It was conquered in early 19th century, and I don't know what would be worse for it, the rule of Czarist Russia and later Communist USSR, or what it had before that -- some local customs were umm... extremely un-civilized and had really poor respect for human life, leave alone democracy.
In any case it didn't prevent Chechnya from becoming one of the most powerful centers of organized crime in Russia. The main reason for Russia to keep Chechnya as a province by all possible means was that if Chechnya succeeded, every other gang leader would declare himself a president of three nearest to his main stomping ground cities, and start a "war" with local military base.
I see your point. And yet, in the US (as in many places and situations) the reality is rather more complex than the claim, as you (as a resident of Colorado) are probably aware.
Actually California. And being on H-1B visa (employed, taxed up the wazoo but without any voting rights) I have a dubious advantage of seeing the hypocrisy in all its glory.
My real power over my government is effectively nil without the resources to push ad campaigns.
This is one of the areas where the existence of Internet actually can improve things -- just as large companies with can't make decent web sites if they have nothing good to say about their products, so millions in campaign contributions won't give any advantage for politicians if Internet will become a significant part of election campaigns (I can imagine -- doubleclick charging millions for changing the texts of political speeches to tailor them to user's known behavior -- yeah, that will help a lot;-). Still, it all comes down to the need of having a large percentage of people who actually want to think, and this remains a problem.
We should probably also address the issue of whether a powerful nation in conflict with another is justified in staging coups of weaker third parties as a strategic move.
My position on that is that it sucks big time, however at least it allows weaker countries to maneuver between powerful players. With one "ridiculously overpowered" player game loses any meaning, so players shift their activity into changing the rules -- and US wonders why terrorism and politicized religious bigotry are so widespread.
(As a sidelight, we could also take up the ethics of today's US actions, essentially using military superiority to enforce business rip-offs. I have the feeling this may be driving your opinions today more than what happened 50 years ago is.)
That, too -- in a big picture large corporations benefit from operating in oppressed countries with weak governments that are prone to corruption and political pressure. However it's more in IMF style -- its demands became ridiculously politicized and don't even pretend of having a goal of creating the condition where debt can be paid, and are more directed into maintaining dependency of its loans' recipients.
And yet you speak of "universal hatred for Americans and their government" as if the two were one and the same - I am a US citizen, but have little control over my government. If you don't want to be judged by your government's actions, you shouldn't judge others by the actions of theirs.
I agree -- however US claims to be a (the?) democratic country, with politicians responsible to "The People". Russia (and most of other countries) doesn't -- in fact Soviet Constitution contained direct mentioning of Communist Party being the ruling force, what, however bad and un-democratic, at least was true. Russians' support of changing the political system of former Soviet Union into US-style democracy was largely based on mis-perception that US is an example of country that successfully lives by principles declared in its Constitution at least at the same extent as Soviet Union was based on its own (flawed) one.
Chechnya is a part of Russia, and was one for centuries. And btw, there are probably 10 people there who think that Allah is not a character from not-so-local folklore. I am tired of explaining, what Chechnya is to ignorant Americans that think what CNN tells them.
So what, the US should reliniquish some power? Buahah... that's a good one.
This is exactly what US has to do to preserve its security, and this is what international treaties are all about. In the modern world where lives are considered valuable, the threat of terrorism and guerilla-style war is one of major reasons for limiting the offensive power -- "world leader" wouldn't gain much from the ability to destroy all its enemies 50 times if someone blows up a skyscraper in highly-populated area in "world leader" country every week, and all military power in the world can't stop that. Ill will can be a worse burden than participation in power-limiting arrangement that preserves the balance.
"Universal" means that it's widespread and popular everywhere, not that it's supported by absolutely everyone. For example, the knowledge of the Newton's laws is universal, yet I know a lot of people who don't have it.
Your name sounds Russian, and your home page confirms this as your nationality. This kind of criticism from a former inhabitant of the former aggressively expansionist Soviet Union is the pot calling the kettle black. How many times did your own nation attempt and supply things like this?
A lot -- but not nearly as often as US did it, and mostly for some understandable (even though rarely justified) reason, as opposed to just "we want it" what seems to be a translation of "US vital interests". For example, Afghanistan, a poster boy of anti-communist propaganda, actually was a neighboring country, and could represent a military threat to USSR -- this is not a good reason for messing with it, but still a reason. In any case I don't see any relationship between me and communists, whose foreign politics I never supported.
