Well, I don't think the spies are intended to truly tear down the walls brick by brick, but to undermine confidence in the defences or recruit key guards to open gates. Troy fell with her walls up, becuase they were compromised from the inside.
As soon as my roomate gets a hold of this, I won't see him for months.
Irony abounds. But I am a strong advocate of gun ownership as a civil right, but also am a strong opponent of curfews, flag-burning amendments, and other signs of the police state.
It won't only be right-wingers imposing unreasonable restrictions. Democrats are just as happy to use the power of law to silence speech they oppose. The problem is not one of left/right ideology, but rather one of authoritarianism versus libertarianism. There are left and right wing authoritarians in roughly egual numbers.
Left-wing appologists (such, apparantly, as yourself) tend to forget that although McCarthy was a Republican, his commission was bi-partisan, and there weren't many dissenting voices from the democratic party until he'd been running rampant for quite a while. Also, President Eisenhower (a republican, if you haven't read your history books) got fed up with him as quickly as the democrats.
Which is not to say that I don't hope the democrats fight for civil liberties. I'm all about that. I hope anyone in elected office will do so. But to turn it into a partisan rant is to ignore history.
If every block of a city is defended by a modest supply of small arms, the city is unconquerable.
I concur. The Onion's Our Dumb Century has a faux editorial headline from 1969 reading "WE CAN LAND A MAN ON THE MOON, BUT WE CAN'T BOMB A TINY ASIAN NATION INTO THE STONE AGE?"
Vietnam had a bunch of guys without much in the way of a mechanized army, but ask them if they lost the war. The US Army beat the NVA at every set-peice engagement. They had tanks, and every time they used them, we stomped them into the ground. Decisively. The US never lost a major engagement with regular army troops from North Vietnam. Estimates of casualties inflicted by US forces during that war range from 500,000 to 2,000,000. Yet in the end, the North Vietnamese drove the US out, and then used regular army units to conquer the Republic of Vietnam.
Edward Abbey, environmental activist and writer, said, "The rifle and handgun are 'equalizers'--the weapons of a democracy. Tanks and bombers represent dictatorship."
Small arms also tend to keep the police and other government enforcers reasonable. If John Suspect might be carrying a gun, law enforcement won't be nearly so quick to put him in a position where he has nothing left to lose. Ditto for prospective mass murderers, muggers, rapists, and so forth.
Here I disagree, not on political grounds, since as a libertarian I am at least suspicious of, and more often vocally opposed to, any governmental edicts opposed to individual empowerment. However, from an empirical observation standpoint, I have to say that British police (outside Northern Ireland) facing a largely unarmed populace, are not nearly as likely to shoot first and seek to understand later as their US counterparts. For the most part, they are unarmed, and, I believe, most are not even trained in firearm use. I could be wrong here, but that's my impression.
Also, Tianenmen Square would have been far bloodier if only those students had had weapons. There were police and infantry units in the area that could have been used to cover the tanks if they'd been threatened. The only way there'd have been a different outcome in Beijing is a thoroughly armed populous sympathetic to the protestors' cause.
Also, tanks in the open are, effectively, machinegun pillboxes that can survive quite a while against small arms and pointy sticks.
Generally, an armed populace in a democracy defends liberty not by firing their weapons, but by remaining involved in government to maintain their rights. If a government can't even take away the populace's guns, it may be too distracted to throw people in the gulag for "political crimes." Hence, I don't let the Government take away my gun rights, despite the shrill cries of Rosie O'Donnell, because any government that respects a dubious right, will generally also respect the really important ones.
And so we need to keep civil liberties top on our list. However, searches of people entering and exiting likely terrorist targets are not unreasonable, so long as it is only as a preventative, and not an investigative search, and is specifically targetted on places with credible threats. Shopping malls are out. Government installations responsible for policy and research on combatting infectious disease and biological warfare are probably in right now.
One, they don't keep dangerous pathogens at NIH in Bethesda. NIH is across the street from where the President gets his checkup, and is only a few miles from the DC border.
What do they do there? Is there anything there that could be of real use to bioterrorists? Clearly if there's nothing there other than a bunch of adminstrators and info that can be found at a university library, then this guy is right to be pissed off, cause its typical overreaction (see this article at The Onion). Still, the fact that its across the street from Bethesda Hospital or not far from DC is hardly evidence that there's nothing dangerous there.
Three, the fact that we're facing a biowar attack is irrelevant...what, he's more likely to steal something because another entity has mailed anthrax to various public figures?
If you are in fact correct that there's nothing dangerous going on at NIH, then you're probably right. However, if there is anything dangerous there, and it is far from clear that the NIH building is totally benign, then its highly relevant. This isn't searching the handbag of everyone coming out of the Hooterville Mall. At first reading, however, this seems to be targeted specifically at a location that could be a target for a very credible threat to the lives of untold thousands, should these attacks go unchecked or escallate. In fact, if there was nothing at NIH to worry about I'd expect the guy to have said that in his submission. If it were me, I'd be shouting, "Hey, there's no way a terrorist would be interested in this place, so this is totally unnecessary." This guy hasn't said that.
