The fruit was poisoned since the beginning, you ve been byting it for awhile already, you've just got a real taste of it.
Do you like it? No? Then what are you waiting for? Go and install one of Linux/PPC distros on you Mac. The sooner you do it the less poison will byte you back.
Apple is a good hardware vendor. But all the history of Apple's software development is an example of stupidity of their top managers. Remind it to them - abandon Apple software for it.
In the ancient Rome there were three classes of people: those who can change the employer and can elect, those who can change the employer but cannot elect, and those who cannot change the employer and cannot elect.
The last class of people was called slaves.
Do you like it or not, but H1B workers cannot change their employers unless INS approves it.
In some countries free people live in poverty, not only slaves. In USA both slaves and freemen (citizens and GC) have not a bad salary and some social protection (H1B slaves have it less, of course). But it doesn't make any difference. The slave is slave, if he cannot go free to another employer even if the other employer agree to hire. Consulting companies, re-selling the work time of their H1B slaves (often even without any contribution from a management side - just pure hours), make the picture even more clear.
If you don't really like the word slaves, then use another word - coacroaches, rates or parasites, that what americans mean anyway when they want to protect US job market from being infested by immigrants.
After a brief search here is one article and another one (both old, cannot find newer quickly) showing how the US export of cheap products kills the local industry and creates the stream of illegal immigrants flooding the US job market.
It's a perfect illustration: US wants to play the globalization game when it comes to US product export, but wants to close the border when it comes to the international job market response. That's not fair.
The current H1B laws protects the slavery of 21st century. New changes will only make things even worse.
The main problem of H1B laws is that the laws does not treate H1B worker as equal human beings. It treates them as salary paid robots. The human life is not only about salary. Among other thing the concern of long term planning should not be ignored.
If the US agrees that the worker is valueable for US economy it should appreciate his wish to stay in the country. Otherwise - don't even bring him here. Look, you bring him, you exploit him, and when economic situation is changed - you throw him away as a used garbage. You can do it with your vacuum cleaner. But you should not do it with a human person.
If you disagree with me then go and tell all this story to your samll children. You cannot? You want to protect their souls? That's right - you know yourself that what you are doing is a human crime. The test was simple.
I don't think that the new laws will protect the US economy. All proposed changes are made with one thought in mind: to protect US citizens from being infested by new coming immigrants. The irony is that many US citizens are first or second generation immigrants. Many of others are grand-grand-children of european immigrants, who came to this land and litterally killed many originally living nationalities here.
It's sad to see how many americans forgot their history and think about the rest of people as about coacroaches and rats.
Another irony is that the new changes won't be so bad for foreign workers, who won't come to US and thus avoid of being the slave of the richest economy. The hanges won't be so bad for them as they will be bad for US people, specifically for their souls. But I don't see americans care about it. Too sad.
Each time some people forget that Linux is not only for Intel platform - many users use Linux on Mac/IBM/Amiga PPC, on Sun Sparcs and on other hardware platforms.
Intel C++ is only for x86, therefore it's for Linux/x86, not for Linux in general. Therefore, Intel C++ should not be used by developers who write the code for other linux users (for Linux in general). GCC must be used instead.
Russian language has long words too, usually created from the other words. That wasn't a problem in technical documentation. Until GUI.
In two projects back I translated menu text from English to Russian using official and non-official recommendations I collected from books, Internet and good examples of similar UI translation/localization. That was 8 years ago and the Russian computer slang was not adapted yet for GUI. As a result many menu items were either too long or too weird. Later I saw many other localized GUIs and found that many menu idioms have been virtually invented, while the most lucky ones survived because they have been common across a country and they came from many independent sources. Also I've noticed as "dictatorship" attempts failed to stay, although contributed few terms as well. Microsoft, Adobe, Apple at first came with proprietary translations and were among those whose GUI localization has been critisized by many users. Later, when the common GUI slang has been stabilized, the monsters renewed theur localized GUIs adopting words and phrases from others.
Thus, the language has been transformed in a "democratic" way, like an open source software. Bad terms and idoms have died. The good ones are still in use. It will take time for official language institutions of Russian Academy of Science to adapt their dictionaries to GUI slang. Meanwhile the slang is living - new meanings of new types of actions behind menu items bring new idioms. It's an endless process.
I guess Chineese, Japanees, Korean and some other far East hierogliph based written languages are the best for GUI - they'll get a poem on a small size button, while Scandinavians and Germans will get a signle (but very-veryl long) word.
Also, I wonder how Dutch is used in SMS:)
Re:next breakthrough: buddhism
on
Tai Chi Robots
·
· Score: 2
Frankly, you have already taken the first few steps onto the slippery slope by implying that Buddhism is the only way to peace. It's only a few short steps from there to the statement that all non-Buddhists should be destroyed as threats to peace.
Not at all. Buddhism let you to run any number of "virtual machines", each with another religion. You should practice it each time when it brings a peace, instead of continous arguing with other religion curriers.The other situation when the other will ask you questions about buddhism - you are happy to answer them as it will improve the knowledge of other people. But don't force them. That's the main difference of buddhism from other religions. As for wars, they are the subject of goverments, which are places for people who want a power, which is the goal of the material world and thus has nothing to do with buddhism (or with many other religions). When you are called for a peace - it should be, first of all, the peace in you soul, your thought and your actions.
That wasn't argueing for buddhism, but more an explanation. Speaking about other religions for robots, I think that there are three serious objective problems:
Robots can study Cristianity or Islam, but will cristian or muslims like it?As far as I understand, buddhists have more chances to understand such movement and to avoid of calling it evelish or anything like that.
Robots study cristianity or islam, but what branch? There are ongoing conflicts between Catolicism and Ortdox Church, between sunits and shiits.
This specific robots are supposed to be the product of China Republic, the country where you can go to jail for other religions. Buddhism is ok.
Again, no ofense to other religions, especially that robots can "natively" (more natively than humans) run different religions in different "virtual machines" simultaniously at the same time - right by buddhism rules.
Re:Does it Follow Asimov's Rules?
on
Tai Chi Robots
·
· Score: 2
Asimov rules are correct but very incomplete subset of buddhist rules. It is possible to prove that the following to Asimov rules will drive to a catastrophe or at least to comic situations (read Stanislav Lem). First of all, Asimov rules do not have higher order rules, controling how to improve Asimov rules.
That's why I suggest to program robots to study buddhism before teaching them any social activity (especially before Martial Arts).
next breakthrough: buddhism
on
Tai Chi Robots
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Balanced robots? Too mechanical, nothing unusual. I expect a better breakthrough in this area: computer OS studiing (zen?) buddhism.
Seriously. People without buddism kill other people or other living beings or bring other forms of suffering to other people or to other living beings. Such people live their lives without high-order goals (what's the goal to get many money if you loose them after your death). Even most of religious people (especially ones of religions based on dogmatic principals) are not usually tolerant to people of other reliogion confessions.
