> It seems to me that the core problem is cross domain > 30x redirects being transparent in browsers.
I'll buy that. Every single use of it that I have ever seen could reasonably be classified as abuse. That goes double for URL-obscuring^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hshortening "services".
> Noah came to a landing on a mountain in Turkey; > then the languages spread out from there.
I think you should maybe review chapter 11. (Hint: Noah and his family all spoke the same language, as evidenced by the fact that they were able to talk to each other.)
> Considering half the drivers there don't seem > to be paying attention to their driving, self-driving > cars would probably be a huge improvement.
Statistically, yes. Socially and politically, I don't think people are going to see it that way.
When two human-driven cars collide with one another, we do one of two things. Either we shrug and say that one of them was an idiot, what else is new, the world is full of idiots; or else we shrug and say, oh, well, accidents happen. The people who built the car are not blamed (unless, you know, there was a serious problem with the car, like the brakes were designed wrong and failed), and the practice of handing out driver's licenses to everyone with a pulse and at least 20/4000 vision is not questioned.
The first time a human-driven car and a machine-driven car get into a serious collision with one another, the family of the occupants of the human-driven car are going to have a hundred thousand lawyers begging to represent them in a multi-trillion-dollar lawsuit against the owner of the machine-driven car, the manufacturer who made the thing, and the government agency that licensed it for use on the road.
The family of the "victims" in the human-driven car will almost certainly win this lawsuit even if the plaintiff's car rear-ended the machine-driven one while speeding through a red light, for the same reason Senile Grandma won millions of dollars from McDonald's when they dared to sell her the hot coffee she asked for and she poured the whole cup in her lap and sat in it for ten minutes and got scalded:
Take-Home Point: Juries don't care about reason or logic when there's a weepy sob story about the plaintiff getting hurt, poor baby.
(I still say McDonald's should have sold room temperature coffee worldwide for 24 hours in protest. It would have cost them some PR and lost them some sales for a few weeks, but if even 2% of the population became disenchanted with jury trials and sob stories, it would've been good for business in the long term. Because there WILL be other lawsuits, I guarantee you that.)
Another classic example of this phenomenon occurs when a druggie gives birth to a baby who has obviously suffered severe negative impact as a result (low birth weight, deformed features, sluggish or non-existent response to stimuli, etc.), and lo and behold it dies in the hospital or shortly after going home. The obstetrician's malpractice insurance frequently settles out of court, because they know the odds of winning are poor. Then people wonder why medical care costs so much.
> Those that sign up, will be at the mercy of the UN (useless nations), bank on it.
I think the larger problem will be in the other direction. Realistically, I don't see how this measure will actually prevent anyone from enriching weapons-grade uranium who has the desire and level of technological advancement to do so.
All it really does is offer countries who genuinely don't *want* nuclear weapons the ability to use nuclear power without worrying everyone as much. Problem is, the set of nations who genuinely don't want nuclear weapons (e.g., Canada) and the set of nations people are worried about (e.g., Iran) tend to be mostly disjoint sets. Nobody's afraid to let Canada enrich their own uranium, and Iran isn't likely to be particularly interested in outsourcing it. North Korea already has nuclear weapons, and Israel is generally assumed to have them (certainly, they have had the requisite capabilities and resources for nuclear weapons production for some time; it is only a question of whether they chose to do so).
> If this equivalent of popcon on 8 was opt-in, this thread wouldn't
Actually, the thread would probably still be here. Granted, a lot of people might be considerably less worked up about it.
Personally, I routinely click "yes" when asked whether I am willing to participate in the Debian package popularity contest, but if Windows asked the same thing I'd probably click "No" in most cases. (I'm a network administrator, so I install more operating systems more often than the average home user.) If this Windows 8 feature is still on-by-default by the time SP1 comes out, I guess I'll probably read up on how to turn it off. (Prior to SP1 it's largely immaterial to my existence. I might be somewhat more inclined to risk early versions if there were a public bug database along the lines of Bugzilla, but last I checked Windows does not have such a thing.)
> He may be democrat but he is nowhere near as good as our last democrat president Clinton.
Clinton was (as Democrats go) relatively moderate. He understood basic macroeconomics in a conservative, Adam Smith sort of way. He deliberately balanced the budget (which required actively fighting Congress on the issue; many Democrats opposed him on this). He signed a free-trade agreement on purpose. His administrative style was fundamentally sane -- liberal in some areas, but sane (except maybe for that business in Somalia, but every President is entitled to one major brain fart.)
