I need a simple analogy to explain net neutrality. Is this one adequate?
Imagine if the roads were owned by Comcast and AT&T. You pay a monthly fee to drive on the roads. Wal-mart and Target also pay a monthly fee to have the roads come to their stores. Under net neutrality, you and I drive at the same speed limit whether we go to Wal-mart or to Target.
Without net neutrality, Comcast and AT&T want to arbitrarily set the speed limit on their roads. They then want to tell Wal-mart and Target that they need to pay even more money to Comcast and AT&T or they'll lower the speed limit on the roads to their stores. Meaning, if Wal-mart doesn't pay the extra toll, then Comcast/AT&T will force Wal-mart customers to drive at 10mph to Wal-mart stores... Meanwhile, Target paid off Comcast/AT&T, which means that Target customers can drive at 60mh to Target stores.
Mostly funny. I'm using the real world definitions, not the theoretical ones, where "real world definitions" == as defined by the U.S.'s Republican party. With everyone paying a flat fee, Turbine decides what content you get and everyone gets that content, aka planned economies akin to Soviet communism. With everyone paying a flat fee, everyone is provided guaranteed access to all aspects of a resource whether they want to buy into it or not and regardless of quality, akin to socialized health care systems. In other words, why should I be forced to pay for paladins and paladin content if I never play paladins? I want my X dollars per month going to content for class Foo.
With micro-transactions, the market can decide what features the players want. This would allow Turine to count the "votes" (money == votes) and tailor the game based on actual customer desires and wants.
Long story short, micro-transactions may actually be "good" for gaming. Look at how profitable the entertainment industry is in tailoring content to the masses. Or to put it another way, micro-transactions may be the console games in the "console games are dumbed down compared to PC games" argument. OTOH, if you want a game that doesn't have the middle of the bell curve as its targeted customer, micro-transactions might be the right way for sophisticated/artsy/edge_of_the_bell_curve MMOs to charge more in order to support a smaller target customer base.
One standard monthly fee for everyone regardless of customer needs and wants is socialism at best or communism at worst. Micro-transactions provide more value to the consumer through choice via "pay for what you want" instead of paying a flat fee and subsidizing everyone else via a flat fee. Ergo, micro-transactions are much more capitalistic in nature, and thus "better."
I have 7 years of ClearCase experience from 3.0 to 6.0, followed by a couple years of Subversion. First, CVS is obsolete. Comparing ClearCase to CVS is like comparing Windows XP to Windows 3.1. You're better off comparing ClearCase to Subversion.
ClearCase can manage extraordinarily large codebases spread across several geographical locations.
No. You need Mulitsite, a rather expensive add-in, to make make ClearCase work across high latency networks. ClearCase is extremely sensitive to latency. Dynamic views fail as you get into the 100ms range. Snapshot views fail around 250ms ping times. Turns out that ClearCase is very chatty and likes to send lots of small packets back and forth. (This really impacts a Unix/Windows interop/Samba setup.)
It can be integrated with version control and bug tracking databases.
So can most modern version control systems. In the case of the ClearCase/ClearQuest integration, it's just a very fugly perl script being fired by a hook.
It allows two or more developers to work on the same file at the same time, with the last one to commit having to perform a manual merge *only when there are conflicts*. Most of the time, it gets the merges right.
Standard feature nowadays. However, ClearCase is much better at managing merges than Subversion. SVN is a downright embarrassment when it comes to merge tracking (and thus merging.)
With proper tagging procedures, I can always reproduce the last build bit-exact. No matter how badly an engineer subsequently mangles the codebase, I can always build from the last tag. My impending release can't be sabotaged by another developer committing code-breaking-but-it-compiles-on-my-machine-oh-silly-me-I-forgot-the-headers kind of changes.
ClearCase labeling is sloooooooow. Labeling a few thousand files can take 15 minutes as it walks the tree and pulls in each object. With Subversion, I can tag thousands of files in under a second.
It has dynamic views, which don't require a full copy of the source tree on the local machine. There are some big advantages to this, among them being not having to worry so much about the theft of a developer's laptop, and using the server's storage pool for building, rather than the local hard disk. From a developer perspective, it is nice not to have to wait an hour or so for the repository download should I need to make a change to an older codebase. I can work on multiple versions of the same code base at the same time, without having to maintain a separate local copy of the entire tree for each of them.
