Agreed that they had been playing politics in the past *cough* Bush's domestic wiretapping *cough*,
The NSA terrorist surveillance program approved by President Bush is an effective tool for law enforcement to identify and break up terrorist activity before it can metastasize again on these shores and cause 9/11 style death and destruction. A large majority of the American electorate approves this action. By all means write to your representative on this issue. That is the American way. Then take your place on the minority side of the issue while President Bush kicks the bloody hell out of radical islam.
As evil as Microsoft is, I've never been able to decide whether or not Bill Gates himself is evil. My suspect, even, that Microsoft's evil behavior is an emergent property of their corporate culture.
Gates has reigned at the top of Micro$soft's like some kind of anti-Christ for 25 years. He has publicly revelled in using Micro$oft as a blunt instrument of power. Micro$oft's sorted history of slimy tactics and businness transgressions are directly attributable to him. Do you remember his performance at the antitrust trial? If you are stuck on this one wonders if you are capable of making a judgement on anything at all.
You blame environmentalists, instead of NASA? Hey, environmentalists can scream, but they're not the ones entrusted with the lives of the astronauts. Oh, the continual cutting of NASA funding may be another reason.
I am usually critical of people who cite Wikipedia as a source for their argument, but I couldn't find anything better. Here is NASA's budget history. It is pretty flat since the space station program started in 1990. There is even some growth since 2000. Thanks GDub!
Just as dumping waste into the world's water supplies and oceans has had a vastly more devestating effect than was originally expected, so too will the environment feel this "dumping".
You are being deceptive in equating CO2 emissions with pollution. I do not accept that a byproduct of respiration is pollution in any sense. I do agree with you that earth chemical and biological systems will feel the result of increasing population and development. Does that mean both should be curtailed to some Kyotoists fantasy level of harmony with nature? Seems like a pretty reckless experiment to me.
Further, I don't think that we can favorably manipulate the climate, but we can certainly curtail certain activities that we know are effecting it negatively.
You deny and accept the same accusation! What negative?
Won't someone please think of the poor SUV companies and power plants?! Huge cost my ass. Progress is as progress does - it has never come cheaply, so why, at this time in history, do we suddenly give progress the finger? Oh, right, the almighty dollar.
Much of the world, most notably China and India, have recently come to the conclusion that more money means a better material life and is better than any available alternative. This after long term ruinous flirtation with the Marxist ideas that still fester among Kyotoists. Call it pursuit of the almighty dollar if you want. The dollar is simply the expression of a better material life.
I love how people can assume that pumping killotons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere every day
Respiring lifeforms have been doing so for billions of years to the glory of all plant life. 6 billion people on earth will have an effect. As a Kyotoist you should be able to scare me better than that.
We know there is a hole in the ozone layer - we've seen it, photographed it.
And we've watched it shrink, most likely as part of a natural cycle. But that wouldn't serve political ends. The ozone holes have always been there. It just happened that as soon as we started to launch spacecraft and balloons we saw it. There have always been Chlorine compounds in the atmosphere, and they have always been activated by low temperature to reduce ozone. I am just thankful I can use the present facts to refute Kyotoists.
As an aside note, the space shuttle ET insulation system never exhibited a catastrophic failure when the insulation was applied with CFC's. It did when engineers started using a green substitute. Therefore I blame Kyotoists for bringing down the Columbia. Let that be a lesson of unexpected consequences of green engineering.
Changes of that variety will have cascading changes all over - the butterfly effect on the environment.
Your implicit assumption is that we can steer climate in some kind of positive way by manipulating CO2 emissions. Yet you appeal to the fact that climate is a chaotic system. Chaotic systems vary unpredictably with small changes of input. If you manipulate CO2 emissions (at huge cost) what kind of benefit can those who invested expect to get? Don't deceive yourself or others by thinking you can favorably manipulate climate.
Nice speculation. But since the end last ice age most of the coastlines surrounding the Arctic Ocean have undergone isostatic rebound. Most of these areas were highly glaciated and heavily loaded with ice. Once the ice was rapidly removed the land maintained bouyant equilibrium by rising. Apparent sea levels have been falling in these areas for 1000's of years. The only question is how long it will continue and how isostacy and sea level rise interrelate in different areas.
