"Star Wars" (chapter IV) brought science fiction back into vogue. After it debuted on the big screen, it ran continuously in many theaters for more than a year: a huge surprise for Hollywood.
Then, Gene Roddenberry saw his opportunity to resurrect Star Trek. Despite the fact that he used the same terrible actors and actresses, he convinced Paramount Pictures to fund "Star Trek: The Motion Picture".
Without "Star Wars", would "Star Trek: TMP" have been possible?
By the way, "Star Wars" is not really about science fiction. Science fiction is about belief in technology. Yet, when Luke Skywalker approached the rubicon in his ill-fated life, he faced a choice between technology (using a computer to guide 2 missiles into the Death Star's exhaust) and faith (using his belief in the power of good to guide the 2 missiles). He turned off the computer and followed his faith.
"Star Wars" is a knights' and princess' tale shrowded with buzz words from science fiction. The fundamental story is about the greater battle of good versus evil. In this life, evil seems to win too often, so we are enthralled by a movie that says, "Sometimes. Just sometimes. Good wins."
Why should the behavior of the Republicans surprise anyone? They do not care about the average American. Ditto for Democrats.
[The following is worth repeating and is comments that I
submitted in another thread of discussion.]
Any high-tech job that can be outsourced will be outsourced.
You will see a continuous shrinking of the high-tech labor
force.
Both political parties claim that free markets
require the free exchange of goods and services (which
includes labor) between the USA and other members of
the World Trade Organization (WTO) and fusing the American
market with the Chinese/Indian/Mexican market maintains
the free market in the USA. Unfortunately,
the politicians are just playing a verbal game with
economics.
Allow me to explain. The USA, in isolation, is a relatively free market
-- with relatively little government intervention (compare to, say,
China).
So is Japan, Canada, and the rest of the West. However,
Mexico, China, and India are not free markets. Excessive
government intervention has damaged the markets in those
economies, and they cannot provide jobs for millions
of underemployed persons.
When the USA interacts with, say, China, we have the interaction
of a free market and a non-free market. The by-product (i.e.
millions of underemployed Chinese) of non-market forces now affects
the market dynamics in the USA. The underemployed Chinese
are a continuing stream of cheap slave labor; jobs are then
transferred from the USA to China.
The USA is no longer a free market because non-market forces
(in this case, Chinese government intervention) is altering
the dynamics of the labor market in the USA. The verbal
game that politicians play is to simply define the USA
to be a "free market",
ignoring the fact that the Chinese government is now grossly
affecting the labor market of the USA.
Similar comments apply to both India and Mexico.
Similar comments
apply to H-1B workers and illegal aliens from Mexico: the American
government has, in effect, actively used H-1B workers
and illegal aliens to intervene in the labor markets in both
high tech and low tech. Illegal aliens have destroyed the upward
pressure on wages in the market for unskilled labor. H-1B have
hurt salaries for engineers. Shortages are a normal part of any
labor market, and they are an upward force on salaries/wages and
working conditions. When the government actively works to wipe out
such shortages in the low-tech market and the high-tech market,
the government is damaging market forces.
If you hate what is happening to our country, the USA, then
please write the following on the November ballot.
The best politician for information technology or the rest of the economy is a politician who supports genuine free markets. A free market is one where market forces are allowed to operate normally except for certain caveats: government intervention to protect the environment, worker's rights, etc.
Note that when we combine a free market like the USA and a non-free market like Mexico, we damage the free market in the USA. For example, the influx of illegal aliens is created by horrible intervention by the Mexican government in the Mexican economy. This influx then destroys the normal market forces in the labor market for unskilled labor in the USA. Ultimately, the USA no longer has a free market.
Note that before the influx of illegal aliens, the free market worked fine in the USA. Unskilled laborers earned enough money to support their families.
Similar comments apply to H-1B workers from India, China (which includes Taiwan province and Hong Kong), etc. They destroy the normal market forces in the market for high-tech labor.
Supporting free markets means that the USA engages in trade (which includes the exchange of labor like engineers, farmers, vegetable pickers, etc.) only with other free markets like that in Canada, Europe, Japan, etc. Supporting free markets means that we defend the border against the influx of illegal aliens and canceling the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Supporting free markets means that H-1B engineers from Europe, Japan, and Canada are allowed into the USA. H-1B engineers from India and China are banned.
