Re:The UAE is rather active lately...
on
Space Tourism from UAE
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Oh yes. Dubai (an emirate of the UAE is equivalent to a city state with its own king) has been trying very hard to establish itself on the map as a tourist destination, and as an economic hub for the middle east, as well as the logical connection between the east and the west.
Apart from the space port, here are some more interesting things about the city:
1) The World : A set of Artificial Islands being built off the coast of dubai, for the ultra rich. 2) The Palms : 3 of them actually These are artificial peninsula built in the shape of a palm tree.. Offering luxury houses with private beaches. 3) The worlds Tallest building : The Burj Dubai.. The end height of the building is secret, but it is rumored to be 2500ft. 4) The worlds most luxurious hotel : The Burj al Arab. Read up on it.. its quite a place to stay.:) 5) The World's largest mall : Dubai Mall Will be built near the Burj Dubai. 6) The World's third largest mall : Mall of the Emirates. Smaller only to Dubai Mall, and Mall of America 7) The Hydropolis : The world's first under water hotel
BTW, this country has no income tax. Gas costs about $1.80 a gallon. Labor is cheap.. you can get a house boy/house maid for about $250-$300 a month LEGALLY. I know.. I had one.
This country is quite liberal too. Alcohol is allowed, though gambling isn't. Newspapers are censored to some degree, and nudity in movies is also censored. At the same time, people can wear whatever they want.. beaches in dubai (Jumeirah beach in particular is quite popular with the western folk) look a lot like american beaches. Lots of bikinis, tight jeans, short shorts. the whole deal.
Actually Dubai itself has very little oil. Abu Dhabi is the one with all the oil.. Dubai is actually rich because of all the oil money that flows through its markets. Its like the hong kong of the middle east.. nearly all of Dubai's wealth comes from commercial activity.
Well Said Indeed. I love SUVs.. I own one back in the middle east. Why? Gas there is cheap.. its about $1.80 for a gallon of gas.. I want one here, I wouldn't buy one.. why? Coz gas here is $2.80. If gas were $3.80 or $4.80, I'm sure a LOT more people would start thinking like me and not get an SUV.
You may find it odd that I agree with your idea even while I say I love SUVs. But that isn't the point.. You get hybrid SUVs too.:)
However, I dont think gasoline should be taxed... But if you HAVE to interfere... then make gas expensive.. through taxation if necessary. Use the revenue to fund research into renewable energy.
I believe in capitalism and market forces. Intefering with the demand and supply will lead to inefficiencies and wastage. Let the price rise, as it inevitably will.. and you will automatically see people decrease their use of gasoline. Make electricity more expensive, and people will not leave their computers on overnight. Make water more expensive, and they will not flush 3 times when they take a piss. (atleast in their homes)
Using your own logic. Why should Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter care if you loose your job to someone else and your jobs get outsourced to India? Why should YOU get a job over an Indian if the Indian is willing to do the same job for 1/5th the cost.
Hell even if it takes 4 indians to do the job you do its STILL a better deal.
Its called market forces. If you want the government making decisions and protecting some people over others, you should consider moving to a communist/socialist country. In a free market/capitalist society such as america, "pay me more coz I'm american!" has no place. Either do the job for the same price as the Indian, or let your job get outsourced to where its cheaper.
Also, dont think "American companies, should protect american workers"... American corporations are corporations first, and americans second. If you dont believe that, look at any of America's biggest companies and see how much they favour chinese/Indian/vietnamese/etc. suppliers over American ones.
Being in America and being in the IT field, believe me, I feel your pain. But, if american companies are forced to pay higher salaries to americans just because they are american..... Well I wont say more.. but take a look at General Motors.
