Re:Hollywood Always Fights, Then Accepts and Profi
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Darknet: Hollywood's War
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'd really like to see a book on the similarity between big corporations, especially in the U.S., and Soviet ministries. There was a technology pundit on Charlie Rose this week who applied just this label to:
- Cable and satellite providers - Cell phone companies in the U.S. - The baby bells
It could easily be extended to movie studios, media giants, Clearchannel, GM and Ford, Boeing and Lockheed, etc.
The excellent documentary on Burt Rutan and SpaceshipOne, "Black Sky: The Race for Space", is playing on Discovery Science this week, a mnust see if you haven't. Towards the end of the second part the aero engineer made the point increasingly everyone is made to feel they can't do anything amazing unless they are part of a big corporation or government. They wanted to show 20 guys, with a little of Paul Allen's money, could do something only 3 giant governments have done previously, put a man in to space(and they broke the altitude record for an air launched vehicle dating to the X-15 in 1963). There are numerous barbs at NASA, Boeing and Lockheed and the role they've played in completely wrecking the U.S. as a space faring nation since the end of Apollo.
Anyway the gist of the proposed book would be that all of America's giant corporations keep touting free enterprise and free markets while they in fact want no such thing. They want free markets but only for them and they WANT any potential competitors snuffed out. They dont want any government regulation of them but they are delighted with regulation, or holes in the same, that allows them to destroy their competitors and to protect their dominant position. They increasingly have more politicians and lobbiests than inventors and engineers. They want to snuff out competition with patent law, regulation, government subsidies(loans, tax breaks, contracts), and predatory monopolistic practices, all the while ranting that there is to much government regulation and they are fans of free markets, though increasingly they write all those regulations. Increasingly there one and only innovative business plan is to move their work force to the cheapest possible labor market to cut costs, so they can continue to be rpofitable for a time though the increasingly don't invest in developing new and innovative products.
The conclusion of the story. In many mature industries the U.S. has ceased to be a free market economy. Free enterprise wasn't a victim of government regulation or Socialism. It was the victim of a few giant companies that came to dominate each market, and now use armies of lawyers and lobbies to destroy competition. American corporations in particular are starting to atrophy and can't compete on a global stage against companies who are really innovating and doing real R&D. John McCain recently pointed out how sad it is that innovative technology like hybrid vehicles is all happening in Japan and not Detroit(who are instead just licensing Japanese technology). Detroit in particular has a long history of innovating only when they are compelled to. American companies no longer compete through innovation, they only vie to protect their position with lawyers and lobbyists.
You can still have stellar new companies like Google but its typicaly only in very new markets with no entrenched players. The only counterpoint I can think of at the moment is in the airlines. The totally corrupt big three have been virtually destroyed by new competitors like Southwest who observed U.S. airlines were brutually inefficient and not providing the service people wanted, and created a new lean economic model and managed to succeed in spite of the entrenched position of the big three, and frequent government subsidies which keep them afloat.
Uh dude, I wasn't exactly seeking to argue the point of whether pornography is good or bad. The point was more that it is an issues where different cultures are likely to disagree. You in your cultural arrogance seem to have decided it is a wonderful and everyone who doesn't agree with you should go away and die.
I'm not of the opinion porn is the evil incarnate that religious fundementalists, Christian and Muslim, make it out to be, but I also am not so naive to think that it doesn't have detrimental impacts on society and there is a case to be made for constraints on it in some cultures. Culturual diversity is good. Having one global culture ruling all is bad because if people don't like it they have no option except suffer.
So the key question is whether its entirely right to completely homogenize culture, and that we happen to pick the culture of the country with the most weapons, to be the culture that will be inflicted on the entire planet. Western culture has deep flaws including rampant greed and a delightful half and half of no moral compass on one side and ridiculously rigid morale compass from the other half, the religious right. In many respects the Taliban and the American religious right have more in common than the two halves of America do, they are both blinded by religious fanaticism and the desire to inflict their religion on everyone else.
Bin Laden doesn't like infidels (non Muslims) invading Muslim nations (like Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq).
When Russia invaded Afghanistan they united the muslim world to throw them out. In a mutual case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend the CIA and Bin Laden formed a partnership of convenience. Bin Laden and company were given big bags of money and arms by the CIA, the stuff they needed to beat the Russian's in Afghanistan, especially the stinger missiles which were used to turn the tide again Soviet helicopter gunships. The CIA got to mortally wounded the Soviet Union using a proxy so no Americans died. Proxy wars were fought throughout the cold war and the U.S. and U.S.S.R destroyed country after country, and killed millions of people, in the process. It wasn't really a cold war, the U.S. and U.S.S.R just never shot directly at each other they mostly killed each others partners in the third world.
Bin Laden didn't really turn on the U.S. until the U.S. put a large army of infidels(Christian and Jew) and liberated women in the heart of the Muslim holy land, Saudi Arabia during the first gulf war and more than a decade following. Putting thousands of culturaly insensitve American teenagers in Saudi Arabi, a VERY conservative culture and home of Islam's holiest sites, for years, was a pretty good way to turn Islamic fundementalist wrathe on the U.S. just as it did when Russia invaded Afghanistan only more so because Saudi Arabia is the home of the holiest places to Muslims. Hindsight being 20/20 the U.S. should have toppled Saddam in the first gulf war and gotten the hell out of Saudia Arabia soon thereafter. Unfortunately the Bush dynasty made a fatal mistake then, just as little George did when he tried to put it right in Iraq only 10 years to late.
Bush administration rhetoric about them hating our freedom doesn't really hit the mark, they hate our culture and religion, they hate the U.S. trying to force its culture on them much of which runs counter to their religion, they hate at least a century of western powers stealing their resources(oil) and treating them as flunky colonies, and they really hate infidel nations occupying Muslim nations. If you have a long view the anitpathy goes back at least as far as the crusades, and American actions in the middle east today do in a lot of ways resemble a modern crusade, though a proxy, the state of Isreal is being used to occupy Jerusalem, the histroical objective of the crusaders.
I can see the flaws in both cultures. Fundementalist islam is oppressive but you can see some sense in their harsh prohibitions on alcohol and drugs, they are really destructive of people and cultures when abused. Islam does really derprive women of a lot of rights but then to they don't debase women as much as Western culture can, for example through pornography. Women have been "liberated" in the West for a very brief period and the current trend by the west to compell the same liberation on ancient and conservative cultures overnight, at the point of a gun, predictably incites a violent backlesh among conservative Muslim men.
Sorry dude that is just DUMB. You are creating chaos when you say we have this monster audio API but it really was intended for anyone to actually use unless you want to expend massive effort to use it. So every app needs to use an abstraction layer to do audio and there is NO standard abtraction layer there are like 10.
This is just classic Linux application development. Its simply impossible to reach consenus on one good API and get everyone to use it. End result its a nightmare to make things work, to work right and most importantly to work consistently, especially across a range of hardware and OS revs.
"Remember, the US didn't take down the Soviet Union by dropping bombs and shooting bullets. We bankrupted their ass in a nice game of 'keeping up with the neighbors'."
Your forgetting that a really significant contributor to the downfall of the Soviet Union was their "Vietnam", the war in Afghanistan. The U.S. did supply the bullets and in particular the Stinger missiles that were used by proxies to kill their draftee soldiers and created a couple generations worth of veterans who were completely scarred in their youth and worked to bring down the government that did it to them, you know tramautized them for life and turned many in to indiscriminate killers. There is, I think, a similar generation being bred in Chechnya today. Its certainly possible a similar American generation is being bred in Iraq though it not as extreme a quagmire as Afghanistan was for Russia. If you feed large numbers of young people in to a meat grinder for no particularly good reason you run the risk they will eventually be motivated to topple the people that ruined their lives while they played power politics in Washington and Moscow and were indifferent to all the people they were killing.
Oh and most American's forget one of those proxies we armed, supported and help train was Osama Bin Laden and what would eventually become Al Qaeda.
More on topic I really doubt state sponsored crackers are really much of today's problem. I'm pretty sure its more a delightful mix of organized crime, script kiddies, virus writers doing it so show off their skillz, and a whole bunch of people desperate to make money, especially in places where their economies are a smoldering hole in the ground like parts of Russia, Eastern Europe and Africa. If you can steal someones credit card or bank account information and make thousands of dollars in an instant, with little chance of being caught, versus working all day everyday for cents per hour, assuming you can even find a job, and barely survive which choice would you make?
As long as you have people with lots of money and who throw around ridiculously insecure keys to get at that money on the Internet you are going to have people lining up to try to steal it. That is the root of the problem, and a prime motivator, that is not going away anytime soon.
As far as identity theft goes the most basic problem is we are still using simple sequences of numbers and letters, to access credit cards and bank accounts, and that info is sitting ALL OVER THE PLACE in the clear. You want to stop the criminals trying to get rich through hacking, you need to move bank accounts and credit cards public key ento some kind of public key encryption so only the person who knows the key can authorize transactions, 3rd parties never store the key, and great pains are taken to protect the key when its entered.
Uh except gstreamer hasn't reached a 1.0 release yet which traditionally means the API isn't locked down and new versions may well break applications. If gstreamer is ready for "every program" to use it should be at 1.0.
"- ALSA must learn to do proper software mixing out of the box."
Problem #1 with ALSA is the driver support is really spotty, some hardware is great, some is not unless things have improved a lot recently.
Problem #2 with ALSA is the API was NOT well thought out from an application developer standpoint and I imagine a driver writer standpoint. It is ridiculously overdone for 90% of the applications out there and I wager it makes driver writing hard too though I haven't tried it. But I guess at this point we can just admit its bad which is why we need gstreamer to hide it.
If you bring up alsamixer the number of channels to control is baffling for the average user and different for every hardwrare/driver combo. I think KDE/Gnome are trying to smooth over the mixer problem but I don't really think they've done it successfully. Linux needs a standard mixer setup that just works for average user.