I think it's just incorrect to say we're "universally hated";
My experience shows otherwise.
and as for showing basic respect for the sovereignty of other countries, you're right. To a point. We've gotten involved in some pretty shady dealings, which the Iranian incident is a perfect example of, but we also have a habit of not invading countries weaker than us, something which just about every major power in human history couldn't avoid doing.
What kind of world do you live in? All countries invaded by US in its history except Japan were weaker than US -- and only Japan happened to actually start a war with US.
Possibly one of the reasons a lot of countries don't mind hosting American military bases.
Considering that Cuba, the most US-hating counry in the world, has an US military base on its territory, I don't think that it can be considering as "not minding" American military bases. More likely treating US as "ridiculously overpowered character" in world politics.
Maybe to report on it? Gee, I though that was what journalists in a country that prides itself on its "free press" (but really has a handful of megaconglomerates pushing their interests with their media possessions) were supposed to do.
Last time I checked, press is supposed to represent the public, not the government. Of course, adding corporations to "the public" already turns the whole idea into a farce, but having government agencies' interests secretly influencing it crosses the line.
Spying is one thing, leading a coup is another. Americans should realize that universal hatred for them and their government is caused by things like this, and instead of throwing billions into missile "defense" they can just spend some hours thinking how can they incorporate basic respect for sovereignty of other countries -- and yes, that includes ones that do not share any of "American Values".
It may be worse -- it may indicate that New York Times journalists actually had clearance for things like that. But for what purpose simple journalists would have it?
The trademark-related article is even more bullshit if other examples are considered -- all kinds of advertisement that mention competitors (positively or negatively). Not to mention that search keywords (in meta tags or somewhere else) may be automatically generated, and something as innocent as "Gnutella is a competitor to Napster" or "Ghostscript interprets Postscript files" in the title of the page will be used by search engines -- and rightfully so because person who asks for Postsctipt interpreters most likely will benefit from the knowledge of Ghostscript despite the fact that Ghostscript competes with that elusive Postscript interpreter from Adobe that isn't even ported for most of platforms.
No. Semantics of the data still remain in the code that processes it, everything else is a minor convenicnce -- the more complex the data usage is, the less noticeable is the convenience.
...completely adhering to specs, it probably would be trusted. However no one ever done that -- even systems that are supposed to be "trusted" contain parts that aren't. Probably some embedded stuff can be "trusted", however it's the place where security problems are the least important, and only proper behavior with certain hardware is necessary -- what is much less of a challenge compared to, say, HTTP server + operating system, desktop environment or even a router. If people had many decades for the development of each version of operating system, switch from "chaotic" development to formal specs and proofs that a piece of code adheres to them probably would improve things, however this is not the case, and even if it was, it's possible that specs would end up being developed even slower than anyone would be able to follow then, thus slowing the pace of development to a halt.
Images are produced from xfig diagram (in this example very primitive one) cut into 200x200 squares, and php script displays them in 3x3 "tiled" maps in "zoomed" mode, or another image produced from the same diagram in the "whole floor" mode. "Whole floor" image could be generatred with less details, however I was too lazy to do that -- in this example it's just all tiles, scaled down.
In both modes clicking on any area on the map leads to tiled 3x3 "zoomed" image with the clicked tile in the center. Images are never re-downloaded if they fit in the cache, and only html is generated dynamically.
Of course, this is a proof-of-concept prototype, and any real design can feature additional scrolling controls, additional areas on the imagemap that lead to objects displayed on them (say, clicking on the room with known detailed description and map shows that map instead). Also 3x3 tiles per "viewport" can be too small, real map probably should be displayed with more tiles. Still, it works, displays well in all browsers (including lynx, if it can call image viewer to view images separately), and can be extended to more zooming levels "recursively".
HTML is never designed to fit some formatting "unit" pixel-to-pixel (or point-to-point) into piece of formatting that is specified by other formatting "unit". If font size is different in different clients, HTML renderer must format everything according to the font sizes available on the client, and relations between tables, paragraphs, images and page width won't change in any significant way. Not so with Word -- in Word formatting is based on the sizes of elements, and it breaks horribly if even one of them is not the same as it was expected when document was written. Since the procedures that generate formats are not documented, programming turns into a constant struggle for generating everything in precisely the same way as Word would do, or formatting breaks.