Dynamic views are a great idea, but aren't that practical. Even moderate amounts of latency (100ms pings) will noticeably slow them down. On the Windows clients with dynamic views, I've seen Anti-Virus screw things up, I've seen malware break dynamic views, and dynamic views are just naturally slower which slows down developer builds. Long story short, dynamic views are good for Admins or for looking at the code base without having to download the entire thing. However, for day to day developer use, snapshot views are much faster and more stable. Unfortunately, ClearCase snapshot views are just horrific (clumsy and limited features) when compared to Subversion workspaces.
I can apply the same bugfix to two different branches of a source tree without checking out and modifying both branches. That is, I can check the changes into one branch, and merge them into another branch (or just pick them up) without having to checkout the repository from the other branch.
Again, a standard feature of most modern tools, Subversion included.
Overall, ClearCase merging is great. However, just about every other ClearCase feature sounds nice on paper, but just doesn't pan out too well when you start using it. IMHO, if Subversion had the merge capabilities of ClearCase, it would be difficult to justify ever using ClearCase again.
Who says you have to use the same cloud or net as everyone else?
Google isn't stupid. They would probably make it possible for corporations to have their own private-corporate clouds, in much the same way that you can have your own private IM servers or LAN/WAN network. If Google doesn't provide that ability, I'm sure China or the CIA IT guys will figure out how to do it. =)
Never mind that using "Organic" agricultural practices exclusively would lead to massive starvation all around the glob. The only reason that we have enough to feed the global population now is the use of "Modern" agricultural practices that grew out of the "Green Revolution".
Mass-producing cheap food is good. Mass-producing cheap food that isn't healthy is...?
Mass-production tends to specialize since specialization is very efficient. In the US, we mass produce food by specialized on corn, soy, and something else that I can't remember. However, our bodies may not be able to handle an over-specialized diet. For example, we get certain nutrients more efficiently when eating certain food combinations. There's also evidence that things like high fructose corn is really unhealthy since we never evolved to eat it. Go read the omnivore's diet and in defense of food books for more details. Diet and food production is a very non-trivial subject.
So, the real question is: can we mass produce cheap, healthy food? The really nasty question is, what do we do if we can't mass-produce enough cheap healthy food to support future (or even current) population growth? Do we trust evolution to select humans that can live on cheap unhealthy food? Do we start producing healthier but more expensive food and let the have-nots die or eat unhealthy food? Do we find a way to create cheap healthy mass-produced food without going bankrupt?
Not to be overly cynical, but is there any reason why anyone hasn't bought cheap land and/or politicians in Mexico to get around those pesky NIMBY people and environmental laws? Granted you would need to spend money on infrastructure to get the power to the Southern US, but you would think it would still be more economical than wasting time in the US.
The Iranians bear 100% of the blame for the existence of a tyrannical government in Iran.
Wrong. They had lots of outside influence. The US supported Saddam in Iraq to counter Iran's influence. Saddam attacked Iran and the war lasted eight years. During a time of war, you need an authoritative government, not a democracy. Therefore, the US indirectly or directly helped create the need that created the current Iranian government. There's also the whole business with the US supported Shah to consider also.
On the flip side, the Iran-Iraq war killed a lot of combat age Iranians which created the huge age imbalance in Iran. You have a huge liberal young generation being governed by a minority, very old demographic during peacetime. There's no middle generation to keep the peace between the two by moderating change.
Iran has been hugely influenced by non-Iranians, which has lead to the current government and situation. Therefore stating that the Iranians have chosen a tyrannical from of government because Iranian culture is a harsh tyrant loving culture is just wrong. Iran has a tyrannical government because they needed a tyrannical government to survive a long, brutal, murderous war. What we're seeing today with the elections is because of the conservative old guard who hasn't realized that tyranny isn't needed any longer. The younger Iranian generation is trying to affect a change to a more liberal peacetime democracy. The older generation is resisting. Both generations know they're right, and both think that they know what's best for everyone. Hence the conflict.
The problem isn't that Iranians are inherently tyrant loving evil people, it's just the standard problems of those in power want to stay in power and will do anything to keep it, combined with those in power being too conservative to accept change. Both problems are common to any society or culture, and the the large Iranian age gap severely exacerbates the situation.
If there has been on country that has benefited from the US "adventures" in Afganistan and Iraq it has been Iran, the US can't do anything to Iran at the moment it is too stretched out
The US has already won the war with Iran. Why fight a war that's already been won?
The Iran-Iraq war killed a lot of Iranians, which is why the country's population is now so young. Iran has young people and very old people. There's no generation in the middle to help ensure smooth relations between the two. The old people with their old ideas are desperately trying to enforce their ideas on young people with new ideas, and the election showed just how well that's working.