But once computers becomes actors in our eco-systems (computers now can decide on our behalf) then I would prefer to see such actors being peacuful, tolerant, non-violent, living their "lives" for good, loving and respecting other living beings.
We don't want to have computers with "ego" - living their "lives" for themselves (and killing us as their competitors or using us as slaves). But also, we don't want computers as stupid slaves, living their lives for "ego" of particular group of people (they would become solders-killers).
Of course, forcing computers to study buddhism should not free us (people) from the same job. We also must be peaceful, tolerant, respectful, loving and non-violent. Unfortunately many of us are not. And that't the real problem.
and try getting 5 hour battery life on an x86 lappy with only one battery
What does bring x86 here? We are talking about Gentoo Linux on Mac PPC. Is it your automatical reaction to think "x86" when you hear "linux"? If so - then fix it: Linux works on a number platforms, besides x86. PPC, Alpha and Sparc are examples.
By the way, Gentoo with PPC extensions (pmud etc) is not really different from Mac OS in terms of battery consumtion.
You don't know Gentoo, do you? The main thing what makes Gentoo very different from other distros and OSes is installation form the source code. And when I say "installation" I mean installation of everything. Every single package is compiled from the source code with compilation flags the most optimal for that particular hardware (CPU and motherboard).
All other OSes keep one universal binary distribution compiled for the most conservative CPU/chipset. As a result the performance on the fastest compter is not that fast. Otherwise, there is a risk of application crashing (another common problem on Mac OS X). The bad news about proprietary Mac OS X - nothing you can do with it. You cannot recompile your kernel, you drivers, you GUI.
Of course, you can install whole Gentoo or just some packages from pre-compiled binaries, available from distro or pre-compiled by yourself. Such option is especially useful when you have more than one identical computers, so you compile each package only once.
There is a foundation of performance comparison of Gentoo and Mac OS X. Read Gentoo forums. Or, even better, try yourself to see the real difference.
why not X86+Linux? That will give you much more complete X11 based desktop environment and application set.
Today you can use one of several stable Linux/PPC distros: Gentoo, Debian, Mandrake, YDL, Slackware.
Personally I prefer Gentoo by three main reasons:
Gentoo is the fastest Linux on PPC and it beats all others (on PPC) including Mac OS X;
Gentoo has the best (among other Linux distros AND other OSes) package management tool: Portage;
Gentoo has the best ratio between stable and bleeding-edge packages;
Gentoo has the best (among all other distros and OSes) support on famous Gentoo forums;
And in case of Mac OS nostalgy, keep the dual boot or use MOL (Mac-on-Linux). I use both ways: I scan hard-printed papers and photos after rebooting to Mac OS (I use 9.2 - I hate OS X by same reasons as people hate Microsoft Windows) and I use MOL when I need Macos binaries (some games) to run (when it doesn't require direct access to USB).
just one more and fresh (yesterday) article about US support of Iraq: here
High on the Bush
administration's list of justifications for war against Iraq are
President Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons, nuclear and
biological programs, and his contacts with international terrorists.
What U.S. officials rarely acknowledge is that these offenses date back
to a period when Hussein was seen in Washington as a valued ally.
Among
the people instrumental in tilting U.S. policy toward Baghdad during
the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was Donald H. Rumsfeld, now defense
secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Hussein as a special
presidential envoy paved the way for normalization of U.S.-Iraqi
relations. Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to
Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost
daily" basis in defiance of international conventions.
The
story of U.S. involvement with Saddam Hussein in the years before his
1990 attack on Kuwait -- which included large-scale intelligence
sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and
facilitating Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological precursors
-- is a topical example of the underside of U.S. foreign policy. It is
a world in which deals can be struck with dictators, human rights
violations sometimes overlooked, and accommodations made with arms
proliferators, all on the principle that the "enemy of my enemy is my
friend."
Throughout the 1980s, Hussein's Iraq was the sworn
enemy of Iran, then still in the throes of an Islamic revolution. U.S.
officials saw Baghdad as a bulwark against militant Shiite extremism
and the fall of pro-American states such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and
even Jordan -- a Middle East version of the "domino theory" in
Southeast Asia. That was enough to turn Hussein into a strategic
partner and for U.S. diplomats in Baghdad to routinely refer to Iraqi
forces as "the good guys," in contrast to the Iranians, who were
depicted as "the bad guys."
A review of thousands of
declassified government documents and interviews with former
policymakers shows that U.S. intelligence and logistical support played
a crucial role in shoring up Iraqi defenses against the "human wave"
attacks by suicidal Iranian troops. The administrations of Ronald
Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous
items that had both military and civilian applications, including
poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and
bubonic plague.
Opinions differ among Middle East experts
and former government officials about the pre-Iraqi tilt, and whether
Washington could have done more to stop the flow to Baghdad of
technology for building weapons of mass destruction.
"It
was a horrible mistake then, but we have got it right now," says
Kenneth M. Pollack, a former CIA military analyst and author of "The
Threatening Storm," which makes the case for war with Iraq. "My fellow
[CIA] analysts and I were warning at the time that Hussein was a very
nasty character. We were constantly fighting the State Department."
"Fundamentally, the policy was justified," argues David Newton, a former
U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, who runs an anti-Hussein radio station in
Prague. "We were concerned that Iraq should not lose the war with Iran,
because that would have threatened Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Our
long-term hope was that Hussein's government would become less
repressive and more responsible."
What makes present-day
Hussein different from the Hussein of the 1980s, say Middle East
experts, is the mellowing of the Iranian revolution and the August 1990
invasion of Kuwait that transformed the Iraqi dictator, almost
overnight, from awkward ally into mortal enemy. In addition, the United
States itself has changed. As a result of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks on New York and Washington, U.S. policymakers take a much more
alarmist view of the threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of
mass destruction.
U.S. Shifts in Iran-Iraq War
When the Iran-Iraq war began in September 1980, with an Iraqi attack
across the Shatt al Arab waterway that leads to the Persian Gulf, the
United States was a bystander. The United States did not have
diplomatic relations with either Baghdad or Tehran. U.S. officials had
almost as little sympathy for Hussein's dictatorial brand of Arab
nationalism as for the Islamic fundamentalism espoused by Iran's
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As long as the two countries fought their
way to a stalemate, nobody in Washington was disposed to intervene.
By the summer of 1982, however, the strategic picture had changed
dramatically. After its initial gains, Iraq was on the defensive, and
Iranian troops had advanced to within a few miles of Basra, Iraq's
second largest city. U.S. intelligence information suggested the
Iranians might achieve a breakthrough on the Basra front, destabilizing
Kuwait, the Gulf states, and even Saudi Arabia, thereby threatening
U.S. oil supplies.
"You have to understand the geostrategic
context, which was very different from where we are now," said Howard
Teicher, a former National Security Council official, who worked on
Iraqi policy during the Reagan administration. "Realpolitik dictated
that we act to prevent the situation from getting worse."