Supporting free markets means that we terminate unfettered trade with China and India until both societies commit to free market principles. They go hand in hand with democracy. Note the presence of Chinese soldiers in Tibet, and the large number of Taiwanese who have spied for Beijing.
If you hate what is happening to our nation, the USA, then please write the following on the November ballot.
It really should be straight forward and have low costs especially as the technology is steadily reaching commodity status.
For India, $88 million is high cost. India has many hungry, suffering kids. $88 million could feed a lot of kids.
That Indians would waste $88 million on a space adventure while Indian kids are malnourished speaks volumes about the inferiority of Indian culture. Consider also the skewed ratio of male babies to female babies in India. In 1998, the ratio was 1.11. It has risen to 1.20 in 2004. The normal ratio is 1.05, which is exhibited by Western nations like Japan, Canada, the USA, etc.
According to a recent study, 36% of Japan's electricity comes from nuclear power plants. 13% of America's electricity comes from nuclear power plants.
If you look closely at the study, you note that North Americans derive only a small percentage of their electricity from nuclear power plants. The Canadians and the Mexicans have an even lower percentage than we do.
Greg's rebuttal to Eric Shrock is airtight and rock solid except for the following statement.
Tell us why we really need to add this new feature to the kernel, and ensure us that you will stick around to maintain it over time.
There really is no way to "ensure" the support of the developer. She has not signed a legally binding contract and could jump ship to the evil empire: Micro$oft.
Therein lies the only potential risk with open source software without the backing of a stable commercial company. The software relies on the goodwill of the developers. How do you ensure "goodwill"?
Therein also lies the reason for Linux exploding in popularity after IBM publically backed it with $1 billion. If any developer were to jump ship and abandon a Linux feature that she developed, allowing it to flounder like a beached whale, IBM would step into the picture and "own" the feature. Under no circumstances would IBM allow its own customers to suffer anything "worse" than 6 sigma reliability.
Please read fascinating information about how nuclear energy is clean and safe and could drastically reduce our dependency on the oil from the Arabs. Unfortunately, we Americans have not built any nuclear plants since the 1970s.
So, this new way of processing nuclear waste will benefit all other Western nations besides the USA.
The USA is a great nation, and it is built by kind-hearted people with good values even though they have only an average intellect in areas of science. This average intellect is being manipulated by science frauds who claim that nuclear enery is a disaster waiting to happen. Most of Japan's electricity is generate by nuclear power plants.
Open source can work with closed standards under 1 caveat: the open-source programmers may need to rename a variant on the closed standards.
The situation is analogous to building a chip that runs an instruction set architecture (ISA) owned by a competitor. The ISA is a closed standard in the sense that the company owning the ISA has trademarked its name. For example, MIPS technology trademarked the name "MIPS". A competitor, Lexra, then implemented a subset of the MIPS ISA, omitting 2 instructions. Lexra said that its chip is MIPS ISA compatible. MIPS sued and won. If Lexra had, instead, labeled its chip "MIPS ISA flavored", not "MIPS ISA compatible", then there would be no legal problems.
Another good analogy is Microsoft incorporating the Java runtime environment in its browser. The environment was not fully compatible with Sun's closed-standard for the Java runtime environment. Sun sued and won. If Microsoft had claimed that the browser was equipped with a "Java flavored runtime environment" or "JavaPlus[tm] runtime environment" (and trademarked "JavaPlus"), then there would be no legal problems.
I do not see a problem here.
Open source is now a credible movement. The open-source development lab (OSDL) and the free software foundation (FSF) have sufficient clout that if any team of talented programmers created a language called "JavaPlus", derived from and mostly (but not entirely) compatible with the closed-standard Java, there is the strong likelihood that JavaPlus would come to dominate the market for Java. Then, Sun would need to kiss OSDL's or FSF's ass. Sun would be forced to alter the Java standard to make it compatible with JavaPlus.
I had a similar problem. The response to my pressing my keyboard keys was unusually slow. Then, I downloaded some spyware eradication software from CNET. It eradicated some spyware with which a visit to a porn site had inadvertently infected my computer.
Everything is normal now.
The problem with the victim's computer is not a bad display driver. The problem is spyware or a virus.
My advice is to stop visiting those porn sites unless "Playboy Magazine" has certified them.