If you want to see a really well done Audio implementation you have to look no further than BeOS and they've had it for years now. Though the rest of their OS died and is attempting resurrections. for audio and media in general it still kicks Linux ass.
In particular every application registers with the media mixer UI so there is a volume control for each application by name and that is what users want, they want to turn up the application they want to listen to and turn down others they dont want to be turning up and down a bunch of hardware mixer channels.
BeOS has a low level powerful API for apps that need total control but there is a dirt simple API for apps that just need to play sound, you register a callback and the OS calls you to get a buffer when it needs it. Its really simple for most apps to code to.
If Linux developers excel at cloning existing systems, and in the audio arena it appears they have mostly failed developing an API that works so far.....please clone the BeOS audio API. It is very well done and professional audio users already love it.
"(Why are all the major chip makers in Taiwan, Japan and America ALL concentrated in areas with high tectonic activity? Is there something in the fault line they use in the production line?)"
Beware the sweeping generalization.
Intel's FAB in Santa Clara matches up for tectonic activity. Hillsboro does kinda since its in a volcanicly active area, though not sure how many major earthquakes there have beeen there lately. Volcanoes do lead to earthquakes and it is on the rim of fire.
But Intel has fabs in such volcanicly inactive places as Arizona, New Mexico, Massachusettes and Ireland. AMD's premiere fab is in Dresden, Germany. Don't know European geology that well but I doubt its on the ring of fire.
Well thats not exactly true. I'm pretty sure about half of the people that voted in the last election think everything the Bush administration is doing is GREAT and really want to live in the new America and really WANT Patriot Act III to make them SAFE. Though maybe its less than half now based on recent polls, since a bunch of people who were totally snowed by Republican manipulation during the campaign, have since come to their senses and realized the current Republican domination of the U.S. is both bad and dangerous (of course the Democrats are bad and dangerous too). All I can say to those people is.... to late..... dumbasses, you already scewed the pooch.
The remaining Bush faithful DO want to abandon their civil liberties in the name of security and morality and they want to dicatate the same course to the rest of the world if possible. They had enough of all the liberation that started in the 60's and they want to go back to America's glory days, the 50's, McCarthyism, rigid morality, sex is taboo, homosexuals are safely locked in the closet, censorship, etc. They especially want to strip other people of their civil liberties to get them in to line with what they consider proper behavior and to eliminate any chance that they might pose any threat, real or imagined to, to there comfy ignorant little lives.
There is unfortunately a pretty close correlation between this set of people and the fundementalist Christians in the U.S. who are of the opinion they put Bush in office so they now own the U.S., its government and all the people in it and its their prerogative to dictate to everyone else how to live and if the Constitution gets in the way then the Constitution needs to be ignored or amended. A few weeks ago I saw the scary sign of the times on the news. A church that decided no good Christain could possible vote Democrat, that it was practicly voting for the devil, and that they were now on going to be a political church and anyone who didn't support Bush and Republicans was no longer welcome in the house of God and Jesus. I wonder isolated incident or is it happening all over the country in varying degrees.
And of course as others have said in other posts the second part of the one two punch is there are a bunch of corporations who also own the government in general and the Bush administration in particular. They want two things, docile cowed workers and if they cant get them in the U.S they will get them in China, and they want docile cowed consumers who buy their products and can't complain it they are defective, unhealty dangerous or overpriced (cigarettes and asbestors being classic examples, predatory gas prices another).
Star Wars earned him all the money but the most prescient and important work from George Lucas was THX-1138 which was released on DVD recently and is really worth seeing. It makes you think what might happen if we let government, corporations and control freaks sieze control of our lives. Probably to late to stop it now, but at least you will recognize it as its happening.
Re:Somekind of thingy I don't have a word for
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New NASA Budget Woes
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· Score: 1
"The spinoffs from developing and implementing new and bleeding edge technology are manifold and not always apparent. "
As Ronald Reagan used to say, "There you go again". There is next to nothing in the ISS that is new or bleeding edge. The Russian built core is very MIR like.
ISS isn't even remotely an icon or symbol and transcends nothing. MIR did everything its doing a whole lot more cheaply. The ISS has mostly managed to hack off nearly every one of American's international partners because most of their components are still sitting on the ground and may never make it in to space. The fact that the crew is restriced to 2, or at most 3 means those partners will NEVER get the return on it they had hoped and the crew size will NEVER increase unless someone comes up with the life boats for an emergency and a logistics train that is sufficiently affortable and reliable to sustain a larger crew. The Russians will probably salvage something out of it but that is in spite of NASA not in partnership with them. I'm pretty sure they deeply regret having to deal with NASA as a partner in their space station. If anyone is going to salvage ISS it appears the Russians will have to be the ones to do it, not the U.S., but the Russians can't afford it, and the U.S. cant contribute the one thing they have of value, money, to the Russians due to the embargo because they are trading with Iran in nuclear technology.
I wager the vast majority of people are look up to the ISS and wonder how exactly we managed to spend a 100 billion dollars on something that doesn't seem to have any useful purpose. of course the U.S has wasted 300 billion on Iraq and that seems to have had no good purpose either. At least most of the icons from times gone buy survived for hundreds and thousands of years and are still marvels to see. It will be a miracle if ISS is still in orbit in 20 years and it will probably be another train wreck when the time comes to deorbit it. Personally I wager NASA will punt on it and the Russians will take it over, unplugging the NASA parts if necessary since their core is a pretty much a self contained MIR-2.
"When has space exploration been an economically driven enterprise?"
Which is, no doubt, why the manned space program hasn't advanced one teeny bit in the last 35 years. No one has figured out anything useful to with people in space. All the economic value is coming from satellites.
I don't suppose it ever registered with you that if you are concerned about the security of your nation there might be value in having domestic manufacturing cability for things like computers and cell phones.
If you transfer all of the production capability necessary for the existence of your society to other nations, China for instance, what exactly do you do if:
A. There is a war with China and it engulfs Taiwan, Korea, Japan and the rest of Asia. B. China decides to exploit its stranglehold on your economy as fodder for various forms and degrees of blackmail.
Not a big fan of Congress passing laws, and it sure is a clumsy and staggeringly expensive way to achieve it, but I can see some value in preserving domestic capacity to design and manufacture things, especially things like IC's that are dual use and essential to national security in peace time and to national defense in event of a war. I wonder how many weapons the U.S would no longer be able to manufacture if the flow of goods from Asia were severed.
Perhaps in our globalized world we have moved beyond a global war but somehow I doubt it. What exactly happens when you have a world war in a world with a globalized economy. China has a huge advantage becuase it is rapidly acquiring all the industrial capacity necessary to fight a sustained conflict, an advantage that was America's during World War II. The U.S. is increasingly a land of service jobs, overpaid execs, marketing and incapable of producing anything of tangible value, excepting maybe weapons. America is increasingly in a position it would have to win a big war fast with the weapons it has because it couldn't fight a sustained war where there is attrition of its weapons and weapons platforms and where industrial capacity is essential to survival. Its hard to even rebuild that industrial capacity if all the machine tools and fabs have been crated up and moved to China.
You better hope F-22's are invincible because if they were taken out in large numbers they would be nearly impossible to replace in event of a real war.
There is also a concern with things like computers going in to security critical facilities like the DHS, NSA, DOD and FBI which are manufactured in a potentially hostile country. They can be designed with subtle and exploitable flaws and back doors and its pretty hard to go over every one of them with a fine tooth comb.
Re:Somekind of thingy I don't have a word for
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New NASA Budget Woes
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· Score: 3, Insightful
" to take the first semipermanent step to get us off mother earth"
Uh you are really overselling the worth of the ISS. MIR was the first step to that goal not ISS and it was done for a fraction of the cost. MIR wasn't in great shape when it was abandoned but it was abandoned due to political pressure from the ISS not because it was done. Chances are slim the ISS will last any longer than the MIR did. The key ISS problem is there is very little happening on it that justifies the staggering price tag. One redeeming aspect of ISS is it kept all the good people in the Russian space program who build MIR employed since they build the heart of the ISS and in many respects its a MIR2 but done on a NASA scale budget which meant vast quantites of our tax dollars were squandered on it, lining the pockets of contractors.
The key problem with space stations are they are intensely dependent on cargo from earth to continue to function and at current launch costs those costs are steep. As others have noted you would be better served at this point to get launch costs down and then a large permenent presence in space would be more feasible. With current technology and approach keeping people in space is simply not sustainable. You have to throw away buckets of money every year that could better go elsewhere, and there isn't actually that much for people to do spinning around in a tin can in zero G in LEO, to justify the cost. A moon base is only slightly better. Zero G manufacturing was supposed to be a boon but you really dont hear any convincing case that it is. There is growing protein crystals and some material science work but its really debatable if that couldn't be done for a fraction of the cost of the $100 billion ISS price tag using robot spacecraft. At this point all NASA can use to justify the ISS is zero G biology, something that is of value for long duration space travel but simple CAN'T justify the $100 billion ISS price tag.
A permenent colony on Mars is probably the only manned endeavor that might be justifiable and sustainable because Mars "might" have enough resources, especially water to sustain a colony that is not completely dependent on Earth. I'm talking about sending people there who stay there and not some pointless Apollo style stunt where they plant a flag, pick up rocks and come home.
Mining asteroids might be another endeavor with some value especially as we exhaust the Earth's mineral resources but its not clear if men or robots would be better for this.
All in all this is just a sad story because it just highlights NASA's incompetence. They are spending staggering sums of money wringing there hands over every detail of the Space Shuttle and to no real long term purpose. All this money is ONLY to try and finish the ISS, with one exception a Hubble repair mission. The ISS is a staggering failure and no one has the guts to admit it and stop pouring every larger sums of money in to it, while it and the Shuttle bleed every other program with a point to death. If they do manage to finish the ISS then the shuttle is abandoned and all the money they are squandering on it now trying to reinvent it at a point it already obsolete, is down the tubes.