While there is every reason to resist going overboard, and every reason to be extra vigilant to protect our rights from our own worst instincts, it is important to distinguish between Stalineque paranoia, and the concrete threat that we are currently facing.
Remember:
There have already been at least 3 deaths in this bioattack, with two more people hospitalized with a disease that has an extremely high mortality rate.
There have been numerous other attacks, with no sign that the attacks will stop.
We are facing an enemy that has demonstrated the ability to kill inocent people literally by the thousands, with a probable hope that the death toll might have been 100,000.
This same enemy has stated "it is the duty of every [insert any true beleiver here, its really irrelevant which theology/ideology this particular group is on about] to obtain biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons" and "kill [insert ethnic group here] whereever they are, at home or abroad."
Given these circumstances, it is not unreasonable to expect that government installations which deal with health issues, such as the NIH, to be the target of terrorist attacks and/or thefts. Hence it is reasonable to search people entering that building, regardless of who they are. Unless, of course, you'd rather that they only target brown-skinned people who try to go there. I for one don't want to see racial profiling get any more acceptance, so lets assume that high-risk targets get everybody searched, rather than a subjective "probable cause" selection criteria that is vulnerable to racism and witch-hunt hysteria.
Short version, if there's something dangerous where he works, then searches are not only reasonable but important. However, this situation should not be taken as an excuse for blanket searches aimed at other goals, wether they be control of information, preventing embezlement, or anything else. That sort of thing really does require probable cause, and should be verbotten.
The spectrum auction drove the prices so high that phone companies no longer have the billions of dollars it would take to actually deliver the service.
Yeah, but that also happened in Europe. That's one of the things that's got Lucent and Nortel and Marconi in the crapper in Europe. No one can afford equipment because they're overextended in spectrum.
One of the other big special interests in the US mix is broadcast television. Little UHF stations that just broadcast home shopping are guaranteed access to cable markets. They're also guaranteed the right to hold on to their current spectrum through the ten years or so of the phase in period for HDTV (assuming it even happens). The TV UHF bands were part of the planned expansion room as 3G started gobbling spectrum, and now that's not gonna be freed up for a while.
Contrary to what they say in all those WTO chat rooms, not everything is a corporate plot to screw the little guy. Sometimes its just stupidity.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence - Hari Seldon
I'm not really an expert (although I work in the US in the wireless industry) but here are a few other ideas here.
1) It is true that the lower population density in the US is a factor.
2) Americans have (in my lifetime) always had no charge for local calls from thier home. The only calls we paid for were long-distance calls. If I recall correctly, this hasn't been the case in many places outside the US. So Americans were slower on the uptake with the pay-for-every-call thing, and the pay for incoming calls thing.
3) What's the killer app? In Japan, the killer app for the 2.5g stuff was interactive directions to get to different places because their streets tended to be pretty confusing (grid style urban planning as used in the US really didn't get started before most of the cities in Europe and Japan were built). I'm not sure why, but I've never really wanted to do the email over the phone thing. Voicemail is easier do send, but harder to read. Combine voice mail with caller id, and you havee something that's good enough. I sure as hell don't want to compose messages on that tiny little keypad. I'm wating for a better interface, I guess.
One interesting note on the Japanese market:
Japan rolled out the first cell phone market around 1980. However, the Japanese phone monopoly had such a closed market that there was no innovation. By the early '90s Japan still only had around 100,000 wireless subscribers. Meanwhile the US and Europe had subscriber bases in the millions. It wasn't until the US, working on behalf of Motorola, made it a big deal in some trade talks that Japan deregulated. Prior to that, you couldn't buy your own phone, you rented it from your provider (I assume that was DoCoMo) and there was very little in cool features available. After deregulation they went from 100,000 to 3,000,000 subscribers in only a year or two, and quckly had the most advanced wireless consumer base in the world.
If you think I am wrong in that, its possible. I am doing it from memory of either an Economist or Reason article I read a year or so ago.
I don't think that the NIMBY types are really slowing us down too much. Mostly that's been a problem in semi-rural areas like small towns in Vermont or the southern Appalachians (in the cases I've heard of) and probably in more upscale Californian coastal communities. In Colorado, on I-25 between Colorado Springs and Denver, there's a great example of what the Cell-phone companies are trying to do to minimize the aesthetic objections. They have cell towers that are made up to look like trees. They're typically much less attractive than artificial Christmas trees, which I don't like to begin with.