Obama is much, MUCH more left-wing. Moreso perhaps even than Gore. If you like Clinton better than Obama, you are not a true dyed-in-the-wool liberal. You'd probably get along pretty well in a swing state, like Ohio, where we like to cross party lines occasionally and vote for the winner.
Of course all software is going to have _some_ bugs.
However, if the software is buggy in a particularly egregious way, above and beyond what a rational person would normally expect (like, say, early versions of Outlook), they should have to recall it and offer every single customer their money back. (They could also offer a fix, but the customers should get to decide whether they'd rather have the fix or the money back.)
Obviously, if you take your money back, you are no longer licensed to continue using the software.
Fortran's not too bad, as long as what you're doing is even vaguely an appropriate thing to be using Fortran for (like, say, statistical modeling). It's MUCH better than some of the other languages from its era (notably, Cobol). Heck, I'd say it'd be better than PHP for a lot of things.
I mean, granted, you wouldn't want to maintain web-scraping code in it. [Shudder]
Well, if you want to play a hard game, NetHack is still available. If even that isn't hard enough for you, there's SLASH'EM, and if that's not enough of a challenge, there's conduct play. Let me know when you've ascended three ten-conduct Tourists in a row, and I'll write a patch that makes it harder for ya.
> It's difficult to get GDP numbers, because the South Korean > government doesn't usually bother to measure such things
Obviously I meant to say the North Korean government doesn't usually bother to measure such things. South Korea, like most first-world countries, does publish GDP numbers, which are usually considered basically reliable (inasmuch as any information that comes from a government is ever reliable).
> South - good. > North - US says they I bad, I really don't know for sure though.
More objectively, avoiding subjective words like "good" and "bad"...
South Korea has a representative government and a per-capita GDP comparable to Western Europe. Most of the population have computers, internet access, and cellphones. Many of them learn foreign languages (popular ones include English, Chinese, and Japanese).
North Korea is a third-world country run by a military dictator-for-life. It's difficult to get GDP numbers, because the South Korean government doesn't usually bother to measure such things, and nobody else really can. (It's a centrally-planned economy with relatively little private-sector activity unless you count black markets.) Even if we had reliable nominal GDP figures denoted in the local currency, it would be difficult to compare said figures to other countries. Exchange rates are largely meaningless, because North Korea has no significant foreign trade with anyone but China, and trade with China is unbalanced for political reasons (China deliberately supplies more than they get in return, in order to support the North Korean government; this is not a significant burden to China because China is so much larger than North Korea). Purchasing power parity would also be difficult to calculate, because most kinds of goods are effectively unavailable to most of the population. Electrical power is unreliable in the capital city and mostly unavailable elsewhere. There is a national phone grid, but something like 90% of the lines are in government offices, and international calls are heavily restricted. (It is possible to call Beijing, Moscow, and Vladivostok.) There is one internet cafe in the capital. The media are entirely run by the government, so there is no freedom of the press. Outside the ruling military elite, there is little or no contact with foreigners. All borders are heavily guarded. Few expatriates are allowed in, and very few citizens are allowed out.
These things are objective and verifiable. Make your own judgments about "good" and "bad" as you will.
> The name for the current Chinese political system is Fascism.
Officially, it's called "Communism". Anybody who says otherwise isn't allowed to have diplomatic relations with them. You might as well say that Taiwan is a separate country from China, or that China invaded Tibet without provocation, or that Mao was an evil dictatorial opportunist who didn't understand boo about economics and China is better off with him dead. What nonsense. Haha. Meaningless lies perpetuated by evil Western capitalist/imperialist propaganda.
But yeah, in practice, although the current system in China is called "Communism", it is not Soviet-style communism in the sense of being the same kind of central-planning system that failed in the USSR. That kind of system would fail in China too, and the Chinese government knows it. They don't (can't, even) talk about it in public, but they know.
> My problem with this whole line of argument is that it > presumes that, absent a cold war with the USA, the > USSR was a stable entity that would not have collapsed > under the pressure of its own internal conflicts. > We DON'T KNOW THAT
I would say we know the contrary. Even setting aside the fact that _all_ governments collapse eventually, anyone who knows the first thing about economics can tell you that communism was never going to be viable in the long term -- certainly not for a major world power.
Even the Chinese government figured that out. They won't admit it in so many words, but they have effectively abandoned Soviet-style communism in favor of "Communism with Chinese Characteristics", i.e., a constitutional hierarchical oligarchy that with each passing decade embraces capitalist free-market economic systems more and more. They haven't embraced Western-style representative democracy, but somebody in their government has apparently read Adam Smith, and the entire nation has profited from it. The only major economic system worse than communism is economic populism. Virtually anything else is better. Keynesian socialism is MUCH better than outright central-planning communism, and free-market capitalism makes Keynesian socialism look about as attractive as used toilet paper.