Now if I were the kind of person who believed in world-wide cabals that are toying with human history over centuries of time, you would think that the US's support of Saddam's Iraq during the early 80s to foil Iran is paying off in spades. By directly and indirectly supporting Iraq, Saddam's war with Iran bled Iran dry and reduced its geo-political clout. Since the war killed off a large percentage of Iran's population, it's enabled the youngest generation of Iranians to grow up in ways that the Iranian old guard couldn't predict or understand and thus not control, resulting in a serious clash of ideas. It doesn't matter if the Iranian government defeats the protesters now. The protesters just have to wait a decade for the old guard to die of old age.
The West has already won the "war" with Iran. There is no need for the US to invade Iran since Iran's younger, more liberal generation will take over in a decade effectively removing Iran as a major anti-west headache.
No, there is no cabal, no grand puppet master. I doubt any organization, with or without black helicopters, can plan, predict, or control global politics that far in advance. Personally, I blame the internet for making it too easy for kids to get new, stupid ideas. They don't even have to go to university anymore to fill their heads full of silly ideas on how the world should work and otherwise ignore their elder's hard won conservative wisdom.
Sure it does. Article III:
The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority; to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls; to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction; to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party; to Controversies between two or more States; between a State and Citizens of another State; between Citizens of different States; between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.
Of course, they're not the final arbiter. Congress and the people can amend the constitution. The Supreme Court gets involved when someone uses the legal system to decide whether a law is constitutional or not.
Plus, Congress has a bit of leeway in deciding and fleshing out the details of the constitution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_question_jurisdiction In 1875 Congress gave the judiciary the ability to "have original jurisdiction of all civil actions arising under the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States."
Let get serious here. The constitution is just a framework. It's also just a societal contract and not an absolute, binding inviolate law of physics. If you don't like how the current government/society interprets it, then the constitution describes the general framework changing that interpretation. If you don't want to work within the process, then you can always try sedition. =)
I understand the frustration which some of the decisions made by government, but this is real life. There's nothing forcing everyone to play be the rules/constitution. It's up to people to enforce the constitution, and people whining about how their interpretation of the constitution is better than the voters, politicians, and judges are missing the point. At least the voters, politicians and judges are doing something that resembles following the rules. The armchair quarterbacks are just whining about having a minority opinion that society doesn't ascribe to. Society's interpretation and enforcement of the constitution trumps an individual's interpretation no matter how right/correct/or letter of the constitution that individual's opinion is. There we go: Society makes laws. Individuals make opinions. Which one is truly binding?
Doesn't the constitution also describe a body or process that determines what is and isn't constitutional? If the Supreme Court says it's constitutional, then it's constitutional. Whether you agree with the Supreme Court or not isn't relevant.
Where do Supreme Court justices come from? If you want to change the Supreme Court's opinion, then you need to work through your elected politicians.
The constitution is fine and working as designed. Move along, please.
I would hope that all desktop OS's are used by enthusiasts. People who run Ubuntu should do so because that's what they like. People who run Mac OS X should do so because that's what they like. People who run Windows should do so because that's what they like. If people are running an OS for some other reason, then we have problems...
Computers are useful because of applications. The OS is just there to make it easy for apps to interface with the hardware, such as video cards and hard drives. The OS also supports the applications with APIs such as DirectX. The user doesn't and shouldn't have to care about the OS.
Now if you meant to say that application developers should be enthusiastic about the OS, then I would agree.
One of the examples in the video was searching for a flight/hotel/etc.. Is Bing trying to compete with existing travel sites? Can a general search/decision engine outperform a dedicated travel site? Is Bing going to be a threat to travel sites?
Who decides how the decision engine decides? How are the result categories created? Are there a lot of MS employees creating categories based on typical search queries? Will users be able to create or suggest categories?
Will there be Bing specific HTML tags that sites can use to suggest what categories their site should belong to?
Are they trying to be the Mac of search engines?
Are there technical details on how Bing works? It's still vaporware unless you're a MS employee. Google and Live Search do not appear to have any technical details (or my search-fu is lacking.)
Given the lack of details and the lack of a product, I'm not inclined to take this "decision engine" effort seriously.
One would expect that after this many years in development, the game designers might have been able to put in some exceptionally complex technology that allowed things not seen in previous games.
No, no, no. The original Duke Nukem 3D came out with Quake. Duke 3D was sprite based whereas Quake was a full 3D game in Technicolor Brown(tm). Duke 3d was *fun* to play, whereas Quake was meh. Duke 3D had fun weapons (pipe bombs, shrink rays), potty humor, strippers, etc., whereas Quake just had advanced graphics and mediocre game play.
