I don't really care either way on the abortion issue but this whole thing makes me think that the side effect of successful embryonic stem cell research will be to reward people montetarily for having abortions or at least make people feel good about aborting.
That is a stunningly misplaced fear. Abortion has nothing, zero, nada, ZILCH to do with embryonic stem cells. Even if a woman was interested, by the time she could know she was preganant, the fetus would be long past the stage at which stem cells appear.
Stem cells are harvested from a fertilized egg that has gone through a handful of cell divisions. In the body, that egg would not have even implanted itself yet. And it's not just a matter of timing; an embryo has to go through a variety of differentiations to prepare itself for implantation, which make getting completely undifferentiated stem cells from it impracical/impossible. So any creation of embryos for stem cells has to happen in vitro, just like in IVF.
I'm not a doctor but won't these embryonic cells be rejected because they've got different DNA then the person being treated?
That, by contrast, is a very insightful fear. Yes, if you're implanted with tissue or an organ grown from someone else's stem cells, you're going to be taking anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your life. Just like with tissue/organ transplants today. There are probably fewer risks with transplanting contaminating immune cells (a major source of problems for transpantees today), but the fundamental problem - that your own body will attack the tissue as non-self - remains. The solution, unique to embryonic stem cells, is the ability to grow them from your own cells and produce perfectly genetically matched tissue to put back into your own body. That is the role of therapeutic cloning.
but allowing stem cell research would result in some people specifically getting pregnant for the very _purpose_ of aborting the baby
No, it wouldn't. EVER. I'm stunned at the level of misinformation on this topic. Embryonic stem cells do not come from a fetus/baby. They come from a fertilized egg that has gone through a handful of cell divisions.
In natural developmental terms, if that fertilization had occured inside the woman, the embryo at this point wouldn't have even implanted yet. I don't think you can even call a woman pregnant before implantation. About half of natural fertilizations don't make it past this point, anyway (see the quote from the Harvard prof above). Those lost embryos are never noticed because it's not until some time after implantation - long after the time to collect stem cells has passed - that it's even possible to detect that the woman is pregnant. So any production of stem cell for therapy will have to occur in vitro, just like IVF. There is no chance of any of those eggs ever developing into a human, unless they're implanted into a woman, and even then the odds are against them. And if we're willing to create (and mostly waste) fertilized eggs in order to create life, what's so horrifying about using them to save life?
Then surely the answer is to fix the copyright system.
I completely agree. But, babysteps. Fix the parts you can, and then they can serve as models to fix the whole. The issue of biological science publishing has a lot more intrinsic appeal, popular support, and Congressional sympathy than the broader issue of copyright law.
If the journal stopped publishing anything interesting after the great earwax editorial panel wars of '99, then they can drop their subscription and subscribe to `Earwax Review 2b' or wherever the worthwhile research went.
That may have been true 10 years ago, when the volume of published works was smaller and the internet was new. But the world has gone electronic. The sheer volume of biological science being done has spawned a huge number of new journals at all levels of prestige (look at the number of Cell's and Nature's, for example); libraries simply don't have, and can't afford, the physical space to keep enormous physical archives in perpetuity. And they can't digitize their existing archives, even for local use (should that become economical) without stepping on copyright.
From the researchers' perspective, you'd foment revolt if you suddenly told them that the only access to Formerly Popular Journal of Earwax will be through a copy machine on the other side of the city. In that sense, the libraries are responding to the needs of the scientists: they demand instant electronic access, and the libraries pay through the nose to get it.
in the other he has influence on whether his article gets published... but I doubt it would be good for the quality of what is published.
"Page charges" are already commonplace, for subscription-only journals. Many bear official "advertisement" notices for this reason. Particularly if rates are flexible only downwards, I don't see how pay-per-publish would further undermine editorial integrity. In fact, moving towards a predominantly electronic publishing model has had the enormous benefit of turning back the near-inexorible trend of the Great Shrinking Science Article. In time, even the long-endangered species Reproducible Methods Section and Critical Control Experiment might start to re-appear.