The question of how long the demise of the USSR would have taken (without the cold war), however, is more to the point. It is almost certainly true that the large amount of spending the USSR poured into keeping up with the American Joneses hastened the collapse of Soviet communism. Nobody can really ever know exactly how *much* it hastened it, though. Personally, I do not think it is likely to be a coincidence that the wall came down (followed shortly by the curtain) less than ten years after Reagan initiated his approach of spending them under the table on excessive military preparedness. Basically, it was keeping up with the Joneses, weaponized. It was a drain on the US economy, but it was one we were able to bear, because our economy was (and largely still is, despite our setbacks of late) fairly strong, relative to the world as a whole.
Yes, it's illegal, on paper. However, in order to do anything meaningful about it, the victim would need to be able to take you to court. Among other things, that effectively means he'd have to be able to afford a lawyer. Additionally, it can be rather difficult to demonstrate to the court that the offender _knew_ he wouldn't win the suit and _intended_ to nonetheless force a settlement to which he was not entitled.
To actually provide the populace at large with effective protection against this kind of abuse of the legal system, all plaintiffs in civil suits would need to be required to pay the defendant's legal fees. (They could then recover their loss if and only if they win the suit.)
The problem with that, of course, is that most people would no longer be able to afford to enforce their legal rights by filing lawsuits. Thus, instead of allowing the courts to be abused to harass the innocent, you're now effectively denying justice by preventing the courts from being used correctly.
It's a thorny problem. There's no perfect solution.
> Circular logic is the best kind of logic because it has no corners, so > logic with corners will really suck because they aren't circular enough.
I prefer spherical logic.
Circular logic is topologically equivalent to square logic, but spherical logic is topologically equivalent to planar logic augmented with one extra point at infinity.
Also, I think this analogy is now just about as blue and snippid as I can make it.
> LISP is quite powerful and fast as a machine > language, it just happens to be unparsable by humans.
What on earth are you talking about? Lisp is extremely trivial to parse. Lisp barely even has syntax.
Now, keeping track of Lisp program flow in your head, that can be a bit tricky and can lead to some substantial maintainability issues, especially when some hotshot programmer starts throwing lambda functions around like there's no tomorrow (or, worse, continuations).
But parsing? Parsing Lisp is dead simple. You could train an elementary education major to do it.
Don't put too much credence in claims that the press in that part of the world propagates about the military over there. Every single time they get in a conflict with anybody from outside the region (France, England, America, anybody with an actual military), they get owned, hard.
Then there's what happens when they cross Israel. Nasser's Egyptian forces going into the 1967 conflict were, if you listened to the hype on the local radio over there, overwhelmingly superior to Israel's in every way. After six days, the UN had to *beg* Israel to stop the war. If it had gone on for a couple more weeks, Egypt would not exist as an independent country today.
> The MiG-23. They could crank them out for a cost > of about 3.3 mil per, when the nearest Western > equivalent was the Kfir C2 coming in at 4.5 mil
OTOH, the US could actually afford the $4.5 million per-unit pricetag on the fighter jets, plus everything else (not least whatever sum we were throwing at SDI), without bankrupting the nation. Military spending was never more than about 20% of the federal budget, and our taxes were (compared to theirs) relatively bearable. As Russia continually tried to match our military spending, it dominated their government budget, despite much higher tax rates, and the Soviet economy eventually collapsed under the strain.
On the whole, I'd say we managed our finances better.
> Knoppix interesting. What's special about Knoppix
Boot-time hardware detection.
Other Linux distributions (RedHat, Mandrake, possibly others) had done significant work on this previously, but Knoppix was, to the best of my knowledge, the first Unix-like system to get to the point where you could swap out several major components (for different models, not identical replacements) at one time, including perhaps the motherboard, and still reasonably expect it to boot up without a hitch. It's not perfect -- on some hardware I have to try two or three different versions of Knoppix to find one that will boot at all -- but it represents enormous progress over the previous state of affairs.