Technology isn't as important as having fun factor, and Duke 3D had fun factor in spades, especially when you include the Duke 3D expansion packs.
You can't mix the PUMA with pedestrians and you sure as heck can't put it in real traffic. You need to create 'small back roads' to link homes to supermarkets/mini-malls/shopping plazas. Which would require some serious rezoning and city planning to make work. The PUMA is a nice idea, but like hydrogen-fuel cars, it suffers from requiring a serious and expensive infrastructure overhaul.
GM would need to work with a 'build the city of the future' type project (aka government assistance) to have any chance of making the PUMA successful in the US. OTOH, maybe they plan on selling it in Europe?
Use redundant sensor systems: * magnets in road * GPS * inertial guidance * collision detection sensors * inspection vehicles * encoded/encrypted magnets as per Graff's suggestion * combinations of the above: if magnet #1234 isn't at GPS coordinates X,Y,Z then shutdown. If the inertial guidance, GPS and magnets do not agree then shutdown. * tamper resistant magnets: every Nth magnet is too big to easily move * lots of magnets: there are too many small magnets to easily move or sabotage * video image analysis: if the road doesn't match the baseline video then stop. (Similar to the Tomahawk cruise missile's terrain contour matching guidance.)
No one system is foolproof, so use layered redundant systems. Systems that human lives depend on already exist (nuclear reactors, 911 services, medical devices, airplanes, etc.) so strategies and processes for coping with sabotage, human interference, safety, reliability, and so on already exist.
The real difficulties are how to make the system cost effective, and how to handle the PR when the first accident happens.
Time to take down those videos of MLK and his agitators espousing mass chaos and social disruption with his guerrilla warfare tactic of "civil disobedience." That's the trouble with banning terrorists or the "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" line. People/government have an annoying tendency to re-define "terrorist" and "wrong." What else can we ban? If not MLK, then what about Malcolm X? The NRA? The National Organization of Women for their support of mass-murder, err I mean abortion?
I'd rather put up with a million KKK or terrorist videos just to make sure the next MLK, Ghandi, or societal conscience can be heard. Isn't that the real point behind the Freedom of Speech?
That would mean that the Allies were terrorists during WWII for their air campaign of targeting civilian cities as a means of breaking the enemy's will to fight. It would also mean that unrestricted submarine warfare during WWI and WWII were acts of terrorism.
More importantly, you're forgetting the biggest down side to only attacking military targets. If the civilians are fat and happy and warm in bed, is easy for them to support continued military action. The main reason to attack civilians is to remind everyone that war is painful and to make the cost of war so expensive that the enemy is no longer willing to pay it. Which then ends the war.
And if you want moral justification, then just remind yourself that a society goes to war. A society full of farmers, teachers, leaders, doctors, contractors, miners, bankers, etc. are needed to create, improve and run the infrastructure necessary to build, feed and maintain the military that's oppressing the freedom fighter and/or terrorist.
Just because you're a civilian, safe at home, far away from the front lines, doesn't mean you have some God given or universal right to remain safe.
"The landing party soon discovers that the entire war between the two planets is completely simulated by computers which launch wargame attacks and counterattacks, then calculate damage and select the dead. When a citizen is reported as "killed", they must submit themselves for termination by stepping inside a disintegration booth. Anan 7 informs Kirk that the simulated attacks and following executions is the agreed system of war decided by both sides in a treaty with Vendikar. A conventional war was deemed too destructive to the environments and societies of both planets."
In games like Team Fortress 2, you can spray an image on an in-game wall. In theory, if you spray a distracting image (not necessarily pornographic,) you could seriously throw off this controller.
Who the hell holds a ruler up to the monitor? We're in the digital age. The ruler reference tells me that your mind is still stuck in the pen and paper age, which limits your ability to use and think about digital tools.
For example, you could use a better editor. In vi, you can hit the % key to jump to a matching curly brace or parenthesis. Even easier would be: whenever you create the opening curly brace, you immediately create the the closing curly brace! Due to the miracle of digital editors you can then easily go back and insert code between the properly balanced braces!
Slashdot Mirror
An entire Telephone/ISP network will now fit on a computer chip? Methinks it's time to get out of the telecomm industry...
prohibiting people from operating a vehicle while wearing them.
I need a simple analogy to explain net neutrality. Is this one adequate?
