"It's a great honor and privilege for us to be here representing not only our own wave, but plankton of peace of all waves, plankton with interest and curiosity and plankton with vision for the future."
-- John Sladek, The Müller-Fokker Effect. (A very funny SF book)
Jean-Jacques Annaud, director of "The Name of the Rose", "The Bear" "Seven Years in Tibet" and "Enemy at the Gates" was actually announced the the director for Asimov's Foundation, quite some time ago. I don't know what happened with that project, but I suppose it's still a possibility.
"That's very nice. I always thought the movie was badly understood. There was an article in The Washington Post when it came out that was not written by a movie critic. One of the editors wrote it saying that this was a neo-Nazi movie and I was promoting Fascism. That same article was published in all the European newspapers. When I went to do the publicity tour in Europe, everybody was already looking through that lens. The Washington Post is not a reliable newspaper anyway but they said the film was written by a neo-Nazi or a Fascist and directed by one. I strongly disagree with that. I saw it as a critique of American society. It is done in an ironic way but not pushing it very hard, which I hate because then it becomes dogmatic and becomes something else other than filmmaking. It was more that the novel by Robert Heinlein is very militaristic and has a tendency to be pro-Fascist a bit. We took a lot of cues out of American society at that time, which was [President Bill] Clinton, not realizing that a couple years later this whole situation would be much more acute and now you can put the film as a blueprint over Iraq or Afghanistan. But of course, I didn't know of bin Laden at that time." -- Paul Verhoeven
So the satire of some future militaristic state is realy a satire about our own present.
I don't know about the other Starship Trooper films, but I thought the first one was pretty successful as an ironic satire of a militaristic and fascist "utopia". Watching it was a bit like reading Norman Spinrad book The Iron Dream. You laugh and cringe at the same time.
He is probably referring to the peering conflict between TeliaSonera and Cogent. See this Slashdot story. I have Telia as an ISP and can't reach Groklaw. This probably mostly effects Scandinavia.
"Can a coal-fired power plant completely eliminate carbon-dioxide emissions? That's what Swedish energy company Vattenfall is hoping to prove with a pilot project under construction in Germany that promises to be the world's first emissions-free carbon power-generating plant.
The $62 million, 30-megawatt facility, scheduled to go into operation by mid-2008, makes use of oxyfuel technology, in which coal is burned in pure oxygen instead of air. That leaves the resulting emissions nitrogen-free and easier to clean and store. Once the plant in Schwarze Pumpe, south of Berlin, is fully operational, the plan is to compress the CO2 into liquid and inject it into porous rock about a kilometer below ground."
ATM machines are very reliable, but nevertheless they malfunction all the time. That is why they have electronic or sometimes even paper journals. If an ATM gives you to little money your bank can check your receipt, the journal and the amount of money still in the machine. In most cases you should get your missing money.
I don't think ATMs are a useful comparison for electronic voting machines, mostly due to the anonymity requirements.
Civilians who directly engage in hostilities, are considered unlawful combatants or unprivileged combatants/belligerents (the treaties of humanitarian law do not expressly contain these terms). They may be prosecuted under the domestic law of the detaining state for such action. Once a combatant is found by a competent tribunal to be an unlawful combatant, he or she no longer has the rights and privileges accorded to a prisoner of war (POW), but he retains all the rights any other civilian would have under municipal and international law in the same situation.
Amnesty did an analysis of five hundred prisoners at Guantanamo. Of those about five percent were captured by the US, 86 percent were arrested by Pakistani or Afghan forces and often given the to the US for a reward of thousands of dollars. 17 prisoners at Guantanamo where under 18 years of age when they were sent there, and by December 2006 about half of the prisoners had been sent home without being charged for a crime or informed why they were there.
The parent post was referring to, I think, the military junta under Papadopoulos, during 1967 - 1974. The junta had close connections with the CIA and opened Greece to US espionage bases and missile launch sites. Papadopoulos was a fascist and admirer of Hitler. Bill Clinton has made a public apology for the US support of the regime.
There is an interesting bit of history behind that lease, the Spanish-American war:
In 1898 the US battleship USS Maine blew up in the Havana harbor, for unknown reasons. Theodore Roosevelt, then an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy, accused Spain of the sinking the Maine and William Randolph Hearst whipped up a patriotic anger directed against Spain. The war lasted for 10 weeks and by December the Treaty of Paris was signed. The treaty gave Cuba independence. But in 1901 the Platt amendment to the US constitution was passed by Congress making Cuba a satellite to the US and creating a permanent US naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Under pressure from the US to avoid a permanent military occupation, a humiliated Cuba accepted the Platt amendment into its own constitution and in 1903 signed the Cuban-American treaty which grants the permanent lease of Guantanamo to the US.
