Why does everyone bitch about MS subsidizing their OWN PRODUCTS??? Microsoft has made enough money convincing people to buy their product. Saying that MS doesn't have to right to spend money on it's own product implies that Microsoft does not have the right to spend its own money. If a company wants to lose wads of cash on a poor product, LET IT. If they want to string it along until it's good enough for people to use, LET IT. Microsoft doesn't hold a gun to people's head and say "use MSN or you're dead." There are always equivalent alternatives.
But, the whole issue with the gas station example was that there was ALWAYS choice involved. People didn't have to buy gas from a Standard Oil gas pump (did any of us realize that this was before there were cars???), but they did anyways. Mom and Pop could have put up signs in their store saying why they would like business (quality, sympathy, whatever), and if people cared (always a big if) then mom and pop would have survived.
I think another issue here is that people don't like reorganizations, because it involves temporary pain. Europe won't tolerate a tempoary increase in unemployment (even though it's very high right now) as their economy restructures - just look at France! The United States is different, however - we have to tolerate that because there is no other choice. We either accept incoming technologies and recycle our labor into more efficient processes, or we live on the street. When there is no safety net involved, the best things happen.
Plus, we're all forgetting that the employees of these "poor" companies that were bought by Microsoft made out like bandits - Microsoft has been responsible for creating more wealth for more people than anything else in American history. While the purist in us may cringe at the idea of a large corporation taking over an innovative small company, the reality is that few, if any people acutally get harmed.
Many of these arguments are all subjective. Why is Europe set up as the government system to emulate?
The EU (not necessarily the individual countries, mind you) is not a friend of personal freedom. A few months ago, it outlawed written speech (i.e. newspapers) critical of the government. The Italian government is actively trying to shut down independent Internet journalists (their version of a Matt Drudge. The EU police JAILED an Englishman for not selling bananas on a street market in kilograms.
While a government may hand out food and entertainment to keep people from rioting (just like Rome in its decline), that doesn't mean it's a healthy one.
Besides, a better measure of prosperity is WHERE ARE PEOPLE GOING. Which country more than any other country on earth has people clamoring to get in? Which one has people braving shark infested waters in log floats to reach? Which country has people risking death in the desert to get inside?
The answer is simple. The United States of America.
This scares me. While on paper I like the idea of rectifying genetic diseases and abnormalities, who is to control this?
Will skin color be considered a "defect?" How about height? In the future how will those who's parents were not wealthy enough to modify their babies have a fair chance in the world?
Watch the second ending to GATTACA on the DVD version. There is a very real possibility of this technology being abused beyond anyone's imagination. It is quite possible that this slope is just too slippery to continue down.
so, because we can "only" stop about 60% (I've heard that a laser based system would be closer to 90%) of the warheads launched at us, we shouldn't bother? If you can only cure 60% of the people infected with HIV, would you not do it because it's only "60% effective?"
I work 35 hours a week, but I also take 12 credits at college. Add it up. (I'm also in the Northern VA area, so the cost of living here is rediculously high).
This is just a side thought - does it surprise anyone that the most prosperous nation on earth has the hardest workers? Just an idea.
In theory, quantum computing would allow fantastically fast computing. There are, as usual, a few hurdles.
The first of these is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This states that you cannot know both the location AND velocity of a sub atomic particle (protons and on down). Stated otherwise, you cannot measure its location without changing its velocity, and vice versa. Or, you cannot separate the observer from the observed. For example, if you wanted to bounce a photon of light off of a proton so you could "see" it, the photon would have to have an extremely small wavelentgh (smaller than the diameter of the proton). This means that the photon would carry a lot of angular momentum, and when said photon collides with the proton, path of the photon would change, but SO WOULD THE PROTON - and there is no way of knowing in what way that path changed. The upshot of this is that you can never accurately predict what a particle will be doing at a given location. This is why electron orbitals are represented as probability clouds (in actual physics labs) as opposed to the more popular "solar system" model.
What the HUP means as far as processors go is that there has to be a reliable way of controlling (starting, stopping, redirecting, DETECTING) super small particles for it to work. As of right now, even in theory, we have no way of doing that.
Near as I can tell, being a failed physics major, the only way we'll get quantum computers is when we finally crack the GUT's and String Theory (the reconcilliatioin of newtonian and quantum mechanics). Albert Einstein, Steve Weinberg, Richard Feynman, and Steven Hawking have all been stumped by this problem. In fact, Einstein compared it to the biblical "thorn in the chest" because he felt his theories were incomplete while that problem existed.
