It's a Republican Congress, last time I checked. And Bush could veto if he really thought the spending bills were bad - instead his administration writes back to Congress complaining about "underfunded" programs.
Refusing to buy from unethical companies is not isolationist. Refusing to buy from any company that obtains goods or services overseas, regardless of their ethics, is isolationist - by definition. I'm sure some will argue that companies that obtain goods or services overseas are unethical - by definition. So be it. We must agree to disagree. But I encourage you to stop and consider just how much benefit you derive from goods and services obtained overseas, and consider what your life would be like without all of those goods and services.
Hmmm... didn't call anyone "Junkers" or "German militarists", or "Nazis" for that matter. And as you'll note from my followup post, I didn't mean Anschluss anyway, I meant Autarky. Of course, I'm sure that you'll claim that using the term "Autarky" is merely an attempt to brand my opponents as Fascists...
Who said anything about free trade? The post to which I was replying said
Don't forget to vote with your dollars as well. Support companies that don't ship work overseas, and don't purchase products or services from those that do.
Exactly what part of that doesn't sound like isolationism to you?
My apologies for the historical slip of the fingers. Where I said "Anschluss" I actually meant "Autarky". I knew it was one of those "pre-WWII things starting with 'A'", but foolishly didn't verify the word before I hit submit:-(
How cheap is it to defend useless isolationist policies that will cause the US to sink into an economic rut and become a backwater, third-world economy? Anschluss didn't work last time round, and it won't work this time either.
Apparently, they should be switching to car repair - a market with a labor shortage, a desperate need for people with strong technical skills, and something that is unlikely to be outsourced until cheap teleportation arrives on the scene.
Everyone keeps asking "what are we supposed to do when all the jobs are outsourced to India?" Well, here's the answer! Car maintenance has become a high-tech industry. There's a labor shortage. Lots of technically savvy people are out of work. Sounds like a perfect fit to me. And this is something that simply won't be cost effective to outsource (at least until cheap teleportation becomes available).
I'm assuming that all those people whining about outsourcing are now going to go out and retrain as car techs, right? Because the only reason you were whining wasn't your lack of desire to "adapt to new ways of doing business" (as we keep telling the RIAA to do), but the lack of an opportunity to do so. Right?
You should first be ethical, and only after that worry about your little wallet.
Perhaps ethics includes ensuring that you have a system that is sustainable in the long term, rather than making a short term decision to save a few lives at the cost of causing the entire system to collapse into rubble a few years later.
For that matter, there are plenty of places in America that have a signficantly lwoer cost of living than (for example) the Bay Area. If American workers really want to be more competitive, why don't they move to those areas? It might be the edge that allows them to retain jobs on-shore (cost of living not as low as India, but proximity to customers is greater, English language skills are - we hope - better, and so on)...
Windows is pervasive for many reasons, but two of the most critical reasons are the Office Suite and Exchange.
followed by
Just look at Mac OS X: arguably as usable (or more usable) as Windows 98/2000/XP, but a tiny market share.
These two statements, taken as a pair, would seem to make the allusion that you deny (if Mac OS X has a smaller market share for reasons other than its lack of Office and Exchange then why give it as an example?).
BTW, if my reading skills were poor I would need to take comprehension. Composition would only help me to improve my writing skills.
Uh, Office runs on Mac OS X (and ran on previous Mac OSes). So what was your argument again? I mean, ok, lots of people like Exchange, but I don't think you can credit it with being the number one reason for the Windows stranglehold.
Turns out that even having one format that everyone should be familiar with won't necessarily help. Later in Schneier's cryptogram you'll find this story about a man who managed to travel from England to Italy, and back, using his wife's passport (accidentally of course). Now, passports are pretty standardized, EU countries must be used to seeing British ones, and certainly the Brits themselves must know what their own passport looks like - yet somehow this guy slipped through. And he wasn't even trying. Moral of the story: even a world-wide standard ID is meaningless if (a) the people doing the verification aren't really paying attention, and (b) the ID can be carried and presented by people other than the owner of the ID.
Remember, people were afraid of vaccines, but they were also afraid of CFC's.
"People" are afraid of anything that's new, that's different, or that they just plain don't understand. They are also not above fear-mongering to destroy a new development that doesn't support their particular agenda.