Simple problem here, NASA bureaucracy and its pork fed contractors Lockheed/Boeing are burning vast sums of money on the shuttle, ISS and their bottom lines to no productive end, and they are just continuing to do what they've done the last 20 years, bleed every other potential aerospace venture white to feed a corrupt empire.
Well the best scenario I've seen for Mars trips don't throw the rather large and expensive ship away after each flight which seems to be what you are suggesting. It is a pretty good place for a reusable vehicle especially since it isn't trashed by any reentry effects. If its a big nuclear ship of one form or another that also speaks to not throwing it away.
Of course I'm not sure why I'm even argueing the point. Round tripping people to Mars tends to be kind of stupid in the first place. They should be going to stay, it dramaticly simplifies the mission and increases its value, stupid Apollo style trips (wander around a while then come back) will never justify the cost, while a permanent colony would. Only problem is it requires that you commit to sending them enough cargo to sustain a permanent colony. A round trip is way harder than one way and its seriously open to debate if the astronauts will be able to readapt to 1G without major leaps in providing gravity on the the trip or in getting people to tolerate long periods in zero and 1/3 G and returning to 1G.
Dude you are delusional. I need do nothing more than point out that you view it as a badge of honor and superiority that humans are pushing one species after another in to extinction. Yea our technology is great, it helped us create industrial scale fishing with which we have managed to crash the population of one species of fish after another.
I really think maybe you should try traveling in the parts of the world that are already desperately overcrowded and starving and just imagine what kind of a fine place the world will be when there are 10 billion mouths to feed and the earth will be to depleted to feed them. Or maybe you should visit the booming cities of China where the air pollution is so acute that it is an immediate, not just long term, health hazard.
Capitalism is a great motivator and it does lead to some giant leaps forward. Unfortunately the only thing boundless in it is greed and the devastation that unconstrained greed leads to.
Later dude, you're not worth the bandwidth any more.
Dude you are going to drag all the mass of a CEV all the way to Mars and back just so they can use it to reenter the Earth's atmosphere. I dont suppose it occured to you, with all this modularity and docking stuff that if thats all you are using it for you could dock a CEV with the Mars return craft when it gets back to earth orbit and save the mass on the round trip to Mars for something useful on mars?
Anyone using these CEV tin cans for anything beyond getting to LEO or maybe as a command module replacement for going to the Moon is crazy.
In other news, Lockheed and Boeing announced their plans to form a partnership for expendable launch vehicles. With the end of Titan and with this consortium owning Delta and Atlas this signals an end to competition for expendable launch vehicles for NASA and the DOD. They pitch it as elimination of duplication of effort, pooling all the talent on one team, and necessary economicly in a starved expendible launch market in the U.S. especially one facing major competition from Russia and ESA in the commerical sector. It also conveniently deprives the DOD and NASA of competitive bidding for this class of launchers so this new consortium can probably charge as much as they can get away with for a launch, since they will be defacto sole source. Commercial satellites can of course still shop around with the Russians, ESA, China etc but that isn't usually an option for the DOD in partciular.
"Can I put a species on an island with some exact constraints and predict -when- the new species will arrive?"
You are trying to place ridiculous constraints on the proof. There is absolutely no requirement to predict when mutations arrive or what they will look like to prove evolution. All that is necessary is to observe that mutations do appear over time, some of them are propagated, and some of them are improvements.
"We've sequenced the Humane Genome and so it ought to be reasonable to calculate down the road which links in our molecules are most likely to disrupt and what sort of evolution we can have and when."
Dude, you apparently lack the most basic understanding of the theory behind evolution. The mutations at the heart of evolution are semi random and triggered by a myriad of possible sources, exposure to natural radiation and accidents of biochemistry being the leading contenders. Most of them are bad and decrease the chances for the organism's survival but some are either neutral or positive for survival and are propagated. Over the immense time span of earth's history this mechanism almost certainly leads to diversification of species.
Sequencing of human, animal and plant genomes has supported evolution to an extent already and probably will more so over time, not by allowing us to predict evolution but by illuminating how extensively we share our genome with our near cousins, especially the apes, how much commonality there is among all species, and exactly where the commonality and divergence in our genome is. As more genomes are sequenced and our understanding of them improves, we can compare them and most probably see all the places where mutations and evolutionary breaks occurred.
The one obvious element of predictability we gain in studying genomes is that we have already developed the ability to create artificial evolution through genetic engineering. In so doing man is already exploiting the mechanisms of evolution, but removing most of the randomness that nature is forced to rely on. Through generic engineering we have pretty much proved the mechanics of evolution it just takes nature a whole lot longer to exploit them sucessfully.
All of this doesn't prove anything about the origin of life, maybe these mechanisms were designed by an intelligence of one form or another whether it be divine, or extraterrestrial or maybe they were an accident but the case is really strong that evolution is a key mechanism by which life diversifies.
Heh. Dude, nice troll I almost bit and started responding to all this nonsense, before I realized either you are a troll or maybe your a trekkie whose watched a little to much Star Trek and you've lost a grip on reality, one hint no we don't have warp drive and we aren't going to be tapping the galaxy's resources anytime soon, ROFL.
Only thing that scares me is there probably are a lot of people who actually think its OK to loot and pillage the earth because A) it will never run out or B) we will just find some miracle fix when the needs arises. Well chances are you and those like you will turn the Earth in to a hell hole before they realize that miracle solutions don't necessarily have to happen and no, trying to live on the Moon, Mars or a tin can in space isn't a pleasant alternative to sunshine, oceans and an atmosphere.
If you value your "wealth and luxury" as much as you seem to, a little hint, trying to live on Mars will be a rude awakening, it will be a really hard and unpleasant life.
I'm guessing your main tack on life is loot and pillage while you can, and hope you are dead before things turn really ugly.
This deal isn't exactly about IBM leaving the PC business. They are buying there way in to the Chinese marketplace on the coattails of China's largest PC manufacturer, by practicly giving away one of their crown jewels, though one that is not profitable and they don't really want. Cringley did a decent job of describing all the not so obvious angles to this deal last year.
Every greedy capitalist and multinational on the planet wants to get in to China's markets because they are poised for explosive growth and in fact already are exploding. This is IBM's roundabout way of doing just that.
China's government and business leaders figured out early on that rather than just letting big American and European companies just come in and loot their markets that it would be better to force them to partner with Chinese companies, move their manufacturing to China and transfer their capital and IP to China. It was a smart strategy because it gave them a huge jumpstart thanks to the infusion of capital and IP and its allowing them to rapidly surpass their American and European benefactors, and Asian competitors. China is growing a LOT faster, thanks to Western help, than it ever could of on its own. Many American companies are crating up whole factories, machine tools, etc and just shipping them to China, that is a massive migration of capital and aboon to China.
China can force this kind of deal because Chinese markets are NOT even remotely free, the government massively manipulates them and manipulates all the Western companies who want to do business there. Lenovo is heavily influenced by the Chinese government like most big Chinese companies.
It is long term a pretty raw deal for Americans and Europeans but it is short term very profitable for them and thats all most stock market obsessed western execs care about, short term profitability just long enough for them to make their killing on their stock. They dramaticly cut their labor costs by disposing of expensive western labor and they gain access to big, fast growing new markets, both things which are very good for your short term stock price. They choose to ignore that long term its unlikely their Chinese partners will need them and someday their Chinese partners will probably bury them.
Market growth is a also a big factor here, American, Japan and European markets are mature, saturated, tired, slow growth and obviously the labor is way overpriced in a newly globalized market place. Real wages aren't growing in those places so most people don't have any new money to spend buying products. The head of GE was on Charlie Rose a while ago and he spelled it out. All big multinationals are moving all their labor intensive jobs to the cheapest, friendliest(a.k.a oppressed) labor market and China is the leader by far in that arena. They are also completely fixated on tapping new markets with growth potential those are in places like China, India, Russia and Eastern Europe not the U.S., Western Europe and Japan.
There is a whole lot of basic Marxism/Capitalism going on here. Capitalism is always going to flow production to the cheapest labor and sales to the growing markets. When growth slows and stops in the developed nations they have to pump up new markets in the underdeveloped world by employing workers there, pumping money in to their economies and training them in rampant consumerism. If you don't brainwash people in these new markets that they must have cars, fast food and appliances capitalism would starve.
Unfortunately capitalism really isn't a sustainable economic model. Eventually the world is going to burst at the seams from the overpopulation of rampant consumers, pollution, resource exhaustion, etc. America got away with its extravagantly wasteful life style for half a century but when you introduce the same excess in places like China and India the world is going to run out finite
"the US will back up these strong suggestions with threats of trade sanctions etc"
Well in answer to that all I need do is point out that Canada is America's largest external supplier of oil and I would guess probably natural gas. I'm pretty sure that China would be glad to take all of Canada's oil currently going to the U.S. if the Bush administration were to be their usual arrogant selves and start a another trade war. Venezuela is on the verge of doing just this and they account for another big chunk of America's oil imports like 12% if I remember. This tactic wouldn't work very well if there was a surplus in the oil markets but there isn't a surplus now so it DOES work very well.
For a country that is completely dependent on the rest of the world for energy and is by far the world's largest debtor nation its threats are starting to ring pretty hollow. The U.S. does have the honking big military but its been established that the American military is pretty impotent as long as you don't go toe to toe with them in the open and opt for an insurgency instead.
The U.S. really does need to be blessed with an attitude adjustment that when you have become completely dependent on the rest of the world for energy, completely dependent on other nations to to prop up your massive debt, and most of your manufactured goods come from abroad that you are a pretty impotent nation and the rest of the world can start treating you as such.
"You say that MMORPGs are pointless, repetitive grinds that people while away their lives at, and that they'll never really be popular until they stop being pointless, repetitive grinds."