So, that thing about detecting all your hardware at boot time and not giving you any problems if it's different from last time? BeOS did that in 1996. When you bought a new computer, you could just stick the old hard drive into the new computer and boot from it as if there were nothing unusual about that (assuming it was in the same architecture family, e.g., upgrading from a 486 system to a Pentium II system). No driver installation hassles (don't even get me started on hardware detection in Windows), no worrying about the network card now being eth1 instead of eth0 just because it's a different model (Debian still has this issue in 2012, and I doubt if it's alone in this regard), no problems: with BeOS, you plugged in the new hardware, turned the computer on, and everything just worked (assuming it was supported at all -- at the time, software modems were the most common sticking point).
There was never any nonsense about "Found New Hardware... Looking for driver... say, do you happen to know what model this thing is or maybe have a disk handy?"
Today, I can't think of a really compelling use case, because we can now all afford monitors that can do 24-bit color and a sane refresh rate at the same time even at the highest resolution our video cards can support.
In the mid nineties, however, it was common that with a mid-range monitor you'd have to choose which of those three things (resolution, color depth, or refresh rate) you were willing to sacrifice to get the other two up to where you wanted them. Being able to place each application on a desktop that supported what it most needed was genuinely useful.
The other major option would've been dynamically changing the monitor's settings, which XFree86 for instance was able to do even while keeping the desktop the same size -- your monitor became a viewport, and you'd scroll around it by moving your mouse pointer past the edge of what was currently visible. (This is still possible in X.org today, though with modern monitor resolutions there's much less reason to use it.)
Neither of these solutions is really ideal (ideal is when one whole wall of your room is a giant high-res monitor, but who can afford that?), but for any given application one or the other of these compromise solutions would be better than the other. Both are a lot less compelling now that you can spend twenty bucks and get a gently-used 19-inch monitor that does 1600x1200 or better at 24bpp and 85Hz refresh, which somebody is letting go cheap because he replaced it with an LCD like all the cool kids. Buy two and have yourself a dual-monitor setup. Throw in a decent new graphics card and it's still cheaper than buying a 15-inch monitor in 1996 that could only do 1024x768 if you lowered the color depth to 16-bit and settled for a 60Hz refresh rate (which with long-tube fluorescent lighting in the room will give you a migraine in less than ten seconds).
Does Frankenstein count as science fiction? I know it's older than most other works in the genre, and the science is significantly more primitive, and it's not set in space, but in other respects it really feels like it ought to belong in the science fiction genre. Some people classify it as horror, but I think that's only because many of the half-baked movies extremely loosely based on it are horror. The book itself does not have any of the usual elements of horror. (Okay, yes, it has a "monster", but he's not a monster in the usual horror-genre sense of the term. If anything, humanity is the monster, which is much more typical of sci-fi.)
It is also categorically the most sorrowful book of any kind that I have ever read. It could almost be called a study in sorrow.
> Could BEOS be used as an alternate GUI for a Unix based system.
You could borrow *ideas* from BeOS if you were designing an alternate GUI for a Unix-type system, or any other system for that matter.
That would be kind of missing the point, though. The BeOS GUI was largely unremarkable. Okay, yes, if you had multiple desktops they could each have a different resolution (and color depth, if desired). At the time, that was innovative. Other systems have it now, of course.
On the whole, though, the really notable things about BeOS were infrastructural, not superficial. To speak of BeOS as a GUI is to rob it of its strengths and everything that makes it really notable.
The way BeOS did multitasking, for example, provided a level of responsiveness that other systems at the time were not able to deliver on similar hardware. That's a kernel design feature, not something you can layer on top when building a GUI.
The BeOS approach to hardware and drivers was really remarkable and completely unprecedented at the time and eliminated several major categories of problems in one fell swoop. Knoppix has since delivered something almost comparable. (I suspect it's probably implemented differently, but the results are similar, if not quite as impressive.)
Then of course there's the filesystem. Personally I'm not terribly fond of the BeOS approach to that (except for the journaling, which has become standard on other systems), but there's no denying that the filesystem, and in particular the unusual metadata handling, was a significant aspect of what made BeOS unique and conceptually interesting, and it's not something you could implement in a GUI without the underpinnings being there in the kernel and in the on-disk filesystem format.
I haven't looked at Haiku recently, but I've also seen no mention anywhere of their having *added* multi-user capabilities that BeOS didn't have -- and BeOS didn't have the functionality you describe. There was no such thing as a user account or logging in. It was multi-user in exactly the same sense that DOS was multi-user: if the user physically vacated the chair in front of the computer, a different person could sit down in the chair.
Slashdot Mirror
> It seems to me that the core problem is cross domain
> 30x redirects being transparent in browsers.
I'll buy that. Every single use of it that I have ever seen could reasonably be classified as abuse. That goes double for URL-obscuring^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hshortening "services".