But it does mean that the publisher's income is inversely proportional to the quality of that process.
There is a lower limit, set by the fact that if a journal gets too bad a reputation people will submit elsewhere, but still I think that a system where the publisher is rewarded for the quality of the content is better.
That's a nice ideal, but it assumes a reasonably free and fluid market, which simply doesn't exist in this field, thanks to perpetual copyright and conglomeration. A library must maintain subscriptions to the top (say, 50) journals in each field, because its institution's researchers need access to those archives. No matter how bad a journal's current content, if it wasn't always so, you're held hostage to that archive. The incentive, for once-prestigous journals, is towards mediocrity, not excellence. The library must keep up the subscription, or face a researcher revolt, so to maximize profits the journal can raise rates and cut costs. And both are happening regularly.
Newer journals, for which archive access isn't a necessity, can make their way by association. A handful of huge corporate conglomerates own most journals in my field (biology) - Nature Publishing Group and Elsevier alone account for a substantial fraction of popular titles. Your library doesn't see a need for "Nature Cell Developmental Biology of the Molecule?" Well, it's included in the exorbitant rate you pay for the Cell and/or Nature families. Think cable TV bundling. Again, the incentive is to maximize profit by market manipulation, not by quality.
All of this works only because the journals retain copyright and can restrict access to journal archives in Mickey-Mouse perpetutity. Switching to a pay-per-publish model where authors retain copyright frees up the whole system, and makes it work for the researcher again. Archives can be free (as in speech and beer). The cost to the researcher is nil, because his/her grant money is paying for the journal either way - through overhead fees that go through the library, or directly via pay-per-publish. For biology, in fact, virtually all of the money comes from the US government, anyway. Better to spend it efficiently with PPP than to continue the current model of government-funded oligolpoly that is the publishing world today.
Like the other respondant pointed out, PV isn't practical for the Presidency, and I never liked how it takes the power to select individual representatives away from voters. You vote for a party, not a person, and the party gets to select which person goes in, even you think that particular person is a scumbag. So I'm sure it works fine for parliamentary systems, but it wouldn't here.
Instant run-off voting, on the other hand, might instantly cure the worst of what ails our system. The two-party duopoly is the source of almost all things bad, and, together with winner-take-all electoral votes, it guarantees that no 3rd party will ever win the Presidency. IRV turns the system on its head by eliminating the fear of "throwing away your vote". It would break the duopoly, and make the system much more fluid again. And since voting rules are defined state-by-state, there's at least a snowball's chance in hell of getting a few states to try it.
It was a pretty good interview. But one aspect of the whole thing distresses me - Martin admits he's not a very technical user. Yet he is in charge of directions to probe and determining what facts to spread.
This really struck me, too. Yeah, he's a "manager", not a "technician", but since he is the public face of MS's platform strategy - the guy who's supposed to impress CTO's and IT specialists with his arguments - you'd think a more technically-inclined person would be a better fit. He isn't going to impress anyone by saying his major experience with Linux is Linspire. Nor by saying that he never uses anti-virus software. Nor by practically boasting of not being a "technical" person.
Given the image he seems determined to present, why would any sane manager trust this guy's word when deciding what sorts of technologies are best for his company?
I almost get the impression that his real job is less that of technical evangelism and more like the prostitute in HHGTTG whose job is to tell rich people that it's OK to be rich: "It's OK to use Microsoft. Im an average guy like you, I don't understand that Linux thingy either, but I know that we're better for you. Don't worry about it. Look at my pretty graphs and studies."
Guess what, even Kaiser and Cancer treatment places are there to MAKE MONEY, not for any other purpose.
Many hospitals and "cancer treatment places" are run as not-for-profit organizations, precisely because there are some businesses for which the bottom line should not be maximum profit.
But yes, Google is a public company now, and as such is statutorily required to maximize profits. Page and Brin could be sued for doing anything else.