Monitering the elections is good news for honest people like Michael Savage, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, etc.
Today, the local radio station aired "The Best of Sean Hannity". Sean Hannity repeatedly demanded to know why Jamal, an African-American, created an anti-Bush ad that accuses Republicans of disenfranchising Black voters in Florida 2000. Hannity challenged Jamal to name one Black voter who was disenfranchised. Jamal could not do so despite his race-baiting commercial.
Allowing the Europeans to moniter the elections will ensure that we prove Jamal and his ilk to be liars. I applaud the Europeans helping us out.
If you hate what is happening to our nation, the USA, then please write the following on the November ballot.
For the uninformed, I note that Intel grades its employees on a bell curve each quarter. Any employee who falls in the bottom 25% for two consecutive quarters "qualifies" to be fired. During an economic recession, the employee is automatically fired. When there is a labor shortage, the employee is given a stern warning.
My information comes from a managing director at Intel.
Suppose that a person is so indifferent to current events that she never votes. If someone then compelled her to vote, her vote would be an uninformed vote. Her vote would be no different than a vote that is cast by flipping a coin for the best candidate.
How can this kind of vote possibly advance democracy?
Let's do an analysis of the reliability of space flight. We can draw a lesson from how Boeing budgets for testing its aircraft. Suppose that a passenger jet seats 300 people. Boeing figures that each person is worth $10 million. So, Boeing then budgets $3 billion to verify that the design of the jet is reliable enough to ensure safe delivery of the passengers. Note that this safety-testing budget is over and above what is spent just to verify that the jet "runs".
You may be shocked by what I just described, but this information comes from a "60 Minutes" interview with Boeing management. The interview was aired several years ago. Boeing management figures that spending more than the value of the payload (i.e. passengers) to test the safety of the jet is a waste of money.
One thing that almost leaps out at you is that a small jet seating only 3 people are substantially less reliable than a huge passenger jet.
Now, consider a manned rocket to Mars. It would carry, at most, 5 people. It warrants a testing/verification budget of $50 million.
That rocket sounds very risky to me.
Flying Car: Completely Impractical
on
NYT On Flying Cars
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Let's tally what we have seen on Slashdot in the last week.
#1 and #3 tickle the fanciful mind, but only #2 is practical.
Even if we could build a flying car economically, how would we regulate it? Imagine everyone replacing their regular car with a flying car. How could we draw the "lanes" in air? Who has the right of way? What is the speed limit?
The flying car would likely be a hazard as all sorts of nuts zip zag across the atmosphere, crashing into each other and killing each other in head-on collisions.
If the theater in Seattle conducted a parody by using its own set of actors, then there should not be a problem. However, the theater is actually using the original film without paying Lucas any royalties.
Lucas' response is understandable. Pirates copied both "Star Wars I" and "Star Wars II". Bootlegged copies were on sale in China (which includes Taiwan province and Hong Kong) before even the official debut in American theaters. Lucas, his employees, and all the actors/actresses lost billions of dollars to piracy.
Personally, I have met Chinese who regularly purchase pirated computer software, music, and movies. They literally laugh at Lucas and his employees.
Notice the lack of outrage by Chinese immigrants in the USA.
Now, read an interesting article published by CNN. Toward the end of the article, you will see the results of a CNN/Time poll conducted in 1997. 50% of the Chinese in Hong Kong prefered social order over democracy. 60% enthusiastically supported the handover of Hong Kong to Beijing.
Further, if you are enrolled at an American university, note that the Chinese are underrepresented at meetings of Amnesty International although they are overrepresented in engineering classes.
Google will not change its atrocious practice of supporting Beijing -- because the Chinese, in general, simply do not care about freedom of speech, democracy, and other Western values.
Both the USA and Japan had "remote" towns in early 1900s. There was neither satellite nor television for broadcasting educational material to the kids in the "remote" towns. There was just old-fashioned books.
Yet, the Americans and the Japanese achieved high educational attainment. Both the USA and Japan eventually became 1st class Western nations.
What is the problem with India?
Up until 1970, Japan was low tech. Yet, it was still a much better place to live than today's high-tech India.
What is the problem with India?
The problem must be the culture of India. Indians act and think in a way which is not conducive to creating a modern society. All the hi-tech in the world will not create a modern society in India. Note that the ratio of male-to-female babies in Indian is 1.20. This ratio is tied directly to the culture.
