It has a sense of urgency to it which Email does not- when you send an e-mail, you can't be sure that anyone will even respond.
Precisely. People don't respond to email. That's where IM has the advantage - you KNOW when people are online (and willing to be seen as online), and therefore they actually have to have an excuse as to why they don't reply.
Spam, poor email strategy in the workplace, lack of tracking, problems with the traces email leave... all mean that IM works in a completely different paradigm than email, and I personally find it very useful in the workplace.
Nah there ain't even a character set declaration in the HTML HEAD section, which is bad. Slashdot doesn't validate either. Indeed it's not even possbile to validate it via W3C...
got the following unexpected response when trying to retrieve :
403 Forbidden
Please make sure you have entered the URI correctly.
Business models change all the time. TV is no exception to that. People are slow to react when their moneyspinning model starts to break down -
a lot of people have made that point. The broadcasters still have their heads in the sand, but progress is inevitable. I believe technology will not stifle quality because viewer choice is becoming more and more measurable, marketable, and most of all possible : you can vote with your remote on pretty much any type of content, and really pick what you want to watch.
Taking on the start of the article -
... the scariest part about all of this is the lack of response from broadcasters, which do not share Wall Street's emerging sense of urgency about how DVR-type technology is being adapted more quickly and undercutting their ad-supported economics more quickly than previously expected.
The economic shift is beginning, we're still with the early adopters but critical mass is about to happen. This might not be such a bad thing. Those broadcasters that learn first will take these viewers with them, and create themselves a nice market out of it.
Yet the article seems to see doom and gloom, saying quality will be sacrificed, as if the networks care about anything other than their bottom line anyway :
The "spiral of death" could rapidly lead to a further deterioration not just in viewing and advertising support but also in the quality of programming. If broadcasters are taking in fewer revenues because they deliver fewer viewers, they will have less money to invest in programming.
I have a less negative take on this. Hopefully advertisers and broadcasters alike will catch on to the fact that the people don't want to be blasted with adverts. Most of us, given the choice, won't watch them, look at them, or download them as part of web sites. The dot com crash had a lot to do with the realisation that ad supported sites would not flourish; few today make revenue purely from advertising - unless their content is astounding.
So I'd suggest that TV will lose some channels, lose some obscure and niche programming, but just maybe quality will prevail. Because good art, good acting, and good screenwriting will always seek an audience. That audience is getting cleverer, more choosy, and has more tools at its disposal. It can't be that bad if we suddenly choose to really watch stuff we want, and even if we pay a premium for it, that's not so bad. A lot of people have mentioned buying TV stuff on DVD these days, and for me Internet + fixed media (TV on demand) is a much better delivery mechanism than streamed scheduled broadcasting. TV (as defined in the traditional model) will be, and indeed should be, much more centered around live events, sports, debates, etc. I predict that eventually all non-live scheduled content will become time shifted, on demand, and paid for. This model has every chance of success.
Less content on less channels and more stuff paid on demand just shifts the econmics around. It doesn't mean that quality is lost. Most decent programmes these days rely on DVD sales and syndicated sales to other countries to make a profit. The big networks don't make money on them just on broadcast in the US. Arguably the best shows sell best - nobody buys crap on DVD in bulk all around the world, but most of us watch it on TV if we have no other choice.
And it's a cultural question, rather than an intelligence question, so Einstein is not a good comparison. After all, he said that anything that can be written down is a waste of time remembering, or something along those lines.
And indeed, the new testament was written after Jesus' death, mostly by second hand sources, so it's not what I'm talking about really. I'm thinking rather more about the Old Testament, since after all more religions believe in that than both books combined.
So many people would like to read the originals. The originals no longer exist. Only copies of copies are what is left, and they are of course in Hebrew and not English.
I'm just waiting for the article where someone hacks one of these BIOSes to be a self contained web server serving off a ramdisk using just low level BIOS calls and the inbuilt TCP/IP stack.
Seeing that take a slashdotting is what we're really interested in... totally in the spirit of slash (TM)
I'm just re-reading a French translation book titled "Blade Runner", but from the original "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". It has references to "Blade Runners" in it, I'm beginning to wonder how bastardized the translation is. The rest of the book so far (only read about 30 pages on the way in to work this morning) is far enough away from the movie plot, and I read it about 8 years ago and it certainly seems to resemble DADoES. Can anyone shed some light on this?