You know what's even more incredible? More than likely, FTL (faster-than-light) computers are closer. I think that's another post, though.
Does that excuse the actions of Castro against his own people? Does that excuse the fact that children are taken away at 8 years old to work in the sugar cane fields?
C'mon. Cuba is a terrible country, not becuase of its people, but because of its government.
Can you blame us for wanting to help those people? Why the hell would hundreds of them risk (and sometimes lose) their lives on flotsam to reach the US? Because they're HAPPY in Cuba?
The problem with the New York Times is the same problem with almost every single news source in the world - they are very very biased. Though, in the NYT, the prejoratives and value statements are there a little bit more obviously, they're not that different from other news sources.
The editorial board of the NYT is a rather liberal, leftist group. They sympathize with China. This article is not surprising. Compare it to similar articles found at places like Fox News, or the Washington Times.
There are always two sides to a story, and just reading the political coverage in the NYT, it's obvious that they don't care about that.
This is a case of states regulating commerce within their borders (perfectly legal). Federal action is NOT THE SOLUTION (it rarely is). The Federal government has no business stepping in here. If other states want to pass similar UCITA laws, let them. If companies like MS want to do business in those states, have them change their policies.
That's the underlying principle of capitalism - it actually gives power to people. If a large group of people dont' like a company, they boycott its products until it changes its ways. If you don't like MS, don't buy their shit. When they piss enough people off, I guarantee you, they'll have no choice.
There's a process called "interferometry." It is the combining of several smaller telescopes along the exact curvature of a larger one to produce a similar effect to the larger one. Anyone seen Contact? The VLA(where Jodie Foster heard that signal), or Very Large Array, is a series of radio telescopes layed out over almost a mile (I think) in a big peace sign. They can gather the same kind of information that a single, unimaginably more expensive telescope could.
The reason we don't have these large arrays of optical telescopes has to do with the nature of light. Radio waves have such a large wavelength that aligning several telescopes along the exact parabolic curve of a simulated large reflector is not difficult (radio waves can be anywhere from several inches to several hundred feet long).
An optical telescope array presents a much more difficult problem. Light in the visible spectrum has very small wavelengths (less than an inch). Thus, aligning even two telescopes along the proper parabolic curve for interferometry is extraordinarily difficult on earth. People are trying this with the twin 10 meter Keck telescopes in Hawaii, though, and have met with some success. The easiest place for interferometry, though, is space.
There are actually plans in NASA (I don't know if Daniel Goldin has cancelled this yet) for a few new space telescopes.
The first one is the NGST, or Next Generation Space Telescope. This will have a large solar shield (basically, a large sheet of mylar to reflect heat away from the mirrors). It will have several octagonal mirror surfaces, and will unfold to be about 8 meters across (Hubble is less than 3). It will also have various infrared and microwave cameras built in, so dangerous "upgrade" missions won't be required nearly as much.
A more long-term telescope project is under way to actually image earth-sized planets. The first will be a series of two or three small telescopes orbiting between Earth and Mars. These will be testing laser tracking and micro-rocket stability systems, and will atempt to keep the telescopes perfectly aligned down to the micrometer.
If this is successful, then a few years later a couple of telescopes the size of NGST (this is into the 2010's) will be launched and aligned in a similar manner beyond Jupiter (the plan is to spread them over about 300 meters. Imagine that - a 300 meter wide telescope, in space, without any of the distortions our atmosphere provides!). This will allow them not only an unprecedented clarity (one of the main reasons Hubble can take such amazing pictures), but also size (it could theoretically see back to half a million years after the Big Bang), and it could, of course, resolve a visual image of an earth-like planet.
Such a telescope could take the spectra of such planets. A spectrum is the rainbow you see when white light is shone through a prism. When light bounced off a certain substance is analyzed, there are dark bars present, that can tell a scientist precisely what elements (and how much of each) are present. Sometimes, in labs, scientists will burn a chunk of material with a laser, and record that (it's much brighter), but astronomers can do it with telescopes. This means that astronomers, from light years away, could tell if a planet had liquid water, oxygen, nitrogen, methane, sulfur, whatever. It is, however, highly unlikely that such a telescope could see lights at night. For one thing, it's not a given that any species would even NEED light (or that if we could detect civilization from so far away, why wouldn't we also be recieving radio or maser signals from them?). For another, just when it would be possible to see the dark side of that planet would be when it is silhouetted against its sun (imagine trying to read the date off of a dime a thousand miles away when it's held in front of a 4D flashlight).
