America WILL attack weak, emaciated Iraq, because modern China has done the same thing to Tibet.
Because China captures a militarily insignificant country, the US needs to invade Iraq? Come on, the Bush administration's justification was a lot better than that, even if their conformance to international law was questionable.
Notice that the british and the dutch never fought each other directly in this exchange. instead they captured the weaker, easier targets to build their empires and thereby make the idea of a direct war between empires unthinkable.
It seems to have escaped your notice that this is the 21st century, not the 19th century. Empire building and striving for world domination are frowned upon.
So ask youself, do you want Earth to be like Modern America or Tibet? What's in your best interests?
Yes, that attitude is the problem: "the rest of the world be damned as long as we are wealthy and safe".
it amazes me how people can blame TV for serious socital problems, it's completely naive and borders on the abusrd
No, what is "naive and absurd" is to believe that people can watch something as graphic and emotional as television for (on average) hours a day and not be profoundly affected by it. And corporate America disagrees with your view as well, otherwise they wouldn't be spending billions on television advertising every year.
A lot of current television sets political agendas, it instills irrational fear for political purposes, it causes people to overeat and overconsume, and it glorifies violence and casual sex. And campaigns like anti-smoking commercials show that even a little bit of positive television can have a big impact. Improve television further and you will reduce many social ills.
So, let's say the US cuts off the H1B visa program. What will happen? US companies have to hire scarce US workers at higher pay. Will they do that? No way. They'll outsource even more jobs to where those skilled H1B workers come from. The end result? Even more jobs that move overseas and a loss of tax revenues. Do you have any more brilliant ideas?
he National Debt has continued to increase an average of $1.47 billion per day since September 30, 2002! The Fix? I don't know. Welcome to Globaliziation.
How exactly is globalization responsible for Americans living beyond their means? Furthermore, the US has been the strongest proponent of globalization; most other nations, in particular developing nations, didn't and don't want it.
Whatever the economic and political woes of America are, they are home-made; nobody else has made decisions for America.
However, there is a difference between defense and total world domination. I think the US has crossed the line. And Europeans didn't need to colonize the world in order to defend themselves--with the technology and science they already had, they could have defended themselves splendidly against any other civilization on the planet.
No, but our world culture would have been richer if Native Americans had been permitted to develop beyond human sacrifice and theocracies at their own pace, just like Europeans and Chinese did.
And I certainly don't think that China, or the world for that matter, would have been better off if China had had a marauding navy, as the parent article suggested.
I don't see anything "paranoid" about this, nor do I have immediate fears of what would happen if the US put nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons into space. This isn't some grand, evil master plan, it's simple, straightforward thinking for an administration and a nation that is completely convinced that it can do no wrong, that the more power it has the better off the rest of the world is, and that it will always remain powerful and democratic.
The administration almost certainly views the misgivings of other nations of US space-based military programs, whether nuclear or otherwise, merely as a public relations problem, and strengthening civilian use of nuclear power in space is a way around that.
The sad thing about the fork in this story leading to crap like this is that people politicize scientific endeavors
What's there to politicize? Science is power, and that makes it a key part of politics. Space exploration isn't some innocent, other-worldly endeavor, it's been part of the power game since day one. And putting fission and fusion reactors into space is definitely a political issue.
All countries "are". They are not good. They are not evil. They are all unilateralist whenever they can afford to be.
You are quite right. But the solution to that problem is not to roll over and let the US do whatever it damned well pleases, the solution to that problem is to make sure that the US can't afford to act unilaterally anymore either. Europe and Asia could achieve that by an arms race with the US, but it seems that US economic dependence on Europe and Asia provides a more powerful and peaceful lever by which to force the US to disarm and back down.
Also, I always find it interesting that minority opinions can seem far more important because it tends to be the vocal minority that is best able to manipulate reality to appear correct. [...] Giant anti-war demonstrations, public opinion polls and the behavior of key powers seem to confirm this view, but the reality is actually much more complicated -- and very different. The majority of European governments support the United States on the Iraq issue.
Yeah, you are right, I suppose: in US-style democracy, overwhelming public opinion doesn't matter, all that matters is how many tiny foreign governments the US can bully into giving verbal support to US policies. Sure, for your American sense of democracy, that may not matter. But to the rest of the world, "majority" and "minority" are defined in terms of people.