Not exactly sure how you read that in what I said.
I NEVER said they weren't popular, they are obviously VERY popular. The only thing I said which is exactly what you said is unfortunately they are a massive waste of time, which when coupled with the fact they are very popular means they are a giant black hole of counterproductivity.
The challenge is to maintain the draw that makes them so popular, but inject in to them useful activity, without making them tedious and boring.
As I suggested the two areas where there is potential is education if you can use the same format and teach real and useful knowledge instead of fantasy trade skills.
Another area is in communication. They offer a really great vehicle for people to meet, form groups, and communicate, far better than disembodied email, IM and IRC.
I grant you the Pavlovian nature of them is bad, but then to, I wager they are so popular because people crave having clear goals and clear rewards. When you achieve the goals you get immediate reward and satisfaction. That is something sorely lacking in real life. In real life the rewards are slow, and often badly defined, and usually at the whim of someone like a parent, boss or teacher where it seldom clear what reward you will receive for what performance, and rewards are often more to skilled ass kissing than actual performance.
One thing I would add is when it comes to shooter they are unfortunately very productive in one area. They are exceptionally good at desensitizing children to killing and being killed and in training them in the skills they will need to operate future high tech, increasingly virtual weapons so they are a superb training tool for the military to get there future recruits a head start on the skills they will need.
As others have noted its not exactly the same technology, its just the same name a company and team used over decades for a family of launchers as are Delta and Atlas.
And as others have noted much of the technology really was good and didn't need to evolve.
But it should also be noted there is a good reason expendable booster evolution has been slow in the U.S.
In particular the Space Shuttle completely decimated and paralyzed expendable booster development in the 70's and early 80's and set it back for at least a decade if not two in the U.S. If you recall there was a NASA mandate during the Shuttle's heyday that all NASA satellites would be launched on it, the DOD similarly, though somewhat more reluctantly, put all its eggs in the shuttle basket which nearly wiped out the business for expendable boosters for a long period.. It wasn't until the Challenger disaster that everyone in the U.S. remembered unmanned expendable boosters were really way better for launching satellites.
At that point Delta, Titan and Atlas went from nearly dead to rebirth but it took years to revive the expendible boost production lines and just get them back where they were before the Shuttle nuked them.
Delta in particular was the team which was given a charter to build new booster technology, there is a pretty good writeup on Space Review. The Delta Heavy is one candidate for launching the CEV. Unfortunately just about every launch vehicle we have compares poorly to the Saturn V if you ware serious about going to the Moon or Mars. All the CEV plans I've seen require multiple launches and docking all the components in LEO to get to the Moon versus the Saturn V doing it all in one shot. Delta 4 Heavy is a slight improvement over the Saturn 1B which was the last U.S. man rated expendable booster used in Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz but pales against Saturn V.
All in all its kind of sad commentary on how little America's space program has progressed since it peaked during Apollo.
The CEV program is going to take a good 10 years, if a miracle occurs and it stays on schedule, until there is a manned launch and then its going to be putting a tiny conical capsule in to LEO. It will be a disappointment to anyone who remembers Apollo. In most respects they would be better served if they just dust off all the Apollo plans and reverse engineer that hardware systems, update things like the computers that have progressed dramaticly, and pick up where Apollo left off versus spending 10 years and a lot of money to design something less capable than Apollo.
Some interesting models for where the game industry should be heading are the virtual worlds of Neil Stephenson's Snowcrash or Diamond Age.
The objective is to create virtual worlds that are so compelling and rich that people will leave the real world for them. It already happens to an extent with games like WoW and EQ, but hey unfortunately quickly devolve in to repetitive, pointless grinds with no real point, they are atrocious time sinks. But there is still interest and color from two directions, interaction with other people and their virtual economies.
In these virtual worlds you can adopt a look and persona of your choosing and not the one you were stuck with at birth, you can be far more creative and daring than most people are in meat space. You can intereact with people from around the world and find people you like and share interests with, and some you hate too. The key point is you aren't stuck with the limited set of people you are stuck with in meat space(school, work, church, bars, mall). You are judged by intellect and creativity and not by whether you are attractive which is unfortunately how people first judge each other in meat space.
You can also take risks that most people wont normally take in the real world.
The challenge is that online games are a pointless time sink in reality. If someone can make the jump to where virtual worlds surpass the real world then they have a winner. One avenue is education, if you can create virtual worlds that educate people more effectively and in a more compelling way than schools you would have a winner. That was a central tenant of "Diamond Age" and it was a compelling one.
Another avenue is if you can move real economies in to virtual space and make them more efficient. Ebay is kind of this but its not really a compelling way to interact. I'm think for example is you move Ebay in to a virtual world where buyers and sellers have avatars and can meet, get to know one other, have conferences and meetings in virtual space etc. Its a little off the wall but I wonder if you could host a professional conference with speakers and presentations, bar room meetings etc in a virtual world so you eliminate the steep costs of traveling. How much would you lose in not having the meat space personal interaction versus how much improved efficiency would you gain in eliminating the cost and time of the meat space travel.
Not sure it will be possible to make the jump from games that are entertaining time sinks to a place where they count for something. If they stay as they will they be an entertaining diversion or will they be a massive pointless time sink draining the world of its productivity, as everyone spend more and more time in virtual worlds that have no real value.
"The problem, the real and specific problem, is that they DO have traction"
No argument with most of your post but you took this out of context. I said "newspapers" have no traction, especially independent newspapers whether they be on paper or the Internet. Television and talk radio are the media dominating the way people think, and maybe mix in some big newspaper conglomerates and tabloids.
"in the few years in between now and when the new man-rated launch-vehicle comes out"
If you are referring to the CEV its not a few years, its more like a decade. The only thing happening in a few years, maybe, is a test flight by the two teams of an unmanned tin can maybe in 2008 but it would be a miracle if they held that schedule, this is NASA, Boeing and Lockheed after all. The earliest there would be a manned flight is 2014 and that is pretty much a fantasy target.
Here is a biting editorial on the giant mound of contractor pork and red tape that is CEV. Transformational Space, the one fresh and innovative company in the early running, apparently pretty much abandoned bidding on it when they saw it was business as usual for NASA and structured so only Boeing and Lockheed could or would compete for it.
Even if a manned CEV ever flies which is a long shot given NASA's record with new manned vehicles since the shuttle, you are probably talking about a relatively tiny conical capsule, yes after a decade of new development and billions of dollars you are going to pretty much be back where we were in the 1960's, a tiny vehicle capable of carrying a few people and a tiny amount of cargo. The launch vehicle will be a derivative of existing expendable launchers and wont have anything close to the power of a Saturn V so every mission profile beyond putting a tin can in LEO requires multiple launches and docking all the pieces in orbit.
Bottomline is what is in NASA's pipe is less than what they had in the 1960's but at a staggering cost in time and money.
The international community would probably be way ahead scraping together the money to build the proposed Russian Kliper.
Yea but Nazi's won the election that brought them to power, though not a clear majority. They consolidated their power largely thanks to winning control of the legislature and passing laws that gradually decimated or outright outlawed all opposition. They used the Reichstag fire to justify many of their greater excesses as the Republican's today use 9/11.
"the nazis were socialist as are most Democrats"
They were Fascists which isn't exactly the same as classic Socialists. The Nazi's created a giant interventionist government but it worked hand in hand with giant corporations and industrialists much like today's Republican party. Wealthy industrialists brought him to power, in fact bankrolled his rise to power, in particular the Thyssen family, and wealthy capitalists don't normally support real socialists. The Thyssen family is interesting because George. W's grandfather Prescott was their banker in America and his bank, Union Banking, was seized for trading with the enemy when war was declared much to the embarrassment of the Bush family. They had extensive financial dealings, along with their wealthy benefactors the Harrimans, with Nazi Germany.
Today's neo con Republicans are also big fans of aggressive warfare, you know unilaterally invading countries who haven't attacked you under false pretenses, like Nazi Germany.
I'm guessing your suggesting today's Republican's are free market conservatives and the antithesis of all this Nazi, Democrat Socialism, well I guess you haven't noticed but the new Republican party has been growing the government, its intrustion in and control of our lives, and its deficit spending at a furious pace, they are just growing it in a way that favors the wealthy and their corporate friends.
I really wish we did have a conservative government that did what all the Republican's have said they were gonna do if they gained power, cut government spending, cut the size of govermment and limit its intrustion in our lives, but today's Republican party is more Fascist than it is conservative. Certainly its velvet gloved, compassionate fascism and nothing close to Germany in the 30's but give it time and one more 9/11 scale attack.
"we still have elections"
So did Germany, they did gain power through elections, laced as they were with Brown shirt intimidation, and they held elections for most of their rise to power, they just used their control of the government to pass laws that marginalized or outright outlawed of all their opposition.
After a stolen presidential election in 2000 and a suspicious election in 2004, remember the exit polls that said one thing and the official results that said another I don't think just having elections proves anything. Unless they are fair and above reproach which America's haven't been since 2000. If they are vulnerable to manipulation they are meaningless.
"free press"
Heh, most people are getting their news from TV networks controlled by a tiny handful of giant corporations. Rupert Murdoch's global empire in particular, is anything but "free", "fair" or "balanced" and is dominating cable news, maybe you've heard of them, Fox News, they own like a third of the world's media, Viacom, Time/Warner, GE and Disney round out the list, none of which are exactly fans of controversy. Radio is controlled largely by Clearchannel and dominated by right wing extremists. Newspapers are also massively consolidated and simply don't have any traction with most people any more.
So our media has been stampeded in to being anything but free. CBS has been thoroughly spanked for its "liberal bias", FOX's right wing bias is blatant, unchecked and its all angry white men watch. CNN used to balance FOX but since November when they got their new chief and the Republican's swept the elections I barely recognize it, they are pandering to the Christian right so much to try to salvage their ratings. There was a time after the Atlanta shooting they were plugging "The Purpose Driven Life" so
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I'd really like to see a book on the similarity between big corporations, especially in the U.S., and Soviet ministries. There was a technology pundit on Charlie Rose this week who applied just this label to:
- Cable and satellite providers
- Cell phone companies in the U.S.