I did see one add that actually got me to see it without being so intrusive that it just pissed me off too badly. It was on weather.com (the Weather Channel's web page), and it was an add for HBO's "Band of Brothers" series. Basically when I first went to the web page, it loaded as normal, then ran a little animation of a series of c47s dropping paratroops across the page, with accompanying sound, then some bit of text appeared saying something like, 'See Band of Brothers on HBO at some time or other.' which then retreated to a standard banner add and sat there. The whole thing lasted maybe 3-5 seconds.
I was on a broadband connection, so I have no idea if it would make the page take longer to load, but their web page has so much graphics that it probably would take forever anyway.
The one thing they could have done to cut the annoying factor would be to put a cookie that tells the page not to run it everytime you go 'BACK' to the main page from a sub page.
MP3s are great, but there's a service that a good DJ/radio programmer serves, which is to introduce us to new music. Assuming that it comes with a bit of metainfo, like track name, artist name, etc that's been shown with MTV videos, it would be a great way to find new music.
Take me. I like progressive rock. That's a pretty narrow genre, that never gets airplay outside of the few big commercial bands (Yes, ELP, Jethro Tull, etc) that get play on Classic Rock stations. There are a lot of other bands that fit the genre, but never get radio play. Spinner was good for that, and I ended up getting some Brian Eno, and a few other cool bands after hearing a couple of tracks on there.
But I don't really dig listening on my computer, and I wasn't getting consistent bandwidth for Spinner. I'm too lazy to download random tracks on MP3. I might pay a little money for a good random mix.
On the flip-side, even if you have read the HP books, you should also read some of the other Hugo winners before saying this was a good idea.
Best Dramatic Presentation also includes Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Princess Bride, neither of which seems to be in the same genre as Blade Runner or 2001.
Still the Holy Grail of the Hugo awards is the Best Novel, and this clearly is the most out-of-character winner they've had, although Double Star is a bit of a fluff piece, too.
the shift to a urban v. Rural lifestyle ruined the lives of generations of people
Its easy to think that from here, but I believe that's a bit of 'grass is greener' thinking. We've never experienced true rural lifestyles. Especially not pre-industrial rural lifestyles. Life in feudal England was best described as nasty, brutish, and short. The same may reasonably said of 1850s London, but that really cannot be said about the majority of Londoners today, even in the worst neighborhoods.
It took a while to figure out how to make that work, but in the end I do think it works better. We can toy with going back to the land, and build little communes, and admire the Ahmish and Mennonites in their horse-drawn carriages. But there are trade-offs to living off the land that we should recognize before throwing it all away to go back to the trees.
And actually, that was the Bay Area. I bet there were some folks that went from living on the street to.com millionare. Weird shit happens out there, and a lot of rich, well-educated Berkeley types spend a couple of years being homeless just for the bohemian lifestyle:-P. And you can do that out there, climate wise; nobody does that in Atlanta or Milwaukee. Still, fewer legitimately impoverished people have gotten cooshy.com jobs than us suburbanite white guys.
Yeah, I don't think this can fly in the Supreme Court. The reason is this: If California can be applied universally (at least throughout the US) only because of the 'reach of the internet,' then by extension, every state, county, and municipal law also applies to everything on the internet, so long as there is an internet connection in that jurisdiction. Sue the Texas Lottery Commission for illegal gaming under South Carolina's gambling laws. Get your local city council to outlaw click-through licenses and watch the fun begin! Hell, Rhode Island could outlaw the publishing of sex offender registration info over the internet and then sue Colorado. Its a prescription for anarchy.
At some stage you need to be able to know what jurisdiction your actions fall under, or no one will be able to do anything.
I have somewhat less sympathy for Pinochet, not so much because what he did was evil, as because the Spanish were trying him for crimes against Spanish Citizens. Although they happened in Chile, Chile was not prosecuting the case, so Spain wanted to get justice for its citizens. Heads of state are a bit different matter.
Well I vowed never to see another Star Wars movie in the late '80s, when I found out that Reagan was going to use Star Wars to blow up the whole world, especially the little babies! How could George Lucas be responsible for making something to blow up little babies? He is a very bad man, and Lucasfilm's reputation and profits should be damaged because I think that he is responsible for everything that Ronald Reagan did!
But I do want a light-saber surgical laser. Think what you could do with those and some Lego Mindstorms!
I meant no offence. Its just a quote from The Simpsons (one of the finest satirical shows ever made, IMHO). Its not intended as a statement of policy.
And I do know that the French helped us out in the Revolution. Baron DeKalb, a Frenchman killed at the Battle of Camden (my home town) is the only person buried on the grounds of the church I went to as a kid.
France and the US make jokes about each other, but I really think it doesn't mean any more than two rival schools making jokes about each other. Its usually pretty childish, but its also usually pretty harmless.