They go on to say many countries in Europe, particularly less developed ones, need the US to move forward at a reasonable pace. Germany and France can afford to play politics. For others, it's about their next meal.
Your arrogance and ignorance is astounding. You seem to really believe that the US is like some shining economic beacon to the rest of the world, preventing starvation in developing nations around the world. Get a clue. US foreign aid is laughable and self-serving. The US has huge foreign debts, an enormous trade imbalance, and a huge budget deficit. Without a stead stream of money (and know-how) coming into the US from Europe and Japan, the US economy would fall apart and the US military couldn't be financed. For both security and economic development, the US is insignificant to the nations of Eastern Europe. And for all their economic and social problems, Eastern Europeans aren't generally starving.
Seems to me that the problem is the programming, not television itself. Maybe instead of opening up television to everything, the country could have opened up selectively: educational programming, non-violent programming, etc.
If the US can prohibit nudity and profanity on television, it seems pretty reasonable that other countries might prohibit violence, greed, commercialism and consumerism, etc.
There are bacteria living in the "Dead Sea" as well (see here).
See also here for a discussion of bacteria living in salt-saturated solutions (the main discussion is about spore survival in salt inclusions--for about 250 million years!).
Hey, and maybe we will see people floating in Europa's oceans as well:-)
the chinese ming Emperor Zhu Di [berkeley.edu] built a massive navy which traded extensively in the pacific, reached africa and almost discovered america. When Emperor Zhu died, his sucessor was advised to lessen the tax burden of the navy, and burned all the ships. Result? Other more outward looking seafaring nations whipped them.
And, so, instead of centuries of relative stability and prosperity, China could have become the conqueror of the Americans, killed off its native population, instituted centuries of slavery, and raided its natural resources. How exactly is that better?
If you are going to talk about what might have been, I'd say it's a shame that America was discovered at all before its indigenous cultures had a chance to develop further on their own. It's sad to think about how much richer our world culture could have become if the major empires of the Americas had been allowed to become powerful and advanced nations on their own.
Unfortunately the enviroloonies, are so terrified of the word 'nuclear' that any project that has it attached will get protested into the ground...
The Bush administration and conservatives are terrified of the word "nuclear" as well--when it applies to any device not under US control.
The problem with nuclear power is not primarily the occasional accident, it's the deliberate use by nations and groups for war and terrorist acts. And, while it may not scare Americans to let the US military have access to fission and fusion devices in orbit, it should scare everybody else.
The Iraq war has proven that the US is unwilling to take into account the wishes of the international community and that the US will decide unilaterally global policy. It doesn't even matter whether the US decision was right in this case--monarchs and dictators also often make good decisions. All of that may seem fine to Americans, but the rest of the world wonders what is so democratic about having 300 million Americans make decisions for 6 billion non-Americans.
The real reason the US government is pushing for nuclear propulsion for civilian use is that it gives it a cover under which to explore putting other kinds of nuclear devices into orbits: nuclear-powered particle weapons, atom bombs, etc.
Right now, that's hard to do because there is no infrastructure for developing and deploying that kind of technology--anything combining nuclear power and space would have to be done in complete secrecy. But once there is a thriving civilian industry, nobody will notice if a little bit of that work is diverted for military purposes.
Because of its military implications, the US should not be permitted to do this unilaterally. If we ever get nuclear propulsion, the technology should be developed openly and any nation using it should be subject to tight international inspections and controls.
The market needs more diversity in terms of browsers and operating systems. If Mac users can't use the crutch of a browser that calls itself "IE" (but really is different from IE on Windows) anymore, then web site designers (many of whom are Mac users) may finally get the hint that they should write standards compliant HTML, not something that "works for most users".
I think Apple and Macintosh will not suffer from this. The Mac is about style, consistency, and appearance, and removal of IE will, if anything, improve the style of the Mac, since IE for Mac never quite fit in with the Mac UI.
I provided a link, so it's not like I was hiding anything. I simply fail to see much of a difference between the two Bush's to make such a distinction. The original Bush was less of a dope than the current Bush, but the current one makes up for that with a cabinet of brilliantly evil, right-wing characters.