To prevent an Iraqi collapse, the Reagan administration supplied
battlefield intelligence on Iranian troop buildups to the Iraqis,
sometimes through third parties such as Saudi Arabia. The U.S. tilt
toward Iraq was enshrined in National Security Decision Directive 114
of Nov. 26, 1983, one of the few important Reagan era foreign policy
decisions that still remains classified. According to former U.S.
officials, the directive stated that the United States would do
"whatever was necessary and legal" to prevent Iraq from losing the war
with Iran.
The presidential directive was issued amid a
flurry of reports that Iraqi forces were using chemical weapons in
their attempts to hold back the Iranians. In principle, Washington was
strongly opposed to chemical warfare, a practice outlawed by the 1925
Geneva Protocol. In practice, U.S. condemnation of Iraqi use of
chemical weapons ranked relatively low on the scale of administration
priorities, particularly compared with the all-important goal of
preventing an Iranian victory.
Thus, on Nov. 1, 1983, a
senior State Department official, Jonathan T. Howe, told Secretary of
State George P. Shultz that intelligence reports showed that Iraqi
troops were resorting to "almost daily use of CW" against the Iranians.
But the Reagan administration had already committed itself to a
large-scale diplomatic and political overture to Baghdad, culminating
in several visits by the president's recently appointed special envoy
to the Middle East, Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Secret talking
points prepared for the first Rumsfeld visit to Baghdad enshrined some
of the language from NSDD 114, including the statement that the United
States would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a
strategic defeat for the West." When Rumsfeld finally met with Hussein
on Dec. 20, he told the Iraqi leader that Washington was ready for a
resumption of full diplomatic relations, according to a State
Department report of the conversation. Iraqi leaders later described
themselves as "extremely pleased" with the Rumsfeld visit, which had
"elevated U.S.-Iraqi relations to a new level."
In a
September interview with CNN, Rumsfeld said he "cautioned" Hussein
about the use of chemical weapons, a claim at odds with declassified
State Department notes of his 90-minute meeting with the Iraqi leader.
A Pentagon spokesman, Brian Whitman, now says that Rumsfeld raised the
issue not with Hussein, but with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz. The
State Department notes show that he mentioned it largely in passing as
one of several matters that "inhibited" U.S. efforts to assist Iraq.
Rumsfeld has also said he had "nothing to do" with helping Iraq in its
war against Iran. Although former U.S. officials agree that Rumsfeld
was not one of the architects of the Reagan administration's tilt
toward Iraq -- he was a private citizen when he was appointed Middle
East envoy -- the documents show that his visits to Baghdad led to
closer U.S.-Iraqi cooperation on a wide variety of fronts. Washington
was willing to resume diplomatic relations immediately, but Hussein
insisted on delaying such a step until the following year.
As part of its opening to Baghdad, the Reagan administration removed
Iraq from the State Department terrorism list in February 1982, despite
heated objections from Congress. Without such a move, Teicher says, it
would have been "impossible to take even the modest steps we were
contemplating" to channel assistance to Baghdad. Iraq -- along with
Syria, Libya and South Yemen -- was one of four original countries on
the list, which was first drawn up in 1979.
Some former
U.S. officials say that removing Iraq from the terrorism list provided
an incentive to Hussein to expel the Palestinian guerrilla leader Abu
Nidal from Baghdad in 1983. On the other hand, Iraq continued to play
host to alleged terrorists throughout the '80s. The most notable was
Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, who found refuge
in Baghdad after being expelled from Tunis for masterminding the 1985
hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, which resulted in the
killing of an elderly American tourist.
Iraq Lobbies for Arms
While Rumsfeld was talking to Hussein and Aziz in Baghdad, Iraqi
diplomats and weapons merchants were fanning out across Western
capitals for a diplomatic charm offensive-cum-arms buying spree. In
Washington, the key figure was the Iraqi chargé d'affaires, Nizar
Hamdoon, a fluent English speaker who impressed Reagan administration
officials as one of the most skillful lobbyists in town.
"He arrived with a blue shirt and a white tie, straight out of the
mafia," recalled Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East specialist in the Reagan
White House. "Within six months, he was hosting suave dinner parties at
his residence, which he parlayed into a formidable lobbying effort. He
was particularly effective with the American Jewish community."
One of Hamdoon's favorite props, says Kemp, was a green Islamic scarf
allegedly found on the body of an Iranian soldier. The scarf was
decorated with a map of the Middle East showing a series of arrows
pointing toward Jerusalem. Hamdoon used to "parade the scarf" to
conferences and congressional hearings as proof that an Iranian victory
over Iraq would result in "Israel becoming a victim along with the
Arabs."
According to a sworn court affidavit prepared by
Teicher in 1995, the United States "actively supported the Iraqi war
effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by
providing military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by
closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq
had the military weaponry required." Teicher said in the affidavit that
former CIA director William Casey used a Chilean company, Cardoen, to
supply Iraq with cluster bombs that could be used to disrupt the
Iranian human wave attacks. Teicher refuses to discuss the affidavit.
At the same time the Reagan administration was facilitating the supply
of weapons and military components to Baghdad, it was attempting to cut
off supplies to Iran under "Operation Staunch." Those efforts were
largely successful, despite the glaring anomaly of the 1986 Iran-contra
scandal when the White House publicly admitted trading arms for
hostages, in violation of the policy that the United States was trying
to impose on the rest of the world.
Although U.S. arms
manufacturers were not as deeply involved as German or British
companies in selling weaponry to Iraq, the Reagan administration
effectively turned a blind eye to the export of "dual use" items such
as chemical precursors and steel tubes that can have military and
civilian applications. According to several former officials, the State
and Commerce departments promoted trade in such items as a way to boost
U.S. exports and acquire political leverage over Hussein.
When
United Nations weapons inspectors were allowed into Iraq after the 1991
Gulf War, they compiled long lists of chemicals, missile components,
and computers from American suppliers, including such household names
as Union Carbide and Honeywell, which were being used for military
purposes.
A 1994 investigation by the Senate Banking
Committee turned up dozens of biological agents shipped to Iraq during
the mid-'80s under license from the Commerce Department, including
various strains of anthrax, subsequently identified by the Pentagon as
a key component of the Iraqi biological warfare program. The Commerce
Department also approved the export of insecticides to Iraq, despite
widespread suspicions that they were being used for chemical warfare.
The fact that Iraq was using chemical weapons was hardly a secret. In
February 1984, an Iraqi military spokesman effectively acknowledged
their use by issuing a chilling warning to Iran. "The invaders should
know that for every harmful insect, there is an insecticide capable of
annihilating it . . . and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide."
Chemicals Kill Kurds
In late 1987, the Iraqi air force began using chemical agents against
Kurdish resistance forces in northern Iraq that had formed a loose
alliance with Iran, according to State Department reports. The attacks,
which were part of a "scorched earth" strategy to eliminate
rebel-controlled villages, provoked outrage on Capitol Hill and renewed
demands for sanctions against Iraq. The State Department and White
House were also outraged -- but not to the point of doing anything that
might seriously damage relations with Baghdad.