So then the Americans are terrorists (nukes. The japanese and Nazi germany are also terrorists. Ofcourse the Soviets and the chinese (tiananmen square) are terrorists too. The french, polish and other partisans fighting nazi germany were terrorists too. The British terrorized people in their Indian colonies (the revolts crushed in punjab/sindh). etc.. I think that definition sucks personally. Especially the last bit "to do or abstain from doing any act".. ANY act? absolutely ANY act? So the israelis are terrorists for assasination Hamas leaders? Hmm...
also.. "with the purpose of intimidating a population".. well thats kind of hard to know now isn't it? The bombing of German cities was an act of terrorism too then.. but the Allies maintained that they were only trying to knock out Germany's infrastructure. But then again.. you never know!:)
Isn't it better to intimidate a population into ending a war quickly, rather than dragging out the atrocities of war for many more months? Intimidating the enemy is really standard procedure.. the "Shock and awe" stunt in Iraq would be considered terrorism too then.. because you could argue that it "intended to cause death or seriously bodily harm to civilians" (well you ARE dropping bombs in a heavily populated city...) "with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act" (would that include building weapons of mass destruction?)
I dont think it comes down to that definition of terrorism really. Its more on who is doing the interpretting. There is no such thing as a "good clean war". You shouldn't expect one.. war is inherently about killing people. The one who is better at it.. wins.
BTW, sorry to reply to my own post. But I just wanted to clarify that I have nothing against the japanese either. I respect them as a people. Their feats of heroism in WW2 need no mention. The way the rebuilt themselves afterwards is obvious. My only point is that war is ugly business.. period.
why is there this expectation that war should be civilized and that enemy casualties should be minimized? I dont understand it. War is not fair. War isn't about being nice to the enemy. There is NOTHING civilized about war fare. War is a big death party where you are supposed to defeat the enemy. Thats it. There is no honour or life saving. Its absurd to talk about saving lives while you are busy working out how to kill people. It is definitely a bad thing.. what we need to figure out is how to stop fighting wars, and not how to "kill as few people as possible".
So I say.. its silly for people to go about talking about the japanese lives lost in hiroshima and nagasaki. Stop whining.. if the japanese didn't want to suffer the casualties of war they shouldn't have ATTACKED in the first place. Its not like they were busy farming rice and suddenly the bad evil Americans started bombing them with nukes you know.
The idealistic side of me agrees with you completely. However, you have to realize that you are judging everything by YOUR societies yardstick. How much of the crude oil (that makes the gasoline and power we all use ) comes from free democratic and human rights respecting countries? The middle east? Russia? Nigeria? etc. etc. should anyone be expected to stop using Oil from such countries since it only helps strengthen the and enrich those already in power? Well thats a tough question..
Anyway, my point is, its not so black and white. Its not good vs. evil. I dont like the chinese government (obviously you dont either), however, do you see any civil unrest there? any rioting or revolutions? no. Perhaps its because of the economic prosperity the totalitarian government is bringing them. Those kids working in the sweat shops, are happy to work there, because its either the sweat shops or they starve. If the chinese are unsatisfied with their government they can do something about it themselves... we shouldn't think they are unhappy just because we would be if we were in their shoes.:)
I wonder if the EU (or any other political/military entity) has the ability to jam US military GPS signals. If that is the case, then this only means that a balance of force exists. ie. I'll jam yours if you jam mine.
However, if the US GPS system is difficult (or impossible?) to jam.. then this is definitely a bad idea. However, the US is only doing what any bully would do. Make sure no one ever gets in a position where it wont have to take his/her/its bullying. (yes mod me down for calling the US a bully.. but frankly when the article says the US 'pressured' the EU into changing the systems specs, it really means 'bullied')
Does anyone know if the US system can be jammed? Is china working on a similar system?
They aren't in digital source format unfortunately. Atleast as far as I know. Basically, Stanford's own university press will be the lab's first client. The project officially began monday I believe. Obviously they aren't already in digitized form, and are good candidates for digitization because Stanford owns their copyrights.
The images are originally uncompressed grayscale or color tiffs. The software has an option to produce JPGS from those images, because it was required for certain projects. The TXT files are created from OCR performed on the Tiffs. The PDFs can be just plain image PDFs, or Image PDFs with searchable text. In the case of the latter, OCR is performed on the images before they are inserted into the PDF, and the text it overlayed on the image to allow searching of text.
Well I have some good news for you. While, I was working (and I still am actually) on this project I asked the Digital Library Projects Manager, who is basically in charge of this project about releasing the books they scan to the public. His reply was that they were probably going to release a pretty significant portion of the books they scan to the public. The rest would only be available within Stanford University Libraries.
