-corporate/sustainable-economics ideology. Although this could have been more immaginative, its very much fulfilling one of the major roles of good SF; namely, exploring and explaining current social/political trends in the context of their future development.
The other, and substantially more interesting conflict in this series is the fight between the Reds and the Greens. In this case, the Reds are the environmentalists, who want to keep Mars in its pristine, wild state, unspoiled by terraforming. They want to study Mars as it is rather than bending Mars to the wants and desires of Humanity. This theme fulfills the ultimate role of good SF, in taking some future problem, and exploring how humanity will react to it.
This said, I never finished Blue Mars. I've been about 3/4 through the book for two years now, and although I've left the bookmark at my current spot in the book, I'm probably never going to try and finish it. The simple problem is that there's no real story line any more. In being overly-realistic, KSR is getting bogged down in fairly mundane day-to-day soap-opera behavior - petty rivalries between people, and long descriptions of what people do for entertainment and employment - without any substantial unifying thread for all the characters. Its gotten to a point that its just telling the stories of a bunch of distantly related people who might or might not interact, but there is no compelling world-spanning conflict at this stage. In short, by this point in the novel, people are still fairly active, but there's really nothing at stake.
Still, Red Mars, at least, is quite a good read, and its up to the individual to decide how far they want to go before they feel they've gotten through the important bits of the story line.
And for a really first-rate old-school SF treatment of Mars, check out the Issac Azimov compilation called The Martian Way and Other Stories
Would we prosecute an individual who created and sold a product used to suppress the same principles held dear by his home country? Of course we would; we'd nail that seditious, un-patriotic bastard to a wall.
What you mean 'we' Kemosabe? If you mean America, we might hold them civilly responsible for damages, assuming that American courts decided they had jurisdiction. However, unless there's a US law stating that 'No individual shall sell to anybody that violates US civil rights,' they'd not be criminally liable. And if an individual were civilly responsible, then a corporation would be equally responsible.
If it were true that no one in the US could do business with another country for violating US civil rights as defined by our constitution, no one would be able to do business with most of Europe, because the UK's near-total ban on gun ownership by its subjects is a clear violation of the right to keep and bear arms. Of course, the US doesn't worry about such things, unless they're used egregiously.
China has much bigger civil rights violations than the Great Firewall of China. Just ask the guy in front of the tank. Selling them filtering software is no more criminal than selling it to an American library (it's the library's fault for using it, or the legislature's fault for requiring it).
This will not be proof that NASA went to the moon. Photographic evidence isn't proof anymore. Anything can be faked. Otherwise, we'd have to believe that Burt did, in fact, meet with Osama bin Laden.
The irrefrickinfutable evidence of the moon landings is the rock samples. They don't have evidence of re-entry, so they aren't meteorites. Chemically, these things just didn't come from earth. They don't have enough water in them. Everything on earth, no matter how dry an environment it comes from, contains a fair amount of water. Even the rocks of the Antarctic Dry Valleys, where there's been no precipitation have some water in hydrated compounds in the rocks. Same for deep-crustal and even mantle rocks brought to the surface by vulcanism.
Fact is, the moon rocks may or may not have come from the moon, but they sure as hell came from somewhere and they didn't enter the earth's atmosphere on their own.
My company uses Websense. My work revolves around providing mapping data for locations all over the world for wireless network planning apps. As you can imagine, I have to deal with maps written in Spanish, French, Portugese, Russian, Arabic, and a number of other languages. I also have to deal with customers and vendors who speak various languages. So for a long time I used babelfish pretty regularly. Then my company started using Websense. Websense classifies almost all translation sites as 'Anonymizer/Translator' which is a no-no because 'it can be used to defeat filtering'.
/..
What was really funny was that I didn't figure out that was the problem for a long time, because a database error (or just stupidity on their part) meant that every time I was denied access to it, it said it was blocked as a 'Sex' site. I figured they'd just made a mistake and not meant to block it at all, so I spent a couple of weeks trying to get it fixed before they finally told me that they meant to block it the whole time.