Simple, it takes almost as much oil to transport it from the middle east as you can bring over. The real reason gas prices are so high is because of investors taking advantage of the gullible in a speculative market
Transport costs are less then 5% of the cost of a barrel of oil at current prices. In fact, this is why crude prices are high here when supply is disrputed in the ME. Oil is a global market. Disruptions in supply to one area mean higher prices for everyone. That's a good thing; otherwise we'd be really be paying through the nose after all the strikes in Venezuela.
But there is surely a "terror premium" in today's crude prices; most folks estimate it at $5-10. OTOH, you could call it a "no spare capacity" premium just as accurately. Global pries are high, and will likely remain high, because demand is growing faster than supply. Small disruptions thus have a disproportionate effect on prices.
But that's not why gas prices are high here in the US. That has much more to do with lack of refinery capacity and price-fixing. Did you notice how gas prices rose dramatically last spring, when crude prices were stable; and actually fell a bit in the fall (run-up to the election) when crude prices were spiking? There's a disconnect because relatively little of the pump price is actually the cost of crude. Other factors are much more important.
I think you have the chronology backwards there. The Bush cutoffs took place after North Korea violated their treaty obligations. (It was because they restarted plutonium production, wasn't it?)
Since I'm sure no one will listen to the AC below, I'll point out too that in neoconservative America, the one who has it backwards is YOU. [apologies]
The deal was struck in 1994. We build light-water reactors, they give up heavy water reactors and the plutonium in their spent fuel rods. Until the light-water reactors are complete, we supply them with an equivalent amount of fuel oil. Good deal. The UN seals, cameras and safeguards quickly went into place.
We, however, soft-reneged almost from the start. Getting the reactors built was like pulling teeth, and getting funding for the fuel shipments was even worse. Our deliveries were delayed more and more, and the reactors fell further and further behind schedule (a contract wasn't even awarded until 1999; even then, despite a planned completion by 2003, almost no work was done before the deal collapsed).
So NK soft-reneged. They secretly started a uranium-enriching program to supplement the plutonium-producing one that was now under UN guard. We didn't have any proof until late 2002, and when we showed them the proof they promptly admitted the program. But...
We had already suspended our side of the deal in early 2001. Yes, we may have suspected by then that the NK were breaking the deal, but we had no proof at all. And, of course, the oil shipments and light-water reactor were so far behind schedule that NK probably didn't consider our "formal" suspension any different from the status quo. We didn't officially kill the deal until late 2002, with proof/admission of uranium enrichment, but by then we were just sticking a knife into a corpse.
Summary? We cheated, then they cheated. We cut the rope without proof, then they admitted their cheating. Assign whatever varying motivation you want to all those actions. We cheated out of bureaucratic inertia, they cheated out of evilness. We cut the rope out of prudence, they enriched uranium out of evilness. But the fact is that, at least initially, they held to their end of the deal, and we didn't. Doesn't mean they can be trusted, or that we can't. Doesn't mean they're not evil, and we're not a beacon of goodness. It's just a fact.
but I did find this cool article on how the North Korean stadium displays use children as "human pixels" for their grand displays of supposed superiority... and how difficult it is to train children in other countries to do the same thing.
Bah, you can even tric^H^Hain Harvard "children" to do the same thing.
Apple currently makes 95% of its money on hardware. They use that money to fund software development, including OS X.
This is true. The dogma is that Apple makes money selling computers, and the OS is just a way to push the hardware. That's why cloning was such a brickbrained idea, and why it almost killed Apple.
But, as another poster pointed out, Apple may still make 95% of its revenue from hardware, but only 60% from computer hardware. The iPod may be changing the equation a bit. For the first time, Apple has a reliable cash cow that's not a computer. If, and it's a big if, they were ever interested in trying to make the transition to being a software company, there would be no better time than now. They can afford to let Mac sales slow or drop, and let clones/licensees pick up some of their market share, while the iPod continues to pay the bills.