- The baby bells
It could easily be extended to movie studios, media giants, Clearchannel, GM and Ford, Boeing and Lockheed, etc.
The excellent documentary on Burt Rutan and SpaceshipOne, "Black Sky: The Race for Space", is playing on Discovery Science this week, a mnust see if you haven't. Towards the end of the second part the aero engineer made the point increasingly everyone is made to feel they can't do anything amazing unless they are part of a big corporation or government. They wanted to show 20 guys, with a little of Paul Allen's money, could do something only 3 giant governments have done previously, put a man in to space(and they broke the altitude record for an air launched vehicle dating to the X-15 in 1963). There are numerous barbs at NASA, Boeing and Lockheed and the role they've played in completely wrecking the U.S. as a space faring nation since the end of Apollo.
Anyway the gist of the proposed book would be that all of America's giant corporations keep touting free enterprise and free markets while they in fact want no such thing. They want free markets but only for them and they WANT any potential competitors snuffed out. They dont want any government regulation of them but they are delighted with regulation, or holes in the same, that allows them to destroy their competitors and to protect their dominant position. They increasingly have more politicians and lobbiests than inventors and engineers. They want to snuff out competition with patent law, regulation, government subsidies(loans, tax breaks, contracts), and predatory monopolistic practices, all the while ranting that there is to much government regulation and they are fans of free markets, though increasingly they write all those regulations. Increasingly there one and only innovative business plan is to move their work force to the cheapest possible labor market to cut costs, so they can continue to be rpofitable for a time though the increasingly don't invest in developing new and innovative products.
The conclusion of the story. In many mature industries the U.S. has ceased to be a free market economy. Free enterprise wasn't a victim of government regulation or Socialism. It was the victim of a few giant companies that came to dominate each market, and now use armies of lawyers and lobbies to destroy competition. American corporations in particular are starting to atrophy and can't compete on a global stage against companies who are really innovating and doing real R&D. John McCain recently pointed out how sad it is that innovative technology like hybrid vehicles is all happening in Japan and not Detroit(who are instead just licensing Japanese technology). Detroit in particular has a long history of innovating only when they are compelled to. American companies no longer compete through innovation, they only vie to protect their position with lawyers and lobbyists.
You can still have stellar new companies like Google but its typicaly only in very new markets with no entrenched players. The only counterpoint I can think of at the moment is in the airlines. The totally corrupt big three have been virtually destroyed by new competitors like Southwest who observed U.S. airlines were brutually inefficient and not providing the service people wanted, and created a new lean economic model and managed to succeed in spite of the entrenched position of the big three, and frequent government subsidies which keep them afloat.
Uh dude, I wasn't exactly seeking to argue the point of whether pornography is good or bad. The point was more that it is an issues where different cultures are likely to disagree. You in your cultural arrogance seem to have decided it is a wonderful and everyone who doesn't agree with you should go away and die.
I'm not of the opinion porn is the evil incarnate that religious fundementalists, Christian and Muslim, make it out to be, but I also am not so naive to think that it doesn't have detrimental impacts on society and there is a case to be made for constraints on it in some cultures. Culturual diversity is good. Having one global culture ruling all is bad because if people don't like it they have no option except suffer.
So the key question is whether its entirely right to completely homogenize culture, and that we happen to pick the culture of the country with the most weapons, to be the culture that will be inflicted on the entire planet. Western culture has deep flaws including rampant greed and a delightful half and half of no moral compass on one side and ridiculously rigid morale compass from the other half, the religious right. In many respects the Taliban and the American religious right have more in common than the two halves of America do, they are both blinded by religious fanaticism and the desire to inflict their religion on everyone else.
Bin Laden doesn't like infidels (non Muslims) invading Muslim nations (like Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq).
When Russia invaded Afghanistan they united the muslim world to throw them out. In a mutual case of the enemy of my enemy is my friend the CIA and Bin Laden formed a partnership of convenience. Bin Laden and company were given big bags of money and arms by the CIA, the stuff they needed to beat the Russian's in Afghanistan, especially the stinger missiles which were used to turn the tide again Soviet helicopter gunships. The CIA got to mortally wounded the Soviet Union using a proxy so no Americans died. Proxy wars were fought throughout the cold war and the U.S. and U.S.S.R destroyed country after country, and killed millions of people, in the process. It wasn't really a cold war, the U.S. and U.S.S.R just never shot directly at each other they mostly killed each others partners in the third world.
Bin Laden didn't really turn on the U.S. until the U.S. put a large army of infidels(Christian and Jew) and liberated women in the heart of the Muslim holy land, Saudi Arabia during the first gulf war and more than a decade following. Putting thousands of culturaly insensitve American teenagers in Saudi Arabi, a VERY conservative culture and home of Islam's holiest sites, for years, was a pretty good way to turn Islamic fundementalist wrathe on the U.S. just as it did when Russia invaded Afghanistan only more so because Saudi Arabia is the home of the holiest places to Muslims. Hindsight being 20/20 the U.S. should have toppled Saddam in the first gulf war and gotten the hell out of Saudia Arabia soon thereafter. Unfortunately the Bush dynasty made a fatal mistake then, just as little George did when he tried to put it right in Iraq only 10 years to late.
Bush administration rhetoric about them hating our freedom doesn't really hit the mark, they hate our culture and religion, they hate the U.S. trying to force its culture on them much of which runs counter to their religion, they hate at least a century of western powers stealing their resources(oil) and treating them as flunky colonies, and they really hate infidel nations occupying Muslim nations. If you have a long view the anitpathy goes back at least as far as the crusades, and American actions in the middle east today do in a lot of ways resemble a modern crusade, though a proxy, the state of Isreal is being used to occupy Jerusalem, the histroical objective of the crusaders.
I can see the flaws in both cultures. Fundementalist islam is oppressive but you can see some sense in their harsh prohibitions on alcohol and drugs, they are really destructive of people and cultures when abused. Islam does really derprive women of a lot of rights but then to they don't debase women as much as Western culture can, for example through pornography. Women have been "liberated" in the West for a very brief period and the current trend by the west to compell the same liberation on ancient and conservative cultures overnight, at the point of a gun, predictably incites a violent backlesh among conservative Muslim men.
Sorry dude that is just DUMB. You are creating chaos when you say we have this monster audio API but it really was intended for anyone to actually use unless you want to expend massive effort to use it. So every app needs to use an abstraction layer to do audio and there is NO standard abtraction layer there are like 10.
This is just classic Linux application development. Its simply impossible to reach consenus on one good API and get everyone to use it. End result its a nightmare to make things work, to work right and most importantly to work consistently, especially across a range of hardware and OS revs.
"Remember, the US didn't take down the Soviet Union by dropping bombs and shooting bullets. We bankrupted their ass in a nice game of 'keeping up with the neighbors'."
Your forgetting that a really significant contributor to the downfall of the Soviet Union was their "Vietnam", the war in Afghanistan. The U.S. did supply the bullets and in particular the Stinger missiles that were used by proxies to kill their draftee soldiers and created a couple generations worth of veterans who were completely scarred in their youth and worked to bring down the government that did it to them, you know tramautized them for life and turned many in to indiscriminate killers. There is, I think, a similar generation being bred in Chechnya today. Its certainly possible a similar American generation is being bred in Iraq though it not as extreme a quagmire as Afghanistan was for Russia.
If you feed large numbers of young people in to a meat grinder for no particularly good reason you run the risk they will eventually be motivated to topple the people that ruined their lives while they played power politics in Washington and Moscow and were indifferent to all the people they were killing.
Oh and most American's forget one of those proxies we armed, supported and help train was Osama Bin Laden and what would eventually become Al Qaeda.
More on topic I really doubt state sponsored crackers are really much of today's problem. I'm pretty sure its more a delightful mix of organized crime, script kiddies, virus writers doing it so show off their skillz, and a whole bunch of people desperate to make money, especially in places where their economies are a smoldering hole in the ground like parts of Russia, Eastern Europe and Africa. If you can steal someones credit card or bank account information and make thousands of dollars in an instant, with little chance of being caught, versus working all day everyday for cents per hour, assuming you can even find a job, and barely survive which choice would you make?
As long as you have people with lots of money and who throw around ridiculously insecure keys to get at that money on the Internet you are going to have people lining up to try to steal it. That is the root of the problem, and a prime motivator, that is not going away anytime soon.
As far as identity theft goes the most basic problem is we are still using simple sequences of numbers and letters, to access credit cards and bank accounts, and that info is sitting ALL OVER THE PLACE in the clear. You want to stop the criminals trying to get rich through hacking, you need to move bank accounts and credit cards public key ento some kind of public key encryption so only the person who knows the key can authorize transactions, 3rd parties never store the key, and great pains are taken to protect the key when its entered.
"- every program should start using gstreamer"
Uh except gstreamer hasn't reached a 1.0 release yet which traditionally means the API isn't locked down and new versions may well break applications. If gstreamer is ready for "every program" to use it should be at 1.0.
"- ALSA must learn to do proper software mixing out of the box."
Problem #1 with ALSA is the driver support is really spotty, some hardware is great, some is not unless things have improved a lot recently.
Problem #2 with ALSA is the API was NOT well thought out from an application developer standpoint and I imagine a driver writer standpoint. It is ridiculously overdone for 90% of the applications out there and I wager it makes driver writing hard too though I haven't tried it. But I guess at this point we can just admit its bad which is why we need gstreamer to hide it.
If you bring up alsamixer the number of channels to control is baffling for the average user and different for every hardwrare/driver combo. I think KDE/Gnome are trying to smooth over the mixer problem but I don't really think they've done it successfully. Linux needs a standard mixer setup that just works for average user.