So, you may at one point see those books freely available for download, provided they can get those copyright issues ironed out.
Actually, I've seen this robot operate in person and it is a work of art. The way the arms move makes you think its going to rip the book to pieces, yet some how it manages to pick up exactly one page( It detects if its picked up two pages and drops the extra page) and flip it.
I was the lead developer for the software side that actually does the crunching on the images. However, I'm not sure exactly how much I am allowed to talk about it so I wont. Basically, the software side of it does produce PDFs, JPGs and TXT files from the OCR performed on the images.
I agree with you completely. In general when I write something I open source it so that other people can use it if they find it useful too, but the primary reason I'm writing it, is me.
I just the success of the project by how satisfied I'm with it. This extends to huge projects like mozilla and apache too. As long as the developers themselves are satisfied with it, its a success. If there is a person who is unsatisfied, he can contribute code to fix/modify/enhance whatever feature (hence becoming a developer himself) and become satisfied too.
Other people being happy with your software, is just a bonus IMO.
I'm not saying its right or wrong, I'm just describing the way it is. It would also explain why OSS is often accused of being poorly documented, or difficult to use. The person who wrote it didn't really care for those things.
hah! You're having trouble with your company not wanting to use Linux for the desktop. My company wants to have nothing to do with open source. They wont even let me use an open source library for an internal tool! All the big wigs here think open source software is way too buggy to be trusted. At the same time I see them complaing about Microsoft bugs, and think to myself... "Lets assume for a minute that OSS is buggy, but atleast you are not paying for it!" But I dont care. I tried on multiple occassions to save the company money by advocating the use of open source libraries, and enhancing existing libraries, instead of writing them from scratch or purchasing a commericial one. I was made dismissed as being another one of those 'linux geeks who have no understanding of how business works'. Who knows? perhaps they are right. But I'm never going to try to propose an open source solution to a problem to this company again. Besides, I realized, that if my suggestion DID save the company money, I wouldn't get much out of the savings, all of it would go into the pockets of the top few. Whats the point?
Anyway, as far as this bug goes. Microsoft will probably have a quick fix available on their website soon.
People like Einstein dedicated their entire lives to find truth. Find, "The answer". So what's the matter? Can't handle the truth?
There shouldn't be any kind of censorship in this quest for knowledge, and this need to understand. I know I'm sounding like I've mixed philosophy with science, but lets not forget that science is an offshoot of philosophy.
So, just becasue some knowledge may potentially be dangerous, doesn't mean its knowledge we shouldn't pursue. That's like saying "you shouldn't learn how to use a gun, just because you might use a gun to kill someone!"
This problem of inhaled nanobots causing health problems was talked about in Neil Stephenson's book "The Diamond Age". In the same book, Neil Stephenson also mentioned armies of nanobots going in to kill harmful nanobots leading to a black soot like dust being created from all these dead nanobots, that shouldn't be inhaled.
On the other end of things, Ben Bova, in his book "Moonwar" describes certain humans having injected armies of nanobots into their body that would repair damage and fix problems.
Now if we were able to build "human repair nanobots" and everyone used them, wouldn't these repair nanobots cancel out the harmful effects of nanobots that shouldn't be in your body?
basically, use nanobots to fight nanobots, or defend against nanobots. I know that defense is usually used to mean fighting off a malicious aggressor, but its not neccessary.
cheating itself is not such a problem. I remember using tainers in Diablo so that I could just go in and kill some monsters. I never PKed, or went into games where they said 'cheaters not welcome'. I went off with a few friends into the caves in nightmare mode. It was a gore fest and it really was fun! I think the issue is decency more than cheating. There will always be a few who wish to gain a 'competitive advantage' somehow, making life difficult for the average joe. This isn't the case just in games... look at our law books and you'll see what I mean.
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Oh yes. Dubai (an emirate of the UAE is equivalent to a city state with its own king) has been trying very hard to establish itself on the map as a tourist destination, and as an economic hub for the middle east, as well as the logical connection between the east and the west.
:)
Apart from the space port, here are some more interesting things about the city:
1) The World : A set of Artificial Islands being built off the coast of dubai, for the ultra rich.