I live in perpetual fear of the time I call 'The Coming of the Great Google Blackout' when they realize that Google's 'cache' can serve as a 'proxy avoidance system.' If they block Google, I'll never be able to find information on local mapping datums, data sources, or just about anything else I do with the net at work. When they do that, about the only thing I'll be able to use the net for is wasting company time reading
I read "Republican Nation" as not a Nation run by "The Republicans" but a Nation that is a Republic
I think if he'd meant that he'd have used a little 'r'. Though the Good Thing capitolization scheme has muddied those waters.
If he really is tying all this on the GOP, I'd point out two things. One, National Review is widely recognized as a Right Wing rag, and is edited by one Wm. F. Buckley, so there's dissent on both left and right on this one. Two, what party does Senator Disney belong to? (That's a rhetorical question. He's a Democrat.)
And as far as not proposing a solution, that may not be as big a deficiency as you'd think. Remember that Big Copyright is trying to persuade everyone that copying is theft, and every bit as morally repugnant as bording a killing the crew and passengers of a ship on the high-seas to take away all their possessions (piracy). They are attempting to portray themselves as victims of a horrible crime. They are also trying to say that their property rights give them absolute control over the use of their 'products'.
Therefore, to fire some broadsides at the idea that copyright is a fundamental, rather than derivative right is a useful tool in the policy battle. To do so in a Right-leaning forum such as NR will also get the word out to people that might not otherwise hear it. Many of the people on the 'free-as-in-speech' side of the discussion also feel the semi-socialist 'profit is wrong' impulse. Therefore, folks on the right tend to dismiss them as simple anti-corporatism for the sake of anti-corporatism, which they won't cotton to. While the populist right wing won't pay much more attention to the arguments in this column than to one in Mother Jones, the intellectual right (your folks who know who Milton Friedman is and who have at least some passing knowledge of the actual concepts laid down in the Bill of Rights, beyond just the 2nd Amendment) are potentially useful allies. Freedom and openness are part of their ideology, because they are necessary for free trade and competitive business, which they're all about.
Swaying these people to the side of light is a Good Thing.
This here is the time to start thinking about everything science fiction has ever told us
Yeah. If the life-form is single-cellular or even simple multicellular, I can't imagine any ethical objection other than the rather tired 'you're playing god!' Its hardly like you're creating a thinking/feeling organism that will then be exploited cruelly. However, a little sci-fi wisdom might be used.
When creating an artificial lifeform, especially single-celled, its difficult to be absolutely certain you aren't going to run into 'Jurassic Park Syndrome' where it turns out to be more dangerous than people thought, and run amok killing the tourists. Sci-fi solution? Put it on a space station at one of the unstable Lagrange points. Then, unless the people enter a code every 20 hours or so, the whole thing is programed to fire a little rocket, pop out of the Lagrange point and completely out of Earth's gravity well, possibly then entering a sun-crossing orbit. Thus if they create a 'we'll kill earth' situation, they end up being cooked pretty thoroughly in a nice big fusion furnace.
Plus we get a cool manned space program - bonus!
I've traveled by train in London, Switzerland, Central Europe (Hungary, Slovakia, Poland), France (Eurostar via the Chunnel), Japan, and the US.
Japan's rail network is pretty damned excellent. Same with Switzerland (and Switzerland's pretty cheap, too, for such an expensive country). Eurostar is pretty good, but the UK side makes such a production of checking in and boarding the train that its almost as inconvenient as taking a plane (except that Waterloo station is a lot easier to get to than Heathrow, and it puts you out in the Metro network when you get to Paris, rather than way the hell out at DeGaul).
The one time I've used inter-city rail in the US - the Silver Meteor from South Carolina to Florida - it took as long as a car trip, cost more, and was no more comfortable.