Imagine if the roads were owned by Comcast and AT&T. You pay a monthly fee to drive on the roads. Wal-mart and Target also pay a monthly fee to have the roads come to their stores. Under net neutrality, you and I drive at the same speed limit whether we go to Wal-mart or to Target.
Without net neutrality, Comcast and AT&T want to arbitrarily set the speed limit on their roads. They then want to tell Wal-mart and Target that they need to pay even more money to Comcast and AT&T or they'll lower the speed limit on the roads to their stores. Meaning, if Wal-mart doesn't pay the extra toll, then Comcast/AT&T will force Wal-mart customers to drive at 10mph to Wal-mart stores... Meanwhile, Target paid off Comcast/AT&T, which means that Target customers can drive at 60mh to Target stores.
Information wants to be free...
Mostly funny. I'm using the real world definitions, not the theoretical ones, where "real world definitions" == as defined by the U.S.'s Republican party. With everyone paying a flat fee, Turbine decides what content you get and everyone gets that content, aka planned economies akin to Soviet communism. With everyone paying a flat fee, everyone is provided guaranteed access to all aspects of a resource whether they want to buy into it or not and regardless of quality, akin to socialized health care systems. In other words, why should I be forced to pay for paladins and paladin content if I never play paladins? I want my X dollars per month going to content for class Foo.
With micro-transactions, the market can decide what features the players want. This would allow Turine to count the "votes" (money == votes) and tailor the game based on actual customer desires and wants.
Long story short, micro-transactions may actually be "good" for gaming. Look at how profitable the entertainment industry is in tailoring content to the masses. Or to put it another way, micro-transactions may be the console games in the "console games are dumbed down compared to PC games" argument. OTOH, if you want a game that doesn't have the middle of the bell curve as its targeted customer, micro-transactions might be the right way for sophisticated/artsy/edge_of_the_bell_curve MMOs to charge more in order to support a smaller target customer base.
One standard monthly fee for everyone regardless of customer needs and wants is socialism at best or communism at worst. Micro-transactions provide more value to the consumer through choice via "pay for what you want" instead of paying a flat fee and subsidizing everyone else via a flat fee. Ergo, micro-transactions are much more capitalistic in nature, and thus "better."
I have 7 years of ClearCase experience from 3.0 to 6.0, followed by a couple years of Subversion. First, CVS is obsolete. Comparing ClearCase to CVS is like comparing Windows XP to Windows 3.1. You're better off comparing ClearCase to Subversion.
ClearCase can manage extraordinarily large codebases spread across several geographical locations.
No. You need Mulitsite, a rather expensive add-in, to make make ClearCase work across high latency networks. ClearCase is extremely sensitive to latency. Dynamic views fail as you get into the 100ms range. Snapshot views fail around 250ms ping times. Turns out that ClearCase is very chatty and likes to send lots of small packets back and forth. (This really impacts a Unix/Windows interop/Samba setup.)
It can be integrated with version control and bug tracking databases.
So can most modern version control systems. In the case of the ClearCase/ClearQuest integration, it's just a very fugly perl script being fired by a hook.
It allows two or more developers to work on the same file at the same time, with the last one to commit having to perform a manual merge *only when there are conflicts*. Most of the time, it gets the merges right.
Standard feature nowadays. However, ClearCase is much better at managing merges than Subversion. SVN is a downright embarrassment when it comes to merge tracking (and thus merging.)
With proper tagging procedures, I can always reproduce the last build bit-exact. No matter how badly an engineer subsequently mangles the codebase, I can always build from the last tag. My impending release can't be sabotaged by another developer committing code-breaking-but-it-compiles-on-my-machine-oh-silly-me-I-forgot-the-headers kind of changes.
ClearCase labeling is sloooooooow. Labeling a few thousand files can take 15 minutes as it walks the tree and pulls in each object. With Subversion, I can tag thousands of files in under a second.
It has dynamic views, which don't require a full copy of the source tree on the local machine. There are some big advantages to this, among them being not having to worry so much about the theft of a developer's laptop, and using the server's storage pool for building, rather than the local hard disk. From a developer perspective, it is nice not to have to wait an hour or so for the repository download should I need to make a change to an older codebase. I can work on multiple versions of the same code base at the same time, without having to maintain a separate local copy of the entire tree for each of them.
Dynamic views are a great idea, but aren't that practical. Even moderate amounts of latency (100ms pings) will noticeably slow them down. On the Windows clients with dynamic views, I've seen Anti-Virus screw things up, I've seen malware break dynamic views, and dynamic views are just naturally slower which slows down developer builds. Long story short, dynamic views are good for Admins or for looking at the code base without having to download the entire thing. However, for day to day developer use, snapshot views are much faster and more stable. Unfortunately, ClearCase snapshot views are just horrific (clumsy and limited features) when compared to Subversion workspaces.