After years of promoting global hysteria it is nice to see the editors slashdot present the other side of the debate. With Al Gore as its leading proponent Kyotoism is in big trouble. The movement has been slowly losing momentum since the Montreal climate meeting last year. I doubt if they can get it back.
there's nothing in the BSD license stopping them from forking OpenBSD, just like there's nothing in the GPL preventing people from forking Linux.
I am not talking about forking. The point of my original post is that the Open Source folks feel betrayed that Apple has closed OSX. The BSD license foolishly permits proprietary modifications. GPL does not. Free software stays free. BSD style open source is at permanant risk.
Shape from shading works only on a very narrow set of objects. If you are trying to recover the shape of a marble statue, use shape from shading. If your object has color forget about it.
Not true at all. If you understand the photometric function of the materials in the scene variation due to color can be separated from variation due to shading. Image classification techniques are useful for doing this. This is discussed in the book and elsewhere. We used the technique for Voyager II to measure topography of Uranus and Neptune satellites. Stereo pairs were not often available.
What you are saying amounts to "People have done research into computer vision in the past, therfore any new research into computer vision is soooo not new.
Ding! Wrong again. The lesson is that slashdot editors should be careful to refrain from hyperbolic descriptions of results that are really incremental rather than revolutionary. And readers like you should not swallow the summaries hook line and sinker.
They've even developed a program that allows the computer to automatically generate 3-D reconstructions of scenes based on a single image
This is so not new. These researchers may have advanced techniques is some areas, but shape from shading inversion problems like this have been worked successfully since the 1970's and earlier. The theory is well established. Horn's Robot Vision is a classic.
Proprietary OSX should be expected now that Apple has gotten all it can out of the BSD code base. Let it be a lesson to the Free Software Community about the dangers of BSD style licenses. It encourages opportunism. Theo's rant earlier today is a further example.
David Koresh felt it necessary to turn a gun on the policeman who came to his door investigating credible alligations of sexual abuse of minors.
He herded his followers deep into his compound before he set it ablaze with pre-rigged incendiaries.
Some followers who sought to escape from the compound were shot by Koresh's militant partners when they tried to escape.
David Koresh committed suicide and murdered his followers at the same time.
Do you really think that the Koresh cult suicide is a religious freedom issue with the same substance as persecution of non-Muslims in the middle east?
When was the last time a US citizen was put to death for practicing the wrong religion? Your tendency toward relativism and moral equivalence have clouded your judgement.
They just threatened. The USA actually attacked Iraq.
Do you believe the US is not trying to rebuild Iraq and institute stable, lawful government in Iraq? Do you contend that the US is systematically plundering that country? Ahmadinejad's comments are pure malice, the fantasy of a homicidal madman who wants to kill Jews because they are Jews. If I were a Jew I would take the threat deadly seriously. Why Persian's are so obscessed by an Arab/Jewish conflict is hard to say. My guess is it distracts from the utter failure and depravity of Iran's mullahcracy.
The same DNA that disrupted the telecom industry is well on its way to totally revolutionizing the way the TV, film, and broadcast industry is going to be,' adding that he's now looking for 'the Vonage of Internet video.'
The buzzword density of this statement is off the charts. Any '90's dotcom CEO would be pround. Mark Cuban once had the Vonage of internet Video in broadcast.com. It became the Dallas Mavericks and his private jets.
Fly over urban metropolises and you'll see pus and grime coming out of them, a haze of brown tinges their atmosphere.
But from my SUV the sun is dimmed to a pleasant orange color.
People shuttle to and fro in their daily lives, consuming as much as their salaries will allow. They justify this as acceptable in the "spirit of capitalism". It's "acceptable" to spend all that money on crap you don't need, because everybody else has it, or "it's cool".
But aren't you free to reject these ideas. People would gravitate to better alternatives. It is hard to beat Nascar on my plasma HD and a six pack of beer
Then most of these blobs will be told they need to hurry up there too, so that they can meet that quota, and then by the time you're 40, bald, and more or less impotent, you say: "My God! I've arrived!" And you look around and realize that not much changed, and you feel a big let down, you feel deceived, as if there was some hoax played on you.
This is a victim's thinking. Are you having a midlife crisis? Try buying a red sports car.
If you're interested about what I said here, please know that it was basically all taken from the words of Alan Watts [wikipedia.org], the 20th century's best and little known-about philosopher and interpreter of Eastern religions.
