I think you have the numbers backwards, and wildly exaggerated to boot. In most cases, the drugs people buy online are fairly cheap to make, to the point where it would cost more to convincingly adulterate a drug than to just make it properly. Plus, the profit margins on those drugs sold to Americans are so *astronomically* high compared to their local markets (because we're used to getting anally-raped as the normal course of things), they really ARE better off selling the real thing to happy repeat buyers who'll spread the word to all their friends who take long-term maintenance drugs that are expensive, a pain, or both, to buy in the US.
As a general rule, the more mundane a maintenance drug is (blood pressure, cholesterol, and proton-pump inhibitors come to mind), the more likely that what you're getting from a foreign pharmacy is going to be perfectly good.
Keep in mind also that most "no prescription" online pharmacies aren't technically "no prescription" -- they're just taking advantage of local laws allowing "telemedicine" that are loosely enforced to allow a staff (usually, retired) doctor to rubber-stamp the prescriptions after an online "consultation" (where you checked the box that says, "these are my symptoms, and I have no known allergies").
If they were made in India, they might differ in size, shape, or color because India doesn't recognize pharmaceutical patents for uses or chemicals -- it only recognizes patents for manufacturing processes. So, when somebody like Pfizer patents a drug in India, they get a patent on the specific process they use to manufacture the drug. If somebody comes up with a different way to make the same drug, they can patent it and sell the drug in India with complete legality. Cipla is notorious (among American/European pharma companies) for doing this. Because they have to come up with a different manufacturing process to legally avoid infringement, the alternate generics usually WILL be different in form (capsule vs tablet, color, taste, etc).
In America, you can take an old drug like finasteride or doxepin (marketed for treating an enlarged prostate or depression), change the dosage slightly, then get a new 18-year patent for it as a treatment for hair loss or insomnia. In India, you'd be laughed at and get told to stick your silly American "use" patent where the sun doesn't shine.
Indian drugs often taste a hell of a lot better than their American versions, because many American drugs are intentionally formulated to taste bad so kids won't "think they're candy". American atenolol is one specific example -- it tastes AWFUL. The Indian Atenolol I've been buying for the past couple of years, in contrast, is gelcoated.
Would I buy imported chemotherapy drugs? No. There's too much at stake, over a relatively short period of time.
I have no qualms about buying long-term "maintenance" drugs like atenolol, though, that are so cheap to make, it would almost cost more for them to try and convincingly fake it. The key is to sample new batches slowly, and be alert for any noticeable differences. The biggest real risk is that an unethical foreign supplier might repackage one drug as another of equivalent dosage, like repackaging propranolol as atenolol, or omeprazole as esomeprazole. The nice thing about drugs from India is that they come in foil packets instead of bottles, so substituting one for another requires larger-scale fraud than merely shipping 60 tablets from bottle #2 instead of bottle #1. The foil also keeps them fresh longer, so you can buy them a year's worth at a time and be through with it, instead of screwing around with refills every month and dealing with "we know you're going on vacation out of the country for two weeks, but your health insurance won't approve payment for the refill until 3 days from now" bullshit.
I would be cautious of extended-release formulations, because it's definitely possible that the difference could matter. On the other hand, it could end up being better. Once again, if it's a drug you've been taking for years, and will be taking for years, after a while... you're going to have a pretty good idea whether your new supply is or is not the same. If anything, you're more likely to experience variations with drugs bought from somewhere like Wal Mart, where they might change suppliers every couple of months, and there's abundant evidence online that different generics ABSOLUTELY differ in their pharmacokinetics (google "bupropion budeprion teva" for one of the more infamous examples of this). Unlike American pharmacies, most online pharmacies will at least let you pick the brand as well as the drug itself.
Insofar as Indian quality goes, keep in mind that probably 90% of the generic drugs at Wal Mart come from the same plants in India as the drugs sold online. The irony is that India actually has tighter requirements on generic bioequivalence than the FDA does (ie, the FDA allows up to 20% variance; I think it's 5% or less in India).
