No, I've never been to China, although I have been to Singapore and Thailand. I do however live in the neighbourhood (Australia), and unlike most Australians I try to take an interest in regional affairs.
I came to my opinion because I believe it is intensely hypocritical of us to develop our own industries at the expense of the planet and then turn around and criticise other nations for doing the same. We should help them to develop clean energy - a dam is not ideal, but it is better IMHO than actively polluting solutions.
Oh, you got me. I was hoping you wouldn't notice how many people were killed in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which I of course totally supported.
This is the same logic that caused people to ask the question "if there are thousands of people protesting against Bush's war, why aren't there thousands of people protesting against Saddam's human rights violations?" The answer of course is that we (well, you) voted for Bush, and as such in a democracy we can expect to hold him accountable for his actions as leader. Likewise it is not relevant to parallel Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia with the present day US and argue that you 'come out ahead.'
Your comments are specious, ignorant and utterly insensitive to the millions of Europeans who died fighting totalitarianism and oppression. If Europe preaches today about human rights it is because they know all to well the terrible results of undervaluing human life.
Regardless of the fact that this has nothing to do with the death penalty, you may also like to read up on how many of the states who committed atrocities against their own people in the last couple of decades were American allies.
I couldn't agree more. In many ways patriotism and 'the good of the nation' are the biggest threat to freedom imaginable - the worst crimes both humanitarian and environmental throughout history have always been committed by and in the name of nations. One need only look at the US from the outside today to see the potential for destruction of freedom that can occur in the name of the state.
However, on a planet of finite size with finite resources is it really practical to say that we can't or shouldn't effect each other's freedoms at all? Surely this must be within some kind of framework or the entire concept of a society will crumble? There are many things I would like to do that would probably have a negative impact on others - should I have these 'freedoms'?
This is the question to which I have never received a satisfactory answer from Libertarians or Anarchists.
Yeah, you guys in the US are really lagging behind China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, way down there in fourth for number of state-sponsored killings carried out each year.
At least you still hold the world record for most executions of juveniles since 1990.
There's only one way to settle this. You build a dam above Los Angeles and I'll build a nuclear reactor in New York and we'll set them both off at the same time. At the very least LA will be a lot cleaner afterwards and the subway congestion in NY will probably improve too.
On the other hand, they are also disadvantaged because we are giving them very advanced technologies but we are *not* giving them a good attitude to the environment. Ford and General Motors don't give a damn about electric cars when they can see a market for a billion petrol powered vehicles sitting there across the Pacific. Where is the equivalent dose of environmentalism? There is none. It will come in 25 years when most of China looks like downtown LA.
Already cities like Hong Kong, Bangkok etc. are car-choked hellholes. People don't seem able to learn from each other's mistakes, only their own...
"The fuel elements ruptured and the resultant explosive force of steam lifted off the cover plate of the reactor, releasing fission products to the atmosphere. A second explosion threw out fragments of burning fuel and graphite from the core and allowed air to rush in, causing the graphite moderator to burst into flames."
No need to panic, not a meltdown! Everyone return to your stations...
Of course I see the irony. However I feel you are being too simplistic. It is easy to look at freedom as a literal concept when you live in a country where the dirty work of destroying the environment and displacing/slaughtering the natives was done by our great grandfathers and is therefore no longer our concern.
To me there is more value in the 'freedom' of living on a planet with beathable air than in the 'freedom' of every individual to live where they want to. Obviously it would be better to have both... but freedom is a lot more than the absence of walls in the jail, as it were.
"The nuclear waste gets buried and when was the lsat time you saw a meltdown?"
There are so many things wrong with this statement I can't even be bothered to list them. However, the last time "I saw a meltdown" was when another giant Communist state was frantically trying to match the energy production of the US and built a large, shoddily maintained reactor. It then melted down and killed a great many people over the next 25 years, and is still blamed for many birth defects and an elevated rate of cancer in parts of Russia and Europe. The dangerous effects of the fallout reached as far as Great Britain from central Russia.
PS
I would rather drown than have my skin burnt off before dying of cancer or radiation sickness.
Although (without the word 'fuck') your analysis would appear to be essentially correct. If China wants to be the equal to the US in the next 20-50 years it really needs to escape from a dependence on oil, which is basically American-controlled, and get its power elsewhere.
They seem to have the willpower to do it, too. I mean, they want to go to the moon, set up a base and mine it for minerals. Meanwhile we in the West want a gum that doesn't lose its flavor.
If every Chinese person started using as much oil and coal and producing as much rubbish as every Westerner the world would be destroyed very quickly.