Sounds kinda creepy to me, like Heaven's Gate. If you haven't noticed a lot of people from the far east are highly motivated by US style consumerism. You can only meditate so much I guess.
I congratulate you for succeeding in your pointless intellectual quest. I'll try to use more old cliche expressions in my posts so you can stay occupied telling me what they really mean. Whatever floats your boat. (Can you tell me what that means?)
Maybe you should look at a more reputable resource as the original poster provided. Amnesty International reports the death toll under saddam as just over 17,000. I think you will find that is LESS than those slaughtered by "friendly" forces during the illegal invasion of Iraq...
It takes nerve to use reputable and Amnesty International in the same thought. The left will do anything to sabotage the great work of Iraqi Freedom, including fabricate statistics. Well, you are only off by a factor of 20. As for legality, I find the operation more palatable from a legal standpoint than the graft and corruption of the Oil for Food crimes that preceeded it.
1. Americans are not at all larger than everyone else [wikipedia.org].
No news here. I always thought it was the Danes who were largest. By the way, quoting Wikipedia as chapter and verse is really annoying and intellectually lazy. Next time do better.
2. In fact - the Americans only seem to grow wider [newyorker.com], unlike the rest of us.
In some places like New York, southeast you may be right. In other places (Seattle, Boulder) people are very fit. It is a big country. It varies. You are very unworldy for a European sophisticate.
3. The US football side was just thrashed by the Czech
It only proves my point. I wish we had better athletes playing soccer. Losing to Europeans is intolerable. I really thing the size, stength, and speed of American football players would be an interesting addition to soccer. The 6'8" attackers on Czech suggest what is possible.
4. You are an ignorant hick.
All I can say is: Cornell '86! Hick is no longer a very insulting word. It has been hurled so often by the effete left as to have lost its meaning.
Silicon Valley startups still receive more VC funding than the next four largest regions combined. Why is this? Stanford and UC Berkeley nearby? The pretty scenery? The affordable housing? In part. But mostly, it's because tens of billions of dollars in VC money resides within a few blocks on Sand Hill Road. And for the most part, VCs don't have any reason to leave the area in search of investments. The Web browser was invented in Illinois, but when it came time to found Netscape, the founders moved West because this is where the VC money lives. That hasn't changed.
Very interesting graph. But it mostly just says that VC's went to school and want to hang around California and Boston. Most businessmen in the country look at VC as a bad deal, which it is. Overall growth in each area is low. They are clearly exhaused. The historical trend data is even more interesting. Total VC now is about 20% of what it spiked at in 2000. After the bust growth has been nearly flat. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the model. Netscape is often trumpeted as a great triumph of VC. It made a few insiders rich -- at the expense of the majority of investors who got screwed. Goggle revived the frenzy for a while. Investors luckily have short memories, huh? Also the investments are very narrowly focused to software and biotech. After 30 years these areas simply do not have the growth potential they once had. I am surprised at little attention is paid to energy and transportation.
The bay area will certainly remain prosperous. But there will be no more Wozs, Jobs, Andy Groves, or Jim Clarks. What the bay area is is a charactature of its former self, choked with wannabees and 2nd stringers for whom making a cheap buck comes before changing the world.
Have you considered the death toll under Saddam? Being President means making difficult choices (Dub), not leaving problems for the next guy (Clinton).
Interesting information, but anecdotal. Google is a decent company for California, but it hardly makes the state economy as you ridiculously suggest. I am not suggesting the SV is like Pittsburg after the steel bust, but its growth pales when you consider the booming growth in states surrounding it. The heady days of the 80's and 90's are behind. The innovations that come out SV have been reduced to a comparative trickle. I stand by that observation.
Spelling flames, grammar flames, condescending parsing of unmeaningless phrases just wastes everyones time. I am surprised that is all you came up with.
I take some exception to this. America became what it is because of the natural resources we have (that were stumbled upon and which we commenced to plunder.) So even today our natural resources bless our economy in ways most people never notice. This is not because of the southwest and southeast, it's because of the whole. You grow it, dig it up, or chop it down; everything else is hard to base a sustainable economy on.
What a ridiculous post. There are clear regional variations in economic growth in the US. All regions do depend on raw materials. And your point is?