> Noah came to a landing on a mountain in Turkey;
> then the languages spread out from there.
I think you should maybe review chapter 11. (Hint: Noah and his family all spoke the same language, as evidenced by the fact that they were able to talk to each other.)
> Considering half the drivers there don't seem
> to be paying attention to their driving, self-driving
> cars would probably be a huge improvement.
Statistically, yes. Socially and politically, I don't think people are going to see it that way.
When two human-driven cars collide with one another, we do one of two things. Either we shrug and say that one of them was an idiot, what else is new, the world is full of idiots; or else we shrug and say, oh, well, accidents happen. The people who built the car are not blamed (unless, you know, there was a serious problem with the car, like the brakes were designed wrong and failed), and the practice of handing out driver's licenses to everyone with a pulse and at least 20/4000 vision is not questioned.
The first time a human-driven car and a machine-driven car get into a serious collision with one another, the family of the occupants of the human-driven car are going to have a hundred thousand lawyers begging to represent them in a multi-trillion-dollar lawsuit against the owner of the machine-driven car, the manufacturer who made the thing, and the government agency that licensed it for use on the road.
The family of the "victims" in the human-driven car will almost certainly win this lawsuit even if the plaintiff's car rear-ended the machine-driven one while speeding through a red light, for the same reason Senile Grandma won millions of dollars from McDonald's when they dared to sell her the hot coffee she asked for and she poured the whole cup in her lap and sat in it for ten minutes and got scalded:
Take-Home Point:
Juries don't care about reason or logic when there's a weepy sob story about the plaintiff getting hurt, poor baby.
(I still say McDonald's should have sold room temperature coffee worldwide for 24 hours in protest. It would have cost them some PR and lost them some sales for a few weeks, but if even 2% of the population became disenchanted with jury trials and sob stories, it would've been good for business in the long term. Because there WILL be other lawsuits, I guarantee you that.)
Another classic example of this phenomenon occurs when a druggie gives birth to a baby who has obviously suffered severe negative impact as a result (low birth weight, deformed features, sluggish or non-existent response to stimuli, etc.), and lo and behold it dies in the hospital or shortly after going home. The obstetrician's malpractice insurance frequently settles out of court, because they know the odds of winning are poor. Then people wonder why medical care costs so much.
> Those that sign up, will be at the mercy of the UN (useless nations), bank on it.
I think the larger problem will be in the other direction. Realistically, I don't see how this measure will actually prevent anyone from enriching weapons-grade uranium who has the desire and level of technological advancement to do so.
All it really does is offer countries who genuinely don't *want* nuclear weapons the ability to use nuclear power without worrying everyone as much. Problem is, the set of nations who genuinely don't want nuclear weapons (e.g., Canada) and the set of nations people are worried about (e.g., Iran) tend to be mostly disjoint sets. Nobody's afraid to let Canada enrich their own uranium, and Iran isn't likely to be particularly interested in outsourcing it. North Korea already has nuclear weapons, and Israel is generally assumed to have them (certainly, they have had the requisite capabilities and resources for nuclear weapons production for some time; it is only a question of whether they chose to do so).
Assimilation is irrelevant. Futility is irrelevant. We are the protagonists. We always prevail.
> If this equivalent of popcon on 8 was opt-in, this thread wouldn't
Actually, the thread would probably still be here. Granted, a lot of people might be considerably less worked up about it.
Personally, I routinely click "yes" when asked whether I am willing to participate in the Debian package popularity contest, but if Windows asked the same thing I'd probably click "No" in most cases. (I'm a network administrator, so I install more operating systems more often than the average home user.) If this Windows 8 feature is still on-by-default by the time SP1 comes out, I guess I'll probably read up on how to turn it off. (Prior to SP1 it's largely immaterial to my existence. I might be somewhat more inclined to risk early versions if there were a public bug database along the lines of Bugzilla, but last I checked Windows does not have such a thing.)
> He may be democrat but he is nowhere near as good as our last democrat president Clinton.
Clinton was (as Democrats go) relatively moderate. He understood basic macroeconomics in a conservative, Adam Smith sort of way. He deliberately balanced the budget (which required actively fighting Congress on the issue; many Democrats opposed him on this). He signed a free-trade agreement on purpose. His administrative style was fundamentally sane -- liberal in some areas, but sane (except maybe for that business in Somalia, but every President is entitled to one major brain fart.)