Yes, it is dangerous in terms of earthquakes and flooding if it collapses.
BUT, it is going to generate *18.2 MILLION kilowatts* of power, indefinitely, with no ongoing pollution. The alternatives are presumably:
- coal or oil power, causing a massive amount of greenhouse gas, contributing to global warming (yes it does exist, America) and drawing fire from the same people who are criticising the environmental impact of the dam
- nuclear power, leading to large amounts of nuclear waste and with an increased risk of a meltdown occurring in a 2nd/3rd world country with dubious safety records and high levels of corruption... drawing fire from the same people who are criticising the environmental impact of the dam
- China goes without power, and the western world continues to get fat and happy using our own dams, nuclear plants and coal fired power stations and sweet sweet Iraqi oil
Obviously the ideal solution would be for China to be able to build a project that produced this much power from solar/wind/tidal energy sources, but the cost at present would be insanely prohibitive. Quite frankly I have more respect for the energy policy of a nation that is trying to generate power without relying on fossil fuels and nuclear reactors than one that is actively trying to expand its power generation in those areas. Of course no other countries I can think of have built massive, environmentally questionable (*cough* Hoover *cough*) dams, have they?
But the whole point of the AMD Athlon naming strategy was based on the fact that in general performance measures megahertz *weren't* a good measure of performance. The number, e.g. 1800+ is meant to be an approximate equivalent in terms of performance to an 1800MHz Intel chip despite being only 1533MHz itself. I believe the same arguments are used by bleating Mac users to justify their puny clock speeds but who listens to them in megahertz discussions anyway?
Back to the subject, the 5200FX will be history as soon as NV35 is out/available and lowers the price of NV30.
...and consequently stocks of the older, faster cards are already thin on the ground, compounded by the fact that many smaller retailers don't want to buy too much stock of anything when ATI and nvidia are pumping out a chip every 6 months.
It's ok for those of us who can do a little digging and work out what's going on from hard benchmarks etc... I just have this horrible mental image of some poor kid whose parent have sprung for his first gaming rig. He thinks he's getting a top of the line card, a GeForce 4 but when he loads Doom III and tries to play all his hopes and dreams come crashing down around him. He eventually drops out of high school because he is so disillusioned about the state of society. He becomes a drug addict and all around moral failure with no job prospects (other than republican nominee for the presidency).
If, on the other hand, nvidia hadn't raised his hopes only to crush them, that little kid might have cured cancer, created great works of art and saved humanity from alien invasion. Plus he would have enjoyed Doom III a lot more.
Is anyone else completely fed up with nvidia's moronic naming conventions?
First we had the original GeForce 1+2 series, and things were good. Then GeForce 3 Ti kicked it up a notch performance wise. Following this the GeForce 4 *Ti* series continued the improvement in performance, but the GeForce 4 *MX* series was also introduced and performed like a piece of overcooked dog-doo. In benchmarking my old GeForce 2 GTS card easily beats a GF2-MX 400 in 3D games and benchmarks.
But nvidia's marketing fools weren't done yet. Not content with ripping off kids who thought they would be getting a cool, up to date graphics card for a bargain price, they then introduced the following naming convention to the GeForce 4 Ti series:
GF4-Ti 4200 - Entry level GF4-Ti 4400 - Mainstream GF4-Ti 4600 - High performance GF4-Ti 4800 - Either a 4200 or 4600 with an 8x AGP bus (read: no performance increase), depending on which version you happen to buy
So, we have a GeForce 2 that kicks the ass of a GeForce 4 in 3D games, and now a GeForce 4 4400 that kicks the ass of some GeForce 4 4800s but will always be slower than a GeForce 4 4600, which in turn will always be at least as fast as a 4800.
With the FX series, who the hell knows? All I know is that there is now absolutely no connection between the family number (Geforce 1,2,3,4,FX) and actual performance, and no connection between the model number (4200, 4400, 4600, 4800) and actual performance. Given that ATI is currently whupping nvidia in performance and output quality it seems to me that the marketing people at nvidia need to think *really* hard about their naming conventions. Amazingly adding a higher number to a piece of crap does not make it a faster piece of crap, although it may wreck your reputation with consumers.
Ok, maybe I shouldn't have said the book was a satire - but nor was it supposed to be a representation of an ideal. It's more an exploration of what things would be like if society was structured along somewhat different lines; Heinlein has said that the philosophies expressed in his work are the philosophies of the characters, not his own.
Of course, one could take the view that the movie version was effectively a criticism of some of the philosophies in the book. By showing a sort of neo-fascist super-state bent of aggressive war perhaps Verhoven was trying to say that the society Heinlein describes wouldn't actually work as such a happy, successful system and might end up looking more like certain other militaristic societies I can think of. Ahem.