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed that they had been playing politics in the past *cough* Bush's domestic wiretapping *cough*,
The NSA terrorist surveillance program approved by President Bush is an effective tool for law enforcement to identify and break up terrorist activity before it can metastasize again on these shores and cause 9/11 style death and destruction. A large majority of the American electorate approves this action. By all means write to your representative on this issue. That is the American way. Then take your place on the minority side of the issue while President Bush kicks the bloody hell out of radical islam.
As evil as Microsoft is, I've never been able to decide whether or not Bill Gates himself is evil. My suspect, even, that Microsoft's evil behavior is an emergent property of their corporate culture.
Gates has reigned at the top of Micro$soft's like some kind of anti-Christ for 25 years. He has publicly revelled in using Micro$oft as a blunt instrument of power. Micro$oft's sorted history of slimy tactics and businness transgressions are directly attributable to him. Do you remember his performance at the antitrust trial? If you are stuck on this one wonders if you are capable of making a judgement on anything at all.
Yes, and measuring a surface with variable size waves and sea ice in different parts of the year. -2.0mm with 10cm errorbars.
You blame environmentalists, instead of NASA? Hey, environmentalists can scream, but they're not the ones entrusted with the lives of the astronauts. Oh, the continual cutting of NASA funding may be another reason.
I am usually critical of people who cite Wikipedia as a source for their argument, but I couldn't find anything better. Here is NASA's budget history. It is pretty flat since the space station program started in 1990. There is even some growth since 2000. Thanks GDub!
Just as dumping waste into the world's water supplies and oceans has had a vastly more devestating effect than was originally expected, so too will the environment feel this "dumping".
You are being deceptive in equating CO2 emissions with pollution. I do not accept that a byproduct of respiration is pollution in any sense. I do agree with you that earth chemical and biological systems will feel the result of increasing population and development. Does that mean both should be curtailed to some Kyotoists fantasy level of harmony with nature? Seems like a pretty reckless experiment to me.
Further, I don't think that we can favorably manipulate the climate, but we can certainly curtail certain activities that we know are effecting it negatively.
You deny and accept the same accusation! What negative?
Won't someone please think of the poor SUV companies and power plants?! Huge cost my ass. Progress is as progress does - it has never come cheaply, so why, at this time in history, do we suddenly give progress the finger? Oh, right, the almighty dollar.
Much of the world, most notably China and India, have recently come to the conclusion that more money means a better material life and is better than any available alternative. This after long term ruinous flirtation with the Marxist ideas that still fester among Kyotoists. Call it pursuit of the almighty dollar if you want. The dollar is simply the expression of a better material life.
I love how people can assume that pumping killotons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere every day
Respiring lifeforms have been doing so for billions of years to the glory of all plant life. 6 billion people on earth will have an effect. As a Kyotoist you should be able to scare me better than that.
We know there is a hole in the ozone layer - we've seen it, photographed it.
And we've watched it shrink, most likely as part of a natural cycle. But that wouldn't serve political ends. The ozone holes have always been there. It just happened that as soon as we started to launch spacecraft and balloons we saw it. There have always been Chlorine compounds in the atmosphere, and they have always been activated by low temperature to reduce ozone. I am just thankful I can use the present facts to refute Kyotoists.
As an aside note, the space shuttle ET insulation system never exhibited a catastrophic failure when the insulation was applied with CFC's. It did when engineers started using a green substitute. Therefore I blame Kyotoists for bringing down the Columbia. Let that be a lesson of unexpected consequences of green engineering.
Changes of that variety will have cascading changes all over - the butterfly effect on the environment.
Your implicit assumption is that we can steer climate in some kind of positive way by manipulating CO2 emissions. Yet you appeal to the fact that climate is a chaotic system. Chaotic systems vary unpredictably with small changes of input. If you manipulate CO2 emissions (at huge cost) what kind of benefit can those who invested expect to get? Don't deceive yourself or others by thinking you can favorably manipulate climate.
Nice speculation. But since the end last ice age most of the coastlines surrounding the Arctic Ocean have undergone isostatic rebound. Most of these areas were highly glaciated and heavily loaded with ice. Once the ice was rapidly removed the land maintained bouyant equilibrium by rising. Apparent sea levels have been falling in these areas for 1000's of years. The only question is how long it will continue and how isostacy and sea level rise interrelate in different areas.
