Most AT&T customers do not go anywhere near 100MB of data and are perfectly willing to pay a flat $40 monthly fee. By cutting their bill by $30 you have just thrown away $30 of AT&T's profits. You're only hope would be to recover that money by raising the prices on the high bandwidth users by the same amount or more. If anything, by restricting their bandwidth usage you'd actually be encouraging a saving behavior that by definition results in lower profits for you. You're also cutting the profits on your largest subscription base, all for a dubious increase in "goodwill". Maybe it would be a lot more cost effective to just build more towers.
Whenever I hear tiered pricing, I never imagine a $30 discount to the low level users. I see a $5 discount (in return for a 50% lower effective usage cap) to those guys and a $20 increase to everyone else.
He seems to be the only classic science fiction writer throwing cold buckets onto the ridiculous idea that it would be easy to communicate with alien intelligences.
RedHat and MySQL are in a completely different line of business, and I don't mean OS vs database.
RedHat provides a product that is better and often more functional then the alternatives (Windows, Solaris) but still requires a large amount of maintenance. Large, non-technical corporations are very likely to both use RedHat Linux for functionality and to prefer "official" hand-holding for peace of mind.
MySQL is favored by either small, startup level firms or tech firms with high skill levels. The first one is not likely to pay for support and the second one does not need it.
The the same business model for the two products offers nowhere near the same levels of revenue in each case. The only way I can see this being profitable for Sun is if they start adding high end features into MySQL that would let it overshoot Oracle and IBM for some specific use cases. Use cases that would make it attractive to the RedHat using companies. Hopefully, that is what the Sun execs were thinking when they bought MySQL.
That
s simplifying it of course, but apt and it's relatives were always one of the majors reasons I loved Linux. Unlike windows, I didn't have to hunt apps down on shady sites, download random EXEs, etc. Everything is in one relatively simple to use place. Add some way to process payments and you have a ready made AppStore.
Ohh wow just had a huge argument with someone about this. The site is very misleading regarding the actual policies, which is ironic considering it's made for Obama.
The actual policy is a $4K tax rebate for those willing to voluntarily perform 100 hours of community service.
The idea is correct but unfortunately, you reversed the parties.
This idea has been called the "Ownership Society" and is very much a Republican ideological creation.
The main application to our current crisis is the idea that home ownership lowers crime and increases wealth, so expanding the lending pool to less qualified owners (aka sub-prime) would also tackle crime and poverty. Unfortunately, there is a reason why these underserved population slices were underserved for so long. It's not exactly that easy to pay back a $500K debt with a $30K salary.
It would be great to hear of any interesting original research. It seems to me that most of the news in this space are more about applications of already well known ideas rather then new well publicized developments.
The 'Semantic Web' companies that are springing up all over like Twine, AdaptiveBlue, etc. are the best examples. They seem to be using some basic NLP, classifiers and statistical models to provide various services on the web. This may not be cutting edge artificial intelligence research but, in my opinion, wide spread, highly visible innovation in the field can often inspire more people to pursue the truly hard and import hard science research.
since many professors in my school had the same view of using laptops in class. I gave the same reasons that they should be a nanny to their class.
Some time later, a friend who became a professor, instituted the same policy. He always browsed as a student so I asked why he would do something like this. His explanation was simple: "It's for my benefit, not theirs. Most of the time I just don't want to remind myself and maybe even my administration that my classes are boring and useless and can be replaced with paper handouts."
This friend has since tried other more creative ways such never providing lecture slides online, and making sure that he mentions important details only in class.
is commoditized...? Once we can use 3D printers to home produce items of great complexity there will be only two items of value in the world. 1) The raw materials to feed the 3D printers and 2) the software blueprints that instruct the printer to produce certain items. Now that will really throw IP law for a spin. Not to mention the world economies.
Speaking from first hand experience I am certain that family values play THE MOST significant role in raising educational levels. And I don't mean that religious values crap, I mean the value that your family places on education and learning.
My experience is with eastern european immigrants from the 70s-90s. They placed a huge value on education seeing it as something that will improve their economic status. I know of Russian adults who in their 30s and 40s, without speaking a word of English, would enroll in college, to learn a completely different profession. The worst thing a child could do was not loose a game or start dating, but bring home a B. Obviously, this doesn't apply to every family in this demographic, but by and large grades and doing well in school were the overwhelming preoccupation of these parents and they made sure to force their kids to behave the same way. Comparatively, asian parents would force their children to study just as hard if not harder, but would opt for more entrepreneurial, small business jobs themselves.