Also, the more I read about PK Dick, the more I feel that he was ahead of his time. "Time Out of Joint" which I have also recently read in French (living in Paris means the best book bargains are in the local language... I'd love to pick up cheap English originals) was written in the 1950s IIRC, and yet it's as if it could have been written yesterday. Sure, the occasional reference to technology which sounds a little out of date does happen, but for the mind that's really easy to step over, because everything else just fits. Sure, it is paranoid, but when you question everything you see on TV about politics these days, you ask yourself what influence one guy (Bush, Blair, whatever) really has over the thousands of people who are really employed in making policy. Indeed, the influence those thousands have on the leader figure is what we should be more worried about.
In England, where we only have a population of 60 million, it's perhaps less flagrant than in the US, but somewhere along the line we are all many steps removed from any policy decisions, we mostly get to say yes or no about once every 4 years and most of us don't even vote in local elections. Michael Moore had a point when he said running for election in small-fry local posts is enough to get in sometimes. Don't bother pointing out the holes and contradictions in some of his other lefty liberal stuff though, I'm well aware of those. I digress.
The point with PK Dick's writing, at least that of it which I have read, is that the individual is studied much more than the collective. The paranoia inherent in a lot of the work is because the stuff is so based on an individuals attempt to understand reality. It's almost a solipsistic nightmare sometimes.
Art can really start to get somewhere with our current malaise. Because the way we think and interpret is what really matters for us as individual human beings. And our current malaise is just that: faced with an increasing access to all sorts of societies, individuals, and cultures, our biggest problem is first how to situate ourselves. No longer (or rarely) do we live in smaller, closer-knit communities, but rather in almost separate little units - which do not interconnect based on local geography but rather along interest based lines and public gatherings...
When we start automatically watering down a lowest common denominator for mass marketing... we're really pulling away from what Dick's writing does to us, in making us look at our own individual reaction to current society and current social groups. The feeling you have after the cited movies are just reflections in a distorted mirror of the feelings that are conveyed when you read the books.
I know that to have mass appeal, a movie should respect a certain number of things which are the antithesis of what real film art is about, but raising the bar a little would gradually educate the filmgoing public - indeed there are literally millions of us who would really go after a less "clean cut happy ending experience". The global market is there now, you don't have to market to the whole of ABC1 audience in suburban midtown multiplexes.
I wish that some independent film maker could fix up to do a truer adaptation of a PKD short story, and really leave it hanging at the end. Just the other day I saw Intolerable Cruelty, and couldn't help thinking that the happy ending was tacked on in order to pass some kind of Hollywood audience standard. Cut the movie about 10 minutes earlier, where the roles suddenly reverse in favour of the character played by
Re: Excellent link, thanks
on
DVD-Rs go 8x
·
· Score: 1
Fascinating article. This is the kind of thing I've been looking for relative to high speed DVD writing, and understanding the real difference between each of the standards with their advantages and disadvantages.
It's a shame your introduction isn't quite a good "sell" of the quality of the article, for example I quote:
16x is without doubt the next target for recording speed, but there are a variety of technical issues to be overcome first. These can be broadly categorized into three areas. The first is improving the recordable DVD drive, which includes challenges such as boosting laser diode output and signal processing IC speed (Fig 3). The second is improving the media, by developing a recording layer with higher sensitivity and a wide recording power margin. And the third is adjusting the interface between the first two: the write strategy.
Other people should go see the site, here's an HTML link to make it more interesting.
It would seem, critically, that the waste can be stored on site for 40 years, does not need to be transported elsewhere, and is inherently more stable than the waste in a typical water reactor.
If you think that modern cars get bad milage, just imagine the fuel bill for one that takes off vertically. Likewise for the personal jetpack and for supersonic flight. Fuel cost is also a big problem in space exploration.
Once they've actually taken off, the MPG for flying cars isn't actually that bad. Indeed compared to some gas guzzling luxury sedans they're cheaper per mile in fuel costs.