If you want to see a really well done Audio implementation you have to look no further than BeOS and they've had it for years now. Though the rest of their OS died and is attempting resurrections. for audio and media in general it still kicks Linux ass.
In particular every application registers with the media mixer UI so there is a volume control for each application by name and that is what users want, they want to turn up the application they want to listen to and turn down others they dont want to be turning up and down a bunch of hardware mixer channels.
BeOS has a low level powerful API for apps that need total control but there is a dirt simple API for apps that just need to play sound, you register a callback and the OS calls you to get a buffer when it needs it. Its really simple for most apps to code to.
If Linux developers excel at cloning existing systems, and in the audio arena it appears they have mostly failed developing an API that works so far.....please clone the BeOS audio API. It is very well done and professional audio users already love it.
"(Why are all the major chip makers in Taiwan, Japan and America ALL concentrated in areas with high tectonic activity? Is there something in the fault line they use in the production line?)"
Beware the sweeping generalization.
Intel's FAB in Santa Clara matches up for tectonic activity. Hillsboro does kinda since its in a volcanicly active area, though not sure how many major earthquakes there have beeen there lately. Volcanoes do lead to earthquakes and it is on the rim of fire.
But Intel has fabs in such volcanicly inactive places as Arizona, New Mexico, Massachusettes and Ireland. AMD's premiere fab is in Dresden, Germany. Don't know European geology that well but I doubt its on the ring of fire.
Well thats not exactly true. I'm pretty sure about half of the people that voted in the last election think everything the Bush administration is doing is GREAT and really want to live in the new America and really WANT Patriot Act III to make them SAFE. Though maybe its less than half now based on recent polls, since a bunch of people who were totally snowed by Republican manipulation during the campaign, have since come to their senses and realized the current Republican domination of the U.S. is both bad and dangerous (of course the Democrats are bad and dangerous too). All I can say to those people is .... to late ..... dumbasses, you already scewed the pooch.
The remaining Bush faithful DO want to abandon their civil liberties in the name of security and morality and they want to dicatate the same course to the rest of the world if possible. They had enough of all the liberation that started in the 60's and they want to go back to America's glory days, the 50's, McCarthyism, rigid morality, sex is taboo, homosexuals are safely locked in the closet, censorship, etc. They especially want to strip other people of their civil liberties to get them in to line with what they consider proper behavior and to eliminate any chance that they might pose any threat, real or imagined to, to there comfy ignorant little lives.
There is unfortunately a pretty close correlation between this set of people and the fundementalist Christians in the U.S. who are of the opinion they put Bush in office so they now own the U.S., its government and all the people in it and its their prerogative to dictate to everyone else how to live and if the Constitution gets in the way then the Constitution needs to be ignored or amended. A few weeks ago I saw the scary sign of the times on the news. A church that decided no good Christain could possible vote Democrat, that it was practicly voting for the devil, and that they were now on going to be a political church and anyone who didn't support Bush and Republicans was no longer welcome in the house of God and Jesus. I wonder isolated incident or is it happening all over the country in varying degrees.
And of course as others have said in other posts the second part of the one two punch is there are a bunch of corporations who also own the government in general and the Bush administration in particular. They want two things, docile cowed workers and if they cant get them in the U.S they will get them in China, and they want docile cowed consumers who buy their products and can't complain it they are defective, unhealty dangerous or overpriced (cigarettes and asbestors being classic examples, predatory gas prices another).
Star Wars earned him all the money but the most prescient and important work from George Lucas was THX-1138 which was released on DVD recently and is really worth seeing. It makes you think what might happen if we let government, corporations and control freaks sieze control of our lives. Probably to late to stop it now, but at least you will recognize it as its happening.
"The spinoffs from developing and implementing new and bleeding edge technology are manifold and not always apparent. "
As Ronald Reagan used to say, "There you go again". There is next to nothing in the ISS that is new or bleeding edge. The Russian built core is very MIR like.
ISS isn't even remotely an icon or symbol and transcends nothing. MIR did everything its doing a whole lot more cheaply. The ISS has mostly managed to hack off nearly every one of American's international partners because most of their components are still sitting on the ground and may never make it in to space. The fact that the crew is restriced to 2, or at most 3 means those partners will NEVER get the return on it they had hoped and the crew size will NEVER increase unless someone comes up with the life boats for an emergency and a logistics train that is sufficiently affortable and reliable to sustain a larger crew. The Russians will probably salvage something out of it but that is in spite of NASA not in partnership with them. I'm pretty sure they deeply regret having to deal with NASA as a partner in their space station. If anyone is going to salvage ISS it appears the Russians will have to be the ones to do it, not the U.S., but the Russians can't afford it, and the U.S. cant contribute the one thing they have of value, money, to the Russians due to the embargo because they are trading with Iran in nuclear technology.
I wager the vast majority of people are look up to the ISS and wonder how exactly we managed to spend a 100 billion dollars on something that doesn't seem to have any useful purpose. of course the U.S has wasted 300 billion on Iraq and that seems to have had no good purpose either. At least most of the icons from times gone buy survived for hundreds and thousands of years and are still marvels to see. It will be a miracle if ISS is still in orbit in 20 years and it will probably be another train wreck when the time comes to deorbit it. Personally I wager NASA will punt on it and the Russians will take it over, unplugging the NASA parts if necessary since their core is a pretty much a self contained MIR-2.
"When has space exploration been an economically driven enterprise?"
Which is, no doubt, why the manned space program hasn't advanced one teeny bit in the last 35 years. No one has figured out anything useful to with people in space. All the economic value is coming from satellites.
I don't suppose it ever registered with you that if you are concerned about the security of your nation there might be value in having domestic manufacturing cability for things like computers and cell phones.
If you transfer all of the production capability necessary for the existence of your society to other nations, China for instance, what exactly do you do if:
A. There is a war with China and it engulfs Taiwan, Korea, Japan and the rest of Asia.
B. China decides to exploit its stranglehold on your economy as fodder for various forms and degrees of blackmail.
Not a big fan of Congress passing laws, and it sure is a clumsy and staggeringly expensive way to achieve it, but I can see some value in preserving domestic capacity to design and manufacture things, especially things like IC's that are dual use and essential to national security in peace time and to national defense in event of a war. I wonder how many weapons the U.S would no longer be able to manufacture if the flow of goods from Asia were severed.
Perhaps in our globalized world we have moved beyond a global war but somehow I doubt it. What exactly happens when you have a world war in a world with a globalized economy. China has a huge advantage becuase it is rapidly acquiring all the industrial capacity necessary to fight a sustained conflict, an advantage that was America's during World War II. The U.S. is increasingly a land of service jobs, overpaid execs, marketing and incapable of producing anything of tangible value, excepting maybe weapons. America is increasingly in a position it would have to win a big war fast with the weapons it has because it couldn't fight a sustained war where there is attrition of its weapons and weapons platforms and where industrial capacity is essential to survival. Its hard to even rebuild that industrial capacity if all the machine tools and fabs have been crated up and moved to China.
You better hope F-22's are invincible because if they were taken out in large numbers they would be nearly impossible to replace in event of a real war.
There is also a concern with things like computers going in to security critical facilities like the DHS, NSA, DOD and FBI which are manufactured in a potentially hostile country. They can be designed with subtle and exploitable flaws and back doors and its pretty hard to go over every one of them with a fine tooth comb.
" to take the first semipermanent step to get us off mother earth"
Uh you are really overselling the worth of the ISS. MIR was the first step to that goal not ISS and it was done for a fraction of the cost. MIR wasn't in great shape when it was abandoned but it was abandoned due to political pressure from the ISS not because it was done. Chances are slim the ISS will last any longer than the MIR did. The key ISS problem is there is very little happening on it that justifies the staggering price tag. One redeeming aspect of ISS is it kept all the good people in the Russian space program who build MIR employed since they build the heart of the ISS and in many respects its a MIR2 but done on a NASA scale budget which meant vast quantites of our tax dollars were squandered on it, lining the pockets of contractors.
The key problem with space stations are they are intensely dependent on cargo from earth to continue to function and at current launch costs those costs are steep. As others have noted you would be better served at this point to get launch costs down and then a large permenent presence in space would be more feasible. With current technology and approach keeping people in space is simply not sustainable. You have to throw away buckets of money every year that could better go elsewhere, and there isn't actually that much for people to do spinning around in a tin can in zero G in LEO, to justify the cost. A moon base is only slightly better. Zero G manufacturing was supposed to be a boon but you really dont hear any convincing case that it is. There is growing protein crystals and some material science work but its really debatable if that couldn't be done for a fraction of the cost of the $100 billion ISS price tag using robot spacecraft. At this point all NASA can use to justify the ISS is zero G biology, something that is of value for long duration space travel but simple CAN'T justify the $100 billion ISS price tag.
A permenent colony on Mars is probably the only manned endeavor that might be justifiable and sustainable because Mars "might" have enough resources, especially water to sustain a colony that is not completely dependent on Earth. I'm talking about sending people there who stay there and not some pointless Apollo style stunt where they plant a flag, pick up rocks and come home.
Mining asteroids might be another endeavor with some value especially as we exhaust the Earth's mineral resources but its not clear if men or robots would be better for this.
All in all this is just a sad story because it just highlights NASA's incompetence. They are spending staggering sums of money wringing there hands over every detail of the Space Shuttle and to no real long term purpose. All this money is ONLY to try and finish the ISS, with one exception a Hubble repair mission. The ISS is a staggering failure and no one has the guts to admit it and stop pouring every larger sums of money in to it, while it and the Shuttle bleed every other program with a point to death. If they do manage to finish the ISS then the shuttle is abandoned and all the money they are squandering on it now trying to reinvent it at a point it already obsolete, is down the tubes.