"The
U.S.-Iraqi relationship is . . . important to our long-term political
and economic objectives," Assistant Secretary of State Richard W.
Murphy wrote in a September 1988 memorandum that addressed the chemical
weapons question. "We believe that economic sanctions will be useless
or counterproductive to influence the Iraqis."
Bush
administration spokesmen have cited Hussein's use of chemical weapons
"against his own people" -- and particularly the March 1988 attack on
the Kurdish village of Halabjah -- to bolster their argument that his
regime presents a "grave and gathering danger" to the United States.
The Iraqis continued to use chemical weapons against the Iranians until
the end of the Iran-Iraq war. A U.S. air force intelligence officer,
Rick Francona, reported finding widespread use of Iraqi nerve gas when
he toured the Al Faw peninsula in southern Iraq in the summer of 1988,
after its recapture by the Iraqi army. The battlefield was littered
with atropine injectors used by panicky Iranian troops as an antidote
against Iraqi nerve gas attacks.
Far from declining, the
supply of U.S. military intelligence to Iraq actually expanded in 1988,
according to a 1999 book by Francona, "Ally to Adversary: an Eyewitness
Account of Iraq's Fall from Grace." Informed sources said much of the
battlefield intelligence was channeled to the Iraqis by the CIA office
in Baghdad.
Although U.S. export controls to Iraq were
tightened up in the late 1980s, there were still many loopholes. In
December 1988, Dow Chemical sold $1.5 million of pesticides to Iraq,
despite U.S. government concerns that they could be used as chemical
warfare agents. An Export-Import Bank official reported in a memorandum
that he could find "no reason" to stop the sale, despite evidence that
the pesticides were "highly toxic" to humans and would cause death
"from asphyxiation."
The U.S. policy of cultivating Hussein
as a moderate and reasonable Arab leader continued right up until he
invaded Kuwait in August 1990, documents show. When the then-U.S.
ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, met with Hussein on July 25,
1990, a week before the Iraqi attack on Kuwait, she assured him that
Bush "wanted better and deeper relations," according to an Iraqi
transcript of the conversation. "President Bush is an intelligent man,"
the ambassador told Hussein, referring to the father of the current
president. "He is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq."
"Everybody was wrong in their assessment of Saddam," said Joe Wilson,
Glaspie's former deputy at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and the last
U.S. official to meet with Hussein. "Everybody in the Arab world told
us that the best way to deal with Saddam was to develop a set of
economic and commercial relationships that would have the effect of
moderating his behavior. History will demonstrate that this was a
miscalculation."
They have similar restrictions on all sorts of technology that could be used by another country (unfriendly) to develop weapons.
Oh, really. And at the same time US exports lots of weapons to all over the world, including Iraq and Taliban.
I wonder, have such sanctions really peaceful reasons or they are just a political instrument to protect economical interests of US weapon corporations?
So, perhaps we can not only theme our desktop on the machine - but our *literal* desktop.
Read it as: "So, perhaps we are not only restricted to theme our desktop on the machine - but our *literal* desktop as well."
The patent reminds me hyperlink and similar patents. Those clerks in patent offices are nuts. The patent has many prior art cases and it's too general to be called a method.
No need for genetically modified humans. The only part of the body that need special oxygen, temperature and pressure conditions, while it's undisposable (yet), is our brain. The rest of the body is easy (almost) to replace by any mechanical stuff. Just take the brain and put in some cell inside the rover, connecting it to central board computer, of course. Such rover can go virtually everywhere. And it can take a shap of a rocket, helicopter and anything else, that can move, fly, swim, dig or just lay down.
However, if we'd understand how brains work and carry on intellectual and soul functions - then we don't need any brain. Just download my copy into central computer of any exploring device and I am ready to go. I won't need any oxygen and I'll be very tolerant to any temperature and pressure. But keep my backup copy at some safe place or I'll sue you!
don't worry about democratic world any time soon - it is US who usually supports such regimes as taliban by both money and weapons. US will never let latin-american or African or Asian countries to join well-developed club, keeping those peoples in poverty and instability.
In the age of 3 I was with my parents walking and looking for a house of my uncle. At some point I told the right house. Last time I was there when I was 1. But what's more important, I told what kind of change the house experienced (they reconstructed it a lot, i.e. they've moved the entrance from one wall to onether one). Now I remember only the scene of remembering. It means it was the intermediate memory.
I'm sorry, but I fail to see the relevance of your point. Microsoft did hire developers from other companies liberally, developers who were familiar with GUI work at IBM, PARC, OSF, and other places. That's one of the reasons why Windows and Linux look alike: they copied from the same sources, in addition to Linux copying from Windows.
You really didn't get a point. It's not importan who copied whom. It's important who first delivered it to many users. Microsoft delivered GUI to home users and to many corporate users. Are we on the same point here? If yes - Microsoft looks innovative for those (millions) users. And don't pull out from ashes that cheezy Mac GUI: who care? They delivered it only to 5% of desktops. Virtually nothing.
Speech recognition
CMU Sphinx and a couple of others.
Text-to-Speech
Edinburgh Festival and a couple of others.
handwriting recognition
Handhelds.org has several pen input methods...
taxonomy based (aka object oriented) document storage (or file systems)
There are numerous choices for that, from object-relational databases like PostgreSQL to knowledge representation systems like FramerD.
Are any of them are usable by end-users out of the box? They are all good technologies, but they are far away from being used by end-users for tasks I mentioned. That's what Microsoft did with GUI and OS ideas of Unix and Mac and others - they delivered it to end-users OUT OF THE BOX. That's good for both Microsft and its customers. I have no illusion about what Microsoft did wrong about monopoly and so on. But they did a good job of bringing innovation (even someone else's) to desktops of many people and it's not clear when (if ever) such innovations whould be delivered to those users without Microsoft copiing.
There are lots of innovative and different Linux desktops out there already. It's just that there is also a lot of people who want a Windows-like desktop on top of Linux. The beauty is that Linux supports all of them.
If you mean Fresco/Berlin and similar non-X11, their problem is that they are not X11. Therefore, those users, who need Windows-like GUI, cannot smoothly migrate from Windows style to something innovative. That's why I suggest to pay attention on Enlightenment/Sawfish (wm) and Gnome (dm) - you can configure a system very alike Windows or you can use some very new ideas about borders, movings, workspaces, or you can combine them. So, users with Windows background can be softly introduced to new ideas. Also, once speech or handwriting or taxonomies will be ready - it's easy to integrate them into Gnome.
The point is: innovation by itself is less important than the way how the innovation will be delivered to most of users.
Much of the Windows UI was actually not originally created by Microsoft--it was copied from various other sources, including previous UNIX toolkits.