Ultimately, it comes down to how much time and research you're willing to invest, and your tolerance for risk. If you're a MBTI xxxJ, online pharmacies probably aren't for you. The anxiety from the abstract risk and fear of disobeying authority will kill you. If you're a MBTI xNTP who can explain a drug's pharmacokinetics and metabolization path better than your own doctor can, online pharmacies are a gift from ${deity}.
> Without the CRTC there would be no commercial outlet for Canadian content.
Err... right. Because Americans seem to just totally hate Canadian artists. Well except for Celine Dion, Sum 41, Starting Line, Bryan Adams, Soul Decision, Kon Kan, and somewhere between and ~8-14% of the songs playing on the radio at any given moment in time.
Or, for that matter, about a quarter of the TV shows on HGTV, Discovery, Bravo, Comedy Central, and other popular cable channels...
The truth is, media is one of Canada's biggest and most profitable exports. The problem is, the CRTC is run by the same people who, back in college, were the "indie kids" who automatically hated anyone who dared to achieve commercial popularity. As far as they're concerned, the moment a Canadian artist gets a #1 hit in the US, they cease to be "authentically Canadian" by virtue of having "sold out". Now they're in a position of power & authority, and aren't shy about using it to make everyone else listen to "better" (in their opinion) music.
Actually, I made a slight typo. I've seen cheap LCD TVs that, given synthetic 30fps 1920x1080 content presented to the TV *as* genuine 1080p30 via HDMI, will *still* produce weave artifacts, because internally one part of the TV's own LCD controller pipeline is kludging it to fake 1080i60.
In fact, it gets even worse. My parents have a 19" LCD TV from Wal Mart in their kitchen whose video pipeline appears to be crudely weaving 1080p30 into 1080i60, then brutally bobbing it down to 1920x540 before resizing it to 1366x768 (as opposed to just resizing each frame from 1920x1080 down to 1366x768). It's almost as if the ASICs were designed by somebody who understood 1080i60 well, then handed off to summer interns who "kind of" understood 720p60, but had no real concept of what the other video modes actually were, and who just crudely stapled everything else on top of the chips' 1080i60 support.
Oh... just to add... in case anybody is wondering why interlacing is a NEW problem, it's because old videogames and home computers tricked TVs into scanning EVERY field as if it were an "odd" field, instead of scanning odd fields, then even fields. That's why they had black scanline artifacts between every other row of pixels. In effect, they tricked CRT TVs into pseudo-progressive 60fps mode by scanning the same field over and over again & leaving the even field's scanlines dark, instead of alternating between the odd and even fields (refreshing each 30 times per second).
There's a bigger problem lurking with "true" HD video -- 50 & 60 fps isn't fast enough to climb out of the "Uncanny Valley". It turns out, the white papers written back in the 80s and 90s were biased by the physical behavior of film and CRT displays, and made lots of assumptions that fall apart when you're talking about an inherently progressive display like a LCD, and source video that's basically rendered to digital film of infinite sensitivity one frame of infinitely-short duration at a time. It turns out, motion blur encodes a hell of a lot of extra visual information into each frame that naive attempts to apply Nyquist to synthetic video content fail to appreciate.
The PC videocard industry and gaming industry started to become painfully aware of the problem about 10 years ago, and they're still working on it. The current band-aid is to simulate motion-blur... but motion blur itself becomes visually-tedious after a while.
Between glasses-free 3D and refresh rates fast enough to make motion-blur unnecessary, there's still plenty of room for future advancement in videogame and TV technology. We have a long, long way to go before you'll be able to dress up a monitor like a fake window & feel like you're looking outside at a real scene... made longer by the fact that the advancements needed to take videogames to this level go WAY beyond what mass-market consumers are likely to care about, much less demand, for TV-watching purposes. This means the quantum leap that occurred over the past 10 years is more of a fluke than anything, and isn't likely to be sustainable in the long run.