Look at impoverished Vietnam. Its ratio is 1.05, which is normal.
At 6 GHz, the only applications that can show appreciable performance improvement are CPU-bound ones. Hence, a program that sits entirely in the on-chip cache will show significant improvement. An example of such a program is the one calculating the value of pi.
Memory-bound applications will not show significant improvement. At 6 GHz, most applications become memory bound since memory becomes extremely slow in responding to the 6 GHz processor.
Has anyone liquid cooled the G5 and the Opteron driven them to 6 GHz? I bet that the G5 could crush the Pentium in performance since the G5 has a powerful floating point unit.
let's see now if you can develop the world's cheapest car;)
Let's not be cynical. This BMW vehicle is a significant accomplishment. It shows that a high-performance vehicle running solely on hydrogen can be built.
Now, let's just entice Honda to apply Japanese manufacturing technologies to reduce the cost of the vehicle by a factor of 1000. Please remember that the Americans invented the videotape recorder (VR), and it started out at more than $10,000 per unit. Then, Japanese companies took it and shrank the price to $50, the current price.
We should applaud this German accomplishment in automotive engineering. The BMW vehicle is certainly more amazing than the ridiculous solar-powered vehicle, which will "never" be practical. Yet, solar-powered vehicles seem to entice more interest than hydrogen-powered vehicles.
There is no need to worry. We could easily alter the path of an
asteroid if it ever were on a collision course with earth. We
have 2 courses of action.
1. Just load
an ICBM with gallons of white paint and smash the missile onto
the asteroid. (This method works for small asteroids.) The light from the sun will push the newly painted asteroid onto a different flight path.
2. Load an ICBM with a hydrogen bomb. Smash the missile into the
asteroid.
A quick scan of the report indicates that the F-word (i.e. FORTRAN) cannot be found. We are finally ridding ourselves of this albatross.
Don't get me wrong. I program in FORTRAN for a living, but I have compared it to C and Java. FORTRAN is an ugly language. It fosters the same disgust that x86 assembly code would foster if we lacked compilers and were forced to program in it on a routine basis. FORTRAN is just a bunch of mishmash that has grown to include every interesting feature that catches the fancy of programmers. The current definition of FORTRAN even includes pointers!
Do not forget the Apple G5 Macintoshes. They qualify as "high-end workstations".
Anyone who benchmarks the dual-Opteron workstations should include performance numbers for the G5 Macintoshes in the final report. Of course, run both systems with Linux.
Benchmarks in isolation do not mean much. If we benchmarked an Opteron but never compared it to its peer, the Pentium IV-64, then the benchmarks would lack credibility. We would also question the motive of the person doing the benchmark.
This liquid has immediate application in the construction of skyscrapers. Consider building a 100-floor building. We pair each solid steel beam with a hollow steel beam. We fill each hollow beam with this unique liquid.
Now consider the following scenario. A raging fire occurs on the 70th floor. Normally, such a fire would threaten the top 30 floors if the fire were sufficiently hot. The top 30 floors could collapse into the 70th floor since the heat of the fire has weakened the supporting beams of the 70th floor.
With liquid-reinforced steel beams, they should retain their supporting strength. The top 30 floors would be safe.
If we had constructed the World Towers in New York City in this fashion, then they would not have collapsed on 2001 September 11.
Analysis of Outsourcing, H-1Bs, and Illegal Aliens
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 0
[The following is worth repeating and is comments that I
submitted in another thread of discussion.]
Any high-tech job that can be outsourced will be outsourced.
You will see a continuous shrinking of the high-tech labor
force.
Both political parties claim that free markets
require the free exchange of goods and services (which
includes labor) between the USA and other members of
the World Trade Organization (WTO) and fusing the American
market with the Chinese/Indian/Mexican market maintains
the free market in the USA. Unfortunately,
the politicians are just playing a verbal game with
economics.
Allow me to explain. The USA, in isolation, is a relatively free market
-- with relatively little government intervention (compare to, say,
China).
So is Japan, Canada, and the rest of the West. However,
Mexico, China, and India are not free markets. Excessive
government intervention has damaged the markets in those
economies, and they cannot provide jobs for millions
of underemployed persons.