Pardon my historical failings, but weren't you guys already fighting the Brits when the (American) war of 1812 broke out? I thought the whole war started over the British impressing American sailors into their navy to fight Napolean and the French. France is defeated in 1814, before the war in the New World is over, with Napolean exiled to Elba. And the war ended in 1815, roughly contemporaneously with the return of Napolean and his subsequent defeat at Waterloo. I'm not denying that there may have been French help in the war (I don't know of it, but its possible), but it would certainly have been more as a part of your own pre-existing war.
Protectionism was rampant throughout the Western world in the 19th century, and the American South was opposed to it, to the point where South Carolina drew up articles of nullification, nullifying two federal tarrif acts, in the 1840s prompting President Jackson to draw up articles of force authorizing the use of the US Army to prevent South Carolina from ceceding from the Union. This is 15 years before the start of the civil war. After the civil war the political power of the south is of course almost nil, and the protectionism by the industrialists of the north goes unchallenged for most of the rest of the century.
Much of my fact checking and timeline checking was done using The History Channel's website, with the remainder being filled in from my high school and college history courses over a decade ago, so there may be mistakes and distortions here.
True, but Gen. Pershing, upon arriving in France to help them out in the War to End All Wars, declared something along the lines of, 'Lafayette, we have come to repay our debt!' I can't remember the exact phrasing, but the gist was that he was expressing his gratitude to Lafayette and the French for their help in the American Revolution.
I always make a point of differentiating between the French of the 1770s and the French of the 1930s when making retreat&surrender jokes. There is a French officer, Baron DeKalb, buried in the churchyard of the church I went to as a kid. He was killed at the Battle of Camden (where Cornwalis was headquartered for most of the war), and the main drag where US1 goes through town, is named DeKalb street. One of the main town parks is Lafayette Square.
I'm not sure what the advantages would be, given that its a fairly well-documented boat, and there were a number like it. I tend to think that the Navy just saw all the hooplah surrounding the Hunley's raising and decided to get in on the fun with their most famous Civil War boat.
It was a marvel of its times, however, and I do wish they'd managed to keep it afloat to be preserved after the war, especially if they could have made an exhibit with it and the Virginia (Merrimack to the Yankees) side-by-side. I'd go see it if it were raised, and I was in the area.
This theory is similar to, but distinct from, the ``entrainment'' theory that Cecil put forward so many years ago.
This theory is a good one, but also fails to satisfy. The correct explanation is the principle of 'entertainment.' The shower curtain, in the absence of other stimuli, will engage in whatever action it finds most entertaining at a given moment. Shower curtains, lacking a central nervous system, are an uncreative and low-brow lot. They can generally think of nothing that is more fun than billowing inward towards a naked showerer, thus causing consternation and dismay. It is for this reason that shower curtains are almost never invited to dinner parties.
The "Entertainment Principle" can be used to explain all sorts of odd behavior in the inanimate world, from panty creep to the election of G. W. Bush! The voting machines all had a big chuckle over that one.
Well to build it you also need an atomic vector plotter and a Bamberweenie 57 Sub-Meson brain, if I am not mistaken. Then you need a Golden Bail to make it operational, but the finite improbability generator should take care of that.
Well, you can get your own GPS which is capable of taking real-time differential corrections, but as a stand alone unit, you can't do better than about 5 meters with the C/A code (which is unencrypted) and about 1 meter with the P-Code (which is currently encrypted, to keep the 'Bad Guys'(tm) from being able to send remote controlled bombs into the White House). The DOD turned off their artificial degradation which left commercial handhelds doing no better than 100m, so you should be seeing 5-10m accuracy these days.
Part of the problem with stand-alone GPS recievers is that the variations in the delay caused by the ionosphere is enough to screw you up by a meter or two.
The way they do the super-high accuracy stuff is to have two GPS recievers, one on a known point, and the other as the 'rover' and they both measure the actual carrier wave of the signal. Back in the day (I was doing this while working on my masters in geophysics way back in 1995/96), this type of thing cost about $10-20k, and required software that ran about $30k to process. I think that's come down some, but its still a specialized thing, and probably pricy.
I was a bit confused by Katz'z bit about forest fires.
'only 35 percent believe it was directly responsible for increasing forest fires in the United States'.
Now, I'm no expert, but I had been under the impression that most of our forest fires are the result of failed forest management practices over the past 100 years. Our attempts to put out any and all forest fires has broken the natural cycle of burn-and-recovery in many areas leading to an excess of fuel. The excess of fuel is in turn leading to fires that get way out of control and burn much more land area than they naturally would. Certainly I have heard this explanation for the western wildfires of the past couple of years, as well as the great Yellowstone Park fire of a decade ago. The only two places that I would think there might be a relationship between climate and fire would be California and Florida, but the California fires were clearly the result of El Nino, which may or may not be directly linked to climate change.
Does anybody have more info on that? Specifically any URLs on links between fire hazard and climate.