Small percent of engineers worked on Unices 15 years. Virtually noone used any computer at home. Even few % of office workspaces had PCs. Although some has TTY:)
Microsoft did innovation by bringing PC to most of home users and to many office users. It was copied and it was ugly. But home users were happy as they've got computers with some GUI. TTY users were happy as they've got GUI. And that was for a fraction of a typical Unix box price.
Now, clone MS Windows GUI and see what an average Joe would say: "I've saw it before. But it worked much better for me."
Linux Desktop must be innovative to get more desktop share. And it is not a problem. Look at Enlightenment or Sawfish window managers - they improve and bring new ussability experience. Look at Gnome panels and applets and its new transparency things. That's the way I expect Linux GUI innovation will be winning.
That's probably not enough to prove the innovation of Linux desktops for some people. That's why there are projects like Fresco/Berlin. Unfortunately, non-X11 way won't work on Linux anytime soon - many Linux users believe in X11 + there are many drivers and applications for it.
I don't want to count Mac OS X either - it's a proprietary deadend and I don't believe in proprietary UI innovation anymore. It's like industrial and post-industrial consuming eras. First you feed people up. Then they demand better quality and old fashion don't work any more.
Finally, I thing there are some formerly/currently proprietary technologies which are much more (than XP GUI) worthy for being cloned in open source GUI. Here is a short list:
Speech recognition
Text-to-Speech
handwriting recognition (especially on touch screens
taxonomy based (aka object oriented) document storage (or file systems)
Make them out of the Linux box and many people will buy Linux boxes for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you like it? No? Then what are you waiting for? Go and install one of Linux/PPC distros on you Mac. The sooner you do it the less poison will byte you back.
Apple is a good hardware vendor. But all the history of Apple's software development is an example of stupidity of their top managers. Remind it to them - abandon Apple software for it.
The last class of people was called slaves.
Do you like it or not, but H1B workers cannot change their employers unless INS approves it.
In some countries free people live in poverty, not only slaves. In USA both slaves and freemen (citizens and GC) have not a bad salary and some social protection (H1B slaves have it less, of course). But it doesn't make any difference. The slave is slave, if he cannot go free to another employer even if the other employer agree to hire. Consulting companies, re-selling the work time of their H1B slaves (often even without any contribution from a management side - just pure hours), make the picture even more clear.
If you don't really like the word slaves, then use another word - coacroaches, rates or parasites, that what americans mean anyway when they want to protect US job market from being infested by immigrants.
After a brief search here is one article and another one (both old, cannot find newer quickly) showing how the US export of cheap products kills the local industry and creates the stream of illegal immigrants flooding the US job market.
It's a perfect illustration: US wants to play the globalization game when it comes to US product export, but wants to close the border when it comes to the international job market response. That's not fair.
The main problem of H1B laws is that the laws does not treate H1B worker as equal human beings. It treates them as salary paid robots. The human life is not only about salary. Among other thing the concern of long term planning should not be ignored.
If the US agrees that the worker is valueable for US economy it should appreciate his wish to stay in the country. Otherwise - don't even bring him here. Look, you bring him, you exploit him, and when economic situation is changed - you throw him away as a used garbage. You can do it with your vacuum cleaner. But you should not do it with a human person.
If you disagree with me then go and tell all this story to your samll children. You cannot? You want to protect their souls? That's right - you know yourself that what you are doing is a human crime. The test was simple.
I don't think that the new laws will protect the US economy. All proposed changes are made with one thought in mind: to protect US citizens from being infested by new coming immigrants. The irony is that many US citizens are first or second generation immigrants. Many of others are grand-grand-children of european immigrants, who came to this land and litterally killed many originally living nationalities here.
It's sad to see how many americans forgot their history and think about the rest of people as about coacroaches and rats.
Another irony is that the new changes won't be so bad for foreign workers, who won't come to US and thus avoid of being the slave of the richest economy. The hanges won't be so bad for them as they will be bad for US people, specifically for their souls. But I don't see americans care about it. Too sad.
This is the typical case of spam on ./, just a profit free one.
Intel C++ is only for x86, therefore it's for Linux/x86, not for Linux in general. Therefore, Intel C++ should not be used by developers who write the code for other linux users (for Linux in general). GCC must be used instead.
In two projects back I translated menu text from English to Russian using official and non-official recommendations I collected from books, Internet and good examples of similar UI translation/localization. That was 8 years ago and the Russian computer slang was not adapted yet for GUI. As a result many menu items were either too long or too weird. Later I saw many other localized GUIs and found that many menu idioms have been virtually invented, while the most lucky ones survived because they have been common across a country and they came from many independent sources. Also I've noticed as "dictatorship" attempts failed to stay, although contributed few terms as well. Microsoft, Adobe, Apple at first came with proprietary translations and were among those whose GUI localization has been critisized by many users. Later, when the common GUI slang has been stabilized, the monsters renewed theur localized GUIs adopting words and phrases from others.
Thus, the language has been transformed in a "democratic" way, like an open source software. Bad terms and idoms have died. The good ones are still in use. It will take time for official language institutions of Russian Academy of Science to adapt their dictionaries to GUI slang. Meanwhile the slang is living - new meanings of new types of actions behind menu items bring new idioms. It's an endless process.
Then why Tools - Gereedschappen? I don't speak Dutch, so I don't know if Gereedschappen is common, but visually Gereedschappen is not short.
Also, I wonder how Dutch is used in SMS :)
Not at all. Buddhism let you to run any number of "virtual machines", each with another religion. You should practice it each time when it brings a peace, instead of continous arguing with other religion curriers.The other situation when the other will ask you questions about buddhism - you are happy to answer them as it will improve the knowledge of other people. But don't force them. That's the main difference of buddhism from other religions. As for wars, they are the subject of goverments, which are places for people who want a power, which is the goal of the material world and thus has nothing to do with buddhism (or with many other religions). When you are called for a peace - it should be, first of all, the peace in you soul, your thought and your actions.
That wasn't argueing for buddhism, but more an explanation. Speaking about other religions for robots, I think that there are three serious objective problems:
- Robots can study Cristianity or Islam, but will cristian or muslims like it?As far as I understand, buddhists have more chances to understand such movement and to avoid of calling it evelish or anything like that.
- Robots study cristianity or islam, but what branch? There are ongoing conflicts between Catolicism and Ortdox Church, between sunits and shiits.
- This specific robots are supposed to be the product of China Republic, the country where you can go to jail for other religions. Buddhism is ok.
Again, no ofense to other religions, especially that robots can "natively" (more natively than humans) run different religions in different "virtual machines" simultaniously at the same time - right by buddhism rules.That's why I suggest to program robots to study buddhism before teaching them any social activity (especially before Martial Arts).
Seriously. People without buddism kill other people or other living beings or bring other forms of suffering to other people or to other living beings. Such people live their lives without high-order goals (what's the goal to get many money if you loose them after your death). Even most of religious people (especially ones of religions based on dogmatic principals) are not usually tolerant to people of other reliogion confessions.