Both groups saw education as the best way to raise their economic status. Comparatively, 2nd or 3rd generation families would place less importance on getting good grades and more on fitting in socially, establishing wide social networks and making sure to associate themselves with the jocks, the rich kids and other already socially successful people. I don't know whether its cultural, an artifact of coming from countries with huge emphasis on a technical education or lack of options but in my experience a lot of immigrants were often a lot more concerned about grades and education then those who grew up in the States.
Obviously, not enough people are willing to pay extra to browse in such an "atmosphere". Otherwise, these small bookshops would be thriving. However, plenty of people are willing to subsidize these little bookshops using other people's money, by making sure that all the consumers have to pay high prices.
In my experience so do most Indians and Chinese. So does 80-90% of the entire world population. I work in a world famous company's IT department surrounded by foreign workers who couldn't care less about computer science. If their parents said, a miner makes more money with less labor, they would have become miners. Most of them, in private, admit that they would rather be designers, financial analysts or anything else. They only went into comp sci because "it was the thing to do". I would say a scientific/engineering inclination is about 10% of any population. The reason we had so many "comp sci" people in the 90s is because that's where the money was, not because all of a sudden people became interested in learning about the intricacies of enterprise customer relationship software. Just like right now every single smart kid in America is studying to become a doctor, lawyer or a wall street analyst. If you don't have a real passion in one field, and you're smart enough, it's only logical that you will go into the highest paid profession you can manage. The only reason there are more foreigners in IT then in, say MBA programs, is because it's a lot easier to program without great English communication skills then to do a business presentation. The foreign It professionals I work with don't want their kids to be programmers, they want them to be earning hundreds of thousands of dollars on Wall Street or in a law firm.
Uhmm I call bullshit. Stop believing Hezbollah propaganda. Israel released almost every single Lebanese prisoner(400) in the last trade. The only people they have left (Officially, onl 4 and that is the number of prisoners Hezbollah is asking to be released.) are the ones who are convicted, by a jury of obvious crimes. Like the great fighter Samir Kuntar, who valiantly slaughtered a little girl by smashing her head in with a rifle butt. My favorite part is how many news outlets even talked about the Lebanese prisoners in this whole time. Or how many of them Hezbollah is actually asking to trade. Or even how Nasrallah said that even after they get the Lebanese prisoners back, they will keep attacking Israel on their territory for all the Palestinian prisoners. But of course I'm sure you knew all of this when you posted the numbers of captured Lebanese Israel held.
I don't have a link to the article now, but there was an interview with the head of Sci-Fi Channel in a business mag regarding those B-plot movies. The gist was that this was a major business innovation for Sci-Fi Channel. It was getting a much larger audience and making a lot more advertising money by rolling out huge numbers of "ridiculous-monster-of-the-week" movies then it was showing smaller numbers of more expensive movies and shows. So they know exactly how bad those movies are and it is in fact a part of the strategy.
I think the article also compared to these movies a similar movement in video games with titles like Bloodrayne.
and even pigeons have it:). B.F. Skinner and Superstitious Pigeons. It's just a basic side effect of automatically associating meaning with events that happen in close proximity in time.
A nation with large natural resource deposits often has worse economic development then a similar resource-poor country. Jordan, for example, has a thriving IT sector as does Israel, while Saudi Arabia and Venezuela prefer to use oil money to cure all economic and political ills. Natural resources do not provide any incentives for economic development in other business and industrial areas and in fact seem to have a reverse effect. The leaders just take the easy way out and buy off the population with heavy subsidies and cash payments (e.g Saudi Arabia randomly paying out $700 to every citizen) instead of doing the hard thing and trying to build up other areas of the economy.
And no, while the "common sense" is that terrorism in the Middle East comes from desperation it seems to me that it comes from plain old power struggles. Regardless of what moral values you assign to the various actions and actors in the region, oil is a strategic resource. By maintaining guranteed access an industrial country makes sure its economic development isn't hampered(China doesn't care what state[Iran, Venezuela] it deals with as long as they provide the oil). By restricting access another country, which may not need large amounts of oil itself, gains barganing and economic power disproportionate to it's size. Most of the Middle East could not give a flying monkey's ass about the "Palestinian Struggle" or the Palestinians themselves. What they do care about is keeping control over a strategic resource and having an exclusive and unassailable way of distributing it. They can't raise prices or limit production without having to make sure it doesn't hurt the US enough to attack them. Israel is a huge thorn in most ME countries' sides mostly because it limits their options with regards to oil control(and regional influence) since it's basically a forward operating base for Western interests. This was already proven in the case of France and England with the disasterous 1953 invasion of the Suez canal and is just as true for the US these days.