One thing that no one mentions when discussing rail traffic is other countries' use of rail freight. There's typically a lot of discussion of 'In Japan or in Europe, X percentage of all passenger traffic is carried by rail, but in the US, only a tiny fraction of that number use rail.' While this is true, and to some extent lamentable, no one ever factors in the relative percentages of freight-by-rail.
In the US, the freight rail network is actually fairly advanced. I know from discussions with an English co-worker, who admits to being a bona fide trainspotter, that the UK rail networks carry a fraction of the freight that the US network carries. A much larger percentage of British freight is carried by lorry. Trucking in the US is also well developed, but still faces very stiff competition from rail.
So to claim that the US ignores rail at the behest of Big Oil or Big Airlines - or what ever other Big Corporate Boogie-Man is meant to be greasing the palms of our Elected Officials - is Big Hooey. Rail is important in the US. We just use it differently.
There are some areas where high-speed rail would make a difference. The North-East Corridor is already getting it, but it will be some time before its really up-to-snuff, especially with the cost-overruns and mainanence problems the Acela line's been facing. California (where commuter rail is already in use in the Bay Area, and maybe elsewhere) is another good app. Farthest 'Out There' is my idea for a high-speed rail diamond in Texas. There's a lot of traffic, passenger and otherwise, on I-35, I-45, and I-10 between Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston. I go from Dallas to Austin several times a year, and I friggin HATE that stretch of I-35. I'd pay good money for a rail solution. Air travel (Southwest flies that route cheaply) would be a good option, but the hassle of airports on either end means I don't want to mess with it. But rail would be OK. I could catch a bus to the DART light-rail line, down to Union Station, pick up the high-speed rail from there to Austin (it could also serve Waco and Temple/Fort Hood).
Amen. From Salon's article on their own troubles in the internet economy:
I still go back and read old suck.com articles when its a slow news day on
True, but the Whole Foods crowd is going to be eating 'organic' foods anyway, so they'd be keeping their production well away from GM farms, regardless.
I do remember that millet gets eaten a fair amount in Africa, and that it can be a problem because, while its more drought-tolerant than the more common western staples, it's missing some key nutrients (niacin, maybe?) or has them in forms that cannot be digested. So when the other crops fail there people are eating it and still getting sick.
There actually IS a good chance that the soybeans could become contaminated, simply because the reproductive pollen may have the chemicals produced by the genetically modified plant. It's an absorbancy effect, as I understand.
/. posting will be left thinking that there are mutant soybeans lurking out there. Don't stop drinking your Silk on account of this story.
Right, the drugs themselves could get to the neighboring soy, but the title of this article, "Drug Making Genes Added To Corn Jump To Soya" can best be described as wildly inaccurate and misleading. When people actually read these postings, or read the article with a critical eye, they figure out that the genes haven't jumped, and that the contamination was of a very different variety. However, the folks that just read the front-page-version of the
The other problem is that every time this kind of breathless doom-and-gloom headline gets out there into popular mythology (with the accompanying "Naw, man, its true - I saw it on Slashdot!"), it dramatically lowers the signal-to-noise ratio in any discussion. If I'm trying to caution my over-eager friend on the legitimate dangers that can be posed by genetic manipulations, I have to spend the first 30 minutes defending against the "Aw, there's nothing wrong - that thing about the mutant soybeans was BS! Those anti-GM types are just a bunch of morons." It makes rational discussion difficult.
OK, Just to clear this up a little bit.
/. editors put in a little addendum correcting the article submission a bit on that score. Its not that there's not legitimate cause for concern, but lets make sure that we've got the right concerns before we go off half-cocked. /.ers rightly complain about FUD coming from Wintel supporters. We should be equally careful not to spread unwarranted FUD regarding other subjects.
Cross-pollenation occurs between plants of the same species. Cross-pollentation is where the pollen of two different corn plants of two different lineages are intentionally introduced to each other. This is the same idea as people marrying somebody from the next town over, rather than their cousin.