"Nano"-anything is a buzzword, often applied to supposedly "new" technologies in order to garner funding. Most of the stuff that your link discusses is not nanotechnology in the classical (i.e. Drexler) sense, but rather nifty atomic constructs (various kinds of fullerenes) that are essentially just neat new molecules, not atom-scale machines. The "dangers" associated with them are the same as those associated with any newly synthesized molecule. But the "nano" buzzword makes them sound "more dangerous".
There is a reason NASA had chosen x86 for a lot of its missions - reliability and hardware dependability.
Except that NASA doesn't use the x86 for its "reliability and dependability". Most NASA mission up until the early 90's used some variation of the MIL-STD 1750 rad-hardened processor (for its reliability and dependability). The early 90's saw the advent of faster, better, cheaper, and a bunch of the Small Explorer (SMEX) missions, such as TRACE, WIRE, and FUSE, used x86 processors. But I suspect that was more due to cost than anything else.
Pretty much all of the more recent NASA missions (Deep Space 1, Mars Pathfinder, SIRTF, Mars Exploration Rover) use the RAD6000 processor, which is a rad-hardened version of one of the RS/6000 family of processors (progenitors of the PowerPC). Even the next-generation SMEX bus, SMEX-Lite, uses a RAD6000. Future missions that are being planned right now are mostly all baselining RAD750 processors, which are rad-hardened PowerPC 750's. There is a rad-hardened Pentium out there (developed by Sandia National Labs) but I haven't heard of anyone actually using it for a flight project.
(a) Hoagland is a crackpot. See for example the demolition job that Phil Plait at BadAstronomy.com did on Hoagland's claims
(b) The Bounce discoveries do not necessarily support the conclusion that life orginated on Mars and came to Earth. All they do is further support the notion that some of the meterorites striking Earth have a Martian origin. Whether or not those meteorites carried biological payloads is a whole different question.
The original ED-209 was a pure robot. The Robocop-2 movie was the one that involved criminal brains in robots. Please drop your incorrect criticism of the parent post. You have 15 seconds to comply...
This [fnord] poster [fnord] is [fnord] clearly [fnord] insane. There's [fnord] no [fnord] such [fnord] thing [fnord] as [fnord] an [fnord] Illuminati [fnord] conspiracy.
BTW, it is possible to be called for a "wide" bowl in cricket, and the lines for that are almost as imaginary as the ones in baseball. That said, I'll take a good limited-overs cricket match (which does not experience a Halting Problem) over a baseball game any day.
I know this is Slashdot, but posters usually manage to get somewhere within spitting distance of the topic even when they haven't RTFA. Did you even bother to read the precis, or are you just having a knee-jerk reaction to the word "collaborative" in the title?
Slashdot Mirror
It's a Republican Congress, last time I checked. And Bush could veto if he really thought the spending bills were bad - instead his administration writes back to Congress complaining about "underfunded" programs.
Refusing to buy from unethical companies is not isolationist. Refusing to buy from any company that obtains goods or services overseas, regardless of their ethics, is isolationist - by definition. I'm sure some will argue that companies that obtain goods or services overseas are unethical - by definition. So be it. We must agree to disagree. But I encourage you to stop and consider just how much benefit you derive from goods and services obtained overseas, and consider what your life would be like without all of those goods and services.
Hmmm... didn't call anyone "Junkers" or "German militarists", or "Nazis" for that matter. And as you'll note from my followup post, I didn't mean Anschluss anyway, I meant Autarky. Of course, I'm sure that you'll claim that using the term "Autarky" is merely an attempt to brand my opponents as Fascists...
Exactly what part of that doesn't sound like isolationism to you?
My apologies for the historical slip of the fingers. Where I said "Anschluss" I actually meant "Autarky". I knew it was one of those "pre-WWII things starting with 'A'", but foolishly didn't verify the word before I hit submit :-(
How cheap is it to defend useless isolationist policies that will cause the US to sink into an economic rut and become a backwater, third-world economy? Anschluss didn't work last time round, and it won't work this time either.
Apparently, they should be switching to car repair - a market with a labor shortage, a desperate need for people with strong technical skills, and something that is unlikely to be outsourced until cheap teleportation arrives on the scene.
I'm assuming that all those people whining about outsourcing are now going to go out and retrain as car techs, right? Because the only reason you were whining wasn't your lack of desire to "adapt to new ways of doing business" (as we keep telling the RIAA to do), but the lack of an opportunity to do so. Right?
Perhaps ethics includes ensuring that you have a system that is sustainable in the long term, rather than making a short term decision to save a few lives at the cost of causing the entire system to collapse into rubble a few years later.