Slashdot Mirror
One in which all the molecules simultaneously jump one foot to the left to break the ice at parties?
I mean, come on...destroy city walls?
Well, I don't think the spies are intended to truly tear down the walls brick by brick, but to undermine confidence in the defences or recruit key guards to open gates. Troy fell with her walls up, becuase they were compromised from the inside.
As soon as my roomate gets a hold of this, I won't see him for months.
Hey, if they award you the X-Prize posthumously, be sure to leave at least part of the money to the Free Software Foundation, or some such .org.
Irony abounds. But I am a strong advocate of gun ownership as a civil right, but also am a strong opponent of curfews, flag-burning amendments, and other signs of the police state.
It won't only be right-wingers imposing unreasonable restrictions. Democrats are just as happy to use the power of law to silence speech they oppose. The problem is not one of left/right ideology, but rather one of authoritarianism versus libertarianism. There are left and right wing authoritarians in roughly egual numbers.
Left-wing appologists (such, apparantly, as yourself) tend to forget that although McCarthy was a Republican, his commission was bi-partisan, and there weren't many dissenting voices from the democratic party until he'd been running rampant for quite a while. Also, President Eisenhower (a republican, if you haven't read your history books) got fed up with him as quickly as the democrats.
Which is not to say that I don't hope the democrats fight for civil liberties. I'm all about that. I hope anyone in elected office will do so. But to turn it into a partisan rant is to ignore history.
If every block of a city is defended by a modest supply of small arms, the city is unconquerable.
I concur. The Onion's Our Dumb Century has a faux editorial headline from 1969 reading "WE CAN LAND A MAN ON THE MOON, BUT WE CAN'T BOMB A TINY ASIAN NATION INTO THE STONE AGE?"
Vietnam had a bunch of guys without much in the way of a mechanized army, but ask them if they lost the war. The US Army beat the NVA at every set-peice engagement. They had tanks, and every time they used them, we stomped them into the ground. Decisively. The US never lost a major engagement with regular army troops from North Vietnam. Estimates of casualties inflicted by US forces during that war range from 500,000 to 2,000,000. Yet in the end, the North Vietnamese drove the US out, and then used regular army units to conquer the Republic of Vietnam.
Edward Abbey, environmental activist and writer, said, "The rifle and handgun are 'equalizers'--the weapons of a democracy. Tanks and bombers represent dictatorship."
Small arms also tend to keep the police and other government enforcers reasonable. If John Suspect might be carrying a gun, law enforcement won't be nearly so quick to put him in a position where he has nothing left to lose. Ditto for prospective mass murderers, muggers, rapists, and so forth.
Here I disagree, not on political grounds, since as a libertarian I am at least suspicious of, and more often vocally opposed to, any governmental edicts opposed to individual empowerment. However, from an empirical observation standpoint, I have to say that British police (outside Northern Ireland) facing a largely unarmed populace, are not nearly as likely to shoot first and seek to understand later as their US counterparts. For the most part, they are unarmed, and, I believe, most are not even trained in firearm use. I could be wrong here, but that's my impression.
Also, Tianenmen Square would have been far bloodier if only those students had had weapons. There were police and infantry units in the area that could have been used to cover the tanks if they'd been threatened. The only way there'd have been a different outcome in Beijing is a thoroughly armed populous sympathetic to the protestors' cause.
Also, tanks in the open are, effectively, machinegun pillboxes that can survive quite a while against small arms and pointy sticks.
Generally, an armed populace in a democracy defends liberty not by firing their weapons, but by remaining involved in government to maintain their rights. If a government can't even take away the populace's guns, it may be too distracted to throw people in the gulag for "political crimes." Hence, I don't let the Government take away my gun rights, despite the shrill cries of Rosie O'Donnell, because any government that respects a dubious right, will generally also respect the really important ones.
And so we need to keep civil liberties top on our list. However, searches of people entering and exiting likely terrorist targets are not unreasonable, so long as it is only as a preventative, and not an investigative search, and is specifically targetted on places with credible threats. Shopping malls are out. Government installations responsible for policy and research on combatting infectious disease and biological warfare are probably in right now.
What do they do there? Is there anything there that could be of real use to bioterrorists? Clearly if there's nothing there other than a bunch of adminstrators and info that can be found at a university library, then this guy is right to be pissed off, cause its typical overreaction (see this article at The Onion). Still, the fact that its across the street from Bethesda Hospital or not far from DC is hardly evidence that there's nothing dangerous there.
Three, the fact that we're facing a biowar attack is irrelevant...what, he's more likely to steal something because another entity has mailed anthrax to various public figures?