Simple problem here, NASA bureaucracy and its pork fed contractors Lockheed/Boeing are burning vast sums of money on the shuttle, ISS and their bottom lines to no productive end, and they are just continuing to do what they've done the last 20 years, bleed every other potential aerospace venture white to feed a corrupt empire.
Well the best scenario I've seen for Mars trips don't throw the rather large and expensive ship away after each flight which seems to be what you are suggesting. It is a pretty good place for a reusable vehicle especially since it isn't trashed by any reentry effects. If its a big nuclear ship of one form or another that also speaks to not throwing it away.
Of course I'm not sure why I'm even argueing the point. Round tripping people to Mars tends to be kind of stupid in the first place. They should be going to stay, it dramaticly simplifies the mission and increases its value, stupid Apollo style trips (wander around a while then come back) will never justify the cost, while a permanent colony would. Only problem is it requires that you commit to sending them enough cargo to sustain a permanent colony. A round trip is way harder than one way and its seriously open to debate if the astronauts will be able to readapt to 1G without major leaps in providing gravity on the the trip or in getting people to tolerate long periods in zero and 1/3 G and returning to 1G.
I guess its like I figured in the beginning you are just a stupid ass troll or you are deeply, deeply disturbed. Sorry I wasted the time on ya.
Dude you are delusional. I need do nothing more than point out that you view it as a badge of honor and superiority that humans are pushing one species after another in to extinction. Yea our technology is great, it helped us create industrial scale fishing with which we have managed to crash the population of one species of fish after another.
I really think maybe you should try traveling in the parts of the world that are already desperately overcrowded and starving and just imagine what kind of a fine place the world will be when there are 10 billion mouths to feed and the earth will be to depleted to feed them. Or maybe you should visit the booming cities of China where the air pollution is so acute that it is an immediate, not just long term, health hazard.
Capitalism is a great motivator and it does lead to some giant leaps forward. Unfortunately the only thing boundless in it is greed and the devastation that unconstrained greed leads to.
Later dude, you're not worth the bandwidth any more.
Dude you are going to drag all the mass of a CEV all the way to Mars and back just so they can use it to reenter the Earth's atmosphere. I dont suppose it occured to you, with all this modularity and docking stuff that if thats all you are using it for you could dock a CEV with the Mars return craft when it gets back to earth orbit and save the mass on the round trip to Mars for something useful on mars?
Anyone using these CEV tin cans for anything beyond getting to LEO or maybe as a command module replacement for going to the Moon is crazy.
In other news, Lockheed and Boeing announced their plans to form a partnership for expendable launch vehicles. With the end of Titan and with this consortium owning Delta and Atlas this signals an end to competition for expendable launch vehicles for NASA and the DOD. They pitch it as elimination of duplication of effort, pooling all the talent on one team, and necessary economicly in a starved expendible launch market in the U.S. especially one facing major competition from Russia and ESA in the commerical sector. It also conveniently deprives the DOD and NASA of competitive bidding for this class of launchers so this new consortium can probably charge as much as they can get away with for a launch, since they will be defacto sole source. Commercial satellites can of course still shop around with the Russians, ESA, China etc but that isn't usually an option for the DOD in partciular.
"Can I put a species on an island with some exact constraints and predict -when- the new species will arrive?"
You are trying to place ridiculous constraints on the proof. There is absolutely no requirement to predict when mutations arrive or what they will look like to prove evolution. All that is necessary is to observe that mutations do appear over time, some of them are propagated, and some of them are improvements.
"We've sequenced the Humane Genome and so it ought to be reasonable to calculate down the road which links in our molecules are most likely to disrupt and what sort of evolution we can have and when."
Dude, you apparently lack the most basic understanding of the theory behind evolution. The mutations at the heart of evolution are semi random and triggered by a myriad of possible sources, exposure to natural radiation and accidents of biochemistry being the leading contenders. Most of them are bad and decrease the chances for the organism's survival but some are either neutral or positive for survival and are propagated. Over the immense time span of earth's history this mechanism almost certainly leads to diversification of species.
Sequencing of human, animal and plant genomes has supported evolution to an extent already and probably will more so over time, not by allowing us to predict evolution but by illuminating how extensively we share our genome with our near cousins, especially the apes, how much commonality there is among all species, and exactly where the commonality and divergence in our genome is. As more genomes are sequenced and our understanding of them improves, we can compare them and most probably see all the places where mutations and evolutionary breaks occurred.
The one obvious element of predictability we gain in studying genomes is that we have already developed the ability to create artificial evolution through genetic engineering. In so doing man is already exploiting the mechanisms of evolution, but removing most of the randomness that nature is forced to rely on. Through generic engineering we have pretty much proved the mechanics of evolution it just takes nature a whole lot longer to exploit them sucessfully.
All of this doesn't prove anything about the origin of life, maybe these mechanisms were designed by an intelligence of one form or another whether it be divine, or extraterrestrial or maybe they were an accident but the case is really strong that evolution is a key mechanism by which life diversifies.
Heh. Dude, nice troll I almost bit and started responding to all this nonsense, before I realized either you are a troll or maybe your a trekkie whose watched a little to much Star Trek and you've lost a grip on reality, one hint no we don't have warp drive and we aren't going to be tapping the galaxy's resources anytime soon, ROFL.
Only thing that scares me is there probably are a lot of people who actually think its OK to loot and pillage the earth because A) it will never run out or B) we will just find some miracle fix when the needs arises. Well chances are you and those like you will turn the Earth in to a hell hole before they realize that miracle solutions don't necessarily have to happen and no, trying to live on the Moon, Mars or a tin can in space isn't a pleasant alternative to sunshine, oceans and an atmosphere.
If you value your "wealth and luxury" as much as you seem to, a little hint, trying to live on Mars will be a rude awakening, it will be a really hard and unpleasant life.
I'm guessing your main tack on life is loot and pillage while you can, and hope you are dead before things turn really ugly.
"IBM leaving the PC business seems sad"
This deal isn't exactly about IBM leaving the PC business. They are buying there way in to the Chinese marketplace on the coattails of China's largest PC manufacturer, by practicly giving away one of their crown jewels, though one that is not profitable and they don't really want. Cringley did a decent job of describing all the not so obvious angles to this deal last year.
Every greedy capitalist and multinational on the planet wants to get in to China's markets because they are poised for explosive growth and in fact already are exploding. This is IBM's roundabout way of doing just that.
China's government and business leaders figured out early on that rather than just letting big American and European companies just come in and loot their markets that it would be better to force them to partner with Chinese companies, move their manufacturing to China and transfer their capital and IP to China. It was a smart strategy because it gave them a huge jumpstart thanks to the infusion of capital and IP and its allowing them to rapidly surpass their American and European benefactors, and Asian competitors. China is growing a LOT faster, thanks to Western help, than it ever could of on its own. Many American companies are crating up whole factories, machine tools, etc and just shipping them to China, that is a massive migration of capital and aboon to China.
China can force this kind of deal because Chinese markets are NOT even remotely free, the government massively manipulates them and manipulates all the Western companies who want to do business there. Lenovo is heavily influenced by the Chinese government like most big Chinese companies.
It is long term a pretty raw deal for Americans and Europeans but it is short term very profitable for them and thats all most stock market obsessed western execs care about, short term profitability just long enough for them to make their killing on their stock. They dramaticly cut their labor costs by disposing of expensive western labor and they gain access to big, fast growing new markets, both things which are very good for your short term stock price. They choose to ignore that long term its unlikely their Chinese partners will need them and someday their Chinese partners will probably bury them.
Market growth is a also a big factor here, American, Japan and European markets are mature, saturated, tired, slow growth and obviously the labor is way overpriced in a newly globalized market place. Real wages aren't growing in those places so most people don't have any new money to spend buying products. The head of GE was on Charlie Rose a while ago and he spelled it out. All big multinationals are moving all their labor intensive jobs to the cheapest, friendliest(a.k.a oppressed) labor market and China is the leader by far in that arena. They are also completely fixated on tapping new markets with growth potential those are in places like China, India, Russia and Eastern Europe not the U.S., Western Europe and Japan.
There is a whole lot of basic Marxism/Capitalism going on here. Capitalism is always going to flow production to the cheapest labor and sales to the growing markets. When growth slows and stops in the developed nations they have to pump up new markets in the underdeveloped world by employing workers there, pumping money in to their economies and training them in rampant consumerism. If you don't brainwash people in these new markets that they must have cars, fast food and appliances capitalism would starve.
Unfortunately capitalism really isn't a sustainable economic model. Eventually the world is going to burst at the seams from the overpopulation of rampant consumers, pollution, resource exhaustion, etc. America got away with its extravagantly wasteful life style for half a century but when you introduce the same excess in places like China and India the world is going to run out finite
"the US will back up these strong suggestions with threats of trade sanctions etc"
Well in answer to that all I need do is point out that Canada is America's largest external supplier of oil and I would guess probably natural gas. I'm pretty sure that China would be glad to take all of Canada's oil currently going to the U.S. if the Bush administration were to be their usual arrogant selves and start a another trade war. Venezuela is on the verge of doing just this and they account for another big chunk of America's oil imports like 12% if I remember. This tactic wouldn't work very well if there was a surplus in the oil markets but there isn't a surplus now so it DOES work very well.
For a country that is completely dependent on the rest of the world for energy and is by far the world's largest debtor nation its threats are starting to ring pretty hollow. The U.S. does have the honking big military but its been established that the American military is pretty impotent as long as you don't go toe to toe with them in the open and opt for an insurgency instead.
The U.S. really does need to be blessed with an attitude adjustment that when you have become completely dependent on the rest of the world for energy, completely dependent on other nations to to prop up your massive debt, and most of your manufactured goods come from abroad that you are a pretty impotent nation and the rest of the world can start treating you as such.
"You say that MMORPGs are pointless, repetitive grinds that people while away their lives at, and that they'll never really be popular until they stop being pointless, repetitive grinds."
Not exactly sure how you read that in what I said.