Why not?
For that matter, there are plenty of places in America that have a signficantly lwoer cost of living than (for example) the Bay Area. If American workers really want to be more competitive, why don't they move to those areas? It might be the edge that allows them to retain jobs on-shore (cost of living not as low as India, but proximity to customers is greater, English language skills are - we hope - better, and so on)...
The fact that they're still not as fuel efficient as the hybrid commuter cars that acheive 60-70 mpg?
Hate to burst your bubble (your bubblehead?) but I haven't touched a Mac in about 15 years, so I hardly qualify as an "Applehead".
followed by
These two statements, taken as a pair, would seem to make the allusion that you deny (if Mac OS X has a smaller market share for reasons other than its lack of Office and Exchange then why give it as an example?).
BTW, if my reading skills were poor I would need to take comprehension. Composition would only help me to improve my writing skills.
Uh, Office runs on Mac OS X (and ran on previous Mac OSes). So what was your argument again? I mean, ok, lots of people like Exchange, but I don't think you can credit it with being the number one reason for the Windows stranglehold.
Heh. Mr Coward you are either a master of irony, or you are also in need of a dictionary.
Turns out that even having one format that everyone should be familiar with won't necessarily help. Later in Schneier's cryptogram you'll find this story about a man who managed to travel from England to Italy, and back, using his wife's passport (accidentally of course). Now, passports are pretty standardized, EU countries must be used to seeing British ones, and certainly the Brits themselves must know what their own passport looks like - yet somehow this guy slipped through. And he wasn't even trying. Moral of the story: even a world-wide standard ID is meaningless if (a) the people doing the verification aren't really paying attention, and (b) the ID can be carried and presented by people other than the owner of the ID.
Perhaps before you attempt anything as difficult as PhD-level research you should work on something simpler, such as the use of a dictionary.
"People" are afraid of anything that's new, that's different, or that they just plain don't understand. They are also not above fear-mongering to destroy a new development that doesn't support their particular agenda.
"Nano"-anything is a buzzword, often applied to supposedly "new" technologies in order to garner funding. Most of the stuff that your link discusses is not nanotechnology in the classical (i.e. Drexler) sense, but rather nifty atomic constructs (various kinds of fullerenes) that are essentially just neat new molecules, not atom-scale machines. The "dangers" associated with them are the same as those associated with any newly synthesized molecule. But the "nano" buzzword makes them sound "more dangerous".
Except that NASA doesn't use the x86 for its "reliability and dependability". Most NASA mission up until the early 90's used some variation of the MIL-STD 1750 rad-hardened processor (for its reliability and dependability). The early 90's saw the advent of faster, better, cheaper, and a bunch of the Small Explorer (SMEX) missions, such as TRACE, WIRE, and FUSE, used x86 processors. But I suspect that was more due to cost than anything else.
Pretty much all of the more recent NASA missions (Deep Space 1, Mars Pathfinder, SIRTF, Mars Exploration Rover) use the RAD6000 processor, which is a rad-hardened version of one of the RS/6000 family of processors (progenitors of the PowerPC). Even the next-generation SMEX bus, SMEX-Lite, uses a RAD6000. Future missions that are being planned right now are mostly all baselining RAD750 processors, which are rad-hardened PowerPC 750's. There is a rad-hardened Pentium out there (developed by Sandia National Labs) but I haven't heard of anyone actually using it for a flight project.
(b) The Bounce discoveries do not necessarily support the conclusion that life orginated on Mars and came to Earth. All they do is further support the notion that some of the meterorites striking Earth have a Martian origin. Whether or not those meteorites carried biological payloads is a whole different question.
...
You now have 10 seconds to comply...
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You now have 5 seconds to comply...
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This [fnord] poster [fnord] is [fnord] clearly [fnord] insane. There's [fnord] no [fnord] such [fnord] thing [fnord] as [fnord] an [fnord] Illuminati [fnord] conspiracy.
That, sir, is a beautiful sig.
"Bails", actually. But you have right idea.
BTW, it is possible to be called for a "wide" bowl in cricket, and the lines for that are almost as imaginary as the ones in baseball. That said, I'll take a good limited-overs cricket match (which does not experience a Halting Problem) over a baseball game any day.
I know this is Slashdot, but posters usually manage to get somewhere within spitting distance of the topic even when they haven't RTFA. Did you even bother to read the precis, or are you just having a knee-jerk reaction to the word "collaborative" in the title?