The pollen of a corn plant, cannot, under any circumstances, land on a soybean flower and create a seed. Two different species cannot create viable offspring unless they are very closely related (where they produce a cross-species hybrid, such as a mule), and even then these offspring are always infertile.
Genetic Modification still has to follow the laws of biology. No matter what the source of the genes, you can't just put two species in close proximity and have genes cross from one to the other. You really do have to have all that spiffy lab equipment and clever people with test-tubes and droppers and microscopes and so forth.
The genes of the corn plants did not contaminate the soy.
So what's the fuss about? Well, those corn plants were producing diabetes and diahorrea drugs. These drugs are probably not something that you really want healthy people taking, as it could possibly have adverse effects. The soy was planted in feilds that contained the GM corn previously. A few of the seeds left over from the previous planting sprouted when the soy was planted. Now it is entirely possible that these corn plants could still be producing these drugs. This is relatively harmless in the wild where they won't be coming into contact with people, but when they're growing in the middle of food-plants, its possible the soy could absorb some of the drugs, simply due to their proximity. This is a legitimate concern, not becuase of some possible 'genetic contamination', but the more mundane but infinitely more plausible pharmecuetical contamination. You won't get soybeans that produce the chemicals themselves, but they might pick up the chemicals from the nearby corn.
The reason that the food manufacturers are upset about using food-plants for pharmaceuticals is that you don't want people eating corn that's been producing diabetes drugs. Eating a tortilla which messes with your insulin levels would be a Bad Thing. There's no reason these drugs couldn't be produced in, say, millet, which nobody on this continent eats as a food. Therefore, nobody accidentally takes drug-millet and makes cornbread from it, becuase nobody eats it anyway. You still wouldn't want to grow soy in that field the next season, though, for the reasons put forth above.
I'd kinda like to see the
I've more or less given up on ever using my name. I'm one of the better modern sculptors of the 1950s/60s, the originator of the Melissa Virus, the husband of the chick who drove her kids into the lake in SC, mission director for some one of NASA's probe missions (I forget which one, although I know it was not to Uranus, to pre-empt the jokes), and my boss's boss when I worked summers at the DuPont plant in college.
Interestingly, McDonald's had to get special dispensation from the government of Quebec to be allowed to have their name in the possessive for their restaurants in that Province. It's illegal there for us plebs.
One of the biggest bits of interface cruft that I've had to deal with is the C:\ drive-naming scheme. I'm sure it made some form of sense when QDOS was being put together. But we've clearly moved beyond that now.
I use ArcView (a crufty bit of GIS software in its own right) on a daily basis, and share ArcView files with the other folks in my lab. ArcView allows a user to save his map-work to a single file that references multiple databases. Unfortunately, it references all the database files with the letter-based paths. Of course, if I pass that file to somebody else on a different machine, they have to have the exact same drive letters to be able to open the files. This means that I can't save anything on my own hard-drive, since it will always be C: or D:, and they will have to map it somewhere in the G: to Z: range.
Further, this imposes a limit of 26 total mapped drives. Now, for some things, it is possible to use the \\host\sharename method to address files, but many software packages do not allow use of the 'network neighborhood' when browsing for files, so this doesn't work too well under many circumstances.
C:\ = Cruft!
I think Zoop engaging in a little irony there. The National Security Advisor and Secretary of State aren't white either. I think what our bright young friend was trying to say was that the voting Democratic 'for the poor children who are starving in the streets, the racially discriminated, the handicapped, and the gun violence victims,' was a little specious, given that minorities are represented at the top levels of government, that gun control has not necessarily correlated with crime-reduction, and that top-level Democrats are all about whoring themselves to Hollywood at the little guy's expense (not only Hollings, but also Gore - who killed DAT to get the 'parental advisory stickers for his wife, Tipper).
To sum up, tear-jerking in support of the Democratic Party has been met by a cynical laugh.