When the USA interacts with, say, China, we have the interaction
of a free market and a non-free market. The by-product (i.e.
millions of underemployed Chinese) of non-market forces now affects
the market dynamics in the USA. The underemployed Chinese
are a continuing stream of cheap slave labor; jobs are then
transferred from the USA to China.
The USA is no longer a free market because non-market forces
(in this case, Chinese government intervention) is altering
the dynamics of the labor market in the USA. The verbal
game that politicians play is to simply define the USA
to be a "free market",
ignoring the fact that the Chinese government is now grossly
affecting the labor market of the USA.
Similar comments apply to both India and Mexico.
Similar comments
apply to H-1B workers and illegal aliens from Mexico: the American
government has, in effect, actively used H-1B workers
and illegal aliens to intervene in the labor markets in both
high tech and low tech. Illegal aliens have destroyed the upward
pressure on wages in the market for unskilled labor. H-1B have
hurt salaries for engineers. Shortages are a normal part of any
labor market, and they are an upward force on salaries/wages and
working conditions. When the government actively works to wipe out
such shortages in the low-tech market and the high-tech market,
the government is damaging market forces.
If you hate what is happening to our country, the USA, then
please write the following on the November ballot.
The reality is that solar-powered transportation is totally impractical. Its sole purpose is to provide interesting material for the basis of a graduate disseration at the university.
If you really want to change the world, devise an efficient hydrogen-powered fuel cell. That would be practical and would change the automotive industrial and the dynamics of geopolitics. In one fell sweep, the hydogren cell would (1) clean the environment, (2) end American dependence on the Middle East, and (3) spark a renaissance in automotive engineering.
The Arabs could kill each other, and we could sit idly by, feeling smug in the fact that our economy is no longer based on oil.
Slashdot Mirror
Then, Gene Roddenberry saw his opportunity to resurrect Star Trek. Despite the fact that he used the same terrible actors and actresses, he convinced Paramount Pictures to fund "Star Trek: The Motion Picture".
Without "Star Wars", would "Star Trek: TMP" have been possible?
By the way, "Star Wars" is not really about science fiction. Science fiction is about belief in technology. Yet, when Luke Skywalker approached the rubicon in his ill-fated life, he faced a choice between technology (using a computer to guide 2 missiles into the Death Star's exhaust) and faith (using his belief in the power of good to guide the 2 missiles). He turned off the computer and followed his faith.
"Star Wars" is a knights' and princess' tale shrowded with buzz words from science fiction. The fundamental story is about the greater battle of good versus evil. In this life, evil seems to win too often, so we are enthralled by a movie that says, "Sometimes. Just sometimes. Good wins."
[The following is worth repeating and is comments that I submitted in another thread of discussion.]
Any high-tech job that can be outsourced will be outsourced. You will see a continuous shrinking of the high-tech labor force.
Both political parties claim that free markets require the free exchange of goods and services (which includes labor) between the USA and other members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and fusing the American market with the Chinese/Indian/Mexican market maintains the free market in the USA. Unfortunately, the politicians are just playing a verbal game with economics.
Allow me to explain. The USA, in isolation, is a relatively free market -- with relatively little government intervention (compare to, say, China). So is Japan, Canada, and the rest of the West. However, Mexico, China, and India are not free markets. Excessive government intervention has damaged the markets in those economies, and they cannot provide jobs for millions of underemployed persons.
When the USA interacts with, say, China, we have the interaction of a free market and a non-free market. The by-product (i.e. millions of underemployed Chinese) of non-market forces now affects the market dynamics in the USA. The underemployed Chinese are a continuing stream of cheap slave labor; jobs are then transferred from the USA to China.
The USA is no longer a free market because non-market forces (in this case, Chinese government intervention) is altering the dynamics of the labor market in the USA. The verbal game that politicians play is to simply define the USA to be a "free market", ignoring the fact that the Chinese government is now grossly affecting the labor market of the USA.
Similar comments apply to both India and Mexico.
Similar comments apply to H-1B workers and illegal aliens from Mexico: the American government has, in effect, actively used H-1B workers and illegal aliens to intervene in the labor markets in both high tech and low tech. Illegal aliens have destroyed the upward pressure on wages in the market for unskilled labor. H-1B have hurt salaries for engineers. Shortages are a normal part of any labor market, and they are an upward force on salaries/wages and working conditions. When the government actively works to wipe out such shortages in the low-tech market and the high-tech market, the government is damaging market forces.