I guess the main point I was trying to make is that people who view the movie tend to react with hostility either because they don't understand that Verhoven is presenting the material in the form of a rather subtle parody or because they are big fans of the book and the ideas therein and they don't like to see the fascist/militarist side of things amplified so that they dominate the story.
I *totally* agree that it would have been great to see the power suits in the movie, especially when you see how cool the bugs look.
This will sound incredibly ignorant, but could someone tell me what the big deal with this book is? I read it and the whole time I was waiting for the penny to drop, for something interesting to happen, but it just went on and on ratcheting up the 'suspense' and never giving any resolution.
By the end I was tearing my hair out, and then the book just finished with no real conclusions about Rama or its contents.
Verhoven's version of Starship Troopers diverged from the novel significantly in terms of plot but the core themes (relationship between citizen and state, militarization of society and resulting need for random wars, violent human nature etc) were very faithfully rendered. I think that has got to be one of the most misunderstood and underappreciated movies of the last decade - the number of people who think it is just a dumb action movie is just frightening, because it suggests that the military-oligopoly state shown is if anything too close to reality. Anyone with half a neurone should be able to tell from the cast selection and dialoge that IT'S A GODDAMN SATIRE!!! LIKE THE BOOK!
Plus the special effects are still unsurpassed IMHO. Those scenes with the thousands and thousands of bugs are just incredible, and the big spaceships are also amazing. Peter Jackson can take his orc army and shove it, at least the bugs came out in daylight.
And anyone who has a problem with the level of gore and violence clearly hasn't read much Heinlein...
But Blade Runner had so many cool special effects, some of them advanced for the time - the police spinners, the city itself, the amazing set and costume design. I agree that most of it didn't require computers to animate, but the film was still given its unique ambience thanks to good production values, which is what we're really talking about I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I've never been to China, although I have been to Singapore and Thailand. I do however live in the neighbourhood (Australia), and unlike most Australians I try to take an interest in regional affairs.
I came to my opinion because I believe it is intensely hypocritical of us to develop our own industries at the expense of the planet and then turn around and criticise other nations for doing the same. We should help them to develop clean energy - a dam is not ideal, but it is better IMHO than actively polluting solutions.
"Welcome to the World Nuclear Association, representing the many companies and organizations of the global nuclear energy industry."
*Homer Simpson voice*: Mmmmm.... balanced sources.
Oh, you got me. I was hoping you wouldn't notice how many people were killed in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which I of course totally supported.
This is the same logic that caused people to ask the question "if there are thousands of people protesting against Bush's war, why aren't there thousands of people protesting against Saddam's human rights violations?" The answer of course is that we (well, you) voted for Bush, and as such in a democracy we can expect to hold him accountable for his actions as leader. Likewise it is not relevant to parallel Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia with the present day US and argue that you 'come out ahead.'
Your comments are specious, ignorant and utterly insensitive to the millions of Europeans who died fighting totalitarianism and oppression. If Europe preaches today about human rights it is because they know all to well the terrible results of undervaluing human life.
Regardless of the fact that this has nothing to do with the death penalty, you may also like to read up on how many of the states who committed atrocities against their own people in the last couple of decades were American allies.
I couldn't agree more. In many ways patriotism and 'the good of the nation' are the biggest threat to freedom imaginable - the worst crimes both humanitarian and environmental throughout history have always been committed by and in the name of nations. One need only look at the US from the outside today to see the potential for destruction of freedom that can occur in the name of the state.
However, on a planet of finite size with finite resources is it really practical to say that we can't or shouldn't effect each other's freedoms at all? Surely this must be within some kind of framework or the entire concept of a society will crumble? There are many things I would like to do that would probably have a negative impact on others - should I have these 'freedoms'?
This is the question to which I have never received a satisfactory answer from Libertarians or Anarchists.
Yeah, you guys in the US are really lagging behind China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, way down there in fourth for number of state-sponsored killings carried out each year.
At least you still hold the world record for most executions of juveniles since 1990.
If the company nurse stops by, tell her I said "never mind."
Hey, relax there fellah.
There's only one way to settle this. You build a dam above Los Angeles and I'll build a nuclear reactor in New York and we'll set them both off at the same time. At the very least LA will be a lot cleaner afterwards and the subway congestion in NY will probably improve too.
Loser buys the winner a beer?