The Skycar uses an engine that can burn almost any fuel from diesel to natural gas so that worldwide refueling can be accommodated by what is locally available.
Using gasoline, the M400 can be expected to get over 25 mpg. With a range of 900 miles, the logistics associated with refueling the shorter-range helicopter can be eliminated.
I don't think your point about broadband teleconferencing is relevant to the first argument, so I won't comment on that. It's like a hanging aside that really needs to be focused on in a separate way, based on human relationships in physical and "virtual" space.
I'm English and I suffered the school system at an all boys school... with stupid uniform rules and all that. It was about 13 years ago that I was in what we called "the fifth year" and is now called "year 11" or something. Stupid.
Anyway a couple of points. First, we still call it senior school, not high school, right? No need to translate British English into American.
Secondly, I wholeheartedly agree, I remember sitting a three hour exam for which I had answered all the questions in an hour. The teacher who was supervising wouldn't let me leave, and so I had to endure two hours sitting doing nothing. Couldn't even read a book. I got 95% in the exam, but the supervisor didn't believe I had finished after an hour. Bitch. Punishment for being good at something - I could have written a harder exam myself but in my class were a bunch of dropouts that the teacher had to cater for.
I would encourage you, however, to get a bit more into the subjects you really like. Saying that you can do enough to pass an exam in five minutes is great, but the free time that you have available to you as a result really should be spent profiting as much as possible intellectually. You will not believe how hard it gets, year on year, from now on. I used to read other course textbooks, novels, plays, science stuff... at least in lessons I had already understood, and I generally got away with it. The computer network was also a source of fun in lessons where there were computers, but then that was a network of BBC Micro B computers and not really too interesting after about two weeks.
You can blame the system all you like, but once you're out of it you will have to live up to your own harsh realities. Try to help those who are trying to help you, by thinking outside of the box and maybe even improving relationships with teachers - no harm in catching them after lessons if you're interested in the subject. I ended up doing some cool weather satellite tracking with our physics teacher instead of lessons I had already mastered. It was 13 years ago too, so imagine how much more amazing that was - recording a signal overnight and decoding it slowly on a machine that had 32Kb of main RAM.
On the USA : I've been there. Visited ground zero in New York and was totally overcome emotionally. Stayed in the bottom of Manhattan, looked around a bit, got bored, flew to Haiti.
I also know a huge amount of US diplomats on foreign missions, worked in an American school, worked for USAID...
But to raise a couple of points :
- I was talking about non urgent healthcare, gradual wasting diseases like cancer and the like.
- A lot of the cold war was directly a result of brinkmanship from the US presidencies, Russia in retrospect, and with the benefit of hindsight, is no longer seen historically as such a big threat : the US started a lot of propaganda, and overstated the power of the Russian bloc, attributing them some kind of amazing strategy that never materialised.
- Let's say socialist instead of left of centre. Does the argument you made still hold? Would you dare be a card carrying socialist?
- I'm not anti american as such. Know a lot of great Americans, most of whom live overseas. I'm just calling into question some points you raised. Telling me I'm losing the argument is beside the point, I'm just trying to put my perspective into the mix to get a clear picture of just how vehement the pro-USA arguments have become...
1) The Europeans can afford the luxury of a welfare state, because they haven't had to defend themselves for the last 50 years. How much more of their GDP would have gone into the armed forces if the US had pulled out of NATO when the Russians had 5,000 tanks and 3,000,000 troops in Eastern Europe?
What? Europeans made a collective, democratic decision to found a welfare state after the second world war. In the USA, being left of centre is bait to all the McCarthyists out there... so nobody openly claims there should be a welfare system. So you have a load of poor people that most white middle class people don't even admit exist. As for the comment about not having had to defend itself... well I'm just at a loss on how you really see the last 50 years of US intervention into other peoples problems as part of what can be seen by some as the gradual establishment of geo-strategic alliances with countries who you leave no choice but to stick with you all the way to the hilt. The UK included.
2) There are ample opportunities for anyone in America to "make it". We don't need a welfare state. Most Americans don't want a welfare state. Your doing exactly what you accuse us of doing -- applying your own standards and morals to our country.