Even further down the road (like approaching 2100) is the idea of a gravity telescope. These would be several dozen AU away (an AU, or Astronomical Unit, is the average distance from Earth to the sun, or 93,000,000 miles). These telescopes would take advantage of the fact that gravity bends light (if you ever look at some of the deep space images that the large telescopes have taken, you can see large arcs, and what look like misplaced images. These are the images of galaxies that have been bent, distorted, or magnified by either another galaxy or galaxy cluster between it and us). These gravity telescopes would be placed exactly where the gravity of the sun focuses light to a point, and thus be able to see simply unbelievable amounts of the universe. Even one of these, sweeping through a tiny arc of its several hundred year orbit, would quickly amass more information than NASA is currently capable of storing.
All in all, though, there is so much left to learn from deep space, it almost makes you cry. I find the whole endeavor rather exciting.
1) During the cold war, Soviet subs were routinely heard by the SOSUS nets barely 15 miles off our coast, and American bases and Carrier groups were routinely buzzed by Bear Foxtrots. China does not do what we for several reasons. First off, China does not have any forward bases in the Americas. Thus, their much shorter-range surveillance planes could never hope to fly up and down our coast. Secondly, China could (and probably does) have submarines and disguised (usually as trawlers) spy ships all over our west coast. China has simply acted a bit childish.
2)There is a fundamental difference between Taiwan and Cuba. To begin with, China is not very subtle about its desire to take over Taiwan - by force, if necessary. The US has no such agenda with Cuba. Cuba is a dictatorship controlled by one despot - Taiwan is a free democracy. Cuba has (and did during the Missle Crisis) wanted ballistic missles for the purpose of having a bargaining chip with the US for better trade deals. Taiwan wants Aegis cruisers to hold back a China that has just recently installed almost 1,000 medium ballistic missles along its closest approach with Taiwan. Taiwan is about self preservation, and Cuba is decidedly not.
The funniest thing to think about: Taiwan was a part of China for perhaps 6 or 7 years out of the last CENTURY.
Plus, Taiwan and China have the same people, and Taiwan has less resources, but Taiwan is a prosperous and wealthy nation while China is still trying to keep peasants from starving to death while selling vegatables at government-controlled prices. The reason for this is quite simple: Taiwan is a free and open society, while China is not. China has meddled very little with Hong Kong's laws, because having an open economy creates wealth.
Freedom brings prosperity to a nation. Those Russian hackers wanted to come here because they knew that being able to live in a freer and more open society would let them live better lives.
You liked the Virtual Boy? That thing was absolutely terrible!
The N64, on the other hand, had a great start (Mario 64 and Goldeneye are still top notch games), but it has had a looooooooooong decline. It has come to the point where the N64 just had repackaged PS games, but without the nifty CG sequences and sound samples. Also, ROM cartridges are still hellishly expensive to manufacture, and Nintendo has a lot of liscencing hoops that it requires developers to jump through.
I think that Nintendo is making a mistake this time by once again not adapting a standardized media format.
Slashdot Mirror
I think another issue here is that people don't like reorganizations, because it involves temporary pain. Europe won't tolerate a tempoary increase in unemployment (even though it's very high right now) as their economy restructures - just look at France! The United States is different, however - we have to tolerate that because there is no other choice. We either accept incoming technologies and recycle our labor into more efficient processes, or we live on the street. When there is no safety net involved, the best things happen.
Plus, we're all forgetting that the employees of these "poor" companies that were bought by Microsoft made out like bandits - Microsoft has been responsible for creating more wealth for more people than anything else in American history. While the purist in us may cringe at the idea of a large corporation taking over an innovative small company, the reality is that few, if any people acutally get harmed.
The reason DNA can copy itself is that each base only bonds with one other base.
The EU (not necessarily the individual countries, mind you) is not a friend of personal freedom. A few months ago, it outlawed written speech (i.e. newspapers) critical of the government. The Italian government is actively trying to shut down independent Internet journalists (their version of a Matt Drudge. The EU police JAILED an Englishman for not selling bananas on a street market in kilograms.