After years of promoting global hysteria it is nice to see the editors slashdot present the other side of the debate. With Al Gore as its leading proponent Kyotoism is in big trouble. The movement has been slowly losing momentum since the Montreal climate meeting last year. I doubt if they can get it back.
there's nothing in the BSD license stopping them from forking OpenBSD, just like there's nothing in the GPL preventing people from forking Linux.
I am not talking about forking. The point of my original post is that the Open Source folks feel betrayed that Apple has closed OSX. The BSD license foolishly permits proprietary modifications. GPL does not. Free software stays free. BSD style open source is at permanant risk.
Shape from shading works only on a very narrow set of objects. If you are trying to recover the shape of a marble statue, use shape from shading. If your object has color forget about it.
Not true at all. If you understand the photometric function of the materials in the scene variation due to color can be separated from variation due to shading. Image classification techniques are useful for doing this. This is discussed in the book and elsewhere. We used the technique for Voyager II to measure topography of Uranus and Neptune satellites. Stereo pairs were not often available.
What you are saying amounts to "People have done research into computer vision in the past, therfore any new research into computer vision is soooo not new.
Ding! Wrong again. The lesson is that slashdot editors should be careful to refrain from hyperbolic descriptions of results that are really incremental rather than revolutionary. And readers like you should not swallow the summaries hook line and sinker.
They've even developed a program that allows the computer to automatically generate 3-D reconstructions of scenes based on a single image
This is so not new. These researchers may have advanced techniques is some areas, but shape from shading inversion problems like this have been worked successfully since the 1970's and earlier. The theory is well established. Horn's Robot Vision is a classic.
Proprietary OSX should be expected now that Apple has gotten all it can out of the BSD code base. Let it be a lesson to the Free Software Community about the dangers of BSD style licenses. It encourages opportunism. Theo's rant earlier today is a further example.
1993
David Koresh felt it necessary to turn a gun on the policeman who came to his door investigating credible alligations of sexual abuse of minors.
He herded his followers deep into his compound before he set it ablaze with pre-rigged incendiaries.
Some followers who sought to escape from the compound were shot by Koresh's militant partners when they tried to escape.
David Koresh committed suicide and murdered his followers at the same time.
Do you really think that the Koresh cult suicide is a religious freedom issue with the same substance as persecution of non-Muslims in the middle east?
So is the USA.
When was the last time a US citizen was put to death for practicing the wrong religion? Your tendency toward relativism and moral equivalence have clouded your judgement.
They just threatened. The USA actually attacked Iraq.
Do you believe the US is not trying to rebuild Iraq and institute stable, lawful government in Iraq? Do you contend that the US is systematically plundering that country? Ahmadinejad's comments are pure malice, the fantasy of a homicidal madman who wants to kill Jews because they are Jews. If I were a Jew I would take the threat deadly seriously. Why Persian's are so obscessed by an Arab/Jewish conflict is hard to say. My guess is it distracts from the utter failure and depravity of Iran's mullahcracy.
The same DNA that disrupted the telecom industry is well on its way to totally revolutionizing the way the TV, film, and broadcast industry is going to be,' adding that he's now looking for 'the Vonage of Internet video.'
The buzzword density of this statement is off the charts. Any '90's dotcom CEO would be pround. Mark Cuban once had the Vonage of internet Video in broadcast.com. It became the Dallas Mavericks and his private jets.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
I am with you. Add junk science, pacificism, and Micro$oft propaganda to this list.
Fly over urban metropolises and you'll see pus and grime coming out of them, a haze of brown tinges their atmosphere.
But from my SUV the sun is dimmed to a pleasant orange color.
People shuttle to and fro in their daily lives, consuming as much as their salaries will allow. They justify this as acceptable in the "spirit of capitalism". It's "acceptable" to spend all that money on crap you don't need, because everybody else has it, or "it's cool".
But aren't you free to reject these ideas. People would gravitate to better alternatives. It is hard to beat Nascar on my plasma HD and a six pack of beer
Then most of these blobs will be told they need to hurry up there too, so that they can meet that quota, and then by the time you're 40, bald, and more or less impotent, you say: "My God! I've arrived!" And you look around and realize that not much changed, and you feel a big let down, you feel deceived, as if there was some hoax played on you.
This is a victim's thinking. Are you having a midlife crisis? Try buying a red sports car.
If you're interested about what I said here, please know that it was basically all taken from the words of Alan Watts [wikipedia.org], the 20th century's best and little known-about philosopher and interpreter of Eastern religions.