That said, I don't see any motivation to actually do this. The downsides are plenty (commoditization, random hardware support, variable hardware quality, loss of computer revenue, incompatibility between PPC and x86), and could seriously dent Apple's reputation. While the upside - market share - may or may not actually happen. And Apple might be able to double their market share on their own, anyway. Aside from the CPUs, there shouldn't be any problems scaling up production, since every PC maker uses the same parts and the same Taiwanese assemblers. I don't see the appeal of outsourcing hardware sales. If Apple's even thinking about it, I imagine they'll change their minds when the Mini's sales figures start coming in.
I explicitly aren't allowed a blank password for Administrator during the install process
Maybe they changed this in XP, but 2000 definitely defaults to a blank password for user "Administrator", which is the default name for the first account. One of my relatives' computers got infected by a worm last year that exploited exactly that, because of exactly that. He didn't even know what his password was (it was set to auto-login, and "Administrator" was the only account), so he certainly didn't set it explicitly.
Remote access on by default, "Administrator" password blank by default. Brilliant!
Especially in Seattle, you can't assume that every open access point is that way only because the owner doesn't know how to secure it. Many folks leave their access points open intentionally, as a service to the community. There's even a substantial, organized effort, Seattle Wireless, to encourage more folks to do so.
In light of this, I think the whole argument about whether finding and using APs is illegal is nonsense. What's the difference between an open-by-ignorance and open-by-design AP? Nothing. Maybe this is an argument for routers to ship with some sort of security on by default, but clearly you can't consider all war-driving in Seattle to be prima facie malicious.
Do you read your own links? "Ten Costliest Battles of the Civil War" leads to a page listing #1 as Gettysburg, with 51,112 total casualties, "killed, wounded, missing, and captured." The number of killed includes mortally wounded, not just KIA.
Throughout the war, deaths by disease certainly outnumbered deaths in battle, but not during a 3-day battle or even a six-week campaign culminating in such a battle. They were a slow, steady trickle, many occuring in camp during periods of inactivity, and many in training camps when rural boys were sudddenly exposed to the gamut of urban disease.
As things stand right now, there's at least 30 years - at least seven presidential terms - between now and when those people start collecting. Chances are some politician is going to wreck social security between now and then even if the gloom and doom predictions don't come true.
Funny thing is, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan - speaking for the nascent conservative wing of he Republican party - were saying the exact same thing forty-one years ago. Social Security was one of the central themes of the 1964 campaign. Glance over the bits about SS in Reagan's televised address in support of Goldwater. If you adjust the numbers for inflation, and didn't know the context, you'd think it was a GWB stump speech. The rhetoric is exactly the same today as it was then. Except, of course, SS has done just fine over the last 41 years, and after the Reagan/Greenspan reforms in the 80s it will do just fine for about the next forty or fifty years.
SS is not in crisis - not within any reasonable horizon, and probably not at all. The general budget deficit, our foreign debt, and our current accounts deficit are all very serious crises, right now. Crises that are already imparing the national security of the United States, and that run a real risk of substantially affecting our standard of living in the near future. Why can't we, for once, focus on actual problems and have real discussion about them, rather then descending into ideologically-driven drivel?
OK they're #5 among the main nuclear powers, but that's still ~120 nuclear missles can do enough damage to consider them pretty powerful.
They have only 24 ICBMs that can reach US soil. Many of the rest can't even reach Tokyo or Moscow. Still, 24 5-megaton warheads makes for a sufficient deterrent, and China probably feels no pressure to upgrade until the US missle defense proves its efficiency.
Has anyone caught on the Kerry does not really seem to understand the job of President of the United States? Listening to his speeches makes me choke, he talks about going into Russia and finding their nuclear waste... What authority does he have to do that?
I can only clear up a tiny bit of ignorance at a time...
It's called the Nunn-Lugar program, it's been around since 1991, and it's worked marvelously at helping Russia secure or destroy its dangerous weapons - with Russia's full cooperation.
Despite the risk of terrorists aquiring WMDs from a nation that's actually swimming in them, Bush proposed cutting the budget for Nunn-Lugar by 13% after he entered office. 9/11 changed everything, but rather than accelerate Nunn-Lugar, Bush chose to meekly restore the original funding level - until this year, when he again proposed reducing the funding, all the way back to his proposed (i.e. slashed) 2001 level.