...is just an umbrella to store the data that should be fed to never documented code that actually produces the layout. "XML-based" formats won't change it -- as long as no one knows how to display the formatted document, it's as good as never documented. A lot of programs can parse.doc, extract text, imitate Word formatting, etc., but since there is no precise description, what should be done to display the document (other than "just use Word itself", what works on Windows over COM and is touted as "openness" of Word by TummyX and other Microsoft supporters here), it can be only approximated unless it will be possible to force Microsoft to either write specs for that code (I am sure, specs never were written, because if they were, at least backward compatibility wouldn't break in every Office release), or, failing this, put the rendering code into the public domain.
When I used StarOffice I have seen horribly broken formatting that was magically cured when I have installed Microsoft/Monotype fonts into my Linux box with StarOffice. This suggests that Word formatting is very inflexible regarding changing parameters of the media (as opposed to, say, TeX that will adapt to any size of anything as long as it makes sense), and every slight difference in algotithms (never documented ones, not "packaging") can cause horrendous miscalculation of the formatting.
The reason we're using Flash, however, is because it's the best option out there. The requirement was to deliver an interactive floorplan for trade-shows to the browser: it had to be zoomable, moveable, fast and respond to clicks. Given this, Flash seemed like the best option, especially since SVG support is currently nigh-on non-existent (actually, having said that, Adobe have released an SVG... plugin. Hmm).
Client-side image maps implement this functionality perfectly -- and client-side image maps made by literate people will even work in Lynx (user will see all links, and will be able to get images if he cares to look at them). If you don't know this, you have no business maintaining a web site, and now you are just wasting your employer's (and customers') money.
I hate to tell you this but some form of encryption are uncrackable. Read some books and you can find the proof. Basically a single pat random key is uncrackable as it can produce any results.
That works as long as the key is not available for the cracker. With "encrypted" movies key is ALWAYS available -- if someone paid for viewing once, he has a key. The idea of "protection" is to obfuscate the process to make it impossible to re-use the key if it will be transferred to someone else or used by the same user more than once. This obfuscation will be the target of cracking, not the key itself.
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It was conquered in early 19th century, and I don't know what would be worse for it, the rule of Czarist Russia and later Communist USSR, or what it had before that -- some local customs were umm... extremely un-civilized and had really poor respect for human life, leave alone democracy.
In any case it didn't prevent Chechnya from becoming one of the most powerful centers of organized crime in Russia. The main reason for Russia to keep Chechnya as a province by all possible means was that if Chechnya succeeded, every other gang leader would declare himself a president of three nearest to his main stomping ground cities, and start a "war" with local military base.
I see your point. And yet, in the US (as in many places and situations) the reality is rather more complex than the claim, as you (as a resident of Colorado) are probably aware.
Actually California. And being on H-1B visa (employed, taxed up the wazoo but without any voting rights) I have a dubious advantage of seeing the hypocrisy in all its glory.
My real power over my government is effectively nil without the resources to push ad campaigns.
This is one of the areas where the existence of Internet actually can improve things -- just as large companies with can't make decent web sites if they have nothing good to say about their products, so millions in campaign contributions won't give any advantage for politicians if Internet will become a significant part of election campaigns (I can imagine -- doubleclick charging millions for changing the texts of political speeches to tailor them to user's known behavior -- yeah, that will help a lot ;-). Still, it all comes down to the need of having a large percentage of people who actually want to think, and this remains a problem.
We should probably also address the issue of whether a powerful nation in conflict with another is justified in staging coups of weaker third parties as a strategic move.
My position on that is that it sucks big time, however at least it allows weaker countries to maneuver between powerful players. With one "ridiculously overpowered" player game loses any meaning, so players shift their activity into changing the rules -- and US wonders why terrorism and politicized religious bigotry are so widespread.
(As a sidelight, we could also take up the ethics of today's US actions, essentially using military superiority to enforce business rip-offs. I have the feeling this may be driving your opinions today more than what happened 50 years ago is.)
That, too -- in a big picture large corporations benefit from operating in oppressed countries with weak governments that are prone to corruption and political pressure. However it's more in IMF style -- its demands became ridiculously politicized and don't even pretend of having a goal of creating the condition where debt can be paid, and are more directed into maintaining dependency of its loans' recipients.