Unfortunately for everyone in the region, there are people who believe that given enough time and pressure, the entire state of Israel could be removed from the map of the Middle East. They are willing to sacrifice young, naive, brain-washed kids for as long as it takes to achieve that and to have hundres of thousands of people living in squalor and poverty while they steal donated money and send their wives off to Paris with millions. Their gamble is that they feel like they don't need to compromise on anything because they have all the time in the world. Who cares if the people they're supposed to represent have no future, after all, their immediate families are perfectly well provided for.
It's simplistic but it looks to me as if there are two ways out of the entire mess. Either the local leaders are convinced that Israel will always be there and that they can't really effectively fight US influence in the area or they think that with time they can win. Bush, extremely ineptly keeps trying to force option one while most "Axis of Evil" leaders believe in option two. Option one leads to economic prosperity and a large loss of national pride for the arab countries, option two is exactly what we have now with low and mid level skirmishes and proxy wars between the US, Europe and Middle East nations with civilians(as always) paying the price.
In the end the more things progress, the more they stay the same. It's the nature of having people competing for limited resources.
BBC is usually pretty even handed. But not, for some reason, when it comes to Israel related news. http://home.comcast.net/~jat.action/BBC_bias.htm
It's surprisingly blatant, especially coming from commentators and reporters on BBC International.
It has already released all the 400 Lebanese prisoners who were not indicted and the only Lebanese prisoners Israel has kept are the ones who had a fair trial and have been convicted. Like for example Samir Qantar. The whole problem is that Hezbollah is using these prisoners as an excuse. Every time Israel makes a deal with them, Hezbollah waits for a year or two and then attacks again hoping for another deal with Israel giving up even more every time. Sheba farms are recognized by the UN as Syrian so Israel can't possibly give them to another country until Syria officially says it's ok, the Lebanese prisoners in jail have all been convicted of crimes and most of those crimes have been regular offenses like murder or theft, not political at all.
Yeah those damn Israelis attacking innocent civilians. If only they could figure out how to magically extract the Hezbollah command bunkers from the under the parking garages, apartment buildings, mosques and hospitals where they are built. Or maybe use magic transporters to "beam out" those rockets that they store in the basements of poor Shi'ite Lebanese. Even better come up with magic bullets that only hit the "bad" guys, even when the bad guys hide among civilians so that even if they're killed the world condemns Israel.
But of course Hezbollah is a poor, rag-tag team of freedom fighters who are doing their best against the Israeli occupiers. Ohh wait no... There is no occupation anymore, and these rag tag teams somehow managed to equip themselves with bullet proof gear, night vision goggles, huge supplies of unguided katyusha rockets, modified Chinese "Silkworm" missles and brand spanking new Iranian anti-tank missiles.
But maybe Israel should give up the innocent prisoners it holds...Like the innocent Lebanese guy who walked into an Israeli village and slit the throats of the mother, father and all the kids...you know, 'cause they were obviously a threat to Lebanon.
Yeah Israel definitely started this whole mess in the first place... You know by dragging Hezbollah fighters onto the Israeli side of the border, putting rpgs in their hands and shooting themselves in their own humvees.
I've always seen the "inner space" part of the novel as something that has been analyzed to death. I'm much more interested in the long dialogue about humans not really venturing to space but bringing space down to Earth. Space travel being travel in tiny, encapsulated versions of Earth's atmosphere, gravity, etc. If you look at Lem's other works you can see that he was very much preoccupied with the cavalier attitude of most science fiction with the real difficulties of space travel. So while "inner space" might be a very significat part of the novel, I find the philosophy of space exploration bits a lot more interesting and original.
Slashdot Mirror
Most AT&T customers do not go anywhere near 100MB of data and are perfectly willing to pay a flat $40 monthly fee. By cutting their bill by $30 you have just thrown away $30 of AT&T's profits. You're only hope would be to recover that money by raising the prices on the high bandwidth users by the same amount or more. If anything, by restricting their bandwidth usage you'd actually be encouraging a saving behavior that by definition results in lower profits for you. You're also cutting the profits on your largest subscription base, all for a dubious increase in "goodwill". Maybe it would be a lot more cost effective to just build more towers.