Obama is much, MUCH more left-wing. Moreso perhaps even than Gore. If you like Clinton better than Obama, you are not a true dyed-in-the-wool liberal. You'd probably get along pretty well in a swing state, like Ohio, where we like to cross party lines occasionally and vote for the winner.
Of course all software is going to have _some_ bugs.
However, if the software is buggy in a particularly egregious way, above and beyond what a rational person would normally expect (like, say, early versions of Outlook), they should have to recall it and offer every single customer their money back. (They could also offer a fix, but the customers should get to decide whether they'd rather have the fix or the money back.)
Obviously, if you take your money back, you are no longer licensed to continue using the software.
Fortran's not too bad, as long as what you're doing is even vaguely an appropriate thing to be using Fortran for (like, say, statistical modeling). It's MUCH better than some of the other languages from its era (notably, Cobol). Heck, I'd say it'd be better than PHP for a lot of things.
I mean, granted, you wouldn't want to maintain web-scraping code in it. [Shudder]
> Video games used to be hard.
Well, if you want to play a hard game, NetHack is still available. If even that isn't hard enough for you, there's SLASH'EM, and if that's not enough of a challenge, there's conduct play. Let me know when you've ascended three ten-conduct Tourists in a row, and I'll write a patch that makes it harder for ya.
> It's difficult to get GDP numbers, because the South Korean
> government doesn't usually bother to measure such things
Obviously I meant to say the North Korean government doesn't usually bother to measure such things. South Korea, like most first-world countries, does publish GDP numbers, which are usually considered basically reliable (inasmuch as any information that comes from a government is ever reliable).
> South - good.
> North - US says they I bad, I really don't know for sure though.
More objectively, avoiding subjective words like "good" and "bad"...
South Korea has a representative government and a per-capita GDP comparable to Western Europe. Most of the population have computers, internet access, and cellphones. Many of them learn foreign languages (popular ones include English, Chinese, and Japanese).
North Korea is a third-world country run by a military dictator-for-life. It's difficult to get GDP numbers, because the South Korean government doesn't usually bother to measure such things, and nobody else really can. (It's a centrally-planned economy with relatively little private-sector activity unless you count black markets.) Even if we had reliable nominal GDP figures denoted in the local currency, it would be difficult to compare said figures to other countries. Exchange rates are largely meaningless, because North Korea has no significant foreign trade with anyone but China, and trade with China is unbalanced for political reasons (China deliberately supplies more than they get in return, in order to support the North Korean government; this is not a significant burden to China because China is so much larger than North Korea). Purchasing power parity would also be difficult to calculate, because most kinds of goods are effectively unavailable to most of the population. Electrical power is unreliable in the capital city and mostly unavailable elsewhere. There is a national phone grid, but something like 90% of the lines are in government offices, and international calls are heavily restricted. (It is possible to call Beijing, Moscow, and Vladivostok.) There is one internet cafe in the capital. The media are entirely run by the government, so there is no freedom of the press. Outside the ruling military elite, there is little or no contact with foreigners. All borders are heavily guarded. Few expatriates are allowed in, and very few citizens are allowed out.
These things are objective and verifiable. Make your own judgments about "good" and "bad" as you will.
> The name for the current Chinese political system is Fascism.
Officially, it's called "Communism". Anybody who says otherwise isn't allowed to have diplomatic relations with them. You might as well say that Taiwan is a separate country from China, or that China invaded Tibet without provocation, or that Mao was an evil dictatorial opportunist who didn't understand boo about economics and China is better off with him dead. What nonsense. Haha. Meaningless lies perpetuated by evil Western capitalist/imperialist propaganda.
But yeah, in practice, although the current system in China is called "Communism", it is not Soviet-style communism in the sense of being the same kind of central-planning system that failed in the USSR. That kind of system would fail in China too, and the Chinese government knows it. They don't (can't, even) talk about it in public, but they know.
Yes, come to think of it, I believe you're right: it was the graphics card that limited color depth, not the monitor.
Either way, it's much less of a consideration now than it was in the mid nineties.
> My problem with this whole line of argument is that it
> presumes that, absent a cold war with the USA, the
> USSR was a stable entity that would not have collapsed
> under the pressure of its own internal conflicts.
> We DON'T KNOW THAT
I would say we know the contrary. Even setting aside the fact that _all_ governments collapse eventually, anyone who knows the first thing about economics can tell you that communism was never going to be viable in the long term -- certainly not for a major world power.