While a government may hand out food and entertainment to keep people from rioting (just like Rome in its decline), that doesn't mean it's a healthy one.
Besides, a better measure of prosperity is WHERE ARE PEOPLE GOING. Which country more than any other country on earth has people clamoring to get in? Which one has people braving shark infested waters in log floats to reach? Which country has people risking death in the desert to get inside?
The answer is simple. The United States of America.
Will skin color be considered a "defect?" How about height? In the future how will those who's parents were not wealthy enough to modify their babies have a fair chance in the world?
Watch the second ending to GATTACA on the DVD version. There is a very real possibility of this technology being abused beyond anyone's imagination. It is quite possible that this slope is just too slippery to continue down.
This is just a side thought - does it surprise anyone that the most prosperous nation on earth has the hardest workers? Just an idea.
The first of these is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. This states that you cannot know both the location AND velocity of a sub atomic particle (protons and on down). Stated otherwise, you cannot measure its location without changing its velocity, and vice versa. Or, you cannot separate the observer from the observed. For example, if you wanted to bounce a photon of light off of a proton so you could "see" it, the photon would have to have an extremely small wavelentgh (smaller than the diameter of the proton). This means that the photon would carry a lot of angular momentum, and when said photon collides with the proton, path of the photon would change, but SO WOULD THE PROTON - and there is no way of knowing in what way that path changed. The upshot of this is that you can never accurately predict what a particle will be doing at a given location. This is why electron orbitals are represented as probability clouds (in actual physics labs) as opposed to the more popular "solar system" model.
What the HUP means as far as processors go is that there has to be a reliable way of controlling (starting, stopping, redirecting, DETECTING) super small particles for it to work. As of right now, even in theory, we have no way of doing that.
Near as I can tell, being a failed physics major, the only way we'll get quantum computers is when we finally crack the GUT's and String Theory (the reconcilliatioin of newtonian and quantum mechanics). Albert Einstein, Steve Weinberg, Richard Feynman, and Steven Hawking have all been stumped by this problem. In fact, Einstein compared it to the biblical "thorn in the chest" because he felt his theories were incomplete while that problem existed.
You know what's even more incredible? More than likely, FTL (faster-than-light) computers are closer. I think that's another post, though.
trolltrolltroll, trolltroll, TROLL TROLL!!! Why do you even give these the time of day?
C'mon. Cuba is a terrible country, not becuase of its people, but because of its government.
Can you blame us for wanting to help those people? Why the hell would hundreds of them risk (and sometimes lose) their lives on flotsam to reach the US? Because they're HAPPY in Cuba?
The editorial board of the NYT is a rather liberal, leftist group. They sympathize with China. This article is not surprising. Compare it to similar articles found at places like Fox News, or the Washington Times.
There are always two sides to a story, and just reading the political coverage in the NYT, it's obvious that they don't care about that.
That's the underlying principle of capitalism - it actually gives power to people. If a large group of people dont' like a company, they boycott its products until it changes its ways. If you don't like MS, don't buy their shit. When they piss enough people off, I guarantee you, they'll have no choice.
The reason we don't have these large arrays of optical telescopes has to do with the nature of light. Radio waves have such a large wavelength that aligning several telescopes along the exact parabolic curve of a simulated large reflector is not difficult (radio waves can be anywhere from several inches to several hundred feet long).
An optical telescope array presents a much more difficult problem. Light in the visible spectrum has very small wavelengths (less than an inch). Thus, aligning even two telescopes along the proper parabolic curve for interferometry is extraordinarily difficult on earth. People are trying this with the twin 10 meter Keck telescopes in Hawaii, though, and have met with some success. The easiest place for interferometry, though, is space.
There are actually plans in NASA (I don't know if Daniel Goldin has cancelled this yet) for a few new space telescopes.
The first one is the NGST, or Next Generation Space Telescope. This will have a large solar shield (basically, a large sheet of mylar to reflect heat away from the mirrors). It will have several octagonal mirror surfaces, and will unfold to be about 8 meters across (Hubble is less than 3). It will also have various infrared and microwave cameras built in, so dangerous "upgrade" missions won't be required nearly as much.
A more long-term telescope project is under way to actually image earth-sized planets. The first will be a series of two or three small telescopes orbiting between Earth and Mars. These will be testing laser tracking and micro-rocket stability systems, and will atempt to keep the telescopes perfectly aligned down to the micrometer.