But once computers becomes actors in our eco-systems (computers now can decide on our behalf) then I would prefer to see such actors being peacuful, tolerant, non-violent, living their "lives" for good, loving and respecting other living beings.
We don't want to have computers with "ego" - living their "lives" for themselves (and killing us as their competitors or using us as slaves). But also, we don't want computers as stupid slaves, living their lives for "ego" of particular group of people (they would become solders-killers).
Of course, forcing computers to study buddhism should not free us (people) from the same job. We also must be peaceful, tolerant, respectful, loving and non-violent. Unfortunately many of us are not. And that't the real problem.
Just few corrections:
Linux PPC runs OpenOffice. But if you insist on MS Mac Office - it runs it fine in MOL with same speed and quaity. Personally I prefer OpenOffice.
Instead of Aqua it has X86 with Gnome, which I like better than Aqua/Quartz.
I play DVD, movies and music on Linux. I've tried iThings on Mac OS X and found them cheesy - they are not THAT special as they pretend to be.
What does bring x86 here? We are talking about Gentoo Linux on Mac PPC. Is it your automatical reaction to think "x86" when you hear "linux"? If so - then fix it: Linux works on a number platforms, besides x86. PPC, Alpha and Sparc are examples.
By the way, Gentoo with PPC extensions (pmud etc) is not really different from Mac OS in terms of battery consumtion.
All other OSes keep one universal binary distribution compiled for the most conservative CPU/chipset. As a result the performance on the fastest compter is not that fast. Otherwise, there is a risk of application crashing (another common problem on Mac OS X). The bad news about proprietary Mac OS X - nothing you can do with it. You cannot recompile your kernel, you drivers, you GUI.
Of course, you can install whole Gentoo or just some packages from pre-compiled binaries, available from distro or pre-compiled by yourself. Such option is especially useful when you have more than one identical computers, so you compile each package only once.
There is a foundation of performance comparison of Gentoo and Mac OS X. Read Gentoo forums. Or, even better, try yourself to see the real difference.
Today you can use one of several stable Linux/PPC distros: Gentoo, Debian, Mandrake, YDL, Slackware.
Personally I prefer Gentoo by three main reasons:
- Gentoo is the fastest Linux on PPC and it beats all others (on PPC) including Mac OS X;
- Gentoo has the best (among other Linux distros AND other OSes) package management tool: Portage;
- Gentoo has the best ratio between stable and bleeding-edge packages;
- Gentoo has the best (among all other distros and OSes) support on famous Gentoo forums;
And in case of Mac OS nostalgy, keep the dual boot or use MOL (Mac-on-Linux). I use both ways: I scan hard-printed papers and photos after rebooting to Mac OS (I use 9.2 - I hate OS X by same reasons as people hate Microsoft Windows) and I use MOL when I need Macos binaries (some games) to run (when it doesn't require direct access to USB).High on the Bush administration's list of justifications for war against Iraq are President Saddam Hussein's use of chemical weapons, nuclear and biological programs, and his contacts with international terrorists. What U.S. officials rarely acknowledge is that these offenses date back to a period when Hussein was seen in Washington as a valued ally.
Among the people instrumental in tilting U.S. policy toward Baghdad during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was Donald H. Rumsfeld, now defense secretary, whose December 1983 meeting with Hussein as a special presidential envoy paved the way for normalization of U.S.-Iraqi relations. Declassified documents show that Rumsfeld traveled to Baghdad at a time when Iraq was using chemical weapons on an "almost daily" basis in defiance of international conventions.
The story of U.S. involvement with Saddam Hussein in the years before his 1990 attack on Kuwait -- which included large-scale intelligence sharing, supply of cluster bombs through a Chilean front company, and facilitating Iraq's acquisition of chemical and biological precursors -- is a topical example of the underside of U.S. foreign policy. It is a world in which deals can be struck with dictators, human rights violations sometimes overlooked, and accommodations made with arms proliferators, all on the principle that the "enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Throughout the 1980s, Hussein's Iraq was the sworn enemy of Iran, then still in the throes of an Islamic revolution. U.S. officials saw Baghdad as a bulwark against militant Shiite extremism and the fall of pro-American states such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan -- a Middle East version of the "domino theory" in Southeast Asia. That was enough to turn Hussein into a strategic partner and for U.S. diplomats in Baghdad to routinely refer to Iraqi forces as "the good guys," in contrast to the Iranians, who were depicted as "the bad guys."
A review of thousands of declassified government documents and interviews with former policymakers shows that U.S. intelligence and logistical support played a crucial role in shoring up Iraqi defenses against the "human wave" attacks by suicidal Iranian troops. The administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague.
Opinions differ among Middle East experts and former government officials about the pre-Iraqi tilt, and whether Washington could have done more to stop the flow to Baghdad of technology for building weapons of mass destruction.
"It was a horrible mistake then, but we have got it right now," says Kenneth M. Pollack, a former CIA military analyst and author of "The Threatening Storm," which makes the case for war with Iraq. "My fellow [CIA] analysts and I were warning at the time that Hussein was a very nasty character. We were constantly fighting the State Department."
"Fundamentally, the policy was justified," argues David Newton, a former U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, who runs an anti-Hussein radio station in Prague. "We were concerned that Iraq should not lose the war with Iran, because that would have threatened Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Our long-term hope was that Hussein's government would become less repressive and more responsible."
What makes present-day Hussein different from the Hussein of the 1980s, say Middle East experts, is the mellowing of the Iranian revolution and the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait that transformed the Iraqi dictator, almost overnight, from awkward ally into mortal enemy. In addition, the United States itself has changed. As a result of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, U.S. policymakers take a much more alarmist view of the threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
U.S. Shifts in Iran-Iraq WarWhen the Iran-Iraq war began in September 1980, with an Iraqi attack across the Shatt al Arab waterway that leads to the Persian Gulf, the United States was a bystander. The United States did not have diplomatic relations with either Baghdad or Tehran. U.S. officials had almost as little sympathy for Hussein's dictatorial brand of Arab nationalism as for the Islamic fundamentalism espoused by Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. As long as the two countries fought their way to a stalemate, nobody in Washington was disposed to intervene.
By the summer of 1982, however, the strategic picture had changed dramatically. After its initial gains, Iraq was on the defensive, and Iranian troops had advanced to within a few miles of Basra, Iraq's second largest city. U.S. intelligence information suggested the Iranians might achieve a breakthrough on the Basra front, destabilizing Kuwait, the Gulf states, and even Saudi Arabia, thereby threatening U.S. oil supplies.
"You have to understand the geostrategic context, which was very different from where we are now," said Howard Teicher, a former National Security Council official, who worked on Iraqi policy during the Reagan administration. "Realpolitik dictated that we act to prevent the situation from getting worse."