Whenever I hear tiered pricing, I never imagine a $30 discount to the low level users. I see a $5 discount (in return for a 50% lower effective usage cap) to those guys and a $20 increase to everyone else.
"His Master's Voice" by Stanislaw Lem.
He seems to be the only classic science fiction writer throwing cold buckets onto the ridiculous idea that it would be easy to communicate with alien intelligences.
RedHat and MySQL are in a completely different line of business, and I don't mean OS vs database.
RedHat provides a product that is better and often more functional then the alternatives (Windows, Solaris) but still requires a large amount of maintenance. Large, non-technical corporations are very likely to both use RedHat Linux for functionality and to prefer "official" hand-holding for peace of mind.
MySQL is favored by either small, startup level firms or tech firms with high skill levels. The first one is not likely to pay for support and the second one does not need it.
The the same business model for the two products offers nowhere near the same levels of revenue in each case. The only way I can see this being profitable for Sun is if they start adding high end features into MySQL that would let it overshoot Oracle and IBM for some specific use cases. Use cases that would make it attractive to the RedHat using companies. Hopefully, that is what the Sun execs were thinking when they bought MySQL.
apt-cache search ________
apt-get install _________
That s simplifying it of course, but apt and it's relatives were always one of the majors reasons I loved Linux. Unlike windows, I didn't have to hunt apps down on shady sites, download random EXEs, etc. Everything is in one relatively simple to use place. Add some way to process payments and you have a ready made AppStore.
Ohh wow just had a huge argument with someone about this. The site is very misleading regarding the actual policies, which is ironic considering it's made for Obama.
The actual policy is a $4K tax rebate for those willing to voluntarily perform 100 hours of community service.
This is nothing new and was outlined by Obama back in March: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2008/03/27/a_legion_of_student_volunteers/ Everything is completely voluntary, the only thing he's doing is providing incentives. It's up to you to take them or not.
The idea is correct but unfortunately, you reversed the parties. This idea has been called the "Ownership Society" and is very much a Republican ideological creation.
The main application to our current crisis is the idea that home ownership lowers crime and increases wealth, so expanding the lending pool to less qualified owners (aka sub-prime) would also tackle crime and poverty. Unfortunately, there is a reason why these underserved population slices were underserved for so long. It's not exactly that easy to pay back a $500K debt with a $30K salary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ownership_society
It would be great to hear of any interesting original research. It seems to me that most of the news in this space are more about applications of already well known ideas rather then new well publicized developments.
The 'Semantic Web' companies that are springing up all over like Twine, AdaptiveBlue, etc. are the best examples. They seem to be using some basic NLP, classifiers and statistical models to provide various services on the web. This may not be cutting edge artificial intelligence research but, in my opinion, wide spread, highly visible innovation in the field can often inspire more people to pursue the truly hard and import hard science research.
How can they have no intention of buying if they bid above the minimum? Is it their fault that Verizon outbid them?
since many professors in my school had the same view of using laptops in class. I gave the same reasons that they should be a nanny to their class.
Some time later, a friend who became a professor, instituted the same policy. He always browsed as a student so I asked why he would do something like this. His explanation was simple: "It's for my benefit, not theirs. Most of the time I just don't want to remind myself and maybe even my administration that my classes are boring and useless and can be replaced with paper handouts."
This friend has since tried other more creative ways such never providing lecture slides online, and making sure that he mentions important details only in class.
is commoditized...? Once we can use 3D printers to home produce items of great complexity there will be only two items of value in the world. 1) The raw materials to feed the 3D printers and 2) the software blueprints that instruct the printer to produce certain items. Now that will really throw IP law for a spin. Not to mention the world economies.