If this is successful, then a few years later a couple of telescopes the size of NGST (this is into the 2010's) will be launched and aligned in a similar manner beyond Jupiter (the plan is to spread them over about 300 meters. Imagine that - a 300 meter wide telescope, in space, without any of the distortions our atmosphere provides!). This will allow them not only an unprecedented clarity (one of the main reasons Hubble can take such amazing pictures), but also size (it could theoretically see back to half a million years after the Big Bang), and it could, of course, resolve a visual image of an earth-like planet.
Such a telescope could take the spectra of such planets. A spectrum is the rainbow you see when white light is shone through a prism. When light bounced off a certain substance is analyzed, there are dark bars present, that can tell a scientist precisely what elements (and how much of each) are present. Sometimes, in labs, scientists will burn a chunk of material with a laser, and record that (it's much brighter), but astronomers can do it with telescopes. This means that astronomers, from light years away, could tell if a planet had liquid water, oxygen, nitrogen, methane, sulfur, whatever. It is, however, highly unlikely that such a telescope could see lights at night. For one thing, it's not a given that any species would even NEED light (or that if we could detect civilization from so far away, why wouldn't we also be recieving radio or maser signals from them?). For another, just when it would be possible to see the dark side of that planet would be when it is silhouetted against its sun (imagine trying to read the date off of a dime a thousand miles away when it's held in front of a 4D flashlight).
Even further down the road (like approaching 2100) is the idea of a gravity telescope. These would be several dozen AU away (an AU, or Astronomical Unit, is the average distance from Earth to the sun, or 93,000,000 miles). These telescopes would take advantage of the fact that gravity bends light (if you ever look at some of the deep space images that the large telescopes have taken, you can see large arcs, and what look like misplaced images. These are the images of galaxies that have been bent, distorted, or magnified by either another galaxy or galaxy cluster between it and us). These gravity telescopes would be placed exactly where the gravity of the sun focuses light to a point, and thus be able to see simply unbelievable amounts of the universe. Even one of these, sweeping through a tiny arc of its several hundred year orbit, would quickly amass more information than NASA is currently capable of storing.
All in all, though, there is so much left to learn from deep space, it almost makes you cry. I find the whole endeavor rather exciting.
1) During the cold war, Soviet subs were routinely heard by the SOSUS nets barely 15 miles off our coast, and American bases and Carrier groups were routinely buzzed by Bear Foxtrots. China does not do what we for several reasons. First off, China does not have any forward bases in the Americas. Thus, their much shorter-range surveillance planes could never hope to fly up and down our coast. Secondly, China could (and probably does) have submarines and disguised (usually as trawlers) spy ships all over our west coast. China has simply acted a bit childish.
2)There is a fundamental difference between Taiwan and Cuba. To begin with, China is not very subtle about its desire to take over Taiwan - by force, if necessary. The US has no such agenda with Cuba. Cuba is a dictatorship controlled by one despot - Taiwan is a free democracy. Cuba has (and did during the Missle Crisis) wanted ballistic missles for the purpose of having a bargaining chip with the US for better trade deals. Taiwan wants Aegis cruisers to hold back a China that has just recently installed almost 1,000 medium ballistic missles along its closest approach with Taiwan. Taiwan is about self preservation, and Cuba is decidedly not.
The funniest thing to think about: Taiwan was a part of China for perhaps 6 or 7 years out of the last CENTURY.
Plus, Taiwan and China have the same people, and Taiwan has less resources, but Taiwan is a prosperous and wealthy nation while China is still trying to keep peasants from starving to death while selling vegatables at government-controlled prices. The reason for this is quite simple: Taiwan is a free and open society, while China is not. China has meddled very little with Hong Kong's laws, because having an open economy creates wealth.
Freedom brings prosperity to a nation. Those Russian hackers wanted to come here because they knew that being able to live in a freer and more open society would let them live better lives.
You liked the Virtual Boy? That thing was absolutely terrible! The N64, on the other hand, had a great start (Mario 64 and Goldeneye are still top notch games), but it has had a looooooooooong decline. It has come to the point where the N64 just had repackaged PS games, but without the nifty CG sequences and sound samples. Also, ROM cartridges are still hellishly expensive to manufacture, and Nintendo has a lot of liscencing hoops that it requires developers to jump through. I think that Nintendo is making a mistake this time by once again not adapting a standardized media format.