Third party voting is about the only form of protest that politicians pay attention to. Take Johnny Foo, a hypothetical right-leaning person whose main political interests lie in limited government spending and strong defense of civil liberties. He's sufficiently in favor of free-market concepts and low tax burdens that he's typically leaning more Republican than Democratic.
However, the Republican candidate in his state, or even the overall Republican party have not been holding up the civil liberties end. Mr. Foo is therefore unhappy with his normal candidate. So he votes for the Libertarian candidate, who has no chance of winning.
Under the current 'Plurality vote' scenario, the Libertarian gets the vote, and the Republican loses it. If enough people have done so, then a significant number of votes are taken away from the Republicans. If this loses him the race, then the Republican strategists know they need to do more to shore up their support from the libertarian wing of thier party. So measures like the CDA, while probably still getting proposed, now might get less top level support, so they tend not to get out of commitee.
Under the 'Instant Runoff system' the Libertarian gets the vote until its clear that he's eliminated, then the Republican gets the vote right back. The Republicans say, 'Oh, the Libertarians got some votes, but its OK, becuase we can rely on their runoff votes!' So nothing changes. No one ever siphons off their votes, so why should they care if the Libertarians are pissed off?
What happened in France was not, indeed, a massive shift to the right. It was a massive collapse on the left! The various left-leaning parties had run out of ideas, and their voters were pissed off about it. They stayed home in droves, and no candidate showed enough leadership to get much of a vote. So enter captain nutjob (that's LePen, if you couldn't guess) - who's still pleasing his base of malcontents upset about immigration - continues to get his 17% of the vote (IIRC he got fewer total votes than last election, but due to voter apathy this was a slightly higher percentage of the vote) and gets into the runoff. Well, you can bet that the French left will be a hellova lot stronger about getting their message out next time.
This is actually a good thing. It allows a spirited minority to occasionally come to power. However, they aren't likely to stay there unless they can convince people that they have the right plan for the country.
As the article said, this is exactly how Lincoln got the presidency in the US. (for those outside the US, it was the election of Lincoln on an anti-slavery ticket that started the American Civil War in 1860) The abolitionists of the fledgeling Republican party were not in a national majority, but since they put forward a strong campaign against a divided and demoralized Democratic party, they won through. This is how change is typically effected in a 'republican' democracy (as opposed to 'parliamentary' democracy, which typically runs on a coalition basis, with Britain as a notable exception).
Its not antidemocratic. Quite the contrary, its healthy. It tells those who lose on a divided ticket that they'd better get their act together, or they can expect a long, cold, unhappy time as the opposition party.
Read the article next time ...
... the email was to be the next link in the chain." Sauce for the goose, eh? That sentence was in the same paragraph as the one you quoted.
... -- and since no one sues, his incompetence doesn't come to light.
(snip)
6. There is no indication that the potential employer even had the woman's phone number.
From the cnet article: "Carter and her potential employer had exchanged telephone messages about the position.
Perhaps you will be that "mathematical instance."
Or me. How does a lawyer protect me? The point here is that infallibility is impossible, even for doctors, and certainly for ISPs. Every doctor who sees sick people will make a mistake. Sue them or not, you can't make a perfect doctor.
A doctor can kill patient after patient through malpractice
A review/oversight board brings it to light. If a patient or patient's family makes a compaint, it gets investigated. The courts, and jurors who have no experience or education from which to evaluate the facts of a case, are ill-prepared to handle such cases.
Lost a loved one? Tough. Lump it.
Everyone loses loved ones. People die. Bad things happen. But its not a free ticket to sue everyone who had contact with them.
This ISP made a mistake. She should certainly be compensated in some form. But to hold the ISP responsible for the salary she might have made is pushing it too far. How many others were also in contention for the spot? When my company has been looking to hire people, we don't contact them one-at-a-time. We'll try and interview as many as possible. Also, if we really wanted somebody, and they didn't respond to an email, we'd follow up with a phone-call; we wouldn't give up unless we had somebody else just as qualified that we'd give the job to. My guess is this was far from a sure thing. At most she should be compensated for the value of the contract (it was not a full-time job) divided by her chances of getting it.