If you hate what is happening to our country, the USA, then please write the following on the November ballot.
president: Bill O'Reilly
vice-president: Tammy Bruce
Note that when we combine a free market like the USA and a non-free market like Mexico, we damage the free market in the USA. For example, the influx of illegal aliens is created by horrible intervention by the Mexican government in the Mexican economy. This influx then destroys the normal market forces in the labor market for unskilled labor in the USA. Ultimately, the USA no longer has a free market.
Note that before the influx of illegal aliens, the free market worked fine in the USA. Unskilled laborers earned enough money to support their families.
Similar comments apply to H-1B workers from India, China (which includes Taiwan province and Hong Kong), etc. They destroy the normal market forces in the market for high-tech labor.
Supporting free markets means that the USA engages in trade (which includes the exchange of labor like engineers, farmers, vegetable pickers, etc.) only with other free markets like that in Canada, Europe, Japan, etc. Supporting free markets means that we defend the border against the influx of illegal aliens and canceling the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Supporting free markets means that H-1B engineers from Europe, Japan, and Canada are allowed into the USA. H-1B engineers from India and China are banned.
Supporting free markets means that we terminate unfettered trade with China and India until both societies commit to free market principles. They go hand in hand with democracy. Note the presence of Chinese soldiers in Tibet, and the large number of Taiwanese who have spied for Beijing.
If you hate what is happening to our nation, the USA, then please write the following on the November ballot.
president: Bill O'Reilly
vice-president: Tammy Bruce
For India, $88 million is high cost. India has many hungry, suffering kids. $88 million could feed a lot of kids.
That Indians would waste $88 million on a space adventure while Indian kids are malnourished speaks volumes about the inferiority of Indian culture. Consider also the skewed ratio of male babies to female babies in India. In 1998, the ratio was 1.11. It has risen to 1.20 in 2004. The normal ratio is 1.05, which is exhibited by Western nations like Japan, Canada, the USA, etc.
According to a recent study, 36% of Japan's electricity comes from nuclear power plants. 13% of America's electricity comes from nuclear power plants.
If you look closely at the study, you note that North Americans derive only a small percentage of their electricity from nuclear power plants. The Canadians and the Mexicans have an even lower percentage than we do.
Tell us why we really need to add this new feature to the kernel, and ensure us that you will stick around to maintain it over time.
There really is no way to "ensure" the support of the developer. She has not signed a legally binding contract and could jump ship to the evil empire: Micro$oft.
Therein lies the only potential risk with open source software without the backing of a stable commercial company. The software relies on the goodwill of the developers. How do you ensure "goodwill"?
Therein also lies the reason for Linux exploding in popularity after IBM publically backed it with $1 billion. If any developer were to jump ship and abandon a Linux feature that she developed, allowing it to flounder like a beached whale, IBM would step into the picture and "own" the feature. Under no circumstances would IBM allow its own customers to suffer anything "worse" than 6 sigma reliability.
So, this new way of processing nuclear waste will benefit all other Western nations besides the USA.
The USA is a great nation, and it is built by kind-hearted people with good values even though they have only an average intellect in areas of science. This average intellect is being manipulated by science frauds who claim that nuclear enery is a disaster waiting to happen. Most of Japan's electricity is generate by nuclear power plants.
The situation is analogous to building a chip that runs an instruction set architecture (ISA) owned by a competitor. The ISA is a closed standard in the sense that the company owning the ISA has trademarked its name. For example, MIPS technology trademarked the name "MIPS". A competitor, Lexra, then implemented a subset of the MIPS ISA, omitting 2 instructions. Lexra said that its chip is MIPS ISA compatible. MIPS sued and won. If Lexra had, instead, labeled its chip "MIPS ISA flavored", not "MIPS ISA compatible", then there would be no legal problems.
Another good analogy is Microsoft incorporating the Java runtime environment in its browser. The environment was not fully compatible with Sun's closed-standard for the Java runtime environment. Sun sued and won. If Microsoft had claimed that the browser was equipped with a "Java flavored runtime environment" or "JavaPlus[tm] runtime environment" (and trademarked "JavaPlus"), then there would be no legal problems.
I do not see a problem here.