Even the Chinese government figured that out. They won't admit it in so many words, but they have effectively abandoned Soviet-style communism in favor of "Communism with Chinese Characteristics", i.e., a constitutional hierarchical oligarchy that with each passing decade embraces capitalist free-market economic systems more and more. They haven't embraced Western-style representative democracy, but somebody in their government has apparently read Adam Smith, and the entire nation has profited from it. The only major economic system worse than communism is economic populism. Virtually anything else is better. Keynesian socialism is MUCH better than outright central-planning communism, and free-market capitalism makes Keynesian socialism look about as attractive as used toilet paper.
The question of how long the demise of the USSR would have taken (without the cold war), however, is more to the point. It is almost certainly true that the large amount of spending the USSR poured into keeping up with the American Joneses hastened the collapse of Soviet communism. Nobody can really ever know exactly how *much* it hastened it, though. Personally, I do not think it is likely to be a coincidence that the wall came down (followed shortly by the curtain) less than ten years after Reagan initiated his approach of spending them under the table on excessive military preparedness. Basically, it was keeping up with the Joneses, weaponized. It was a drain on the US economy, but it was one we were able to bear, because our economy was (and largely still is, despite our setbacks of late) fairly strong, relative to the world as a whole.
Yes, it's illegal, on paper. However, in order to do anything meaningful about it, the victim would need to be able to take you to court. Among other things, that effectively means he'd have to be able to afford a lawyer. Additionally, it can be rather difficult to demonstrate to the court that the offender _knew_ he wouldn't win the suit and _intended_ to nonetheless force a settlement to which he was not entitled.
To actually provide the populace at large with effective protection against this kind of abuse of the legal system, all plaintiffs in civil suits would need to be required to pay the defendant's legal fees. (They could then recover their loss if and only if they win the suit.)
The problem with that, of course, is that most people would no longer be able to afford to enforce their legal rights by filing lawsuits. Thus, instead of allowing the courts to be abused to harass the innocent, you're now effectively denying justice by preventing the courts from being used correctly.
It's a thorny problem. There's no perfect solution.
> Circular logic is the best kind of logic because it has no corners, so
> logic with corners will really suck because they aren't circular enough.
I prefer spherical logic.
Circular logic is topologically equivalent to square logic, but spherical logic is topologically equivalent to planar logic augmented with one extra point at infinity.
Also, I think this analogy is now just about as blue and snippid as I can make it.
> LISP is quite powerful and fast as a machine
> language, it just happens to be unparsable by humans.
What on earth are you talking about? Lisp is extremely trivial to parse. Lisp barely even has syntax.
Now, keeping track of Lisp program flow in your head, that can be a bit tricky and can lead to some substantial maintainability issues, especially when some hotshot programmer starts throwing lambda functions around like there's no tomorrow (or, worse, continuations).
But parsing? Parsing Lisp is dead simple. You could train an elementary education major to do it.
> The Iraqi army, war-hardened and no slouch
Don't put too much credence in claims that the press in that part of the world propagates about the military over there. Every single time they get in a conflict with anybody from outside the region (France, England, America, anybody with an actual military), they get owned, hard.
Then there's what happens when they cross Israel. Nasser's Egyptian forces going into the 1967 conflict were, if you listened to the hype on the local radio over there, overwhelmingly superior to Israel's in every way. After six days, the UN had to *beg* Israel to stop the war. If it had gone on for a couple more weeks, Egypt would not exist as an independent country today.
> The MiG-23. They could crank them out for a cost
> of about 3.3 mil per, when the nearest Western
> equivalent was the Kfir C2 coming in at 4.5 mil
OTOH, the US could actually afford the $4.5 million per-unit pricetag on the fighter jets, plus everything else (not least whatever sum we were throwing at SDI), without bankrupting the nation. Military spending was never more than about 20% of the federal budget, and our taxes were (compared to theirs) relatively bearable. As Russia continually tried to match our military spending, it dominated their government budget, despite much higher tax rates, and the Soviet economy eventually collapsed under the strain.
On the whole, I'd say we managed our finances better.
> Knoppix interesting. What's special about Knoppix
Boot-time hardware detection.
Other Linux distributions (RedHat, Mandrake, possibly others) had done significant work on this previously, but Knoppix was, to the best of my knowledge, the first Unix-like system to get to the point where you could swap out several major components (for different models, not identical replacements) at one time, including perhaps the motherboard, and still reasonably expect it to boot up without a hitch. It's not perfect -- on some hardware I have to try two or three different versions of Knoppix to find one that will boot at all -- but it represents enormous progress over the previous state of affairs.