I am not sure about Sweden's particulars but in the USA for example it now appears that presidential campaign costs will run into hundreds of millions of dollars.
The dominating income for Swedish political parties are state subsidies. The amount is proportional to the result in the previous election. Of cause you have to get into the parliament first, and to do that you have to get at least 4% of the votes.
And yes, no system of rule can be perfect, the world is too complicated and full of conflicting goals.
Well maybe the price will go down soon since IBM just announced that it will start to produce 65 nm Cell processors. On the other hand maybe Sony will just use the lower production cost to decrease the amount lost per console sold.
I have seen a report about this that confirms the that fluorescent are better in terms of release of Hg. Unfortunately I can't find it now.:-( But here is one informative URL if you read Swedish. It is only relevant for Swedish energy production or for similar countries, of cause. But as I recall about 90 percent of Swedish electricity produced comes from either nuclear power or water power. So many so for many countries fluorescents should be even better. A short translation of the important part of the URL:
The energy required to light a normal bulb 10000 hours will release 18 mg of Hg. Lighting a fluorescent bulb 10000 hours will produce 3 mg and with the bulb itself containing 5.5 mg the total amount of mercury is 8.5 mg.
Of cause you are not supposed to throw fluorescent bulbs out with the garbage.
Fair enough. I think we agree on that the authoritarian - anti-authoritarian dimension has nothing to do with the left - right dimension. I was just reacting against the use of the phrase fascist of liberal or conservative persuasion. Here is a relevant quote from the wikipedia article.
In the mid-20th century, liberalism began to define itself in opposition to totalitarianism. The term was first used by Giovanni Gentile to describe the socio-political system set up by Mussolini. Stalin would apply it to German Nazism, and after the war it became a descriptive term for what liberalism considered the common characteristics of fascist, Nazi and Marxist-Leninist regimes. Totalitarian regimes sought and tried to implement absolute centralized control over all aspects of society, in order to achieve prosperity and stability. These governments often justified such absolutism by arguing that the survival of their civilization was at risk. Opposition to totalitarian regimes acquired great importance in liberal and democratic thinking, and they were often portrayed as trying to destroy liberal democracy. On the other hand, the opponents of liberalism strongly objected to the classification that unified mutually hostile fascist and communist ideologies and considered them fundamentally different.
Almost as confusing a term as fascism is liberalism. It carries different meanings in different countries. In the US liberal mean left leaning. In Germany the Liberals are are a far right wing party. In England the Liberals are somewhere between the Tories and Labour, that is somewhere in the middle. If you look in Wikipedia it defines liberalism as: "Liberalism is an ideology, philosophical view, and political tradition which holds that liberty is the primary political value." and that would place it as the opposite fascism.
A ticket to Super Bowl XXXV in Tampa Bay, Florida, didn't just get you a seat at the biggest professional football game of the year. Those who attended the January 2000 event were also part of the largest police lineup ever conducted, although they may not have been aware of it at the time. The Tampa Police Department was testing out a new technology, called FaceIt, that allows snapshots of faces from the crowd to be compared to a database of criminal mugshots.
So yeah your future scenario is not that far fetched at all.
Flash drives are coming much quicker than that. Se this article in The Inquirer.
"PQI, WHICH IS showing an engineering sample of a 64GB flash-based hard disk drive at Computex says the price for the expensive, but desirable, storage devices could fall below $1000 before the end of this year. "It depends on the chip price, but maybe it can get below $1000 this year" said Bob Chiu of PQI's Disk on Module sales dept. A competitor confirmed that such a precipitous fall in price was a possibility."
Because of the low power consumption and modest speeds flash drives will mostly be interesting for laptops, at least initially.
"WE'VE BEEN HEARING the "K8L" codename for ages now, but we can say now, straight from the horse's mouth, K8L was never a codename for AMD's upcoming generation of chips."
If we are to believe the article, K8L was apparently the code name for the Turion64 where the L stands for Low-power. K9 was the X2 processors, so that would make the upcoming Barcelona the K10. The article also claims that the differences between the K10 and K9 and K8 are larger than what most people assume.