Kerry, by contrast, has promised to fund Nunn-Lugar generously, and accelerate its progress.
And this isn't exactly blowing the budget. Nunn-Lugar funding has boomeranged between $400 and $500 million the last few years. It's less than a rounding error in the DoD budget, yet it's the most effective way to secure the most likely source fo WMDs for terrorists.
And, before the democrats threw a fit, it was only going to be for the super-rich. Specifically, the parts for people with incomes of under $200,000 per year were not in the original bill.
Holy crap, you're right. How did I never know this? I looked up the original version of the summer 2001 tax cut bill, HR 1836, as introduced in the House on 5/15/2001: Thomas link to summary.
Indeed, it does not contain the famous $300 rebate, or any increase in the child tax credit, or the "marriage penalty", or education. Admittedly, nothing about the estate tax either, so I guess the pressures work both ways once a bill gets introduced. It only lowered the first bracket to 12%, and phased in the new brackets (10/15/25/33) entirely by 2006. In other words, little help for the middle class, and little/no immediate stimulus. What a useless bill.
How does a tax cut that gradually phases in by 2009, and which all expires in 2010 (in order to reduce the ten-year 2002-2011 "cost") have anything to do with stimulating the economy in 2001?
The stimulus bit, the $300 checks mailed out to taxpayers, the bit that Dems in Congress insisted on, was not only an afterthought, but amounted to a rounding error in the overall cost of the bill.
I dunno, MS has over $60B in cash/securities, which is fully one-fifth their market cap. Some unknown fraction of that cap is already owned by insiders and by the company itself, too. And they're generating at least $8B cash a year. I just can't see how the stock can fall very far (more than, say, half) with that much cash propping it up - unless the cash flow dries up first.
I really don't understand the infatuation with high tech voting.
The most common justification I hear for touch-screen voting is customization. It's trivial to make custom "ballots" for people with any kind of handicap or limitation, for whom filling out a normal ballot might be difficut. Everything from blind people to ESL folks, to old people who have trouble with small print. It kinda makes sense, but all you need is an electronic interface. No reason you can't then print out a ballot that can be verified by the voter (in most cases) and actually counted by hand or by OCR.
Imagine all of Medicare got their act together and would negotiate ONE price with the supplier? Suddenly the prices would drop.
What a brilliant idea! Why didn't someone in Congress think of that?
Oh, right, because the Administration and Congressional Republicans made it explicitly illegal for Medicare to negotiate bulk prices when they passed the recent Medicare prescription drug benefit. The VA's been doing it for years, but Medicare is forbidden by law.
Are you Canadian? Then I guess you can't help us undo this bit of absurdity. For all you other Americans out there, though, I hope you know why Medicare doesn't do it, who to blame, and in less than two weeks you can help the guy who's promised to undo this ridiculous restriction to reach office.
Insurance companies just run the numbers and tack on a profit - they really are the least responsible.
Must be a typo. I think you meant to say "Insurance companies just run the numbers and tack on a profit, then invest those profits in the stock market, build up expectations of high profit margins due to stock returns, then lose their shirts when the market crashes, and hike up premiums to maintain the profit margins Wall Street has come to expect of them."
Re:A bit underwhelmed by the review...