At some point, the cost burden is going to shift from mass-market consumers subsidizing the technology through billions of general TV sales back to mere millions of high-end gamers driving the market for outrageously expensive (compared to what you'd pay for even an *expensive* TV at Wal Mart) cutting-edge hardware. Think: the gigantic cost leap seen today when you go from 1920x1080 to any higher res (like 2560x1920), but even worse.
> The big joke of the last 3 generations is that Nintendo has put together under-performing hardware
You're overlooking the 400-ton elephant wearing a pink tutu standing over in the corner -- 1080i60. As much as we'd like for it to be true, native 1080pAnything is far from universal. You'd be horrified if you saw the architectural mess inside most mass-market sub-$400 LCD TV controller ASICs -- it makes the parallelport-semi-SCSI-kludged-to-USB trainwreck that evolved with scanners look downright elegant by comparison.
The raw panels themselves can do 24p, 30p, and 60p without drama, but the brain-damaged controllers driving them were value-engineered to just kludge anything besides 720p60 the same way they always have -- they bob it (ie, they treat 1920x1080 16:9 interlaced video as 1920x540 16:9 progressive video, then resample it to 1366x768).
When presented with 1080p24, instead of just natively showing it at 24fps, they stupidly apply 3:2 pulldown to emulate 1080i60 and pass it to the same braindamaged controller. I've seen cheap LCD TVs that somehow managed to end up with weave artifacts out of 1080p30 source. And today's Walmart crap is the semi-high-end from 5 years ago.
Put another way, it's going to be at least another 10 years before you can confidently throw out 1080p60 video and expect butter-smooth artifact-free rendering on the TVs in most living rooms. With current TVs out "in the wild", modes like 1080p24 and 1080p30, let alone 1080p60, are too inconsistently-implemented to risk depending on... and true 1080i60 looks like crap on anything besides a 240hz set that uses oversampling to emulate interlace fade. So we get the least common denominator -- 1080p30 pretending to be 1080i60, that 10-20% of TVs still manage to screw up and butcher.
Of course, 720p60 works well on just about everything. Unfortunately, 720p60 isn't sexy enough for the marketing department. So instead of getting judder-free butter-smooth 1280x720 60fps video without glitches, and with enough filtering to be almost indistinguishable from real-life, we end up with 1080i60 video that looks like crap.
That's the sad truth. 720p60 isn't good enough for the marketing department, 1080i60 rendered AS 1080i60 looks like crap on most TVs. 1080p60 is a fantasy in 94% of the homes in America, 1080p24 is badly-implemented in at least a quarter of the TVs out there, and 5-10% somehow manage to even screw up 1080p30 encoded as fake 1080i60.
I should mention that the bug I'm describing most certainly DOES affect Windows 7, too. But just to re-emphasize for the benefit of context (in case future replies separate this post from the parent), the bug ONLY manifests itself when you have an enterprise network with certain specific group policies that look individually innocent, but collectively have the effect of preventing local admin group members (and ONLY members of this group) from using mklink to create symlinks.
It usually does. The bug only surfaces when you're part of an enterprise active directory network that has group policies & domain admins, and it only crops up with specific combinations of group policy settings that look innocent in and of themselves, but have disabling the creation of symlinks by local admin members (but nobody else) as an unintended side effect. To make them work, you have to set some other policy that looks like it's imposing a restriction upon local admins, but actually has the opposite effect.
He's not. Lost amidst the orgy of hate for Vista was the fact that it did, in fact, finally give us real, honest-to-god symlinks, so it's no longer necessary to use NTFS junctions to kludge directory symlinks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mklink
The bad news is, there's an ambiguous set of Group Policy settings that work together in non-obvious ways to create a perverse scenario where the only users who CAN'T create symlinks are users with local admin privileges. In other words, anybody who doesn't have local admin rights (including the guest user) can create symlinks wherever they're allowed to create files, but if you DO have local admin rights, mklink will fail.