Slashdot Mirror
-- John Sladek, The Müller-Fokker Effect. (A very funny SF book)
Jean-Jacques Annaud, director of "The Name of the Rose", "The Bear" "Seven Years in Tibet" and "Enemy at the Gates" was actually announced the the director for Asimov's Foundation, quite some time ago. I don't know what happened with that project, but I suppose it's still a possibility.
"That's very nice. I always thought the movie was badly understood. There was an article in The Washington Post when it came out that was not written by a movie critic. One of the editors wrote it saying that this was a neo-Nazi movie and I was promoting Fascism. That same article was published in all the European newspapers. When I went to do the publicity tour in Europe, everybody was already looking through that lens. The Washington Post is not a reliable newspaper anyway but they said the film was written by a neo-Nazi or a Fascist and directed by one. I strongly disagree with that. I saw it as a critique of American society. It is done in an ironic way but not pushing it very hard, which I hate because then it becomes dogmatic and becomes something else other than filmmaking. It was more that the novel by Robert Heinlein is very militaristic and has a tendency to be pro-Fascist a bit. We took a lot of cues out of American society at that time, which was [President Bill] Clinton, not realizing that a couple years later this whole situation would be much more acute and now you can put the film as a blueprint over Iraq or Afghanistan. But of course, I didn't know of bin Laden at that time." -- Paul Verhoeven
So the satire of some future militaristic state is realy a satire about our own present.
I don't know about the other Starship Trooper films, but I thought the first one was pretty successful as an ironic satire of a militaristic and fascist "utopia". Watching it was a bit like reading Norman Spinrad book The Iron Dream. You laugh and cringe at the same time.
Also, it should also work great with the holographic keyboard. And if we really work on it, maybe we can turn a complete computer into a hologram?
I like the boxes. They make finding the parent post much easier, but then I'm not browsing on an iPhone. Don't know about the buttons though.
He is probably referring to the peering conflict between TeliaSonera and Cogent. See this Slashdot story. I have Telia as an ISP and can't reach Groklaw. This probably mostly effects Scandinavia.
Vattenfall is working on it.
"Can a coal-fired power plant completely eliminate carbon-dioxide emissions? That's what Swedish energy company Vattenfall is hoping to prove with a pilot project under construction in Germany that promises to be the world's first emissions-free carbon power-generating plant.
The $62 million, 30-megawatt facility, scheduled to go into operation by mid-2008, makes use of oxyfuel technology, in which coal is burned in pure oxygen instead of air. That leaves the resulting emissions nitrogen-free and easier to clean and store. Once the plant in Schwarze Pumpe, south of Berlin, is fully operational, the plan is to compress the CO2 into liquid and inject it into porous rock about a kilometer below ground."
ATM machines are very reliable, but nevertheless they malfunction all the time. That is why they have electronic or sometimes even paper journals. If an ATM gives you to little money your bank can check your receipt, the journal and the amount of money still in the machine. In most cases you should get your missing money.
I don't think ATMs are a useful comparison for electronic voting machines, mostly due to the anonymity requirements.
Of uncertain origin; theories include:
Civilians who directly engage in hostilities, are considered unlawful combatants or unprivileged combatants/belligerents (the treaties of humanitarian law do not expressly contain these terms). They may be prosecuted under the domestic law of the detaining state for such action. Once a combatant is found by a competent tribunal to be an unlawful combatant, he or she no longer has the rights and privileges accorded to a prisoner of war (POW), but he retains all the rights any other civilian would have under municipal and international law in the same situation.
Amnesty did an analysis of five hundred prisoners at Guantanamo. Of those about five percent were captured by the US, 86 percent were arrested by Pakistani or Afghan forces and often given the to the US for a reward of thousands of dollars. 17 prisoners at Guantanamo where under 18 years of age when they were sent there, and by December 2006 about half of the prisoners had been sent home without being charged for a crime or informed why they were there.
The parent post was referring to, I think, the military junta under Papadopoulos, during 1967 - 1974. The junta had close connections with the CIA and opened Greece to US espionage bases and missile launch sites. Papadopoulos was a fascist and admirer of Hitler. Bill Clinton has made a public apology for the US support of the regime.
I recycle my light bulbs in a building next to the parking lot where I park my car.