So, that thing about detecting all your hardware at boot time and not giving you any problems if it's different from last time? BeOS did that in 1996. When you bought a new computer, you could just stick the old hard drive into the new computer and boot from it as if there were nothing unusual about that (assuming it was in the same architecture family, e.g., upgrading from a 486 system to a Pentium II system). No driver installation hassles (don't even get me started on hardware detection in Windows), no worrying about the network card now being eth1 instead of eth0 just because it's a different model (Debian still has this issue in 2012, and I doubt if it's alone in this regard), no problems: with BeOS, you plugged in the new hardware, turned the computer on, and everything just worked (assuming it was supported at all -- at the time, software modems were the most common sticking point).
There was never any nonsense about "Found New Hardware... Looking for driver... say, do you happen to know what model this thing is or maybe have a disk handy?"
Today, I can't think of a really compelling use case, because we can now all afford monitors that can do 24-bit color and a sane refresh rate at the same time even at the highest resolution our video cards can support.
In the mid nineties, however, it was common that with a mid-range monitor you'd have to choose which of those three things (resolution, color depth, or refresh rate) you were willing to sacrifice to get the other two up to where you wanted them. Being able to place each application on a desktop that supported what it most needed was genuinely useful.
The other major option would've been dynamically changing the monitor's settings, which XFree86 for instance was able to do even while keeping the desktop the same size -- your monitor became a viewport, and you'd scroll around it by moving your mouse pointer past the edge of what was currently visible. (This is still possible in X.org today, though with modern monitor resolutions there's much less reason to use it.)
Neither of these solutions is really ideal (ideal is when one whole wall of your room is a giant high-res monitor, but who can afford that?), but for any given application one or the other of these compromise solutions would be better than the other. Both are a lot less compelling now that you can spend twenty bucks and get a gently-used 19-inch monitor that does 1600x1200 or better at 24bpp and 85Hz refresh, which somebody is letting go cheap because he replaced it with an LCD like all the cool kids. Buy two and have yourself a dual-monitor setup. Throw in a decent new graphics card and it's still cheaper than buying a 15-inch monitor in 1996 that could only do 1024x768 if you lowered the color depth to 16-bit and settled for a 60Hz refresh rate (which with long-tube fluorescent lighting in the room will give you a migraine in less than ten seconds).
Does Frankenstein count as science fiction? I know it's older than most other works in the genre, and the science is significantly more primitive, and it's not set in space, but in other respects it really feels like it ought to belong in the science fiction genre. Some people classify it as horror, but I think that's only because many of the half-baked movies extremely loosely based on it are horror. The book itself does not have any of the usual elements of horror. (Okay, yes, it has a "monster", but he's not a monster in the usual horror-genre sense of the term. If anything, humanity is the monster, which is much more typical of sci-fi.)
It is also categorically the most sorrowful book of any kind that I have ever read. It could almost be called a study in sorrow.
> Could BEOS be used as an alternate GUI for a Unix based system.
You could borrow *ideas* from BeOS if you were designing an alternate GUI for a Unix-type system, or any other system for that matter.
That would be kind of missing the point, though. The BeOS GUI was largely unremarkable. Okay, yes, if you had multiple desktops they could each have a different resolution (and color depth, if desired). At the time, that was innovative. Other systems have it now, of course.
On the whole, though, the really notable things about BeOS were infrastructural, not superficial. To speak of BeOS as a GUI is to rob it of its strengths and everything that makes it really notable.
The way BeOS did multitasking, for example, provided a level of responsiveness that other systems at the time were not able to deliver on similar hardware. That's a kernel design feature, not something you can layer on top when building a GUI.
The BeOS approach to hardware and drivers was really remarkable and completely unprecedented at the time and eliminated several major categories of problems in one fell swoop. Knoppix has since delivered something almost comparable. (I suspect it's probably implemented differently, but the results are similar, if not quite as impressive.)
Then of course there's the filesystem. Personally I'm not terribly fond of the BeOS approach to that (except for the journaling, which has become standard on other systems), but there's no denying that the filesystem, and in particular the unusual metadata handling, was a significant aspect of what made BeOS unique and conceptually interesting, and it's not something you could implement in a GUI without the underpinnings being there in the kernel and in the on-disk filesystem format.
I haven't looked at Haiku recently, but I've also seen no mention anywhere of their having *added* multi-user capabilities that BeOS didn't have -- and BeOS didn't have the functionality you describe. There was no such thing as a user account or logging in. It was multi-user in exactly the same sense that DOS was multi-user: if the user physically vacated the chair in front of the computer, a different person could sit down in the chair.