Open source is now a credible movement. The open-source development lab (OSDL) and the free software foundation (FSF) have sufficient clout that if any team of talented programmers created a language called "JavaPlus", derived from and mostly (but not entirely) compatible with the closed-standard Java, there is the strong likelihood that JavaPlus would come to dominate the market for Java. Then, Sun would need to kiss OSDL's or FSF's ass. Sun would be forced to alter the Java standard to make it compatible with JavaPlus.
Sweet. Sweet revenge.
Everything is normal now.
The problem with the victim's computer is not a bad display driver. The problem is spyware or a virus.
My advice is to stop visiting those porn sites unless "Playboy Magazine" has certified them.
Today, the local radio station aired "The Best of Sean Hannity". Sean Hannity repeatedly demanded to know why Jamal, an African-American, created an anti-Bush ad that accuses Republicans of disenfranchising Black voters in Florida 2000. Hannity challenged Jamal to name one Black voter who was disenfranchised. Jamal could not do so despite his race-baiting commercial.
Allowing the Europeans to moniter the elections will ensure that we prove Jamal and his ilk to be liars. I applaud the Europeans helping us out.
If you hate what is happening to our nation, the USA, then please write the following on the November ballot.
president: Bill O'Reilly
vice-president: Tammy Bruce
For the uninformed, I note that Intel grades its employees on a bell curve each quarter. Any employee who falls in the bottom 25% for two consecutive quarters "qualifies" to be fired. During an economic recession, the employee is automatically fired. When there is a labor shortage, the employee is given a stern warning.
My information comes from a managing director at Intel.
How can this kind of vote possibly advance democracy?
You may be shocked by what I just described, but this information comes from a "60 Minutes" interview with Boeing management. The interview was aired several years ago. Boeing management figures that spending more than the value of the payload (i.e. passengers) to test the safety of the jet is a waste of money.
One thing that almost leaps out at you is that a small jet seating only 3 people are substantially less reliable than a huge passenger jet.
Now, consider a manned rocket to Mars. It would carry, at most, 5 people. It warrants a testing/verification budget of $50 million.
That rocket sounds very risky to me.
#1 and #3 tickle the fanciful mind, but only #2 is practical.
Even if we could build a flying car economically, how would we regulate it? Imagine everyone replacing their regular car with a flying car. How could we draw the "lanes" in air? Who has the right of way? What is the speed limit?
The flying car would likely be a hazard as all sorts of nuts zip zag across the atmosphere, crashing into each other and killing each other in head-on collisions.
Lucas' response is understandable. Pirates copied both "Star Wars I" and "Star Wars II". Bootlegged copies were on sale in China (which includes Taiwan province and Hong Kong) before even the official debut in American theaters. Lucas, his employees, and all the actors/actresses lost billions of dollars to piracy.
Personally, I have met Chinese who regularly purchase pirated computer software, music, and movies. They literally laugh at Lucas and his employees.
Now, read an interesting article published by CNN. Toward the end of the article, you will see the results of a CNN/Time poll conducted in 1997. 50% of the Chinese in Hong Kong prefered social order over democracy. 60% enthusiastically supported the handover of Hong Kong to Beijing.
Further, if you are enrolled at an American university, note that the Chinese are underrepresented at meetings of Amnesty International although they are overrepresented in engineering classes.
Google will not change its atrocious practice of supporting Beijing -- because the Chinese, in general, simply do not care about freedom of speech, democracy, and other Western values.
Yet, the Americans and the Japanese achieved high educational attainment. Both the USA and Japan eventually became 1st class Western nations.
What is the problem with India?
Up until 1970, Japan was low tech. Yet, it was still a much better place to live than today's high-tech India.
What is the problem with India?
The problem must be the culture of India. Indians act and think in a way which is not conducive to creating a modern society. All the hi-tech in the world will not create a modern society in India. Note that the ratio of male-to-female babies in Indian is 1.20. This ratio is tied directly to the culture.
Look at impoverished Vietnam. Its ratio is 1.05, which is normal.
Memory-bound applications will not show significant improvement. At 6 GHz, most applications become memory bound since memory becomes extremely slow in responding to the 6 GHz processor.
Has anyone liquid cooled the G5 and the Opteron driven them to 6 GHz? I bet that the G5 could crush the Pentium in performance since the G5 has a powerful floating point unit.
Let's not be cynical. This BMW vehicle is a significant accomplishment. It shows that a high-performance vehicle running solely on hydrogen can be built.