2) The Palms : 3 of them actually These are artificial peninsula built in the shape of a palm tree.. Offering luxury houses with private beaches.
3) The worlds Tallest building : The Burj Dubai.. The end height of the building is secret, but it is rumored to be 2500ft.
4) The worlds most luxurious hotel : The Burj al Arab. Read up on it.. its quite a place to stay.
5) The World's largest mall : Dubai Mall Will be built near the Burj Dubai.
6) The World's third largest mall : Mall of the Emirates. Smaller only to Dubai Mall, and Mall of America
7) The Hydropolis : The world's first under water hotel
BTW, this country has no income tax. Gas costs about $1.80 a gallon. Labor is cheap.. you can get a house boy/house maid for about $250-$300 a month LEGALLY. I know.. I had one.
This country is quite liberal too. Alcohol is allowed, though gambling isn't. Newspapers are censored to some degree, and nudity in movies is also censored.
At the same time, people can wear whatever they want.. beaches in dubai (Jumeirah beach in particular is quite popular with the western folk) look a lot like american beaches. Lots of bikinis, tight jeans, short shorts. the whole deal.
Actually Dubai itself has very little oil. Abu Dhabi is the one with all the oil.. Dubai is actually rich because of all the oil money that flows through its markets. Its like the hong kong of the middle east.. nearly all of Dubai's wealth comes from commercial activity.
The largest number of 'westerners' in the UAE are from Britain. Americans come second.
I was brought up in the UAE actually, and people who havne't been there think 'middle east' and go 'OMG! TERr0r1s+!"
Actually, Dubai is often referred to as the Hong Kong of the middle east. Very liberal, very modern, very rich, and quite tolerant.
Well Said Indeed. I love SUVs.. I own one back in the middle east. Why? Gas there is cheap.. its about $1.80 for a gallon of gas.. I want one here, I wouldn't buy one.. why? Coz gas here is $2.80. If gas were $3.80 or $4.80, I'm sure a LOT more people would start thinking like me and not get an SUV.
:)
You may find it odd that I agree with your idea even while I say I love SUVs. But that isn't the point.. You get hybrid SUVs too.
However, I dont think gasoline should be taxed... But if you HAVE to interfere... then make gas expensive.. through taxation if necessary. Use the revenue to fund research into renewable energy.
I believe in capitalism and market forces. Intefering with the demand and supply will lead to inefficiencies and wastage. Let the price rise, as it inevitably will.. and you will automatically see people decrease their use of gasoline. Make electricity more expensive, and people will not leave their computers on overnight. Make water more expensive, and they will not flush 3 times when they take a piss. (atleast in their homes)
Using your own logic. Why should Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter care if you loose your job to someone else and your jobs get outsourced to India? Why should YOU get a job over an Indian if the Indian is willing to do the same job for 1/5th the cost.
Hell even if it takes 4 indians to do the job you do its STILL a better deal.
Its called market forces. If you want the government making decisions and protecting some people over others, you should consider moving to a communist/socialist country. In a free market/capitalist society such as america, "pay me more coz I'm american!" has no place. Either do the job for the same price as the Indian, or let your job get outsourced to where its cheaper.
Also, dont think "American companies, should protect american workers"... American corporations are corporations first, and americans second. If you dont believe that, look at any of America's biggest companies and see how much they favour chinese/Indian/vietnamese/etc. suppliers over American ones.
Being in America and being in the IT field, believe me, I feel your pain. But, if american companies are forced to pay higher salaries to americans just because they are american..... Well I wont say more.. but take a look at General Motors.
Think about it.
So then the Americans are terrorists (nukes. The japanese and Nazi germany are also terrorists. Ofcourse the Soviets and the chinese (tiananmen square) are terrorists too. The french, polish and other partisans fighting nazi germany were terrorists too. The British terrorized people in their Indian colonies (the revolts crushed in punjab/sindh). etc.. I think that definition sucks personally. Especially the last bit "to do or abstain from doing any act" .. ANY act? absolutely ANY act? So the israelis are terrorists for assasination Hamas leaders? Hmm...