It sounds more like some (Canadian?) environmental group unrelated to the asbestos purchaser was trying to block the sale by arguing that it shouldn't be legal for a Canadian company to export a product that's illegal to sell in Canada itself.
It's like the zoning and code-enforcement mess in the City of Hialeah, Florida. You could make it a college textbook case study. Basically, the zoning & code-enforcement office took a ~35-year lunch break, and by the time anyone started to really notice or care, they discovered that something like 95% of the single-family homes in the city had at least one *major* building or zoning code violation (mostly, illegal additions built without permits and/or illegal studio apartments the owners rent out for additional income).
Politically, you just can't fix a mess like that. If elected officials tried, angry citizens would force a recall election within a month or two, and they'd all end up getting thrown out of office. However, the same elected officials can't legally amend many of the laws to grandfather the status quo into compliance, because many of those same laws were basically dictated to the city by the county, state, and federal governments. So, the city does the only thing it can -- it keeps its code enforcement office grossly under-staffed so it physically CAN'T dredge up too many awkward problems.
There's a reason why Americans fly to London or Paris on Thursday night after work, sleep on the plane, spend Friday running around the city taking pictures, crash & burn Friday night, spend Saturday as a tourist, then leave mid-afternoon on Sunday. It's not because we're glamorous jet-setters... it's because we managed to take Friday off, and have to be in the office at 9am on Monday.
> creditors will take over the country like they did in Greece and force the US to sell its assets.
One big, huge difference -- US debt is denominated in our own currency. We could, with complete legality, have the Fed print 400 trillion dollars, lend it to the federal government at 0% interest, and use it to pay off those same foreign creditors. Greece couldn't do that, because it doesn't control its own currency.
Also, unlike Greece, the US is STILL sitting on more natural resources than just about any other country on earth (Canada probably beats us per-capita, though).
OK. Let's be intellectually honest here. Inflation benefits neither the poorest of poor nor the richest of rich. It does, however, benefit the middle-class majority. You know...the ones who have mortgages that are double the present market value of their homes, tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, etc.
First and foremost, inflation is ${deity's} way of forcing the wealthiest.5% to invest their money and put it to work, instead of putting it in a vault and just sitting on it.
It's because Oracle (formerly Sun) makes huge amounts of money licensing the rights to distribute installable copies of Java. Java is only free (as in beer) if you, the end user, personally download it from Oracle's official web site and install it yourself as a separate process distinct from installing any app that requires Java.
Officially, you (as a developer) aren't even allowed to try and automate the process. If you want to automate the process in any way, and/or bundle a Java installer with your app, you have to pay HUGE amounts of money for the rights to do it.
Java's licensing is brilliantly viral, because it imposes restrictions that developers never even *notice* until somebody points out their implications to naive end users. MySQL's licensing works more or less the same way -- free for end users to download & install themselves, but the moment an automated installer enters the picture (or a consultant is involved), the mandatory licensing fees kick in... and the fees are high enough that if you're running Windows servers anyway, you'll probably end up kicking yourself for having not just used SQL Server to begin with. I'm not talking about web serves you configure yourself... I'm talking about commercial apps that depend upon a database for their persistent backing store, and would normally be installed like a normal application.
99 times out of 100, when a user has problems running a Java app, it's because somebody specified an inappropriate version of Java in the manifest. There's an entire subtle range of possible values that have meanings like "The newest installed VM that's Java $N or newer", "The newest installed VM that's Java $N", "The newest installed VM that's at least Java $N.$V", and so on. The problems come about when some idiot doesn't know what he's doing, has an application that only NEEDS Java 4, then turns around and specifies in the manifest that it MUST run under Java 4, instead of "Java 4 or newer", so somebody who has Java 6, release 28 installed has to try and literally install a Java 4 VM to run it. It gets even worse with applets, because Sun's official docs totally borked the explanation of how CLSID values worked, and caused ENDLESS grief when some corporate apps decided to dictate specific releases of Java for no good reason.