on
The Ultimate MacDate
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Speaking of obvious, he complained that Safari doesn't auto-complete URLs. Huh? How can you not notice this feature? Maybe he expected it to auto-complete a URL that he had never visited before? Steve Jobs is still polishing that mind-reading software - look for it in 10.4. But now, Safari even auto-completes terms you type into the Google search box. Every text box on any website you visit auto-completes, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Stem cells are harvested from a fertilized egg that has gone through a handful of cell divisions. In the body, that egg would not have even implanted itself yet. And it's not just a matter of timing; an embryo has to go through a variety of differentiations to prepare itself for implantation, which make getting completely undifferentiated stem cells from it impracical/impossible. So any creation of embryos for stem cells has to happen in vitro, just like in IVF.That, by contrast, is a very insightful fear. Yes, if you're implanted with tissue or an organ grown from someone else's stem cells, you're going to be taking anti-rejection drugs for the rest of your life. Just like with tissue/organ transplants today. There are probably fewer risks with transplanting contaminating immune cells (a major source of problems for transpantees today), but the fundamental problem - that your own body will attack the tissue as non-self - remains. The solution, unique to embryonic stem cells, is the ability to grow them from your own cells and produce perfectly genetically matched tissue to put back into your own body. That is the role of therapeutic cloning.
In natural developmental terms, if that fertilization had occured inside the woman, the embryo at this point wouldn't have even implanted yet. I don't think you can even call a woman pregnant before implantation. About half of natural fertilizations don't make it past this point, anyway (see the quote from the Harvard prof above). Those lost embryos are never noticed because it's not until some time after implantation - long after the time to collect stem cells has passed - that it's even possible to detect that the woman is pregnant. So any production of stem cell for therapy will have to occur in vitro, just like IVF. There is no chance of any of those eggs ever developing into a human, unless they're implanted into a woman, and even then the odds are against them. And if we're willing to create (and mostly waste) fertilized eggs in order to create life, what's so horrifying about using them to save life?
From the researchers' perspective, you'd foment revolt if you suddenly told them that the only access to Formerly Popular Journal of Earwax will be through a copy machine on the other side of the city. In that sense, the libraries are responding to the needs of the scientists: they demand instant electronic access, and the libraries pay through the nose to get it."Page charges" are already commonplace, for subscription-only journals. Many bear official "advertisement" notices for this reason. Particularly if rates are flexible only downwards, I don't see how pay-per-publish would further undermine editorial integrity. In fact, moving towards a predominantly electronic publishing model has had the enormous benefit of turning back the near-inexorible trend of the Great Shrinking Science Article. In time, even the long-endangered species Reproducible Methods Section and Critical Control Experiment might start to re-appear.
Newer journals, for which archive access isn't a necessity, can make their way by association. A handful of huge corporate conglomerates own most journals in my field (biology) - Nature Publishing Group and Elsevier alone account for a substantial fraction of popular titles. Your library doesn't see a need for "Nature Cell Developmental Biology of the Molecule?" Well, it's included in the exorbitant rate you pay for the Cell and/or Nature families. Think cable TV bundling. Again, the incentive is to maximize profit by market manipulation, not by quality.
All of this works only because the journals retain copyright and can restrict access to journal archives in Mickey-Mouse perpetutity. Switching to a pay-per-publish model where authors retain copyright frees up the whole system, and makes it work for the researcher again. Archives can be free (as in speech and beer). The cost to the researcher is nil, because his/her grant money is paying for the journal either way - through overhead fees that go through the library, or directly via pay-per-publish. For biology, in fact, virtually all of the money comes from the US government, anyway. Better to spend it efficiently with PPP than to continue the current model of government-funded oligolpoly that is the publishing world today.
Like the other respondant pointed out, PV isn't practical for the Presidency, and I never liked how it takes the power to select individual representatives away from voters. You vote for a party, not a person, and the party gets to select which person goes in, even you think that particular person is a scumbag. So I'm sure it works fine for parliamentary systems, but it wouldn't here.
Instant run-off voting, on the other hand, might instantly cure the worst of what ails our system. The two-party duopoly is the source of almost all things bad, and, together with winner-take-all electoral votes, it guarantees that no 3rd party will ever win the Presidency. IRV turns the system on its head by eliminating the fear of "throwing away your vote". It would break the duopoly, and make the system much more fluid again. And since voting rules are defined state-by-state, there's at least a snowball's chance in hell of getting a few states to try it.
Given the image he seems determined to present, why would any sane manager trust this guy's word when deciding what sorts of technologies are best for his company?