I can apply the same bugfix to two different branches of a source tree without checking out and modifying both branches. That is, I can check the changes into one branch, and merge them into another branch (or just pick them up) without having to checkout the repository from the other branch.
Again, a standard feature of most modern tools, Subversion included.
Overall, ClearCase merging is great. However, just about every other ClearCase feature sounds nice on paper, but just doesn't pan out too well when you start using it. IMHO, if Subversion had the merge capabilities of ClearCase, it would be difficult to justify ever using ClearCase again.
Who says you have to use the same cloud or net as everyone else?
Google isn't stupid. They would probably make it possible for corporations to have their own private-corporate clouds, in much the same way that you can have your own private IM servers or LAN/WAN network. If Google doesn't provide that ability, I'm sure China or the CIA IT guys will figure out how to do it. =)
Never mind that using "Organic" agricultural practices exclusively would lead to massive starvation all around the glob. The only reason that we have enough to feed the global population now is the use of "Modern" agricultural practices that grew out of the "Green Revolution".
Mass-producing cheap food is good. Mass-producing cheap food that isn't healthy is...?
Mass-production tends to specialize since specialization is very efficient. In the US, we mass produce food by specialized on corn, soy, and something else that I can't remember. However, our bodies may not be able to handle an over-specialized diet. For example, we get certain nutrients more efficiently when eating certain food combinations. There's also evidence that things like high fructose corn is really unhealthy since we never evolved to eat it. Go read the omnivore's diet and in defense of food books for more details. Diet and food production is a very non-trivial subject.
So, the real question is: can we mass produce cheap, healthy food? The really nasty question is, what do we do if we can't mass-produce enough cheap healthy food to support future (or even current) population growth? Do we trust evolution to select humans that can live on cheap unhealthy food? Do we start producing healthier but more expensive food and let the have-nots die or eat unhealthy food? Do we find a way to create cheap healthy mass-produced food without going bankrupt?
Not to be overly cynical, but is there any reason why anyone hasn't bought cheap land and/or politicians in Mexico to get around those pesky NIMBY people and environmental laws? Granted you would need to spend money on infrastructure to get the power to the Southern US, but you would think it would still be more economical than wasting time in the US.
The Iranians created this horrible society.
The Iranians bear 100% of the blame for the existence of a tyrannical government in Iran.
Wrong. They had lots of outside influence. The US supported Saddam in Iraq to counter Iran's influence. Saddam attacked Iran and the war lasted eight years. During a time of war, you need an authoritative government, not a democracy. Therefore, the US indirectly or directly helped create the need that created the current Iranian government. There's also the whole business with the US supported Shah to consider also.
On the flip side, the Iran-Iraq war killed a lot of combat age Iranians which created the huge age imbalance in Iran. You have a huge liberal young generation being governed by a minority, very old demographic during peacetime. There's no middle generation to keep the peace between the two by moderating change.
Iran has been hugely influenced by non-Iranians, which has lead to the current government and situation. Therefore stating that the Iranians have chosen a tyrannical from of government because Iranian culture is a harsh tyrant loving culture is just wrong. Iran has a tyrannical government because they needed a tyrannical government to survive a long, brutal, murderous war. What we're seeing today with the elections is because of the conservative old guard who hasn't realized that tyranny isn't needed any longer. The younger Iranian generation is trying to affect a change to a more liberal peacetime democracy. The older generation is resisting. Both generations know they're right, and both think that they know what's best for everyone. Hence the conflict.
The problem isn't that Iranians are inherently tyrant loving evil people, it's just the standard problems of those in power want to stay in power and will do anything to keep it, combined with those in power being too conservative to accept change. Both problems are common to any society or culture, and the the large Iranian age gap severely exacerbates the situation.
If there has been on country that has benefited from the US "adventures" in Afganistan and Iraq it has been Iran, the US can't do anything to Iran at the moment it is too stretched out
The US has already won the war with Iran. Why fight a war that's already been won?
The Iran-Iraq war killed a lot of Iranians, which is why the country's population is now so young. Iran has young people and very old people. There's no generation in the middle to help ensure smooth relations between the two. The old people with their old ideas are desperately trying to enforce their ideas on young people with new ideas, and the election showed just how well that's working.