Your opinion is that you don't need it. Maybe you have private insurance. Most Americans don't want to die either, but they might if something happens to them that they can't afford to get fixed.
And yet with our "crumbling school system" we still lead the World with advances in all sorts of Sciences. World leaders come to our country for major medical procedures because they don't trust their own medical systems. Foreign students come to our universities in droves.
Foreign students still see the US as some kind of Eldorado. They all pay dearly for their studies. The US' main tactic is a brain drain away from developing countries and from Europe on the basis of paying high salaries because the schools have more money. Europe decided, generally, that enough was enough regarding competition with the US on money alone, so the gold-digging academics all go over to you. Shame, but that's the reason. Considering the massive population over there, tell me how many of the great scientists and doctors and educators you have are like more than about 3rd generation natives?
International aid is usually audited and meant to go towards humanitarian and other noble projects. Space exploration is no doubt funded by tax money. Now, there may be ways that international aid goes into one bucket and empties from another. Bear in mind that in spite of that, "international aid" is often nothing more than a dressed up trade agreement. This makes it rather more akin to "we'll give you a billion dollars. You spend about 80% of it in our country, and we'll call it quits"...
I regularly submit articles to Slashdot. I've had one accepted so far, perhaps the least interesting of them all.
I refuse to use words like 'interesting article' and such like, try to include a few links, and try to summarise in my own words.
Now the subject matter I choose (often science) may not fit into the Slashdot editorial line, but I might have to experiment with copying first paragraphs preceded by 'interesting article' and see what happens...
Switching to metal gates and high-k gate dielectrics also eliminates phonon scattering. Increasingly, the atoms inside transistors are vibrating. Incorporating high-k gate dielectrics alone does not solve the problem.
"This slows down the mobility of electrons," David said. "The metal gate seems to act like a sink for this phenomenon."
David, however, declined to identify what metals Intel is experimenting with. AMD is working with nickel in its metal gates.
So it's all a bit over my head, nickel certainly conducts electricity but obviously not like gold and at an atomic level maybe it doesn't matter... since the silicon is like 4 or 5 atoms thick, and the metal seems to be some sort of a sink for lost electrons.
You're totally right... in fact, most long distance calls anywhere in the world are already happening over IP, and have been doing for a long long time. The real losers are the big old digital ISDN type equipment vendors... I had a major telco with a lot of Ericsson equipment tell me you couldn't get 2mbps through regular copper wire over more than about 500m because they'd only tried the wrong kind of equipment to do it. We had MDSL modems running 1mbps (symmetric, no less) over a standard twisted pair analog circuit like 5km across Rabat, Morocco. Hardly where you have the greatest end to end quality in the infrastructure.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. Indeed, copyright violation is not the same as theft anyway. Stealing means "the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it" and has absolutely nothing to do with online piracy. It's disgusting.
I don't doubt they do the job. I still get by with ~400MHz and 96MB RAM at my job, but with Office 2000/Win98. I wouldn't upgrade in a hurry (especially not the Office package; but maybe the OS) because extra stuff means those few extra seconds each day, it all adds up in the end.
Slashdot Mirror
Precisely. People don't respond to email. That's where IM has the advantage - you KNOW when people are online (and willing to be seen as online), and therefore they actually have to have an excuse as to why they don't reply.
Spam, poor email strategy in the workplace, lack of tracking, problems with the traces email leave... all mean that IM works in a completely different paradigm than email, and I personally find it very useful in the workplace.
8 bit ASCII : (& # 163 ;) should work, but I don't think it will really.
Native pound - - unlikely to work either
So use ISO currency code, GBP.
Business models change all the time. TV is no exception to that. People are slow to react when their moneyspinning model starts to break down - a lot of people have made that point. The broadcasters still have their heads in the sand, but progress is inevitable. I believe technology will not stifle quality because viewer choice is becoming more and more measurable, marketable, and most of all possible : you can vote with your remote on pretty much any type of content, and really pick what you want to watch.
Taking on the start of the article -
The economic shift is beginning, we're still with the early adopters but critical mass is about to happen. This might not be such a bad thing. Those broadcasters that learn first will take these viewers with them, and create themselves a nice market out of it.