Speaking from first hand experience I am certain that family values play THE MOST significant role in raising educational levels. And I don't mean that religious values crap, I mean the value that your family places on education and learning. My experience is with eastern european immigrants from the 70s-90s. They placed a huge value on education seeing it as something that will improve their economic status. I know of Russian adults who in their 30s and 40s, without speaking a word of English, would enroll in college, to learn a completely different profession. The worst thing a child could do was not loose a game or start dating, but bring home a B. Obviously, this doesn't apply to every family in this demographic, but by and large grades and doing well in school were the overwhelming preoccupation of these parents and they made sure to force their kids to behave the same way. Comparatively, asian parents would force their children to study just as hard if not harder, but would opt for more entrepreneurial, small business jobs themselves. Both groups saw education as the best way to raise their economic status. Comparatively, 2nd or 3rd generation families would place less importance on getting good grades and more on fitting in socially, establishing wide social networks and making sure to associate themselves with the jocks, the rich kids and other already socially successful people. I don't know whether its cultural, an artifact of coming from countries with huge emphasis on a technical education or lack of options but in my experience a lot of immigrants were often a lot more concerned about grades and education then those who grew up in the States.
Obviously, not enough people are willing to pay extra to browse in such an "atmosphere". Otherwise, these small bookshops would be thriving. However, plenty of people are willing to subsidize these little bookshops using other people's money, by making sure that all the consumers have to pay high prices.
Funny...that's exactly the same kinds of people who started the Russian revolution.
In my experience so do most Indians and Chinese. So does 80-90% of the entire world population. I work in a world famous company's IT department surrounded by foreign workers who couldn't care less about computer science. If their parents said, a miner makes more money with less labor, they would have become miners. Most of them, in private, admit that they would rather be designers, financial analysts or anything else. They only went into comp sci because "it was the thing to do". I would say a scientific/engineering inclination is about 10% of any population. The reason we had so many "comp sci" people in the 90s is because that's where the money was, not because all of a sudden people became interested in learning about the intricacies of enterprise customer relationship software. Just like right now every single smart kid in America is studying to become a doctor, lawyer or a wall street analyst. If you don't have a real passion in one field, and you're smart enough, it's only logical that you will go into the highest paid profession you can manage. The only reason there are more foreigners in IT then in, say MBA programs, is because it's a lot easier to program without great English communication skills then to do a business presentation. The foreign It professionals I work with don't want their kids to be programmers, they want them to be earning hundreds of thousands of dollars on Wall Street or in a law firm.
is that if you browse the css and js source you can see that internally they're calling this version "leftly". Witty :)
Uhmm I call bullshit. Stop believing Hezbollah propaganda. Israel released almost every single Lebanese prisoner(400) in the last trade. The only people they have left (Officially, onl 4 and that is the number of prisoners Hezbollah is asking to be released.) are the ones who are convicted, by a jury of obvious crimes. Like the great fighter Samir Kuntar, who valiantly slaughtered a little girl by smashing her head in with a rifle butt. My favorite part is how many news outlets even talked about the Lebanese prisoners in this whole time. Or how many of them Hezbollah is actually asking to trade. Or even how Nasrallah said that even after they get the Lebanese prisoners back, they will keep attacking Israel on their territory for all the Palestinian prisoners. But of course I'm sure you knew all of this when you posted the numbers of captured Lebanese Israel held.
References:
BBC prisoners' page
Wikipedia prisoners' page
I don't have a link to the article now, but there was an interview with the head of Sci-Fi Channel in a business mag regarding those B-plot movies. The gist was that this was a major business innovation for Sci-Fi Channel. It was getting a much larger audience and making a lot more advertising money by rolling out huge numbers of "ridiculous-monster-of-the-week" movies then it was showing smaller numbers of more expensive movies and shows. So they know exactly how bad those movies are and it is in fact a part of the strategy.
I think the article also compared to these movies a similar movement in video games with titles like Bloodrayne.
and even pigeons have it :). B.F. Skinner and Superstitious Pigeons. It's just a basic side effect of automatically associating meaning with events that happen in close proximity in time.
The article is a bit too late in relating to the USA. It's already been done here.
Stolen Sidekick
A nation with large natural resource deposits often has worse economic development then a similar resource-poor country. Jordan, for example, has a thriving IT sector as does Israel, while Saudi Arabia and Venezuela prefer to use oil money to cure all economic and political ills. Natural resources do not provide any incentives for economic development in other business and industrial areas and in fact seem to have a reverse effect. The leaders just take the easy way out and buy off the population with heavy subsidies and cash payments (e.g Saudi Arabia randomly paying out $700 to every citizen) instead of doing the hard thing and trying to build up other areas of the economy.