Hardly. What he's saying there is (to expand a little), when code becomes too complicated, it becomes hard to understand, and thus people waste a lot of time trying (and often failing at first) to debug, evolve etc.
Why does code become too complicated in Java? Because the language was designed poorly and lacks good mechanisms for abstraction.
If Gosling were concerned with "complexity" or knew anything about how to manage it, he would have designed a better language. Jackpot is not a solution to Java's problems, it's a band-aid for a hacked-off limb.
You get cleaner, easier to maintain, and easier to debug code, and better multi-threaded scaling simply by avoiding J2EE and some of Sun's other libraries.
As for "merging apps", that's almost always a stupid idea to begin with. The parts of apps that were designed to be reusable should already be in identifiable libraries. The parts of apps that weren't designed to be reusable shouldn't be merged. If they do need to interact, have them communicate via IPC, RPC, DOs, or some database.
You can discuss your program on a whole other abstraction level. GREAT.
If you used a better programming language, you wouldn't need complicated tools to "discuss your program on a whole other abstraction level".
The stuff Gamma has been doing is the equivalent of "structured programming for assembly language programmers". It's a set of tricks to make programming in OOLs slightly less awful than it would be otherwise. It is certainly not a great advance in software engineering.
When you construct forwarding methods, they're different from the original methods. You can't just replace all uses of the forwarding method by uses of the moved method, because they actually behave slightly differently.
That sounds like a language design problem to me. The solution to that should be to fix the language, not to construct elaborate theorem provers and visual representations of the source code. Building tools to deal with a messy language will just mean that the language and software written in it will evolve to be so messy that nobody can deal with it by hand anymore at all.
But, hey, Gosling did all of this before: NeWS used a bad choice for a display server programming language, and when all was said and done, almost everybody just used the toolkit wrappers; the only effect of Postscript on the server was that the thing ran slow and was flaky.
Yes, and do you realize the significance of Gosling Emacs? It was its proprietary nature. Gosling Emacs was what finally got GNU Emacs off the ground as a successful open source Emacs implementation for UNIX systems.
Gosling has been hostile to open source from day one. He created NeWS and tried to kill off X11, and he was probably partially behind keeping Java proprietary.
This was all over the news when Bush (Sr.) said it in 1987. Perhaps you are a little too young to remember. Bush the younger wouldn't even be capable of making such a (relatively) articulate statement.
And you are kidding yourself if you think that those kinds of attitudes are at all unusual.
which are related to the three divine religions, which we all respect and believe in.'
Sadly, similar attitudes exist among US leaders; Here is a quote from Bush:
No, I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
The only thing that is holding back people like Bush is a strong legal tradition of separation of church and state. But give people like Bush, Ashcroft, and their fascist pseudo-Christian core constituency a bit more time, and they will change that.
Depends on the contract. IBM may have made guarantees to you, in which case they would be on the hook for damages if you can't use AIX anymore for one reason or another. Or your contract with IBM might say that they only license what they own and that if they don't own everything they think or thought they owned, that was your problem, not theirs. Both kinds of contracts exist.
However, those considerations are completely hypothetical. There is not a shred of evidence that SCO's allegations are true. SCO is just engaging in one big smear campaign.
If the European law isn't enforceable, either by treaty with the US or directly, nothing happens. However, it looks enforceable to me. Even virtual businesses with no physical presence have assets in Europe: copyrights, patents, payments in transit, etc. If they don't pay up, European courts can seize those.
But an online sale conducted through a server in California, from a shop e.g. in Washington and using a credit card company in New York does not take place in Europe. It is the customer who chooses to have the merchandise shipped to Europe who should be responsible for the taxes.
Euroepan governments are the democratically elected representatives of European customers. Therefore, European customers have chosen to have tax collection centralized.
As for when a government is justified to tax this way that's easy: whenever they can enforce it. In this case, European governments could easily stop most of the money for such purchases from making it back to the US.
Ah, and I thought the Europeans were (understandably) pretty pissed off when the US recently introduced extra steel tarriffs?
Apples and oranges. Tariffs, by definition, are unequal treatment of foreign companies vs. domestic companies. Imposing VAT collection on foreign companies equalizes the treatment.