To prevent an Iraqi collapse, the Reagan administration supplied battlefield intelligence on Iranian troop buildups to the Iraqis, sometimes through third parties such as Saudi Arabia. The U.S. tilt toward Iraq was enshrined in National Security Decision Directive 114 of Nov. 26, 1983, one of the few important Reagan era foreign policy decisions that still remains classified. According to former U.S. officials, the directive stated that the United States would do "whatever was necessary and legal" to prevent Iraq from losing the war with Iran.
The presidential directive was issued amid a flurry of reports that Iraqi forces were using chemical weapons in their attempts to hold back the Iranians. In principle, Washington was strongly opposed to chemical warfare, a practice outlawed by the 1925 Geneva Protocol. In practice, U.S. condemnation of Iraqi use of chemical weapons ranked relatively low on the scale of administration priorities, particularly compared with the all-important goal of preventing an Iranian victory.
Thus, on Nov. 1, 1983, a senior State Department official, Jonathan T. Howe, told Secretary of State George P. Shultz that intelligence reports showed that Iraqi troops were resorting to "almost daily use of CW" against the Iranians. But the Reagan administration had already committed itself to a large-scale diplomatic and political overture to Baghdad, culminating in several visits by the president's recently appointed special envoy to the Middle East, Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Secret talking points prepared for the first Rumsfeld visit to Baghdad enshrined some of the language from NSDD 114, including the statement that the United States would regard "any major reversal of Iraq's fortunes as a strategic defeat for the West." When Rumsfeld finally met with Hussein on Dec. 20, he told the Iraqi leader that Washington was ready for a resumption of full diplomatic relations, according to a State Department report of the conversation. Iraqi leaders later described themselves as "extremely pleased" with the Rumsfeld visit, which had "elevated U.S.-Iraqi relations to a new level."
In a September interview with CNN, Rumsfeld said he "cautioned" Hussein about the use of chemical weapons, a claim at odds with declassified State Department notes of his 90-minute meeting with the Iraqi leader. A Pentagon spokesman, Brian Whitman, now says that Rumsfeld raised the issue not with Hussein, but with Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz. The State Department notes show that he mentioned it largely in passing as one of several matters that "inhibited" U.S. efforts to assist Iraq.
Rumsfeld has also said he had "nothing to do" with helping Iraq in its war against Iran. Although former U.S. officials agree that Rumsfeld was not one of the architects of the Reagan administration's tilt toward Iraq -- he was a private citizen when he was appointed Middle East envoy -- the documents show that his visits to Baghdad led to closer U.S.-Iraqi cooperation on a wide variety of fronts. Washington was willing to resume diplomatic relations immediately, but Hussein insisted on delaying such a step until the following year.
As part of its opening to Baghdad, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department terrorism list in February 1982, despite heated objections from Congress. Without such a move, Teicher says, it would have been "impossible to take even the modest steps we were contemplating" to channel assistance to Baghdad. Iraq -- along with Syria, Libya and South Yemen -- was one of four original countries on the list, which was first drawn up in 1979.
Some former U.S. officials say that removing Iraq from the terrorism list provided an incentive to Hussein to expel the Palestinian guerrilla leader Abu Nidal from Baghdad in 1983. On the other hand, Iraq continued to play host to alleged terrorists throughout the '80s. The most notable was Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, who found refuge in Baghdad after being expelled from Tunis for masterminding the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, which resulted in the killing of an elderly American tourist.
Iraq Lobbies for ArmsWhile Rumsfeld was talking to Hussein and Aziz in Baghdad, Iraqi diplomats and weapons merchants were fanning out across Western capitals for a diplomatic charm offensive-cum-arms buying spree. In Washington, the key figure was the Iraqi chargé d'affaires, Nizar Hamdoon, a fluent English speaker who impressed Reagan administration officials as one of the most skillful lobbyists in town.
"He arrived with a blue shirt and a white tie, straight out of the mafia," recalled Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East specialist in the Reagan White House. "Within six months, he was hosting suave dinner parties at his residence, which he parlayed into a formidable lobbying effort. He was particularly effective with the American Jewish community."
One of Hamdoon's favorite props, says Kemp, was a green Islamic scarf allegedly found on the body of an Iranian soldier. The scarf was decorated with a map of the Middle East showing a series of arrows pointing toward Jerusalem. Hamdoon used to "parade the scarf" to conferences and congressional hearings as proof that an Iranian victory over Iraq would result in "Israel becoming a victim along with the Arabs."
According to a sworn court affidavit prepared by Teicher in 1995, the United States "actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure Iraq had the military weaponry required." Teicher said in the affidavit that former CIA director William Casey used a Chilean company, Cardoen, to supply Iraq with cluster bombs that could be used to disrupt the Iranian human wave attacks. Teicher refuses to discuss the affidavit.
At the same time the Reagan administration was facilitating the supply of weapons and military components to Baghdad, it was attempting to cut off supplies to Iran under "Operation Staunch." Those efforts were largely successful, despite the glaring anomaly of the 1986 Iran-contra scandal when the White House publicly admitted trading arms for hostages, in violation of the policy that the United States was trying to impose on the rest of the world.
Although U.S. arms manufacturers were not as deeply involved as German or British companies in selling weaponry to Iraq, the Reagan administration effectively turned a blind eye to the export of "dual use" items such as chemical precursors and steel tubes that can have military and civilian applications. According to several former officials, the State and Commerce departments promoted trade in such items as a way to boost U.S. exports and acquire political leverage over Hussein.
When United Nations weapons inspectors were allowed into Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, they compiled long lists of chemicals, missile components, and computers from American suppliers, including such household names as Union Carbide and Honeywell, which were being used for military purposes.
A 1994 investigation by the Senate Banking Committee turned up dozens of biological agents shipped to Iraq during the mid-'80s under license from the Commerce Department, including various strains of anthrax, subsequently identified by the Pentagon as a key component of the Iraqi biological warfare program. The Commerce Department also approved the export of insecticides to Iraq, despite widespread suspicions that they were being used for chemical warfare.
The fact that Iraq was using chemical weapons was hardly a secret. In February 1984, an Iraqi military spokesman effectively acknowledged their use by issuing a chilling warning to Iran. "The invaders should know that for every harmful insect, there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it . . . and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide."
Chemicals Kill KurdsIn late 1987, the Iraqi air force began using chemical agents against Kurdish resistance forces in northern Iraq that had formed a loose alliance with Iran, according to State Department reports. The attacks, which were part of a "scorched earth" strategy to eliminate rebel-controlled villages, provoked outrage on Capitol Hill and renewed demands for sanctions against Iraq. The State Department and White House were also outraged -- but not to the point of doing anything that might seriously damage relations with Baghdad.
"The U.S.-Iraqi relationship is . . . important to our long-term political and economic objectives," Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy wrote in a September 1988 memorandum that addressed the chemical weapons question. "We believe that economic sanctions will be useless or counterproductive to influence the Iraqis."
Bush administration spokesmen have cited Hussein's use of chemical weapons "against his own people" -- and particularly the March 1988 attack on the Kurdish village of Halabjah -- to bolster their argument that his regime presents a "grave and gathering danger" to the United States.