Even then, I think its a bit of a stretch to hold an ISP responsible for the potential monetary value of each email going through their system. She should not be paid 65K because of one email. I assume (ICBW) that this was a personal email account, not a business email account. Most ISPs have more expensive services for small businesses. They're more expensive because they have to be mission critical. If you're doing business by email, and if one email could lose you $65k, you should be paying more than me, who's not really doing anything critical with it. I'd just as soon pay the lower rates and take my chances. But since I'm knowingly doing so, I also shouldn't get my drawers in an uproar because I then lose out if I get in a tiff with them and refuse to pay my bill.
Now that said, I do think that the other element in her lawsuit, the change in policy to have emails to suspended accounts bounce rather than stick makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, most of the 'facts' in this case are coming from the aggreived party, so there may be some spin. One question is wether she had told Inter.net that she was cancelling the account, or had simply stopped calling them. That's not clear from her account of the situation (or I missed it). It makes a big difference. It's plausible that their thinking was that the billing dispute would eventually be resolved, and that the account would be re-activated. In which case she then gets all the email that she'd recieved in that time. Some people would probably prefer that, although I wouldn't.
On another note, not all ISPs do the black-hole thing. I've got at&t broadband, and managed to forget to pay a bill while I was on vacation this summer. When my account was suspended, my email account started bouncing messages. I found out because I'd sent an email to my roomate (different address on the same account) and it'd bounced. So I was able to settle up and not lose any emails, although I was still incommunicado til then. They suck other ways, but that's not one of them.
This is true. I've seen relatively little anime, and mostly on Adult Swim/Toonami. I'm typically unimpressed. DBZ is largely just ridiculous, and MSG seems to be Transformers/Battle of the Planets with a more pretensious story line. That could be editing, or just that I chose bad episodes to start with, but I quickly gave up on it.
Bebop is pretty cool, and I'm looking forward to an unedited, undubbed viewing of the DVDs a friend of mine got. It's got a flair that is missing from many of CN's titles. Similar, but a bit more juvenile is Outlaw Star.
And while I would never claim it wasn't also ridiculous, I dig the Tenchi Muyo OVA. I went out on a limb and got the DVD collection, and watched the dubbed version. Christ-on-a-pony was that edited down, and the dubbed translation is much tamer and less explicit than the subtitles.
While visiting a friend in SF a while back, I got a chance to see the San Jose PBS station's anime block. That night they were showing Lain, which is a fairly odd show that puts characters and story above flashy animation and noisy fights. This sort of thing is something adults probably COULD get into.
Don't expect the animation to look beter than the computer aided stuff of The Simpsons or '90s era batman. Its a different style, and seamless motion is less important than more general look-and-feel considerations.
The national rankings of "Reporters without Borders" were measures of freedom of the press, not freedom of speech.
Free Press != Free Speech
If only "journalists" are protected by free press laws, then all manner of censoring and abuse can go on that would never create a blip on the free press index.
That's not to say that the RWB index is useless, but you need to understand what it was saying. The US could certainly use some renewed focus on civil liberties, now that we've had some time to digest the post 9/11 world.
Uh, wouldn't that moot the question at hand anyway?
How many countries that don't have legitimate elections have independent review boards for anything?
The EU is working towards expanding eastwards. Poland, Hungary, The Czech Republic, the Balkans, Turkey, the Baltic states IIRC. The list is long, and the citizens add up quickly.
Yeah, once you factor in the eastern europeans and so forth, the EU will be closer to the 600-700M mark, while even the high-end projections of the US will be closer to 550.
By the way, have the Turks ever gotten rid of capitol punishment? I know that was a sticking point with them for a while.