Slashdot Mirror
America WILL attack weak, emaciated Iraq, because modern China has done the same thing to Tibet.
Because China captures a militarily insignificant country, the US needs to invade Iraq? Come on, the Bush administration's justification was a lot better than that, even if their conformance to international law was questionable.
Notice that the british and the dutch never fought each other directly in this exchange. instead they captured the weaker, easier targets to build their empires and thereby make the idea of a direct war between empires unthinkable.
It seems to have escaped your notice that this is the 21st century, not the 19th century. Empire building and striving for world domination are frowned upon.
So ask youself, do you want Earth to be like Modern America or Tibet? What's in your best interests?
Yes, that attitude is the problem: "the rest of the world be damned as long as we are wealthy and safe".
it amazes me how people can blame TV for serious socital problems, it's completely naive and borders on the abusrd
No, what is "naive and absurd" is to believe that people can watch something as graphic and emotional as television for (on average) hours a day and not be profoundly affected by it. And corporate America disagrees with your view as well, otherwise they wouldn't be spending billions on television advertising every year.
A lot of current television sets political agendas, it instills irrational fear for political purposes, it causes people to overeat and overconsume, and it glorifies violence and casual sex. And campaigns like anti-smoking commercials show that even a little bit of positive television can have a big impact. Improve television further and you will reduce many social ills.
So, let's say the US cuts off the H1B visa program. What will happen? US companies have to hire scarce US workers at higher pay. Will they do that? No way. They'll outsource even more jobs to where those skilled H1B workers come from. The end result? Even more jobs that move overseas and a loss of tax revenues. Do you have any more brilliant ideas?
he National Debt has continued to increase an average of $1.47 billion per day since September 30, 2002! The Fix? I don't know. Welcome to Globaliziation.
How exactly is globalization responsible for Americans living beyond their means? Furthermore, the US has been the strongest proponent of globalization; most other nations, in particular developing nations, didn't and don't want it.
Whatever the economic and political woes of America are, they are home-made; nobody else has made decisions for America.
However, there is a difference between defense and total world domination. I think the US has crossed the line. And Europeans didn't need to colonize the world in order to defend themselves--with the technology and science they already had, they could have defended themselves splendidly against any other civilization on the planet.
No, but our world culture would have been richer if Native Americans had been permitted to develop beyond human sacrifice and theocracies at their own pace, just like Europeans and Chinese did.
And I certainly don't think that China, or the world for that matter, would have been better off if China had had a marauding navy, as the parent article suggested.
I don't see anything "paranoid" about this, nor do I have immediate fears of what would happen if the US put nuclear reactors or nuclear weapons into space. This isn't some grand, evil master plan, it's simple, straightforward thinking for an administration and a nation that is completely convinced that it can do no wrong, that the more power it has the better off the rest of the world is, and that it will always remain powerful and democratic.
The administration almost certainly views the misgivings of other nations of US space-based military programs, whether nuclear or otherwise, merely as a public relations problem, and strengthening civilian use of nuclear power in space is a way around that.
The sad thing about the fork in this story leading to crap like this is that people politicize scientific endeavors
What's there to politicize? Science is power, and that makes it a key part of politics. Space exploration isn't some innocent, other-worldly endeavor, it's been part of the power game since day one. And putting fission and fusion reactors into space is definitely a political issue.
All countries "are". They are not good. They are not evil. They are all unilateralist whenever they can afford to be.
You are quite right. But the solution to that problem is not to roll over and let the US do whatever it damned well pleases, the solution to that problem is to make sure that the US can't afford to act unilaterally anymore either. Europe and Asia could achieve that by an arms race with the US, but it seems that US economic dependence on Europe and Asia provides a more powerful and peaceful lever by which to force the US to disarm and back down.
Also, I always find it interesting that minority opinions can seem far more important because it tends to be the vocal minority that is best able to manipulate reality to appear correct. [...] Giant anti-war demonstrations, public opinion polls and the behavior of key powers seem to confirm this view, but the reality is actually much more complicated -- and very different. The majority of European governments support the United States on the Iraq issue.