The Iraqis continued to use chemical weapons against the Iranians until the end of the Iran-Iraq war. A U.S. air force intelligence officer, Rick Francona, reported finding widespread use of Iraqi nerve gas when he toured the Al Faw peninsula in southern Iraq in the summer of 1988, after its recapture by the Iraqi army. The battlefield was littered with atropine injectors used by panicky Iranian troops as an antidote against Iraqi nerve gas attacks.
Far from declining, the supply of U.S. military intelligence to Iraq actually expanded in 1988, according to a 1999 book by Francona, "Ally to Adversary: an Eyewitness Account of Iraq's Fall from Grace." Informed sources said much of the battlefield intelligence was channeled to the Iraqis by the CIA office in Baghdad.
Although U.S. export controls to Iraq were tightened up in the late 1980s, there were still many loopholes. In December 1988, Dow Chemical sold $1.5 million of pesticides to Iraq, despite U.S. government concerns that they could be used as chemical warfare agents. An Export-Import Bank official reported in a memorandum that he could find "no reason" to stop the sale, despite evidence that the pesticides were "highly toxic" to humans and would cause death "from asphyxiation."
The U.S. policy of cultivating Hussein as a moderate and reasonable Arab leader continued right up until he invaded Kuwait in August 1990, documents show. When the then-U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie, met with Hussein on July 25, 1990, a week before the Iraqi attack on Kuwait, she assured him that Bush "wanted better and deeper relations," according to an Iraqi transcript of the conversation. "President Bush is an intelligent man," the ambassador told Hussein, referring to the father of the current president. "He is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq."
"Everybody was wrong in their assessment of Saddam," said Joe Wilson, Glaspie's former deputy at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, and the last U.S. official to meet with Hussein. "Everybody in the Arab world told us that the best way to deal with Saddam was to develop a set of economic and commercial relationships that would have the effect of moderating his behavior. History will demonstrate that this was a miscalculation."
Oh, really. And at the same time US exports lots of weapons to all over the world, including Iraq and Taliban.
I wonder, have such sanctions really peaceful reasons or they are just a political instrument to protect economical interests of US weapon corporations?
Read it as: "So, perhaps we are not only restricted to theme our desktop on the machine - but our *literal* desktop as well."
The patent reminds me hyperlink and similar patents. Those clerks in patent offices are nuts. The patent has many prior art cases and it's too general to be called a method.
However, if we'd understand how brains work and carry on intellectual and soul functions - then we don't need any brain. Just download my copy into central computer of any exploring device and I am ready to go. I won't need any oxygen and I'll be very tolerant to any temperature and pressure. But keep my backup copy at some safe place or I'll sue you!
don't worry about democratic world any time soon - it is US who usually supports such regimes as taliban by both money and weapons. US will never let latin-american or African or Asian countries to join well-developed club, keeping those peoples in poverty and instability.
In the age of 3 I was with my parents walking and looking for a house of my uncle. At some point I told the right house. Last time I was there when I was 1. But what's more important, I told what kind of change the house experienced (they reconstructed it a lot, i.e. they've moved the entrance from one wall to onether one). Now I remember only the scene of remembering. It means it was the intermediate memory.
You really didn't get a point. It's not importan who copied whom. It's important who first delivered it to many users. Microsoft delivered GUI to home users and to many corporate users. Are we on the same point here? If yes - Microsoft looks innovative for those (millions) users. And don't pull out from ashes that cheezy Mac GUI: who care? They delivered it only to 5% of desktops. Virtually nothing.
Speech recognition
CMU Sphinx and a couple of others.
Text-to-Speech
Edinburgh Festival and a couple of others.
handwriting recognition
Handhelds.org has several pen input methods...
taxonomy based (aka object oriented) document storage (or file systems)
There are numerous choices for that, from object-relational databases like PostgreSQL to knowledge representation systems like FramerD.
Are any of them are usable by end-users out of the box? They are all good technologies, but they are far away from being used by end-users for tasks I mentioned. That's what Microsoft did with GUI and OS ideas of Unix and Mac and others - they delivered it to end-users OUT OF THE BOX. That's good for both Microsft and its customers. I have no illusion about what Microsoft did wrong about monopoly and so on. But they did a good job of bringing innovation (even someone else's) to desktops of many people and it's not clear when (if ever) such innovations whould be delivered to those users without Microsoft copiing.
There are lots of innovative and different Linux desktops out there already. It's just that there is also a lot of people who want a Windows-like desktop on top of Linux. The beauty is that Linux supports all of them.
If you mean Fresco/Berlin and similar non-X11, their problem is that they are not X11. Therefore, those users, who need Windows-like GUI, cannot smoothly migrate from Windows style to something innovative. That's why I suggest to pay attention on Enlightenment/Sawfish (wm) and Gnome (dm) - you can configure a system very alike Windows or you can use some very new ideas about borders, movings, workspaces, or you can combine them. So, users with Windows background can be softly introduced to new ideas. Also, once speech or handwriting or taxonomies will be ready - it's easy to integrate them into Gnome.
The point is: innovation by itself is less important than the way how the innovation will be delivered to most of users.
Small percent of engineers worked on Unices 15 years. Virtually noone used any computer at home. Even few % of office workspaces had PCs. Although some has TTY :)
Microsoft did innovation by bringing PC to most of home users and to many office users. It was copied and it was ugly. But home users were happy as they've got computers with some GUI. TTY users were happy as they've got GUI. And that was for a fraction of a typical Unix box price.
Now, clone MS Windows GUI and see what an average Joe would say: "I've saw it before. But it worked much better for me."
Linux Desktop must be innovative to get more desktop share. And it is not a problem. Look at Enlightenment or Sawfish window managers - they improve and bring new ussability experience. Look at Gnome panels and applets and its new transparency things. That's the way I expect Linux GUI innovation will be winning.
That's probably not enough to prove the innovation of Linux desktops for some people. That's why there are projects like Fresco/Berlin. Unfortunately, non-X11 way won't work on Linux anytime soon - many Linux users believe in X11 + there are many drivers and applications for it.
I don't want to count Mac OS X either - it's a proprietary deadend and I don't believe in proprietary UI innovation anymore. It's like industrial and post-industrial consuming eras. First you feed people up. Then they demand better quality and old fashion don't work any more.
Finally, I thing there are some formerly/currently proprietary technologies which are much more (than XP GUI) worthy for being cloned in open source GUI. Here is a short list:
- Speech recognition
- Text-to-Speech
- handwriting recognition (especially on touch screens
- taxonomy based (aka object oriented) document storage (or file systems)
Make them out of the Linux box and many people will buy Linux boxes for that.I can imagine - in US most of home Internet users connect using 56K of AOL.
Unfortunately it's all not gonna happen. No one will lobby any open source software. Even Sun insisted on Java, not on Star/Open-Office.