:)
also.. "with the purpose of intimidating a population".. well thats kind of hard to know now isn't it? The bombing of German cities was an act of terrorism too then.. but the Allies maintained that they were only trying to knock out Germany's infrastructure. But then again.. you never know!
Isn't it better to intimidate a population into ending a war quickly, rather than dragging out the atrocities of war for many more months? Intimidating the enemy is really standard procedure.. the "Shock and awe" stunt in Iraq would be considered terrorism too then.. because you could argue that it "intended to cause death or seriously bodily harm to civilians" (well you ARE dropping bombs in a heavily populated city...) "with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act" (would that include building weapons of mass destruction?)
I dont think it comes down to that definition of terrorism really. Its more on who is doing the interpretting. There is no such thing as a "good clean war". You shouldn't expect one.. war is inherently about killing people. The one who is better at it.. wins.
BTW, sorry to reply to my own post. But I just wanted to clarify that I have nothing against the japanese either. I respect them as a people. Their feats of heroism in WW2 need no mention. The way the rebuilt themselves afterwards is obvious. My only point is that war is ugly business.. period.
why is there this expectation that war should be civilized and that enemy casualties should be minimized? I dont understand it. War is not fair. War isn't about being nice to the enemy. There is NOTHING civilized about war fare. War is a big death party where you are supposed to defeat the enemy. Thats it. There is no honour or life saving. Its absurd to talk about saving lives while you are busy working out how to kill people. It is definitely a bad thing.. what we need to figure out is how to stop fighting wars, and not how to "kill as few people as possible".
So I say.. its silly for people to go about talking about the japanese lives lost in hiroshima and nagasaki. Stop whining.. if the japanese didn't want to suffer the casualties of war they shouldn't have ATTACKED in the first place. Its not like they were busy farming rice and suddenly the bad evil Americans started bombing them with nukes you know.
Btw. I'm not American.
The idealistic side of me agrees with you completely. However, you have to realize that you are judging everything by YOUR societies yardstick. How much of the crude oil (that makes the gasoline and power we all use ) comes from free democratic and human rights respecting countries? The middle east? Russia? Nigeria? etc. etc. should anyone be expected to stop using Oil from such countries since it only helps strengthen the and enrich those already in power? Well thats a tough question..
:)
Anyway, my point is, its not so black and white. Its not good vs. evil. I dont like the chinese government (obviously you dont either), however, do you see any civil unrest there? any rioting or revolutions? no. Perhaps its because of the economic prosperity the totalitarian government is bringing them. Those kids working in the sweat shops, are happy to work there, because its either the sweat shops or they starve. If the chinese are unsatisfied with their government they can do something about it themselves... we shouldn't think they are unhappy just because we would be if we were in their shoes.
Its pronounced 'ahhs'.
please no beawolf cluster comments! PLEASE!!!
I wonder if the EU (or any other political/military entity) has the ability to jam US military GPS signals. If that is the case, then this only means that a balance of force exists. ie. I'll jam yours if you jam mine.
However, if the US GPS system is difficult (or impossible?) to jam.. then this is definitely a bad idea. However, the US is only doing what any bully would do. Make sure no one ever gets in a position where it wont have to take his/her/its bullying. (yes mod me down for calling the US a bully.. but frankly when the article says the US 'pressured' the EU into changing the systems specs, it really means 'bullied')
Does anyone know if the US system can be jammed? Is china working on a similar system?
when you boss tells you "oh. keep your existing timetable untouched.. you can work on this project over the weekends..." :)
PS. I'm pointing this out because its happened to me.
They aren't in digital source format unfortunately. Atleast as far as I know. Basically, Stanford's own university press will be the lab's first client. The project officially began monday I believe. Obviously they aren't already in digitized form, and are good candidates for digitization because Stanford owns their copyrights.
lol. It was poor english on my part.
:)
The images are originally uncompressed grayscale or color tiffs. The software has an option to produce JPGS from those images, because it was required for certain projects. The TXT files are created from OCR performed on the Tiffs. The PDFs can be just plain image PDFs, or Image PDFs with searchable text. In the case of the latter, OCR is performed on the images before they are inserted into the PDF, and the text it overlayed on the image to allow searching of text.