Anyhow, if it comes to a pissing match in 2050 about who has the largest population, I wouldn't make any bets yet.
Amen. Ever read any of the 1950 projections of what the world would be like in 2000? We still have oil, there aren't any bases on the moon, and there are a lot fewer than 12 billion people. And we're not eating soylent green.
Still, regardless of who's bigger, there will be some demographic shifts that will make the US look even more distinct from Europe.
And of course, continued population growth may be more of a curse than a blessing. Especially when oil really does start running out.
Of course getting back on topic, by then, net statistics between the two will be largely identical, although there will probably only be two main languages in the US/Canada market (the French Canadians will be a fairly small subculture compared to Anglophone Canadians/Americans and American Hispanics) compared to a much wider linguistic variety in the EU, which will make the Norteamericano market remain a bit more unified.
Actually I meant small population and had Sweden and S Korea in mind (I know the ROK is much larger than Sweden, too, but still small relative to the US). Japan, a rather large country by population but small by area is another outlier in my argument.
I was only talking about the EU. Not the continent. I don't know the overall figures, but the current EU population is around 500M, IIRC. The US is up around 280M right now. And the birth-rate in the US is back around replacement, while Europe is shrinking (down near 1.6). Add to that much higher immigration in the US, and its not hard to see the US overtaking a smaller Europe. However this does not include Eastern Europe, or the Balkans, except Greece.
The Economist has a better explanation than I do.
Since Europe is still larger than the Gringo-land by a fair amount, a somewhat smaller per-capita net usage stat will put the total number of users ahead of the US. Its still only in small countries with a concerted effort to push the internet that net usage per-capita tops the US. And that may only be in broadband - I don't remember off the top of my head.
The US, between immigration and a rebounding birth-rate, will outstrip the population of Europe before 2050, if current trends hold. But net usage should be around 99% by then throughout the developed world.
Are you thinking of The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness?
I'd certainly place The Dispossessed in a dual hard-sf/new-wave slot. Hard SF in that it adheres to scientific possibility pretty well, with no 'fuzzy' science like telepathy or super-advanced technology inserted solely for wiz-bang coolness. And of course New Wave for its exploration of an entire world. However, I saw no fantasy elements, so I'd bet that he's thinking of either The Left Hand of Darkness or The Lathe of Heaven. I haven't read either (largely because The Dispossessed took so much effort to slog through: I respect the ideas in the book, but the book was way dry for my taste), but I'm familiar with the basic premise of The Lathe of Heaven and it would seem to fit with the concept of a magical realism, where there are elements (telepathy, magic, precognition, etc) which violate known scientific law, but which is treated according to rational, self-consistent rules within the universe in question. I think today's audience kinda expects some of that. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer treats magic and the supernatural as adhering to rules which can be understood, even though they are somewhat mystical.
This is patently untrue. For example, in the article, they point out that personal mail coming to you through the company's mail room is not subject to search or opening. This would be a direct violation of federal law in the US. Similarly, in many states it is illegal to monitor or record phone calls without the express permission of both parties in the call, regardless of who owns the telephone. So when you say 'However, to expect that what you do within the walls of your company is private is laughable,' not only is it not laughable, it is in many cases a matter of law. If they want to set up a camera to monitor wether you're working, that's their business, but they can't screen your mail. So it is hardly unreasonable to think that a certain modicum of privacy could be protected in web use.
My company also has as part of their acceptable IT use policy that the internet can be used for certain amounts of personal business that cannot be conducted outside of business hours. This includes personal banking, bill paying, and other such activities. If we assume that they then have the right to spy on anything we do, then they can spy on our personal finances, medical history, or whatever. By allowing us expressly in their IT policy to use the web for personal business, they've put themselves in a position where we have a demonstable expectation of privacy. Of course, this is not true in the case of every company, and even the US Mail is not private in cases of companies that deal with national security or other sensitive activities.