Yet the article seems to see doom and gloom, saying quality will be sacrificed, as if the networks care about anything other than their bottom line anyway :
I have a less negative take on this. Hopefully advertisers and broadcasters alike will catch on to the fact that the people don't want to be blasted with adverts. Most of us, given the choice, won't watch them, look at them, or download them as part of web sites. The dot com crash had a lot to do with the realisation that ad supported sites would not flourish; few today make revenue purely from advertising - unless their content is astounding.
So I'd suggest that TV will lose some channels, lose some obscure and niche programming, but just maybe quality will prevail. Because good art, good acting, and good screenwriting will always seek an audience. That audience is getting cleverer, more choosy, and has more tools at its disposal. It can't be that bad if we suddenly choose to really watch stuff we want, and even if we pay a premium for it, that's not so bad. A lot of people have mentioned buying TV stuff on DVD these days, and for me Internet + fixed media (TV on demand) is a much better delivery mechanism than streamed scheduled broadcasting. TV (as defined in the traditional model) will be, and indeed should be, much more centered around live events, sports, debates, etc. I predict that eventually all non-live scheduled content will become time shifted, on demand, and paid for. This model has every chance of success.
Less content on less channels and more stuff paid on demand just shifts the econmics around. It doesn't mean that quality is lost. Most decent programmes these days rely on DVD sales and syndicated sales to other countries to make a profit. The big networks don't make money on them just on broadcast in the US. Arguably the best shows sell best - nobody buys crap on DVD in bulk all around the world, but most of us watch it on TV if we have no other choice.
Some places in the world, you have to justify a separate machine for each IP that you get, and anything above a /27 is both expensive and rare!
And it's a cultural question, rather than an intelligence question, so Einstein is not a good comparison. After all, he said that anything that can be written down is a waste of time remembering, or something along those lines.
And indeed, the new testament was written after Jesus' death, mostly by second hand sources, so it's not what I'm talking about really. I'm thinking rather more about the Old Testament, since after all more religions believe in that than both books combined.
So many people would like to read the originals. The originals no longer exist. Only copies of copies are what is left, and they are of course in Hebrew and not English.
Seeing that take a slashdotting is what we're really interested in... totally in the spirit of slash (TM)
Reply rather than mod if you think that it really is a Troll, because I can't see it.
I'm just re-reading a French translation book titled "Blade Runner", but from the original "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep". It has references to "Blade Runners" in it, I'm beginning to wonder how bastardized the translation is. The rest of the book so far (only read about 30 pages on the way in to work this morning) is far enough away from the movie plot, and I read it about 8 years ago and it certainly seems to resemble DADoES. Can anyone shed some light on this?
Also, the more I read about PK Dick, the more I feel that he was ahead of his time. "Time Out of Joint" which I have also recently read in French (living in Paris means the best book bargains are in the local language... I'd love to pick up cheap English originals) was written in the 1950s IIRC, and yet it's as if it could have been written yesterday. Sure, the occasional reference to technology which sounds a little out of date does happen, but for the mind that's really easy to step over, because everything else just fits. Sure, it is paranoid, but when you question everything you see on TV about politics these days, you ask yourself what influence one guy (Bush, Blair, whatever) really has over the thousands of people who are really employed in making policy. Indeed, the influence those thousands have on the leader figure is what we should be more worried about.
In England, where we only have a population of 60 million, it's perhaps less flagrant than in the US, but somewhere along the line we are all many steps removed from any policy decisions, we mostly get to say yes or no about once every 4 years and most of us don't even vote in local elections. Michael Moore had a point when he said running for election in small-fry local posts is enough to get in sometimes. Don't bother pointing out the holes and contradictions in some of his other lefty liberal stuff though, I'm well aware of those. I digress.
The point with PK Dick's writing, at least that of it which I have read, is that the individual is studied much more than the collective. The paranoia inherent in a lot of the work is because the stuff is so based on an individuals attempt to understand reality. It's almost a solipsistic nightmare sometimes. Art can really start to get somewhere with our current malaise. Because the way we think and interpret is what really matters for us as individual human beings. And our current malaise is just that: faced with an increasing access to all sorts of societies, individuals, and cultures, our biggest problem is first how to situate ourselves. No longer (or rarely) do we live in smaller, closer-knit communities, but rather in almost separate little units - which do not interconnect based on local geography but rather along interest based lines and public gatherings...