And no, while the "common sense" is that terrorism in the Middle East comes from desperation it seems to me that it comes from plain old power struggles. Regardless of what moral values you assign to the various actions and actors in the region, oil is a strategic resource. By maintaining guranteed access an industrial country makes sure its economic development isn't hampered(China doesn't care what state[Iran, Venezuela] it deals with as long as they provide the oil). By restricting access another country, which may not need large amounts of oil itself, gains barganing and economic power disproportionate to it's size. Most of the Middle East could not give a flying monkey's ass about the "Palestinian Struggle" or the Palestinians themselves. What they do care about is keeping control over a strategic resource and having an exclusive and unassailable way of distributing it. They can't raise prices or limit production without having to make sure it doesn't hurt the US enough to attack them. Israel is a huge thorn in most ME countries' sides mostly because it limits their options with regards to oil control(and regional influence) since it's basically a forward operating base for Western interests. This was already proven in the case of France and England with the disasterous 1953 invasion of the Suez canal and is just as true for the US these days.
Unfortunately for everyone in the region, there are people who believe that given enough time and pressure, the entire state of Israel could be removed from the map of the Middle East. They are willing to sacrifice young, naive, brain-washed kids for as long as it takes to achieve that and to have hundres of thousands of people living in squalor and poverty while they steal donated money and send their wives off to Paris with millions. Their gamble is that they feel like they don't need to compromise on anything because they have all the time in the world. Who cares if the people they're supposed to represent have no future, after all, their immediate families are perfectly well provided for.
It's simplistic but it looks to me as if there are two ways out of the entire mess. Either the local leaders are convinced that Israel will always be there and that they can't really effectively fight US influence in the area or they think that with time they can win. Bush, extremely ineptly keeps trying to force option one while most "Axis of Evil" leaders believe in option two. Option one leads to economic prosperity and a large loss of national pride for the arab countries, option two is exactly what we have now with low and mid level skirmishes and proxy wars between the US, Europe and Middle East nations with civilians(as always) paying the price.
In the end the more things progress, the more they stay the same. It's the nature of having people competing for limited resources.
BBC is usually pretty even handed. But not, for some reason, when it comes to Israel related news. http://home.comcast.net/~jat.action/BBC_bias.htm It's surprisingly blatant, especially coming from commentators and reporters on BBC International.
Why should Israel return territory captured in a war?
It has already released all the 400 Lebanese prisoners who were not indicted and the only Lebanese prisoners Israel has kept are the ones who had a fair trial and have been convicted. Like for example Samir Qantar. The whole problem is that Hezbollah is using these prisoners as an excuse. Every time Israel makes a deal with them, Hezbollah waits for a year or two and then attacks again hoping for another deal with Israel giving up even more every time. Sheba farms are recognized by the UN as Syrian so Israel can't possibly give them to another country until Syria officially says it's ok, the Lebanese prisoners in jail have all been convicted of crimes and most of those crimes have been regular offenses like murder or theft, not political at all.
Yeah those damn Israelis attacking innocent civilians. If only they could figure out how to magically extract the Hezbollah command bunkers from the under the parking garages, apartment buildings, mosques and hospitals where they are built. Or maybe use magic transporters to "beam out" those rockets that they store in the basements of poor Shi'ite Lebanese. Even better come up with magic bullets that only hit the "bad" guys, even when the bad guys hide among civilians so that even if they're killed the world condemns Israel.
But of course Hezbollah is a poor, rag-tag team of freedom fighters who are doing their best against the Israeli occupiers. Ohh wait no... There is no occupation anymore, and these rag tag teams somehow managed to equip themselves with bullet proof gear, night vision goggles, huge supplies of unguided katyusha rockets, modified Chinese "Silkworm" missles and brand spanking new Iranian anti-tank missiles.
But maybe Israel should give up the innocent prisoners it holds...Like the innocent Lebanese guy who walked into an Israeli village and slit the throats of the mother, father and all the kids...you know, 'cause they were obviously a threat to Lebanon.
Yeah Israel definitely started this whole mess in the first place... You know by dragging Hezbollah fighters onto the Israeli side of the border, putting rpgs in their hands and shooting themselves in their own humvees.
I've always seen the "inner space" part of the novel as something that has been analyzed to death. I'm much more interested in the long dialogue about humans not really venturing to space but bringing space down to Earth. Space travel being travel in tiny, encapsulated versions of Earth's atmosphere, gravity, etc. If you look at Lem's other works you can see that he was very much preoccupied with the cavalier attitude of most science fiction with the real difficulties of space travel. So while "inner space" might be a very significat part of the novel, I find the philosophy of space exploration bits a lot more interesting and original.