I almost get the impression that his real job is less that of technical evangelism and more like the prostitute in HHGTTG whose job is to tell rich people that it's OK to be rich: "It's OK to use Microsoft. Im an average guy like you, I don't understand that Linux thingy either, but I know that we're better for you. Don't worry about it. Look at my pretty graphs and studies."
But yes, Google is a public company now, and as such is statutorily required to maximize profits. Page and Brin could be sued for doing anything else.
But there is surely a "terror premium" in today's crude prices; most folks estimate it at $5-10. OTOH, you could call it a "no spare capacity" premium just as accurately. Global pries are high, and will likely remain high, because demand is growing faster than supply. Small disruptions thus have a disproportionate effect on prices.
But that's not why gas prices are high here in the US. That has much more to do with lack of refinery capacity and price-fixing. Did you notice how gas prices rose dramatically last spring, when crude prices were stable; and actually fell a bit in the fall (run-up to the election) when crude prices were spiking? There's a disconnect because relatively little of the pump price is actually the cost of crude. Other factors are much more important.
The deal was struck in 1994. We build light-water reactors, they give up heavy water reactors and the plutonium in their spent fuel rods. Until the light-water reactors are complete, we supply them with an equivalent amount of fuel oil. Good deal. The UN seals, cameras and safeguards quickly went into place.
We, however, soft-reneged almost from the start. Getting the reactors built was like pulling teeth, and getting funding for the fuel shipments was even worse. Our deliveries were delayed more and more, and the reactors fell further and further behind schedule (a contract wasn't even awarded until 1999; even then, despite a planned completion by 2003, almost no work was done before the deal collapsed).
So NK soft-reneged. They secretly started a uranium-enriching program to supplement the plutonium-producing one that was now under UN guard. We didn't have any proof until late 2002, and when we showed them the proof they promptly admitted the program. But...
We had already suspended our side of the deal in early 2001. Yes, we may have suspected by then that the NK were breaking the deal, but we had no proof at all. And, of course, the oil shipments and light-water reactor were so far behind schedule that NK probably didn't consider our "formal" suspension any different from the status quo. We didn't officially kill the deal until late 2002, with proof/admission of uranium enrichment, but by then we were just sticking a knife into a corpse.
Summary? We cheated, then they cheated. We cut the rope without proof, then they admitted their cheating. Assign whatever varying motivation you want to all those actions. We cheated out of bureaucratic inertia, they cheated out of evilness. We cut the rope out of prudence, they enriched uranium out of evilness. But the fact is that, at least initially, they held to their end of the deal, and we didn't. Doesn't mean they can be trusted, or that we can't. Doesn't mean they're not evil, and we're not a beacon of goodness. It's just a fact.
But, as another poster pointed out, Apple may still make 95% of its revenue from hardware, but only 60% from computer hardware. The iPod may be changing the equation a bit. For the first time, Apple has a reliable cash cow that's not a computer. If, and it's a big if, they were ever interested in trying to make the transition to being a software company, there would be no better time than now. They can afford to let Mac sales slow or drop, and let clones/licensees pick up some of their market share, while the iPod continues to pay the bills.
That said, I don't see any motivation to actually do this. The downsides are plenty (commoditization, random hardware support, variable hardware quality, loss of computer revenue, incompatibility between PPC and x86), and could seriously dent Apple's reputation. While the upside - market share - may or may not actually happen. And Apple might be able to double their market share on their own, anyway. Aside from the CPUs, there shouldn't be any problems scaling up production, since every PC maker uses the same parts and the same Taiwanese assemblers. I don't see the appeal of outsourcing hardware sales. If Apple's even thinking about it, I imagine they'll change their minds when the Mini's sales figures start coming in.
Thank you.
Remote access on by default, "Administrator" password blank by default. Brilliant!
Especially in Seattle, you can't assume that every open access point is that way only because the owner doesn't know how to secure it. Many folks leave their access points open intentionally, as a service to the community. There's even a substantial, organized effort, Seattle Wireless, to encourage more folks to do so.