When we start automatically watering down a lowest common denominator for mass marketing... we're really pulling away from what Dick's writing does to us, in making us look at our own individual reaction to current society and current social groups. The feeling you have after the cited movies are just reflections in a distorted mirror of the feelings that are conveyed when you read the books.
I know that to have mass appeal, a movie should respect a certain number of things which are the antithesis of what real film art is about, but raising the bar a little would gradually educate the filmgoing public - indeed there are literally millions of us who would really go after a less "clean cut happy ending experience". The global market is there now, you don't have to market to the whole of ABC1 audience in suburban midtown multiplexes.
I wish that some independent film maker could fix up to do a truer adaptation of a PKD short story, and really leave it hanging at the end. Just the other day I saw Intolerable Cruelty, and couldn't help thinking that the happy ending was tacked on in order to pass some kind of Hollywood audience standard. Cut the movie about 10 minutes earlier, where the roles suddenly reverse in favour of the character played by
It's a shame your introduction isn't quite a good "sell" of the quality of the article, for example I quote:
Other people should go see the site, here's an HTML link to make it more interesting.
It would seem, critically, that the waste can be stored on site for 40 years, does not need to be transported elsewhere, and is inherently more stable than the waste in a typical water reactor.
If you think that modern cars get bad milage, just imagine the fuel bill for one that takes off vertically. Likewise for the personal jetpack and for supersonic flight. Fuel cost is also a big problem in space exploration.
Once they've actually taken off, the MPG for flying cars isn't actually that bad. Indeed compared to some gas guzzling luxury sedans they're cheaper per mile in fuel costs.
From: Skycar website. My emphasis.
I don't think your point about broadband teleconferencing is relevant to the first argument, so I won't comment on that. It's like a hanging aside that really needs to be focused on in a separate way, based on human relationships in physical and "virtual" space.
Anyway a couple of points. First, we still call it senior school, not high school, right? No need to translate British English into American.
Secondly, I wholeheartedly agree, I remember sitting a three hour exam for which I had answered all the questions in an hour. The teacher who was supervising wouldn't let me leave, and so I had to endure two hours sitting doing nothing. Couldn't even read a book. I got 95% in the exam, but the supervisor didn't believe I had finished after an hour. Bitch. Punishment for being good at something - I could have written a harder exam myself but in my class were a bunch of dropouts that the teacher had to cater for.
I would encourage you, however, to get a bit more into the subjects you really like. Saying that you can do enough to pass an exam in five minutes is great, but the free time that you have available to you as a result really should be spent profiting as much as possible intellectually. You will not believe how hard it gets, year on year, from now on. I used to read other course textbooks, novels, plays, science stuff... at least in lessons I had already understood, and I generally got away with it. The computer network was also a source of fun in lessons where there were computers, but then that was a network of BBC Micro B computers and not really too interesting after about two weeks.
You can blame the system all you like, but once you're out of it you will have to live up to your own harsh realities. Try to help those who are trying to help you, by thinking outside of the box and maybe even improving relationships with teachers - no harm in catching them after lessons if you're interested in the subject. I ended up doing some cool weather satellite tracking with our physics teacher instead of lessons I had already mastered. It was 13 years ago too, so imagine how much more amazing that was - recording a signal overnight and decoding it slowly on a machine that had 32Kb of main RAM.
I also know a huge amount of US diplomats on foreign missions, worked in an American school, worked for USAID...
But to raise a couple of points :
- I was talking about non urgent healthcare, gradual wasting diseases like cancer and the like.
- A lot of the cold war was directly a result of brinkmanship from the US presidencies, Russia in retrospect, and with the benefit of hindsight, is no longer seen historically as such a big threat : the US started a lot of propaganda, and overstated the power of the Russian bloc, attributing them some kind of amazing strategy that never materialised.
- Let's say socialist instead of left of centre. Does the argument you made still hold? Would you dare be a card carrying socialist?