I NEVER said they weren't popular, they are obviously VERY popular. The only thing I said which is exactly what you said is unfortunately they are a massive waste of time, which when coupled with the fact they are very popular means they are a giant black hole of counterproductivity.
The challenge is to maintain the draw that makes them so popular, but inject in to them useful activity, without making them tedious and boring.
As I suggested the two areas where there is potential is education if you can use the same format and teach real and useful knowledge instead of fantasy trade skills.
Another area is in communication. They offer a really great vehicle for people to meet, form groups, and communicate, far better than disembodied email, IM and IRC.
I grant you the Pavlovian nature of them is bad, but then to, I wager they are so popular because people crave having clear goals and clear rewards. When you achieve the goals you get immediate reward and satisfaction. That is something sorely lacking in real life. In real life the rewards are slow, and often badly defined, and usually at the whim of someone like a parent, boss or teacher where it seldom clear what reward you will receive for what performance, and rewards are often more to skilled ass kissing than actual performance.
One thing I would add is when it comes to shooter they are unfortunately very productive in one area. They are exceptionally good at desensitizing children to killing and being killed and in training them in the skills they will need to operate future high tech, increasingly virtual weapons so they are a superb training tool for the military to get there future recruits a head start on the skills they will need.
As others have noted its not exactly the same technology, its just the same name a company and team used over decades for a family of launchers as are Delta and Atlas.
And as others have noted much of the technology really was good and didn't need to evolve.
But it should also be noted there is a good reason expendable booster evolution has been slow in the U.S.
In particular the Space Shuttle completely decimated and paralyzed expendable booster development in the 70's and early 80's and set it back for at least a decade if not two in the U.S. If you recall there was a NASA mandate during the Shuttle's heyday that all NASA satellites would be launched on it, the DOD similarly, though somewhat more reluctantly, put all its eggs in the shuttle basket which nearly wiped out the business for expendable boosters for a long period.. It wasn't until the Challenger disaster that everyone in the U.S. remembered unmanned expendable boosters were really way better for launching satellites.
At that point Delta, Titan and Atlas went from nearly dead to rebirth but it took years to revive the expendible boost production lines and just get them back where they were before the Shuttle nuked them.
Delta in particular was the team which was given a charter to build new booster technology, there is a pretty good writeup on Space Review. The Delta Heavy is one candidate for launching the CEV. Unfortunately just about every launch vehicle we have compares poorly to the Saturn V if you ware serious about going to the Moon or Mars. All the CEV plans I've seen require multiple launches and docking all the components in LEO to get to the Moon versus the Saturn V doing it all in one shot. Delta 4 Heavy is a slight improvement over the Saturn 1B which was the last U.S. man rated expendable booster used in Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz but pales against Saturn V.
All in all its kind of sad commentary on how little America's space program has progressed since it peaked during Apollo.
The CEV program is going to take a good 10 years, if a miracle occurs and it stays on schedule, until there is a manned launch and then its going to be putting a tiny conical capsule in to LEO. It will be a disappointment to anyone who remembers Apollo. In most respects they would be better served if they just dust off all the Apollo plans and reverse engineer that hardware systems, update things like the computers that have progressed dramaticly, and pick up where Apollo left off versus spending 10 years and a lot of money to design something less capable than Apollo.
Some interesting models for where the game industry should be heading are the virtual worlds of Neil Stephenson's Snowcrash or Diamond Age.
The objective is to create virtual worlds that are so compelling and rich that people will leave the real world for them. It already happens to an extent with games like WoW and EQ, but hey unfortunately quickly devolve in to repetitive, pointless grinds with no real point, they are atrocious time sinks. But there is still interest and color from two directions, interaction with other people and their virtual economies.
In these virtual worlds you can adopt a look and persona of your choosing and not the one you were stuck with at birth, you can be far more creative and daring than most people are in meat space. You can intereact with people from around the world and find people you like and share interests with, and some you hate too. The key point is you aren't stuck with the limited set of people you are stuck with in meat space(school, work, church, bars, mall). You are judged by intellect and creativity and not by whether you are attractive which is unfortunately how people first judge each other in meat space.
You can also take risks that most people wont normally take in the real world.
The challenge is that online games are a pointless time sink in reality. If someone can make the jump to where virtual worlds surpass the real world then they have a winner. One avenue is education, if you can create virtual worlds that educate people more effectively and in a more compelling way than schools you would have a winner. That was a central tenant of "Diamond Age" and it was a compelling one.
Another avenue is if you can move real economies in to virtual space and make them more efficient. Ebay is kind of this but its not really a compelling way to interact. I'm think for example is you move Ebay in to a virtual world where buyers and sellers have avatars and can meet, get to know one other, have conferences and meetings in virtual space etc. Its a little off the wall but I wonder if you could host a professional conference with speakers and presentations, bar room meetings etc in a virtual world so you eliminate the steep costs of traveling. How much would you lose in not having the meat space personal interaction versus how much improved efficiency would you gain in eliminating the cost and time of the meat space travel.
Not sure it will be possible to make the jump from games that are entertaining time sinks to a place where they count for something. If they stay as they will they be an entertaining diversion or will they be a massive pointless time sink draining the world of its productivity, as everyone spend more and more time in virtual worlds that have no real value.
"The problem, the real and specific problem, is that they DO have traction"
No argument with most of your post but you took this out of context. I said "newspapers" have no traction, especially independent newspapers whether they be on paper or the Internet. Television and talk radio are the media dominating the way people think, and maybe mix in some big newspaper conglomerates and tabloids.
"in the few years in between now and when the new man-rated launch-vehicle comes out"
If you are referring to the CEV its not a few years, its more like a decade. The only thing happening in a few years, maybe, is a test flight by the two teams of an unmanned tin can maybe in 2008 but it would be a miracle if they held that schedule, this is NASA, Boeing and Lockheed after all. The earliest there would be a manned flight is 2014 and that is pretty much a fantasy target.
Here is a biting editorial on the giant mound of contractor pork and red tape that is CEV. Transformational Space, the one fresh and innovative company in the early running, apparently pretty much abandoned bidding on it when they saw it was business as usual for NASA and structured so only Boeing and Lockheed could or would compete for it.
Even if a manned CEV ever flies which is a long shot given NASA's record with new manned vehicles since the shuttle, you are probably talking about a relatively tiny conical capsule, yes after a decade of new development and billions of dollars you are going to pretty much be back where we were in the 1960's, a tiny vehicle capable of carrying a few people and a tiny amount of cargo. The launch vehicle will be a derivative of existing expendable launchers and wont have anything close to the power of a Saturn V so every mission profile beyond putting a tin can in LEO requires multiple launches and docking all the pieces in orbit.
Bottomline is what is in NASA's pipe is less than what they had in the 1960's but at a staggering cost in time and money.
The international community would probably be way ahead scraping together the money to build the proposed Russian Kliper.
Yea but Nazi's won the election that brought them to power, though not a clear majority. They consolidated their power largely thanks to winning control of the legislature and passing laws that gradually decimated or outright outlawed all opposition. They used the Reichstag fire to justify many of their greater excesses as the Republican's today use 9/11.
"the nazis were socialist as are most Democrats"
They were Fascists which isn't exactly the same as classic Socialists. The Nazi's created a giant interventionist government but it worked hand in hand with giant corporations and industrialists much like today's Republican party. Wealthy industrialists brought him to power, in fact bankrolled his rise to power, in particular the Thyssen family, and wealthy capitalists don't normally support real socialists. The Thyssen family is interesting because George. W's grandfather Prescott was their banker in America and his bank, Union Banking, was seized for trading with the enemy when war was declared much to the embarrassment of the Bush family. They had extensive financial dealings, along with their wealthy benefactors the Harrimans, with Nazi Germany.
Today's neo con Republicans are also big fans of aggressive warfare, you know unilaterally invading countries who haven't attacked you under false pretenses, like Nazi Germany.
I'm guessing your suggesting today's Republican's are free market conservatives and the antithesis of all this Nazi, Democrat Socialism, well I guess you haven't noticed but the new Republican party has been growing the government, its intrustion in and control of our lives, and its deficit spending at a furious pace, they are just growing it in a way that favors the wealthy and their corporate friends.
I really wish we did have a conservative government that did what all the Republican's have said they were gonna do if they gained power, cut government spending, cut the size of govermment and limit its intrustion in our lives, but today's Republican party is more Fascist than it is conservative. Certainly its velvet gloved, compassionate fascism and nothing close to Germany in the 30's but give it time and one more 9/11 scale attack.
"we still have elections"
So did Germany, they did gain power through elections, laced as they were with Brown shirt intimidation, and they held elections for most of their rise to power, they just used their control of the government to pass laws that marginalized or outright outlawed of all their opposition.
After a stolen presidential election in 2000 and a suspicious election in 2004, remember the exit polls that said one thing and the official results that said another I don't think just having elections proves anything. Unless they are fair and above reproach which America's haven't been since 2000. If they are vulnerable to manipulation they are meaningless.
"free press"
Heh, most people are getting their news from TV networks controlled by a tiny handful of giant corporations. Rupert Murdoch's global empire in particular, is anything but "free", "fair" or
"balanced" and is dominating cable news, maybe you've heard of them, Fox News, they own like a third of the world's media, Viacom, Time/Warner, GE and Disney round out the list, none of which are exactly fans of controversy. Radio is controlled largely by Clearchannel and dominated by right wing extremists. Newspapers are also massively consolidated and simply don't have any traction with most people any more.
So our media has been stampeded in to being anything but free. CBS has been thoroughly spanked for its "liberal bias", FOX's right wing bias is blatant, unchecked and its all angry white men watch. CNN used to balance FOX but since November when they got their new chief and the Republican's swept the elections I barely recognize it, they are pandering to the Christian right so much to try to salvage their ratings. There was a time after the Atlanta shooting they were plugging "The Purpose Driven Life" so