In light of this, I think the whole argument about whether finding and using APs is illegal is nonsense. What's the difference between an open-by-ignorance and open-by-design AP? Nothing. Maybe this is an argument for routers to ship with some sort of security on by default, but clearly you can't consider all war-driving in Seattle to be prima facie malicious.
Do you read your own links? "Ten Costliest Battles of the Civil War" leads to a page listing #1 as Gettysburg, with 51,112 total casualties, "killed, wounded, missing, and captured." The number of killed includes mortally wounded, not just KIA.
Throughout the war, deaths by disease certainly outnumbered deaths in battle, but not during a 3-day battle or even a six-week campaign culminating in such a battle. They were a slow, steady trickle, many occuring in camp during periods of inactivity, and many in training camps when rural boys were sudddenly exposed to the gamut of urban disease.
SS is not in crisis - not within any reasonable horizon, and probably not at all. The general budget deficit, our foreign debt, and our current accounts deficit are all very serious crises, right now. Crises that are already imparing the national security of the United States, and that run a real risk of substantially affecting our standard of living in the near future. Why can't we, for once, focus on actual problems and have real discussion about them, rather then descending into ideologically-driven drivel?
It's called the Nunn-Lugar program, it's been around since 1991, and it's worked marvelously at helping Russia secure or destroy its dangerous weapons - with Russia's full cooperation.
Despite the risk of terrorists aquiring WMDs from a nation that's actually swimming in them, Bush proposed cutting the budget for Nunn-Lugar by 13% after he entered office. 9/11 changed everything, but rather than accelerate Nunn-Lugar, Bush chose to meekly restore the original funding level - until this year, when he again proposed reducing the funding, all the way back to his proposed (i.e. slashed) 2001 level.
Kerry, by contrast, has promised to fund Nunn-Lugar generously, and accelerate its progress.
And this isn't exactly blowing the budget. Nunn-Lugar funding has boomeranged between $400 and $500 million the last few years. It's less than a rounding error in the DoD budget, yet it's the most effective way to secure the most likely source fo WMDs for terrorists.
Indeed, it does not contain the famous $300 rebate, or any increase in the child tax credit, or the "marriage penalty", or education. Admittedly, nothing about the estate tax either, so I guess the pressures work both ways once a bill gets introduced. It only lowered the first bracket to 12%, and phased in the new brackets (10/15/25/33) entirely by 2006. In other words, little help for the middle class, and little/no immediate stimulus. What a useless bill.
Silly anonymous coward...
How does a tax cut that gradually phases in by 2009, and which all expires in 2010 (in order to reduce the ten-year 2002-2011 "cost") have anything to do with stimulating the economy in 2001?
The stimulus bit, the $300 checks mailed out to taxpayers, the bit that Dems in Congress insisted on, was not only an afterthought, but amounted to a rounding error in the overall cost of the bill.
Silly, silly anonymous coward.
I dunno, MS has over $60B in cash/securities, which is fully one-fifth their market cap. Some unknown fraction of that cap is already owned by insiders and by the company itself, too. And they're generating at least $8B cash a year. I just can't see how the stock can fall very far (more than, say, half) with that much cash propping it up - unless the cash flow dries up first.
Oh, right, because the Administration and Congressional Republicans made it explicitly illegal for Medicare to negotiate bulk prices when they passed the recent Medicare prescription drug benefit. The VA's been doing it for years, but Medicare is forbidden by law.
Are you Canadian? Then I guess you can't help us undo this bit of absurdity. For all you other Americans out there, though, I hope you know why Medicare doesn't do it, who to blame, and in less than two weeks you can help the guy who's promised to undo this ridiculous restriction to reach office.
That's what you meant to say, right?
Speaking of obvious, he complained that Safari doesn't auto-complete URLs. Huh? How can you not notice this feature? Maybe he expected it to auto-complete a URL that he had never visited before? Steve Jobs is still polishing that mind-reading software - look for it in 10.4. But now, Safari even auto-completes terms you type into the Google search box. Every text box on any website you visit auto-completes, too.