- I'm not anti american as such. Know a lot of great Americans, most of whom live overseas. I'm just calling into question some points you raised. Telling me I'm losing the argument is beside the point, I'm just trying to put my perspective into the mix to get a clear picture of just how vehement the pro-USA arguments have become...
Begin counter argument
1) The Europeans can afford the luxury of a welfare state, because they haven't had to defend themselves for the last 50 years. How much more of their GDP would have gone into the armed forces if the US had pulled out of NATO when the Russians had 5,000 tanks and 3,000,000 troops in Eastern Europe?
What? Europeans made a collective, democratic decision to found a welfare state after the second world war. In the USA, being left of centre is bait to all the McCarthyists out there... so nobody openly claims there should be a welfare system. So you have a load of poor people that most white middle class people don't even admit exist. As for the comment about not having had to defend itself... well I'm just at a loss on how you really see the last 50 years of US intervention into other peoples problems as part of what can be seen by some as the gradual establishment of geo-strategic alliances with countries who you leave no choice but to stick with you all the way to the hilt. The UK included.
2) There are ample opportunities for anyone in America to "make it". We don't need a welfare state. Most Americans don't want a welfare state. Your doing exactly what you accuse us of doing -- applying your own standards and morals to our country.
Your opinion is that you don't need it. Maybe you have private insurance. Most Americans don't want to die either, but they might if something happens to them that they can't afford to get fixed.
And yet with our "crumbling school system" we still lead the World with advances in all sorts of Sciences. World leaders come to our country for major medical procedures because they don't trust their own medical systems. Foreign students come to our universities in droves.
Foreign students still see the US as some kind of Eldorado. They all pay dearly for their studies. The US' main tactic is a brain drain away from developing countries and from Europe on the basis of paying high salaries because the schools have more money. Europe decided, generally, that enough was enough regarding competition with the US on money alone, so the gold-digging academics all go over to you. Shame, but that's the reason. Considering the massive population over there, tell me how many of the great scientists and doctors and educators you have are like more than about 3rd generation natives?
End counter argument
International aid is usually audited and meant to go towards humanitarian and other noble projects. Space exploration is no doubt funded by tax money. Now, there may be ways that international aid goes into one bucket and empties from another. Bear in mind that in spite of that, "international aid" is often nothing more than a dressed up trade agreement. This makes it rather more akin to "we'll give you a billion dollars. You spend about 80% of it in our country, and we'll call it quits"...
I refuse to use words like 'interesting article' and such like, try to include a few links, and try to summarise in my own words.
Now the subject matter I choose (often science) may not fit into the Slashdot editorial line, but I might have to experiment with copying first paragraphs preceded by 'interesting article' and see what happens...
No need to read the threads here, the summary of feeling is already in the original article :-)
Move along, nothing new to see here...
So it's all a bit over my head, nickel certainly conducts electricity but obviously not like gold and at an atomic level maybe it doesn't matter... since the silicon is like 4 or 5 atoms thick, and the metal seems to be some sort of a sink for lost electrons.
Physics PhD to the rescue?
You're totally right... in fact, most long distance calls anywhere in the world are already happening over IP, and have been doing for a long long time. The real losers are the big old digital ISDN type equipment vendors... I had a major telco with a lot of Ericsson equipment tell me you couldn't get 2mbps through regular copper wire over more than about 500m because they'd only tried the wrong kind of equipment to do it. We had MDSL modems running 1mbps (symmetric, no less) over a standard twisted pair analog circuit like 5km across Rabat, Morocco. Hardly where you have the greatest end to end quality in the infrastructure.
Why am I thinking more along the lines of setting a blanket on fire under their entire subscriber pool?
I wholeheartedly agree with you. Indeed, copyright violation is not the same as theft anyway. Stealing means "the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it" and has absolutely nothing to do with online piracy. It's disgusting.
I don't doubt they do the job. I still get by with ~400MHz and 96MB RAM at my job, but with Office 2000/Win98. I wouldn't upgrade in a hurry (especially not the Office package; but maybe the OS) because extra stuff means those few extra seconds each day, it all adds up in the end.
Large : > 1MB (word), > 750KB (Excel)