And yet you speak of "universal hatred for Americans and their government" as if the two were one and the same - I am a US citizen, but have little control over my government. If you don't want to be judged by your government's actions, you shouldn't judge others by the actions of theirs.
I agree -- however US claims to be a (the?) democratic country, with politicians responsible to "The People". Russia (and most of other countries) doesn't -- in fact Soviet Constitution contained direct mentioning of Communist Party being the ruling force, what, however bad and un-democratic, at least was true. Russians' support of changing the political system of former Soviet Union into US-style democracy was largely based on mis-perception that US is an example of country that successfully lives by principles declared in its Constitution at least at the same extent as Soviet Union was based on its own (flawed) one.
Chechnya is a part of Russia, and was one for centuries. And btw, there are probably 10 people there who think that Allah is not a character from not-so-local folklore. I am tired of explaining, what Chechnya is to ignorant Americans that think what CNN tells them.
So what, the US should reliniquish some power? Buahah... that's a good one.
This is exactly what US has to do to preserve its security, and this is what international treaties are all about. In the modern world where lives are considered valuable, the threat of terrorism and guerilla-style war is one of major reasons for limiting the offensive power -- "world leader" wouldn't gain much from the ability to destroy all its enemies 50 times if someone blows up a skyscraper in highly-populated area in "world leader" country every week, and all military power in the world can't stop that. Ill will can be a worse burden than participation in power-limiting arrangement that preserves the balance.
"Universal" means that it's widespread and popular everywhere, not that it's supported by absolutely everyone. For example, the knowledge of the Newton's laws is universal, yet I know a lot of people who don't have it.
Your name sounds Russian, and your home page confirms this as your nationality. This kind of criticism from a former inhabitant of the former aggressively expansionist Soviet Union is the pot calling the kettle black. How many times did your own nation attempt and supply things like this?
A lot -- but not nearly as often as US did it, and mostly for some understandable (even though rarely justified) reason, as opposed to just "we want it" what seems to be a translation of "US vital interests". For example, Afghanistan, a poster boy of anti-communist propaganda, actually was a neighboring country, and could represent a military threat to USSR -- this is not a good reason for messing with it, but still a reason. In any case I don't see any relationship between me and communists, whose foreign politics I never supported.
I think it's just incorrect to say we're "universally hated";
My experience shows otherwise.
and as for showing basic respect for the sovereignty of other countries, you're right. To a point. We've gotten involved in some pretty shady dealings, which the Iranian incident is a perfect example of, but we also have a habit of not invading countries weaker than us, something which just about every major power in human history couldn't avoid doing.
What kind of world do you live in? All countries invaded by US in its history except Japan were weaker than US -- and only Japan happened to actually start a war with US.
Possibly one of the reasons a lot of countries don't mind hosting American military bases.
Considering that Cuba, the most US-hating counry in the world, has an US military base on its territory, I don't think that it can be considering as "not minding" American military bases. More likely treating US as "ridiculously overpowered character" in world politics.
Maybe to report on it? Gee, I though that was what journalists in a country that prides itself on its "free press" (but really has a handful of megaconglomerates pushing their interests with their media possessions) were supposed to do.
Last time I checked, press is supposed to represent the public, not the government. Of course, adding corporations to "the public" already turns the whole idea into a farce, but having government agencies' interests secretly influencing it crosses the line.
Spying is one thing, leading a coup is another. Americans should realize that universal hatred for them and their government is caused by things like this, and instead of throwing billions into missile "defense" they can just spend some hours thinking how can they incorporate basic respect for sovereignty of other countries -- and yes, that includes ones that do not share any of "American Values".
It may be worse -- it may indicate that New York Times journalists actually had clearance for things like that. But for what purpose simple journalists would have it?
The trademark-related article is even more bullshit if other examples are considered -- all kinds of advertisement that mention competitors (positively or negatively). Not to mention that search keywords (in meta tags or somewhere else) may be automatically generated, and something as innocent as "Gnutella is a competitor to Napster" or "Ghostscript interprets Postscript files" in the title of the page will be used by search engines -- and rightfully so because person who asks for Postsctipt interpreters most likely will benefit from the knowledge of Ghostscript despite the fact that Ghostscript competes with that elusive Postscript interpreter from Adobe that isn't even ported for most of platforms.