Now if I were the kind of person who believed in world-wide cabals that are toying with human history over centuries of time, you would think that the US's support of Saddam's Iraq during the early 80s to foil Iran is paying off in spades. By directly and indirectly supporting Iraq, Saddam's war with Iran bled Iran dry and reduced its geo-political clout. Since the war killed off a large percentage of Iran's population, it's enabled the youngest generation of Iranians to grow up in ways that the Iranian old guard couldn't predict or understand and thus not control, resulting in a serious clash of ideas. It doesn't matter if the Iranian government defeats the protesters now. The protesters just have to wait a decade for the old guard to die of old age.
The West has already won the "war" with Iran. There is no need for the US to invade Iran since Iran's younger, more liberal generation will take over in a decade effectively removing Iran as a major anti-west headache.
No, there is no cabal, no grand puppet master. I doubt any organization, with or without black helicopters, can plan, predict, or control global politics that far in advance. Personally, I blame the internet for making it too easy for kids to get new, stupid ideas. They don't even have to go to university anymore to fill their heads full of silly ideas on how the world should work and otherwise ignore their elder's hard won conservative wisdom.
Sure it does. Article III: The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority; to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls; to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction; to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party; to Controversies between two or more States; between a State and Citizens of another State; between Citizens of different States; between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.
Of course, they're not the final arbiter. Congress and the people can amend the constitution. The Supreme Court gets involved when someone uses the legal system to decide whether a law is constitutional or not.
Plus, Congress has a bit of leeway in deciding and fleshing out the details of the constitution. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_question_jurisdiction In 1875 Congress gave the judiciary the ability to "have original jurisdiction of all civil actions arising under the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States."
Let get serious here. The constitution is just a framework. It's also just a societal contract and not an absolute, binding inviolate law of physics. If you don't like how the current government/society interprets it, then the constitution describes the general framework changing that interpretation. If you don't want to work within the process, then you can always try sedition. =)
I understand the frustration which some of the decisions made by government, but this is real life. There's nothing forcing everyone to play be the rules/constitution. It's up to people to enforce the constitution, and people whining about how their interpretation of the constitution is better than the voters, politicians, and judges are missing the point. At least the voters, politicians and judges are doing something that resembles following the rules. The armchair quarterbacks are just whining about having a minority opinion that society doesn't ascribe to. Society's interpretation and enforcement of the constitution trumps an individual's interpretation no matter how right/correct/or letter of the constitution that individual's opinion is. There we go: Society makes laws. Individuals make opinions. Which one is truly binding?
Doesn't the constitution also describe a body or process that determines what is and isn't constitutional? If the Supreme Court says it's constitutional, then it's constitutional. Whether you agree with the Supreme Court or not isn't relevant.
Where do Supreme Court justices come from? If you want to change the Supreme Court's opinion, then you need to work through your elected politicians.
The constitution is fine and working as designed. Move along, please.
I would hope that all desktop OS's are used by enthusiasts. People who run Ubuntu should do so because that's what they like. People who run Mac OS X should do so because that's what they like. People who run Windows should do so because that's what they like. If people are running an OS for some other reason, then we have problems...
Computers are useful because of applications. The OS is just there to make it easy for apps to interface with the hardware, such as video cards and hard drives. The OS also supports the applications with APIs such as DirectX. The user doesn't and shouldn't have to care about the OS.
Now if you meant to say that application developers should be enthusiastic about the OS, then I would agree.
One of the examples in the video was searching for a flight/hotel/etc.. Is Bing trying to compete with existing travel sites? Can a general search/decision engine outperform a dedicated travel site? Is Bing going to be a threat to travel sites?
Who decides how the decision engine decides? How are the result categories created? Are there a lot of MS employees creating categories based on typical search queries? Will users be able to create or suggest categories?
Will there be Bing specific HTML tags that sites can use to suggest what categories their site should belong to?
Are they trying to be the Mac of search engines?
Are there technical details on how Bing works? It's still vaporware unless you're a MS employee. Google and Live Search do not appear to have any technical details (or my search-fu is lacking.)
Given the lack of details and the lack of a product, I'm not inclined to take this "decision engine" effort seriously.
One would expect that after this many years in development, the game designers might have been able to put in some exceptionally complex technology that allowed things not seen in previous games.
No, no, no. The original Duke Nukem 3D came out with Quake. Duke 3D was sprite based whereas Quake was a full 3D game in Technicolor Brown(tm). Duke 3d was *fun* to play, whereas Quake was meh. Duke 3D had fun weapons (pipe bombs, shrink rays), potty humor, strippers, etc., whereas Quake just had advanced graphics and mediocre game play.