Now, let's just entice Honda to apply Japanese manufacturing technologies to reduce the cost of the vehicle by a factor of 1000. Please remember that the Americans invented the videotape recorder (VR), and it started out at more than $10,000 per unit. Then, Japanese companies took it and shrank the price to $50, the current price.
We should applaud this German accomplishment in automotive engineering. The BMW vehicle is certainly more amazing than the ridiculous solar-powered vehicle, which will "never" be practical. Yet, solar-powered vehicles seem to entice more interest than hydrogen-powered vehicles.
Go Deutschland!
1. Just load an ICBM with gallons of white paint and smash the missile onto the asteroid. (This method works for small asteroids.) The light from the sun will push the newly painted asteroid onto a different flight path.
2. Load an ICBM with a hydrogen bomb. Smash the missile into the asteroid.
All is well.
Don't get me wrong. I program in FORTRAN for a living, but I have compared it to C and Java. FORTRAN is an ugly language. It fosters the same disgust that x86 assembly code would foster if we lacked compilers and were forced to program in it on a routine basis. FORTRAN is just a bunch of mishmash that has grown to include every interesting feature that catches the fancy of programmers. The current definition of FORTRAN even includes pointers!
Anyone who benchmarks the dual-Opteron workstations should include performance numbers for the G5 Macintoshes in the final report. Of course, run both systems with Linux.
Benchmarks in isolation do not mean much. If we benchmarked an Opteron but never compared it to its peer, the Pentium IV-64, then the benchmarks would lack credibility. We would also question the motive of the person doing the benchmark.
Now consider the following scenario. A raging fire occurs on the 70th floor. Normally, such a fire would threaten the top 30 floors if the fire were sufficiently hot. The top 30 floors could collapse into the 70th floor since the heat of the fire has weakened the supporting beams of the 70th floor.
With liquid-reinforced steel beams, they should retain their supporting strength. The top 30 floors would be safe.
If we had constructed the World Towers in New York City in this fashion, then they would not have collapsed on 2001 September 11.
Any high-tech job that can be outsourced will be outsourced. You will see a continuous shrinking of the high-tech labor force.
Both political parties claim that free markets require the free exchange of goods and services (which includes labor) between the USA and other members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and fusing the American market with the Chinese/Indian/Mexican market maintains the free market in the USA. Unfortunately, the politicians are just playing a verbal game with economics.
Allow me to explain. The USA, in isolation, is a relatively free market -- with relatively little government intervention (compare to, say, China). So is Japan, Canada, and the rest of the West. However, Mexico, China, and India are not free markets. Excessive government intervention has damaged the markets in those economies, and they cannot provide jobs for millions of underemployed persons.
When the USA interacts with, say, China, we have the interaction of a free market and a non-free market. The by-product (i.e. millions of underemployed Chinese) of non-market forces now affects the market dynamics in the USA. The underemployed Chinese are a continuing stream of cheap slave labor; jobs are then transferred from the USA to China.
The USA is no longer a free market because non-market forces (in this case, Chinese government intervention) is altering the dynamics of the labor market in the USA. The verbal game that politicians play is to simply define the USA to be a "free market", ignoring the fact that the Chinese government is now grossly affecting the labor market of the USA.
Similar comments apply to both India and Mexico.
Similar comments apply to H-1B workers and illegal aliens from Mexico: the American government has, in effect, actively used H-1B workers and illegal aliens to intervene in the labor markets in both high tech and low tech. Illegal aliens have destroyed the upward pressure on wages in the market for unskilled labor. H-1B have hurt salaries for engineers. Shortages are a normal part of any labor market, and they are an upward force on salaries/wages and working conditions. When the government actively works to wipe out such shortages in the low-tech market and the high-tech market, the government is damaging market forces.
If you hate what is happening to our country, the USA, then please write the following on the November ballot.
president: Bill O'Reilly
vice-president: Tammy Bruce
If you really want to change the world, devise an efficient hydrogen-powered fuel cell. That would be practical and would change the automotive industrial and the dynamics of geopolitics. In one fell sweep, the hydogren cell would (1) clean the environment, (2) end American dependence on the Middle East, and (3) spark a renaissance in automotive engineering.
The Arabs could kill each other, and we could sit idly by, feeling smug in the fact that our economy is no longer based on oil.