If you are in fact correct that there's nothing dangerous going on at NIH, then you're probably right. However, if there is anything dangerous there, and it is far from clear that the NIH building is totally benign, then its highly relevant. This isn't searching the handbag of everyone coming out of the Hooterville Mall. At first reading, however, this seems to be targeted specifically at a location that could be a target for a very credible threat to the lives of untold thousands, should these attacks go unchecked or escallate. In fact, if there was nothing at NIH to worry about I'd expect the guy to have said that in his submission. If it were me, I'd be shouting, "Hey, there's no way a terrorist would be interested in this place, so this is totally unnecessary." This guy hasn't said that.
While there is every reason to resist going overboard, and every reason to be extra vigilant to protect our rights from our own worst instincts, it is important to distinguish between Stalineque paranoia, and the concrete threat that we are currently facing.
Remember:
Given these circumstances, it is not unreasonable to expect that government installations which deal with health issues, such as the NIH, to be the target of terrorist attacks and/or thefts. Hence it is reasonable to search people entering that building, regardless of who they are. Unless, of course, you'd rather that they only target brown-skinned people who try to go there. I for one don't want to see racial profiling get any more acceptance, so lets assume that high-risk targets get everybody searched, rather than a subjective "probable cause" selection criteria that is vulnerable to racism and witch-hunt hysteria.
Short version, if there's something dangerous where he works, then searches are not only reasonable but important. However, this situation should not be taken as an excuse for blanket searches aimed at other goals, wether they be control of information, preventing embezlement, or anything else. That sort of thing really does require probable cause, and should be verbotten.
that's my two yen's worth anyway.
The spectrum auction drove the prices so high that phone companies no longer have the billions of dollars it would take to actually deliver the service.
Yeah, but that also happened in Europe. That's one of the things that's got Lucent and Nortel and Marconi in the crapper in Europe. No one can afford equipment because they're overextended in spectrum.
One of the other big special interests in the US mix is broadcast television. Little UHF stations that just broadcast home shopping are guaranteed access to cable markets. They're also guaranteed the right to hold on to their current spectrum through the ten years or so of the phase in period for HDTV (assuming it even happens). The TV UHF bands were part of the planned expansion room as 3G started gobbling spectrum, and now that's not gonna be freed up for a while.
Contrary to what they say in all those WTO chat rooms, not everything is a corporate plot to screw the little guy. Sometimes its just stupidity.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence
- Hari Seldon
I'm not really an expert (although I work in the US in the wireless industry) but here are a few other ideas here.
1) It is true that the lower population density in the US is a factor.
2) Americans have (in my lifetime) always had no charge for local calls from thier home. The only calls we paid for were long-distance calls. If I recall correctly, this hasn't been the case in many places outside the US. So Americans were slower on the uptake with the pay-for-every-call thing, and the pay for incoming calls thing.
3) What's the killer app? In Japan, the killer app for the 2.5g stuff was interactive directions to get to different places because their streets tended to be pretty confusing (grid style urban planning as used in the US really didn't get started before most of the cities in Europe and Japan were built). I'm not sure why, but I've never really wanted to do the email over the phone thing. Voicemail is easier do send, but harder to read. Combine voice mail with caller id, and you havee something that's good enough. I sure as hell don't want to compose messages on that tiny little keypad. I'm wating for a better interface, I guess.
One interesting note on the Japanese market:
Japan rolled out the first cell phone market around 1980. However, the Japanese phone monopoly had such a closed market that there was no innovation. By the early '90s Japan still only had around 100,000 wireless subscribers. Meanwhile the US and Europe had subscriber bases in the millions. It wasn't until the US, working on behalf of Motorola, made it a big deal in some trade talks that Japan deregulated. Prior to that, you couldn't buy your own phone, you rented it from your provider (I assume that was DoCoMo) and there was very little in cool features available. After deregulation they went from 100,000 to 3,000,000 subscribers in only a year or two, and quckly had the most advanced wireless consumer base in the world.
If you think I am wrong in that, its possible. I am doing it from memory of either an Economist or Reason article I read a year or so ago.
I don't think that the NIMBY types are really slowing us down too much. Mostly that's been a problem in semi-rural areas like small towns in Vermont or the southern Appalachians (in the cases I've heard of) and probably in more upscale Californian coastal communities. In Colorado, on I-25 between Colorado Springs and Denver, there's a great example of what the Cell-phone companies are trying to do to minimize the aesthetic objections. They have cell towers that are made up to look like trees. They're typically much less attractive than artificial Christmas trees, which I don't like to begin with.
I did see one add that actually got me to see it without being so intrusive that it just pissed me off too badly. It was on weather.com (the Weather Channel's web page), and it was an add for HBO's "Band of Brothers" series. Basically when I first went to the web page, it loaded as normal, then ran a little animation of a series of c47s dropping paratroops across the page, with accompanying sound, then some bit of text appeared saying something like, 'See Band of Brothers on HBO at some time or other.' which then retreated to a standard banner add and sat there. The whole thing lasted maybe 3-5 seconds.