On the other hand, they are also disadvantaged because we are giving them very advanced technologies but we are *not* giving them a good attitude to the environment. Ford and General Motors don't give a damn about electric cars when they can see a market for a billion petrol powered vehicles sitting there across the Pacific. Where is the equivalent dose of environmentalism? There is none. It will come in 25 years when most of China looks like downtown LA.
Already cities like Hong Kong, Bangkok etc. are car-choked hellholes. People don't seem able to learn from each other's mistakes, only their own...
My mistake:
"The fuel elements ruptured and the resultant explosive force of steam lifted off the cover plate of the reactor, releasing fission products to the atmosphere. A second explosion threw out fragments of burning fuel and graphite from the core and allowed air to rush in, causing the graphite moderator to burst into flames."
No need to panic, not a meltdown! Everyone return to your stations...
Of course I see the irony. However I feel you are being too simplistic. It is easy to look at freedom as a literal concept when you live in a country where the dirty work of destroying the environment and displacing/slaughtering the natives was done by our great grandfathers and is therefore no longer our concern.
To me there is more value in the 'freedom' of living on a planet with beathable air than in the 'freedom' of every individual to live where they want to. Obviously it would be better to have both... but freedom is a lot more than the absence of walls in the jail, as it were.
"The nuclear waste gets buried and when was the lsat time you saw a meltdown?"
There are so many things wrong with this statement I can't even be bothered to list them. However, the last time "I saw a meltdown" was when another giant Communist state was frantically trying to match the energy production of the US and built a large, shoddily maintained reactor. It then melted down and killed a great many people over the next 25 years, and is still blamed for many birth defects and an elevated rate of cancer in parts of Russia and Europe. The dangerous effects of the fallout reached as far as Great Britain from central Russia.
PS
I would rather drown than have my skin burnt off before dying of cancer or radiation sickness.
Oooh... that's not going to get modded up.
Although (without the word 'fuck') your analysis would appear to be essentially correct. If China wants to be the equal to the US in the next 20-50 years it really needs to escape from a dependence on oil, which is basically American-controlled, and get its power elsewhere.
They seem to have the willpower to do it, too. I mean, they want to go to the moon, set up a base and mine it for minerals. Meanwhile we in the West want a gum that doesn't lose its flavor.
If every Chinese person started using as much oil and coal and producing as much rubbish as every Westerner the world would be destroyed very quickly.
...but what are they supposed to do?
... drawing fire from the same people who are criticising the environmental impact of the dam
Yes, this dam will damage the environment.
Yes, it will displace many people.
Yes, it is dangerous in terms of earthquakes and flooding if it collapses.
BUT, it is going to generate *18.2 MILLION kilowatts* of power, indefinitely, with no ongoing pollution. The alternatives are presumably:
- coal or oil power, causing a massive amount of greenhouse gas, contributing to global warming (yes it does exist, America) and drawing fire from the same people who are criticising the environmental impact of the dam
- nuclear power, leading to large amounts of nuclear waste and with an increased risk of a meltdown occurring in a 2nd/3rd world country with dubious safety records and high levels of corruption
- China goes without power, and the western world continues to get fat and happy using our own dams, nuclear plants and coal fired power stations and sweet sweet Iraqi oil
Obviously the ideal solution would be for China to be able to build a project that produced this much power from solar/wind/tidal energy sources, but the cost at present would be insanely prohibitive. Quite frankly I have more respect for the energy policy of a nation that is trying to generate power without relying on fossil fuels and nuclear reactors than one that is actively trying to expand its power generation in those areas. Of course no other countries I can think of have built massive, environmentally questionable (*cough* Hoover *cough*) dams, have they?
France has a large number of nuclear weapons, you may find the 'Wolfowitz doctrine' (tm) only applies to little, poorly armed countries without nukes.
...Dick Cheney has a pacemaker, doesn't he?
But the whole point of the AMD Athlon naming strategy was based on the fact that in general performance measures megahertz *weren't* a good measure of performance. The number, e.g. 1800+ is meant to be an approximate equivalent in terms of performance to an 1800MHz Intel chip despite being only 1533MHz itself. I believe the same arguments are used by bleating Mac users to justify their puny clock speeds but who listens to them in megahertz discussions anyway?
Back to the subject, the 5200FX will be history as soon as NV35 is out/available and lowers the price of NV30.
...and consequently stocks of the older, faster cards are already thin on the ground, compounded by the fact that many smaller retailers don't want to buy too much stock of anything when ATI and nvidia are pumping out a chip every 6 months.