In 1898 the US battleship USS Maine blew up in the Havana harbor, for unknown reasons. Theodore Roosevelt, then an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy, accused Spain of the sinking the Maine and William Randolph Hearst whipped up a patriotic anger directed against Spain. The war lasted for 10 weeks and by December the Treaty of Paris was signed. The treaty gave Cuba independence. But in 1901 the Platt amendment to the US constitution was passed by Congress making Cuba a satellite to the US and creating a permanent US naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Under pressure from the US to avoid a permanent military occupation, a humiliated Cuba accepted the Platt amendment into its own constitution and in 1903 signed the Cuban-American treaty which grants the permanent lease of Guantanamo to the US.
The dominating income for Swedish political parties are state subsidies. The amount is proportional to the result in the previous election. Of cause you have to get into the parliament first, and to do that you have to get at least 4% of the votes.
And yes, no system of rule can be perfect, the world is too complicated and full of conflicting goals.
And even stranger, everyone seems to speak English.
Well maybe the price will go down soon since IBM just announced that it will start to produce 65 nm Cell processors. On the other hand maybe Sony will just use the lower production cost to decrease the amount lost per console sold.
The energy required to light a normal bulb 10000 hours will release 18 mg of Hg. Lighting a fluorescent bulb 10000 hours will produce 3 mg and with the bulb itself containing 5.5 mg the total amount of mercury is 8.5 mg.
Of cause you are not supposed to throw fluorescent bulbs out with the garbage.
Fair enough. I think we agree on that the authoritarian - anti-authoritarian dimension has nothing to do with the left - right dimension. I was just reacting against the use of the phrase fascist of liberal or conservative persuasion. Here is a relevant quote from the wikipedia article.
In the mid-20th century, liberalism began to define itself in opposition to totalitarianism. The term was first used by Giovanni Gentile to describe the socio-political system set up by Mussolini. Stalin would apply it to German Nazism, and after the war it became a descriptive term for what liberalism considered the common characteristics of fascist, Nazi and Marxist-Leninist regimes. Totalitarian regimes sought and tried to implement absolute centralized control over all aspects of society, in order to achieve prosperity and stability. These governments often justified such absolutism by arguing that the survival of their civilization was at risk. Opposition to totalitarian regimes acquired great importance in liberal and democratic thinking, and they were often portrayed as trying to destroy liberal democracy. On the other hand, the opponents of liberalism strongly objected to the classification that unified mutually hostile fascist and communist ideologies and considered them fundamentally different.
Almost as confusing a term as fascism is liberalism. It carries different meanings in different countries. In the US liberal mean left leaning. In Germany the Liberals are are a far right wing party. In England the Liberals are somewhere between the Tories and Labour, that is somewhere in the middle. If you look in Wikipedia it defines liberalism as: "Liberalism is an ideology, philosophical view, and political tradition which holds that liberty is the primary political value." and that would place it as the opposite fascism.
Oh and here is an article about how How Facial Recognition Systems Works. From the article:
A ticket to Super Bowl XXXV in Tampa Bay, Florida, didn't just get you a seat at the biggest professional football game of the year. Those who attended the January 2000 event were also part of the largest police lineup ever conducted, although they may not have been aware of it at the time. The Tampa Police Department was testing out a new technology, called FaceIt, that allows snapshots of faces from the crowd to be compared to a database of criminal mugshots.
So yeah your future scenario is not that far fetched at all.
And don't forget Brian Aldiss's Non-stop, where the action takes place in a generation starship after society has broken down.
"PQI, WHICH IS showing an engineering sample of a 64GB flash-based hard disk drive at Computex says the price for the expensive, but desirable, storage devices could fall below $1000 before the end of this year. "It depends on the chip price, but maybe it can get below $1000 this year" said Bob Chiu of PQI's Disk on Module sales dept. A competitor confirmed that such a precipitous fall in price was a possibility."
Because of the low power consumption and modest speeds flash drives will mostly be interesting for laptops, at least initially.
From an article in The Inquirer:
"WE'VE BEEN HEARING the "K8L" codename for ages now, but we can say now, straight from the horse's mouth, K8L was never a codename for AMD's upcoming generation of chips."
If we are to believe the article, K8L was apparently the code name for the Turion64 where the L stands for Low-power. K9 was the X2 processors, so that would make the upcoming Barcelona the K10. The article also claims that the differences between the K10 and K9 and K8 are larger than what most people assume.
Here is another article or post that has a relatively long lists of the improvements in Barcelona.