The fact is, if you write a Java application and Jar it up in a way that says only that it must have a VM that's at least as old as some minimum version, the likelihood of users having real-world problems with it are pretty low. I have stuff I wrote 10+ years ago and compiled with a pre-alpha 1.4 JDK that still works today (which is a good thing, because the source code was lost when my old laptop died). I've seen corporate apps that anal-retentively specify that they must not be used with any JDK besides 2.6.0_19, then go a step beyond and die if you have a newer JDK even installed at all, because they're launched by webapps that use the CLSID that means "ignore the settings in the JPI control panel, always use the newest version installed", then turn around and use Javascript to test for JPI version & commit suicide if it's older than 2.6.0_19 (even if you have 2.6.0_19 installed, and bent over backwards to specify that precise JDK in the control panel). I've actually had to use Greasemonkey in some cases to dynamically fix the stupid CLSID embedded in the Object definition on the fly so it wouldn't ignore my JPI control panel settings. But don't get me started on that... grrrrrrr...
Of course, we've all had our "ohcrap" moments. I remember spending a week working on what was supposed to be a cross-platform videochat application written in Java (so it could run under Windows, Mac, and Linux) using JMF. It worked nicely under Windows. Then I went to test it under Linux, and discovered that JMF was basically broken to the point of uselessness under everything besides Windows due to codec licensing & implementation issues. That was when I learned the hard way that anytime you're explicitly writing something that HAS to work on a platform besides Windows, make sure it doesn't have "issues" with other platforms before investing lots of time in it... especially if it depends upon any extension or framework that's not a native part of bog-standard Java that gets installed by default. Especially anything based upon a JSR. I've lost count of the number of JSR-related extensions that were nothing but stubs & almost inevitably had Macintosh problems.
IMHO, Sun fucked up, and fucked up badly, when they handed over control of Macintosh Java to Apple. Jonathan Schwarz basically handed Steve Jobs the rope, and was too oblivious to notice Steve busily tying it into a noose. Java's main reason for existing as a platform for desktop applications is WORA, and allowing Apple to screw up Macintosh Java as badly as they did hurt that main purpose really badly.
... and that's why Italy's government already has plans to build a huge dike around Venice's lagoon, complete with locks to automatically flush its water into the Adriatic. "Global Warming" is almost irrelevant to Venice, because as you pointed out, subsidence due to water table depletion has already put it in a position of needing protection. The expensive part is getting the protection in place to begin with. Once you've committed to building it, it doesn't really make much of a difference to the cost whether you're building it to handle 1 meter, 3 meters, or even 6 meters of sealevel rise.
The truth is, Florida and the Netherlands would be the LEAST directly-affected by rising sea levels. Why? Because we ALREADY have water control structures in place. We have to. Without them, the land could never have been usefully developed at all. The places that will flood are swampy rural areas that will just end up turning into lakes, lagoons, and inland seas.
Need proof? Go to Manhattan, and TRY to make bodily contact with the Hudson River or East River. AFAIK, there's no public place where you can actually reach down and touch the water's surface, let alone wade into it or swim. Ditto, for downtown Chicago. The closest you can get is a dock, or maybe the edge of a manmade concrete cliff that's a good 18-30 feet above the high tide mark. Yes, I'm sure if you're determined, you can eventually find somewhere to climb down to some old access area and do it... but if you're standing in the middle of Park Avenue or in front of the Sears Tower (or whatever they changed its name to) and just spontaneously decide you want to touch the water's surface, you're likely to have a hell of a time finding anyplace where you can get close enough to the actual river surface to do it, because the adjacent land has been built up so much over the past few centuries.