It's ok for those of us who can do a little digging and work out what's going on from hard benchmarks etc... I just have this horrible mental image of some poor kid whose parent have sprung for his first gaming rig. He thinks he's getting a top of the line card, a GeForce 4 but when he loads Doom III and tries to play all his hopes and dreams come crashing down around him. He eventually drops out of high school because he is so disillusioned about the state of society. He becomes a drug addict and all around moral failure with no job prospects (other than republican nominee for the presidency).
If, on the other hand, nvidia hadn't raised his hopes only to crush them, that little kid might have cured cancer, created great works of art and saved humanity from alien invasion. Plus he would have enjoyed Doom III a lot more.
...and called it a Porche MX 5800
Is anyone else completely fed up with nvidia's moronic naming conventions?
First we had the original GeForce 1+2 series, and things were good. Then GeForce 3 Ti kicked it up a notch performance wise. Following this the GeForce 4 *Ti* series continued the improvement in performance, but the GeForce 4 *MX* series was also introduced and performed like a piece of overcooked dog-doo. In benchmarking my old GeForce 2 GTS card easily beats a GF2-MX 400 in 3D games and benchmarks.
But nvidia's marketing fools weren't done yet. Not content with ripping off kids who thought they would be getting a cool, up to date graphics card for a bargain price, they then introduced the following naming convention to the GeForce 4 Ti series:
GF4-Ti 4200 - Entry level
GF4-Ti 4400 - Mainstream
GF4-Ti 4600 - High performance
GF4-Ti 4800 - Either a 4200 or 4600 with an 8x AGP bus (read: no performance increase), depending on which version you happen to buy
So, we have a GeForce 2 that kicks the ass of a GeForce 4 in 3D games, and now a GeForce 4 4400 that kicks the ass of some GeForce 4 4800s but will always be slower than a GeForce 4 4600, which in turn will always be at least as fast as a 4800.
With the FX series, who the hell knows? All I know is that there is now absolutely no connection between the family number (Geforce 1,2,3,4,FX) and actual performance, and no connection between the model number (4200, 4400, 4600, 4800) and actual performance. Given that ATI is currently whupping nvidia in performance and output quality it seems to me that the marketing people at nvidia need to think *really* hard about their naming conventions. Amazingly adding a higher number to a piece of crap does not make it a faster piece of crap, although it may wreck your reputation with consumers.
"I block all email from outside the us" Good to see the global village taking another giant stride forward.
Ok, maybe I shouldn't have said the book was a satire - but nor was it supposed to be a representation of an ideal. It's more an exploration of what things would be like if society was structured along somewhat different lines; Heinlein has said that the philosophies expressed in his work are the philosophies of the characters, not his own.
Of course, one could take the view that the movie version was effectively a criticism of some of the philosophies in the book. By showing a sort of neo-fascist super-state bent of aggressive war perhaps Verhoven was trying to say that the society Heinlein describes wouldn't actually work as such a happy, successful system and might end up looking more like certain other militaristic societies I can think of. Ahem.
I guess the main point I was trying to make is that people who view the movie tend to react with hostility either because they don't understand that Verhoven is presenting the material in the form of a rather subtle parody or because they are big fans of the book and the ideas therein and they don't like to see the fascist/militarist side of things amplified so that they dominate the story.
I *totally* agree that it would have been great to see the power suits in the movie, especially when you see how cool the bugs look.
This will sound incredibly ignorant, but could someone tell me what the big deal with this book is? I read it and the whole time I was waiting for the penny to drop, for something interesting to happen, but it just went on and on ratcheting up the 'suspense' and never giving any resolution.
By the end I was tearing my hair out, and then the book just finished with no real conclusions about Rama or its contents.
Verhoven's version of Starship Troopers diverged from the novel significantly in terms of plot but the core themes (relationship between citizen and state, militarization of society and resulting need for random wars, violent human nature etc) were very faithfully rendered. I think that has got to be one of the most misunderstood and underappreciated movies of the last decade - the number of people who think it is just a dumb action movie is just frightening, because it suggests that the military-oligopoly state shown is if anything too close to reality. Anyone with half a neurone should be able to tell from the cast selection and dialoge that IT'S A GODDAMN SATIRE!!! LIKE THE BOOK!
Plus the special effects are still unsurpassed IMHO. Those scenes with the thousands and thousands of bugs are just incredible, and the big spaceships are also amazing. Peter Jackson can take his orc army and shove it, at least the bugs came out in daylight.
And anyone who has a problem with the level of gore and violence clearly hasn't read much Heinlein...
But Blade Runner had so many cool special effects, some of them advanced for the time - the police spinners, the city itself, the amazing set and costume design. I agree that most of it didn't require computers to animate, but the film was still given its unique ambience thanks to good production values, which is what we're really talking about I guess.