:P
I was on a broadband connection, so I have no idea if it would make the page take longer to load, but their web page has so much graphics that it probably would take forever anyway.
The one thing they could have done to cut the annoying factor would be to put a cookie that tells the page not to run it everytime you go 'BACK' to the main page from a sub page.
And it didn't even crash Netscape
MP3s are great, but there's a service that a good DJ/radio programmer serves, which is to introduce us to new music. Assuming that it comes with a bit of metainfo, like track name, artist name, etc that's been shown with MTV videos, it would be a great way to find new music.
Take me. I like progressive rock. That's a pretty narrow genre, that never gets airplay outside of the few big commercial bands (Yes, ELP, Jethro Tull, etc) that get play on Classic Rock stations. There are a lot of other bands that fit the genre, but never get radio play. Spinner was good for that, and I ended up getting some Brian Eno, and a few other cool bands after hearing a couple of tracks on there.
But I don't really dig listening on my computer, and I wasn't getting consistent bandwidth for Spinner. I'm too lazy to download random tracks on MP3. I might pay a little money for a good random mix.
On the flip-side, even if you have read the HP books, you should also read some of the other Hugo winners before saying this was a good idea.
Best Dramatic Presentation also includes Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Princess Bride, neither of which seems to be in the same genre as Blade Runner or 2001.
Still the Holy Grail of the Hugo awards is the Best Novel, and this clearly is the most out-of-character winner they've had, although Double Star is a bit of a fluff piece, too.
the shift to a urban v. Rural lifestyle ruined the lives of generations of people
.com millionare. Weird shit happens out there, and a lot of rich, well-educated Berkeley types spend a couple of years being homeless just for the bohemian lifestyle :-P. And you can do that out there, climate wise; nobody does that in Atlanta or Milwaukee. Still, fewer legitimately impoverished people have gotten cooshy .com jobs than us suburbanite white guys.
Its easy to think that from here, but I believe that's a bit of 'grass is greener' thinking. We've never experienced true rural lifestyles. Especially not pre-industrial rural lifestyles. Life in feudal England was best described as nasty, brutish, and short. The same may reasonably said of 1850s London, but that really cannot be said about the majority of Londoners today, even in the worst neighborhoods.
It took a while to figure out how to make that work, but in the end I do think it works better. We can toy with going back to the land, and build little communes, and admire the Ahmish and Mennonites in their horse-drawn carriages. But there are trade-offs to living off the land that we should recognize before throwing it all away to go back to the trees.
And actually, that was the Bay Area. I bet there were some folks that went from living on the street to
Yeah, I don't think this can fly in the Supreme Court. The reason is this: If California can be applied universally (at least throughout the US) only because of the 'reach of the internet,' then by extension, every state, county, and municipal law also applies to everything on the internet, so long as there is an internet connection in that jurisdiction. Sue the Texas Lottery Commission for illegal gaming under South Carolina's gambling laws. Get your local city council to outlaw click-through licenses and watch the fun begin! Hell, Rhode Island could outlaw the publishing of sex offender registration info over the internet and then sue Colorado. Its a prescription for anarchy.
At some stage you need to be able to know what jurisdiction your actions fall under, or no one will be able to do anything.
I have somewhat less sympathy for Pinochet, not so much because what he did was evil, as because the Spanish were trying him for crimes against Spanish Citizens. Although they happened in Chile, Chile was not prosecuting the case, so Spain wanted to get justice for its citizens. Heads of state are a bit different matter.
Well I vowed never to see another Star Wars movie in the late '80s, when I found out that Reagan was going to use Star Wars to blow up the whole world, especially the little babies! How could George Lucas be responsible for making something to blow up little babies? He is a very bad man, and Lucasfilm's reputation and profits should be damaged because I think that he is responsible for everything that Ronald Reagan did!
But I do want a light-saber surgical laser. Think what you could do with those and some Lego Mindstorms!
I meant no offence. Its just a quote from The Simpsons (one of the finest satirical shows ever made, IMHO). Its not intended as a statement of policy.
And I do know that the French helped us out in the Revolution. Baron DeKalb, a Frenchman killed at the Battle of Camden (my home town) is the only person buried on the grounds of the church I went to as a kid.
France and the US make jokes about each other, but I really think it doesn't mean any more than two rival schools making jokes about each other. Its usually pretty childish, but its also usually pretty harmless.
Pardon my historical failings, but weren't you guys already fighting the Brits when the (American) war of 1812 broke out? I thought the whole war started over the British impressing American sailors into their navy to fight Napolean and the French. France is defeated in 1814, before the war in the New World is over, with Napolean exiled to Elba. And the war ended in 1815, roughly contemporaneously with the return of Napolean and his subsequent defeat at Waterloo. I'm not denying that there may have been French help in the war (I don't know of it, but its possible), but it would certainly have been more as a part of your own pre-existing war.