Yeah, you are right, I suppose: in US-style democracy, overwhelming public opinion doesn't matter, all that matters is how many tiny foreign governments the US can bully into giving verbal support to US policies. Sure, for your American sense of democracy, that may not matter. But to the rest of the world, "majority" and "minority" are defined in terms of people.
They go on to say many countries in Europe, particularly less developed ones, need the US to move forward at a reasonable pace. Germany and France can afford to play politics. For others, it's about their next meal.
Your arrogance and ignorance is astounding. You seem to really believe that the US is like some shining economic beacon to the rest of the world, preventing starvation in developing nations around the world. Get a clue. US foreign aid is laughable and self-serving. The US has huge foreign debts, an enormous trade imbalance, and a huge budget deficit. Without a stead stream of money (and know-how) coming into the US from Europe and Japan, the US economy would fall apart and the US military couldn't be financed. For both security and economic development, the US is insignificant to the nations of Eastern Europe. And for all their economic and social problems, Eastern Europeans aren't generally starving.
Seems to me that the problem is the programming, not television itself. Maybe instead of opening up television to everything, the country could have opened up selectively: educational programming, non-violent programming, etc.
If the US can prohibit nudity and profanity on television, it seems pretty reasonable that other countries might prohibit violence, greed, commercialism and consumerism, etc.
There are bacteria living in the "Dead Sea" as well (see here).
:-)
See also here for a discussion of bacteria living in salt-saturated solutions (the main discussion is about spore survival in salt inclusions--for about 250 million years!).
Hey, and maybe we will see people floating in Europa's oceans as well
the chinese ming Emperor Zhu Di [berkeley.edu] built a massive navy which traded extensively in the pacific, reached africa and almost discovered america. When Emperor Zhu died, his sucessor was advised to lessen the tax burden of the navy, and burned all the ships. Result? Other more outward looking seafaring nations whipped them.
And, so, instead of centuries of relative stability and prosperity, China could have become the conqueror of the Americans, killed off its native population, instituted centuries of slavery, and raided its natural resources. How exactly is that better?
If you are going to talk about what might have been, I'd say it's a shame that America was discovered at all before its indigenous cultures had a chance to develop further on their own. It's sad to think about how much richer our world culture could have become if the major empires of the Americas had been allowed to become powerful and advanced nations on their own.
Unfortunately the enviroloonies, are so terrified of the word 'nuclear' that any project that has it attached will get protested into the ground...
The Bush administration and conservatives are terrified of the word "nuclear" as well--when it applies to any device not under US control.
The problem with nuclear power is not primarily the occasional accident, it's the deliberate use by nations and groups for war and terrorist acts. And, while it may not scare Americans to let the US military have access to fission and fusion devices in orbit, it should scare everybody else.
The Iraq war has proven that the US is unwilling to take into account the wishes of the international community and that the US will decide unilaterally global policy. It doesn't even matter whether the US decision was right in this case--monarchs and dictators also often make good decisions. All of that may seem fine to Americans, but the rest of the world wonders what is so democratic about having 300 million Americans make decisions for 6 billion non-Americans.
The real reason the US government is pushing for nuclear propulsion for civilian use is that it gives it a cover under which to explore putting other kinds of nuclear devices into orbits: nuclear-powered particle weapons, atom bombs, etc.
Right now, that's hard to do because there is no infrastructure for developing and deploying that kind of technology--anything combining nuclear power and space would have to be done in complete secrecy. But once there is a thriving civilian industry, nobody will notice if a little bit of that work is diverted for military purposes.
Because of its military implications, the US should not be permitted to do this unilaterally. If we ever get nuclear propulsion, the technology should be developed openly and any nation using it should be subject to tight international inspections and controls.
The market needs more diversity in terms of browsers and operating systems. If Mac users can't use the crutch of a browser that calls itself "IE" (but really is different from IE on Windows) anymore, then web site designers (many of whom are Mac users) may finally get the hint that they should write standards compliant HTML, not something that "works for most users".
I think Apple and Macintosh will not suffer from this. The Mac is about style, consistency, and appearance, and removal of IE will, if anything, improve the style of the Mac, since IE for Mac never quite fit in with the Mac UI.
I provided a link, so it's not like I was hiding anything. I simply fail to see much of a difference between the two Bush's to make such a distinction. The original Bush was less of a dope than the current Bush, but the current one makes up for that with a cabinet of brilliantly evil, right-wing characters.