Sounds kinda creepy to me, like Heaven's Gate. If you haven't noticed a lot of people from the far east are highly motivated by US style consumerism. You can only meditate so much I guess.
I congratulate you for succeeding in your pointless intellectual quest. I'll try to use more old cliche expressions in my posts so you can stay occupied telling me what they really mean. Whatever floats your boat. (Can you tell me what that means?)
Are you going to compile new binaries for every architecture and combination of cores?
As a Gentoo user that is an emphatic yes!
Maybe you should look at a more reputable resource as the original poster provided. Amnesty International reports the death toll under saddam as just over 17,000. I think you will find that is LESS than those slaughtered by "friendly" forces during the illegal invasion of Iraq...
It takes nerve to use reputable and Amnesty International in the same thought. The left will do anything to sabotage the great work of Iraqi Freedom, including fabricate statistics. Well, you are only off by a factor of 20. As for legality, I find the operation more palatable from a legal standpoint than the graft and corruption of the Oil for Food crimes that preceeded it.
1. Americans are not at all larger than everyone else [wikipedia.org].
No news here. I always thought it was the Danes who were largest. By the way, quoting Wikipedia as chapter and verse is really annoying and intellectually lazy. Next time do better.
2. In fact - the Americans only seem to grow wider [newyorker.com], unlike the rest of us.
In some places like New York, southeast you may be right. In other places (Seattle, Boulder) people are very fit. It is a big country. It varies. You are very unworldy for a European sophisticate.
3. The US football side was just thrashed by the Czech
It only proves my point. I wish we had better athletes playing soccer. Losing to Europeans is intolerable. I really thing the size, stength, and speed of American football players would be an interesting addition to soccer. The 6'8" attackers on Czech suggest what is possible.
4. You are an ignorant hick.
All I can say is: Cornell '86! Hick is no longer a very insulting word. It has been hurled so often by the effete left as to have lost its meaning.
Silicon Valley startups still receive more VC funding than the next four largest regions combined. Why is this? Stanford and UC Berkeley nearby? The pretty scenery? The affordable housing? In part. But mostly, it's because tens of billions of dollars in VC money resides within a few blocks on Sand Hill Road. And for the most part, VCs don't have any reason to leave the area in search of investments. The Web browser was invented in Illinois, but when it came time to found Netscape, the founders moved West because this is where the VC money lives. That hasn't changed.
Very interesting graph. But it mostly just says that VC's went to school and want to hang around California and Boston. Most businessmen in the country look at VC as a bad deal, which it is. Overall growth in each area is low. They are clearly exhaused. The historical trend data is even more interesting. Total VC now is about 20% of what it spiked at in 2000. After the bust growth has been nearly flat. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the model. Netscape is often trumpeted as a great triumph of VC. It made a few insiders rich -- at the expense of the majority of investors who got screwed. Goggle revived the frenzy for a while. Investors luckily have short memories, huh? Also the investments are very narrowly focused to software and biotech. After 30 years these areas simply do not have the growth potential they once had. I am surprised at little attention is paid to energy and transportation.
The bay area will certainly remain prosperous. But there will be no more Wozs, Jobs, Andy Groves, or Jim Clarks. What the bay area is is a charactature of its former self, choked with wannabees and 2nd stringers for whom making a cheap buck comes before changing the world.
Have you considered the death toll under Saddam? Being President means making difficult choices (Dub), not leaving problems for the next guy (Clinton).
Interesting information, but anecdotal. Google is a decent company for California, but it hardly makes the state economy as you ridiculously suggest. I am not suggesting the SV is like Pittsburg after the steel bust, but its growth pales when you consider the booming growth in states surrounding it. The heady days of the 80's and 90's are behind. The innovations that come out SV have been reduced to a comparative trickle. I stand by that observation.
Spelling flames, grammar flames, condescending parsing of unmeaningless phrases just wastes everyones time. I am surprised that is all you came up with.
I take some exception to this. America became what it is because of the natural resources we have (that were stumbled upon and which we commenced to plunder.) So even today our natural resources bless our economy in ways most people never notice. This is not because of the southwest and southeast, it's because of the whole. You grow it, dig it up, or chop it down; everything else is hard to base a sustainable economy on.
What a ridiculous post. There are clear regional variations in economic growth in the US. All regions do depend on raw materials. And your point is?