Even if it is a troll, it's frightening, how many people in US sincerely believe in it.
Isn't that what schema are for?
No. Semantics of the data still remain in the code that processes it, everything else is a minor convenicnce -- the more complex the data usage is, the less noticeable is the convenience.
...completely adhering to specs, it probably would be trusted. However no one ever done that -- even systems that are supposed to be "trusted" contain parts that aren't. Probably some embedded stuff can be "trusted", however it's the place where security problems are the least important, and only proper behavior with certain hardware is necessary -- what is much less of a challenge compared to, say, HTTP server + operating system, desktop environment or even a router. If people had many decades for the development of each version of operating system, switch from "chaotic" development to formal specs and proofs that a piece of code adheres to them probably would improve things, however this is not the case, and even if it was, it's possible that specs would end up being developed even slower than anyone would be able to follow then, thus slowing the pace of development to a halt.
A prototype, that I have hacked together in php is at http://www.illtel.denver.c o.us/~abelits/floor/floor.php3" (see source.
Images are produced from xfig diagram (in this example very primitive one) cut into 200x200 squares, and php script displays them in 3x3 "tiled" maps in "zoomed" mode, or another image produced from the same diagram in the "whole floor" mode. "Whole floor" image could be generatred with less details, however I was too lazy to do that -- in this example it's just all tiles, scaled down.
In both modes clicking on any area on the map leads to tiled 3x3 "zoomed" image with the clicked tile in the center. Images are never re-downloaded if they fit in the cache, and only html is generated dynamically.
Of course, this is a proof-of-concept prototype, and any real design can feature additional scrolling controls, additional areas on the imagemap that lead to objects displayed on them (say, clicking on the room with known detailed description and map shows that map instead). Also 3x3 tiles per "viewport" can be too small, real map probably should be displayed with more tiles. Still, it works, displays well in all browsers (including lynx, if it can call image viewer to view images separately), and can be extended to more zooming levels "recursively".
Writing a sample -- when finished it will be somewhere at phobos.illtel.denver.co.us, I will post the URL.
By linking segments of them to zoomed images, and using any of 65535 possible ways to implement a scrolling on the zoomed ones.
HTML is never designed to fit some formatting "unit" pixel-to-pixel (or point-to-point) into piece of formatting that is specified by other formatting "unit". If font size is different in different clients, HTML renderer must format everything according to the font sizes available on the client, and relations between tables, paragraphs, images and page width won't change in any significant way. Not so with Word -- in Word formatting is based on the sizes of elements, and it breaks horribly if even one of them is not the same as it was expected when document was written. Since the procedures that generate formats are not documented, programming turns into a constant struggle for generating everything in precisely the same way as Word would do, or formatting breaks.
When I used StarOffice I have seen horribly broken formatting that was magically cured when I have installed Microsoft/Monotype fonts into my Linux box with StarOffice. This suggests that Word formatting is very inflexible regarding changing parameters of the media (as opposed to, say, TeX that will adapt to any size of anything as long as it makes sense), and every slight difference in algotithms (never documented ones, not "packaging") can cause horrendous miscalculation of the formatting.
But what about huge number of russian geeks that hate his guts? Some of them will find a way to blow up the station ;-)
The reason we're using Flash, however, is because it's the best option out there. The requirement was to deliver an interactive floorplan for trade-shows to the browser: it had to be zoomable, moveable, fast and respond to clicks. Given this, Flash seemed like the best option, especially since SVG support is currently nigh-on non-existent (actually, having said that, Adobe have released an SVG ... plugin. Hmm).
Client-side image maps implement this functionality perfectly -- and client-side image maps made by literate people will even work in Lynx (user will see all links, and will be able to get images if he cares to look at them). If you don't know this, you have no business maintaining a web site, and now you are just wasting your employer's (and customers') money.
You mean, it's all "Moon robots for Hitler"? ;-)
sponsored a gourmet chefs contest?
I hate to tell you this but some form of encryption are uncrackable. Read some books and you can find the proof. Basically a single pat random key is uncrackable as it can produce any results.
That works as long as the key is not available for the cracker. With "encrypted" movies key is ALWAYS available -- if someone paid for viewing once, he has a key. The idea of "protection" is to obfuscate the process to make it impossible to re-use the key if it will be transferred to someone else or used by the same user more than once. This obfuscation will be the target of cracking, not the key itself.