I hope that clears things up
Well I have some good news for you. While, I was working (and I still am actually) on this project I asked the Digital Library Projects Manager, who is basically in charge of this project about releasing the books they scan to the public. His reply was that they were probably going to release a pretty significant portion of the books they scan to the public. The rest would only be available within Stanford University Libraries.
So, you may at one point see those books freely available for download, provided they can get those copyright issues ironed out.
Oh... and no, unfortunately, its not open souce.
Actually, I've seen this robot operate in person and it is a work of art. The way the arms move makes you think its going to rip the book to pieces, yet some how it manages to pick up exactly one page( It detects if its picked up two pages and drops the extra page) and flip it.
I was the lead developer for the software side that actually does the crunching on the images. However, I'm not sure exactly how much I am allowed to talk about it so I wont. Basically, the software side of it does produce PDFs, JPGs and TXT files from the OCR performed on the images.
That completely depends on which industry you're in. ;)
I agree with you completely. In general when I write something I open source it so that other people can use it if they find it useful too, but the primary reason I'm writing it, is me.
I just the success of the project by how satisfied I'm with it. This extends to huge projects like mozilla and apache too. As long as the developers themselves are satisfied with it, its a success. If there is a person who is unsatisfied, he can contribute code to fix/modify/enhance whatever feature (hence becoming a developer himself) and become satisfied too.
Other people being happy with your software, is just a bonus IMO.
I'm not saying its right or wrong, I'm just describing the way it is. It would also explain why OSS is often accused of being poorly documented, or difficult to use. The person who wrote it didn't really care for those things.
Thats a deal breaker right there!
hah! You're having trouble with your company not wanting to use Linux for the desktop. My company wants to have nothing to do with open source. They wont even let me use an open source library for an internal tool!
All the big wigs here think open source software is way too buggy to be trusted. At the same time I see them complaing about Microsoft bugs, and think to myself... "Lets assume for a minute that OSS is buggy, but atleast you are not paying for it!"
But I dont care. I tried on multiple occassions to save the company money by advocating the use of open source libraries, and enhancing existing libraries, instead of writing them from scratch or purchasing a commericial one. I was made dismissed as being another one of those 'linux geeks who have no understanding of how business works'. Who knows? perhaps they are right. But I'm never going to try to propose an open source solution to a problem to this company again. Besides, I realized, that if my suggestion DID save the company money, I wouldn't get much out of the savings, all of it would go into the pockets of the top few. Whats the point?
Anyway, as far as this bug goes. Microsoft will probably have a quick fix available on their website soon.
People like Einstein dedicated their entire lives to find truth. Find, "The answer". So what's the matter? Can't handle the truth?
There shouldn't be any kind of censorship in this quest for knowledge, and this need to understand. I know I'm sounding like I've mixed philosophy with science, but lets not forget that science is an offshoot of philosophy.
So, just becasue some knowledge may potentially be dangerous, doesn't mean its knowledge we shouldn't pursue. That's like saying "you shouldn't learn how to use a gun, just because you might use a gun to kill someone!"
This problem of inhaled nanobots causing health problems was talked about in Neil Stephenson's book "The Diamond Age". In the same book, Neil Stephenson also mentioned armies of nanobots going in to kill harmful nanobots leading to a black soot like dust being created from all these dead nanobots, that shouldn't be inhaled.
On the other end of things, Ben Bova, in his book "Moonwar" describes certain humans having injected armies of nanobots into their body that would repair damage and fix problems.
Now if we were able to build "human repair nanobots" and everyone used them, wouldn't these repair nanobots cancel out the harmful effects of nanobots that shouldn't be in your body?
basically, use nanobots to fight nanobots, or defend against nanobots. I know that defense is usually used to mean fighting off a malicious aggressor, but its not neccessary.
cheating itself is not such a problem. I remember using tainers in Diablo so that I could just go in and kill some monsters. I never PKed, or went into games where they said 'cheaters not welcome'. I went off with a few friends into the caves in nightmare mode. It was a gore fest and it really was fun!
I think the issue is decency more than cheating. There will always be a few who wish to gain a 'competitive advantage' somehow, making life difficult for the average joe. This isn't the case just in games... look at our law books and you'll see what I mean.