Technology isn't as important as having fun factor, and Duke 3D had fun factor in spades, especially when you include the Duke 3D expansion packs.
Excuse me? Have you not heard about the Bermuda Triangle, UFO abductions, or Income Tax? All the work of ninjas.
Can't be much fun having a collapsing nuclear power next door.
I don't know. Would any Canadians like to comment?
Iceland has nukes?!?
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/oct2008/gb2008109_947306.htm?chan=globalbiz_europe+index+page_top+stories
You can't mix the PUMA with pedestrians and you sure as heck can't put it in real traffic. You need to create 'small back roads' to link homes to supermarkets/mini-malls/shopping plazas. Which would require some serious rezoning and city planning to make work. The PUMA is a nice idea, but like hydrogen-fuel cars, it suffers from requiring a serious and expensive infrastructure overhaul.
GM would need to work with a 'build the city of the future' type project (aka government assistance) to have any chance of making the PUMA successful in the US. OTOH, maybe they plan on selling it in Europe?
Use redundant sensor systems:
* magnets in road
* GPS
* inertial guidance
* collision detection sensors
* inspection vehicles
* encoded/encrypted magnets as per Graff's suggestion
* combinations of the above: if magnet #1234 isn't at GPS coordinates X,Y,Z then shutdown. If the inertial guidance, GPS and magnets do not agree then shutdown.
* tamper resistant magnets: every Nth magnet is too big to easily move
* lots of magnets: there are too many small magnets to easily move or sabotage
* video image analysis: if the road doesn't match the baseline video then stop. (Similar to the Tomahawk cruise missile's terrain contour matching guidance.)
No one system is foolproof, so use layered redundant systems. Systems that human lives depend on already exist (nuclear reactors, 911 services, medical devices, airplanes, etc.) so strategies and processes for coping with sabotage, human interference, safety, reliability, and so on already exist.
The real difficulties are how to make the system cost effective, and how to handle the PR when the first accident happens.
Time to take down those videos of MLK and his agitators espousing mass chaos and social disruption with his guerrilla warfare tactic of "civil disobedience." That's the trouble with banning terrorists or the "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" line. People/government have an annoying tendency to re-define "terrorist" and "wrong." What else can we ban? If not MLK, then what about Malcolm X? The NRA? The National Organization of Women for their support of mass-murder, err I mean abortion?
I'd rather put up with a million KKK or terrorist videos just to make sure the next MLK, Ghandi, or societal conscience can be heard. Isn't that the real point behind the Freedom of Speech?
That would mean that the Allies were terrorists during WWII for their air campaign of targeting civilian cities as a means of breaking the enemy's will to fight. It would also mean that unrestricted submarine warfare during WWI and WWII were acts of terrorism.
More importantly, you're forgetting the biggest down side to only attacking military targets. If the civilians are fat and happy and warm in bed, is easy for them to support continued military action. The main reason to attack civilians is to remind everyone that war is painful and to make the cost of war so expensive that the enemy is no longer willing to pay it. Which then ends the war.
And if you want moral justification, then just remind yourself that a society goes to war. A society full of farmers, teachers, leaders, doctors, contractors, miners, bankers, etc. are needed to create, improve and run the infrastructure necessary to build, feed and maintain the military that's oppressing the freedom fighter and/or terrorist.
Just because you're a civilian, safe at home, far away from the front lines, doesn't mean you have some God given or universal right to remain safe.
Even Star Trek covered the problems of "painless" war in A Taste of Armageddon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon, in which a "war" lasted for centuries:
"The landing party soon discovers that the entire war between the two planets is completely simulated by computers which launch wargame attacks and counterattacks, then calculate damage and select the dead. When a citizen is reported as "killed", they must submit themselves for termination by stepping inside a disintegration booth. Anan 7 informs Kirk that the simulated attacks and following executions is the agreed system of war decided by both sides in a treaty with Vendikar. A conventional war was deemed too destructive to the environments and societies of both planets."
In games like Team Fortress 2, you can spray an image on an in-game wall. In theory, if you spray a distracting image (not necessarily pornographic,) you could seriously throw off this controller.
Subliminal images might be fun also...
Who the hell holds a ruler up to the monitor? We're in the digital age. The ruler reference tells me that your mind is still stuck in the pen and paper age, which limits your ability to use and think about digital tools.
For example, you could use a better editor. In vi, you can hit the % key to jump to a matching curly brace or parenthesis. Even easier would be: whenever you create the opening curly brace, you immediately create the the closing curly brace! Due to the miracle of digital editors you can then easily go back and insert code between the properly balanced braces!