Hardly. What he's saying there is (to expand a little), when code becomes too complicated, it becomes hard to understand, and thus people waste a lot of time trying (and often failing at first) to debug, evolve etc.
Why does code become too complicated in Java? Because the language was designed poorly and lacks good mechanisms for abstraction.
If Gosling were concerned with "complexity" or knew anything about how to manage it, he would have designed a better language. Jackpot is not a solution to Java's problems, it's a band-aid for a hacked-off limb.
You get cleaner, easier to maintain, and easier to debug code, and better multi-threaded scaling simply by avoiding J2EE and some of Sun's other libraries.
As for "merging apps", that's almost always a stupid idea to begin with. The parts of apps that were designed to be reusable should already be in identifiable libraries. The parts of apps that weren't designed to be reusable shouldn't be merged. If they do need to interact, have them communicate via IPC, RPC, DOs, or some database.
You can discuss your program on a whole other abstraction level.
GREAT.
If you used a better programming language, you wouldn't need complicated tools to "discuss your program on a whole other abstraction level".
The stuff Gamma has been doing is the equivalent of "structured programming for assembly language programmers". It's a set of tricks to make programming in OOLs slightly less awful than it would be otherwise. It is certainly not a great advance in software engineering.
When you construct forwarding methods, they're different from the original methods. You can't just replace all uses of the forwarding method by uses of the moved method, because they actually behave slightly differently.
That sounds like a language design problem to me. The solution to that should be to fix the language, not to construct elaborate theorem provers and visual representations of the source code. Building tools to deal with a messy language will just mean that the language and software written in it will evolve to be so messy that nobody can deal with it by hand anymore at all.
But, hey, Gosling did all of this before: NeWS used a bad choice for a display server programming language, and when all was said and done, almost everybody just used the toolkit wrappers; the only effect of Postscript on the server was that the thing ran slow and was flaky.
Yes, and do you realize the significance of Gosling Emacs? It was its proprietary nature. Gosling Emacs was what finally got GNU Emacs off the ground as a successful open source Emacs implementation for UNIX systems.
Gosling has been hostile to open source from day one. He created NeWS and tried to kill off X11, and he was probably partially behind keeping Java proprietary.
This was all over the news when Bush (Sr.) said it in 1987. Perhaps you are a little too young to remember. Bush the younger wouldn't even be capable of making such a (relatively) articulate statement.
And you are kidding yourself if you think that those kinds of attitudes are at all unusual.
Sadly, similar attitudes exist among US leaders; Here is a quote from Bush: The only thing that is holding back people like Bush is a strong legal tradition of separation of church and state. But give people like Bush, Ashcroft, and their fascist pseudo-Christian core constituency a bit more time, and they will change that.
Depends on the contract. IBM may have made guarantees to you, in which case they would be on the hook for damages if you can't use AIX anymore for one reason or another. Or your contract with IBM might say that they only license what they own and that if they don't own everything they think or thought they owned, that was your problem, not theirs. Both kinds of contracts exist.
However, those considerations are completely hypothetical. There is not a shred of evidence that SCO's allegations are true. SCO is just engaging in one big smear campaign.
If the European law isn't enforceable, either by treaty with the US or directly, nothing happens. However, it looks enforceable to me. Even virtual businesses with no physical presence have assets in Europe: copyrights, patents, payments in transit, etc. If they don't pay up, European courts can seize those.
But an online sale conducted through a server in California, from a shop e.g. in Washington and using a credit card company in New York does not take place in Europe. It is the customer who chooses to have the merchandise shipped to Europe who should be responsible for the taxes.
Euroepan governments are the democratically elected representatives of European customers. Therefore, European customers have chosen to have tax collection centralized.
As for when a government is justified to tax this way that's easy: whenever they can enforce it. In this case, European governments could easily stop most of the money for such purchases from making it back to the US.
Ah, and I thought the Europeans were (understandably) pretty pissed off when the US recently introduced extra steel tarriffs?
Apples and oranges. Tariffs, by definition, are unequal treatment of foreign companies vs. domestic companies. Imposing VAT collection on foreign companies equalizes the treatment.