Protectionism was rampant throughout the Western world in the 19th century, and the American South was opposed to it, to the point where South Carolina drew up articles of nullification, nullifying two federal tarrif acts, in the 1840s prompting President Jackson to draw up articles of force authorizing the use of the US Army to prevent South Carolina from ceceding from the Union. This is 15 years before the start of the civil war. After the civil war the political power of the south is of course almost nil, and the protectionism by the industrialists of the north goes unchallenged for most of the rest of the century.
Much of my fact checking and timeline checking was done using The History Channel's website, with the remainder being filled in from my high school and college history courses over a decade ago, so there may be mistakes and distortions here.
And of course:
"They even have Groundskeeper Willie teaching French."
"Bonjourrrrrr, ya cheese eatin surrrender-monkies!"
True, but Gen. Pershing, upon arriving in France to help them out in the War to End All Wars, declared something along the lines of, 'Lafayette, we have come to repay our debt!' I can't remember the exact phrasing, but the gist was that he was expressing his gratitude to Lafayette and the French for their help in the American Revolution.
I always make a point of differentiating between the French of the 1770s and the French of the 1930s when making retreat&surrender jokes. There is a French officer, Baron DeKalb, buried in the churchyard of the church I went to as a kid. He was killed at the Battle of Camden (where Cornwalis was headquartered for most of the war), and the main drag where US1 goes through town, is named DeKalb street. One of the main town parks is Lafayette Square.
Some Americans know our history.
I'm not sure what the advantages would be, given that its a fairly well-documented boat, and there were a number like it. I tend to think that the Navy just saw all the hooplah surrounding the Hunley's raising and decided to get in on the fun with their most famous Civil War boat.
It was a marvel of its times, however, and I do wish they'd managed to keep it afloat to be preserved after the war, especially if they could have made an exhibit with it and the Virginia (Merrimack to the Yankees) side-by-side. I'd go see it if it were raised, and I was in the area.
This theory is similar to, but distinct from, the ``entrainment'' theory that Cecil put forward so many years ago.
This theory is a good one, but also fails to satisfy. The correct explanation is the principle of 'entertainment.' The shower curtain, in the absence of other stimuli, will engage in whatever action it finds most entertaining at a given moment. Shower curtains, lacking a central nervous system, are an uncreative and low-brow lot. They can generally think of nothing that is more fun than billowing inward towards a naked showerer, thus causing consternation and dismay. It is for this reason that shower curtains are almost never invited to dinner parties.
The "Entertainment Principle" can be used to explain all sorts of odd behavior in the inanimate world, from panty creep to the election of G. W. Bush! The voting machines all had a big chuckle over that one.
Well to build it you also need an atomic vector plotter and a Bamberweenie 57 Sub-Meson brain, if I am not mistaken. Then you need a Golden Bail to make it operational, but the finite improbability generator should take care of that.
Well, you can get your own GPS which is capable of taking real-time differential corrections, but as a stand alone unit, you can't do better than about 5 meters with the C/A code (which is unencrypted) and about 1 meter with the P-Code (which is currently encrypted, to keep the 'Bad Guys'(tm) from being able to send remote controlled bombs into the White House). The DOD turned off their artificial degradation which left commercial handhelds doing no better than 100m, so you should be seeing 5-10m accuracy these days.
Part of the problem with stand-alone GPS recievers is that the variations in the delay caused by the ionosphere is enough to screw you up by a meter or two.
The way they do the super-high accuracy stuff is to have two GPS recievers, one on a known point, and the other as the 'rover' and they both measure the actual carrier wave of the signal. Back in the day (I was doing this while working on my masters in geophysics way back in 1995/96), this type of thing cost about $10-20k, and required software that ran about $30k to process. I think that's come down some, but its still a specialized thing, and probably pricy.
Thanks for the correction. That had been bugging me for a while, since its one of my favorite McLure quotes, and 'ologists' just didn't sound right.
Are we obsolete? Or just Deprecated?
I was a bit confused by Katz'z bit about forest fires.
'only 35 percent believe it was directly responsible for increasing forest fires in the United States'.
Now, I'm no expert, but I had been under the impression that most of our forest fires are the result of failed forest management practices over the past 100 years. Our attempts to put out any and all forest fires has broken the natural cycle of burn-and-recovery in many areas leading to an excess of fuel. The excess of fuel is in turn leading to fires that get way out of control and burn much more land area than they naturally would. Certainly I have heard this explanation for the western wildfires of the past couple of years, as well as the great Yellowstone Park fire of a decade ago. The only two places that I would think there might be a relationship between climate and fire would be California and Florida, but the California fires were clearly the result of El Nino, which may or may not be directly linked to climate change.
Does anybody have more info on that? Specifically any URLs on links between fire hazard and climate.