No, you don't need tracking if you're content to accept grossly-inefficient spectrum usage. Just scan through all the bands when you power up (and periodically thereafter), note the IDs of every satellite with a signal that can be heard, and there's your sky map. My "untracked" example assumes you've got gobs of bandwidth and AREN'T trying to efficiently reuse spectrum, and you're just doing more or less what Sirius does (each satellite downlinks the same bitstream on a different frequency, with only a couple actively transmitting at once). It would be just about the worst possible way you could build a satellite broadband network (because your entire user base -- some fraction of 300 million -- would be sharing for 1/2 to 1/4 of your total available spectrum at the same time), but it DOES illustrate that it's possible to have satellite downlinks that don't require tracking or dishes.
Now, getting back to my real example (multilink combining low-latency low-speed IDSL with high-speed high-latency satellite in geostationary orbit), there's no need to track a moving satellite, so you're back to efficient small-footprint spot beams capable of delivering their entire bandwidth to a small region, and doing the same thing with the same spectrum in dozens of other small regions with their own spot beams. Most things that are truly latency-sensitive don't require LOTS of data, and most things that require LOTS of data can deal with a second or two of latency. Make the small http request in 20ms via IDSL, receive the whole HTML page back via IDSL before the satellite link has even finished sending the header. Send 70 http requests via IDSL for the linked files on the page, and start receiving them back via both IDSL and satellite. The small things finish sending via IDSL before the satellite finishes sending the header, the big files blast through over satellite and finish before the IDSL has finished sending 400k. It's so brute-force brilliant, I'm amazed nobody has ever done it yet (let's be honest... most people who rely on satellite internet aren't exactly poor, so $300/month for satellite + IDSL isn't likely to be a deal-breaker compared to $180/month for satellite alone.
> Maybe because - for the most part - Samsung's phones don't *suck* the way some others' do.
Um, I suspect quite a few unhappy American Galaxy S owners would be inclined to disagree. The Froyo delay and dysfunctional GPS pretty much guaranteed that my next phone wasn't going to be from Samsung.
That said, I've been pretty disappointed by Motorola (Photon), too. They got off to a good start, then completely dropped the ball ~2 months ago. They're still wringing their hands over bootloader-unlocking (yes, hacks exist... but AFAIK, they all break 4G), and the video drivers in both the Photon and Xoom forcibly render all output to 16-bit through bad gamma curves that prematurely attenuate dark shades to black (Google "black crush").
> What about the ones that live in areas that are going to be covered in water?
Thanks to civil engineering, building permanent structures in areas that are submerged is quite do-able (think: causeway, oil rig). In stark contrast, glaciers are a very, very BIG problem. There's really no good way to build a permanent structure in the middle of a thick glacier field. If you build on top of the glacier, pressure melts the ice & causes the structure to slowly sink into it. If you refrigerate the contact points to keep the ice from melting, the structure moves with the glacier. If you try to bore holes down to the bedrock & build concrete pilings through the glacier, the glacier's motion will snap them like twigs. It's not necessarily *impossible*, but the engineering problems involved make open water look like a neatly-cleared urban vacant lot in a big city by comparison.
I'm still somewhat amused by sea-level alarmists whose flood maps just assume that people will passively abandon hundreds of billions of dollars worth of low-lying real estate & allow it to become submerged, instead of doing more or less the same thing developers in Florida have been doing for the past century -- digging holes for fill dirt, raising the terrain, and building on pilings where appropriate. Hell, my neighborhood, and the land my house sits on, was submerged under several feet of water for thousands of years on the day I was born. ~20 years later, the area was drained, dredged, filled, and turned into nice houses on a big manmade lake. I know, because my neighborhood's HOA has been fighting with FEMA for the past 10 years to update the official flood map for my neighborhood from -2 feet to 12 feet, because nobody ever bothered to update the official county elevation map after the developer terraformed the neighborhood into dry land.
Actually, this raises another point... lots of the Global Warming flood prediction maps based on land elevation for South Florida are just plain wrong, for the same reason as the map in my own neighborhood -- developers over the past 100 years dredged, filled, and raised the land, and nobody ever bothered to update the official terrain maps. The flood models are wrong, for the same reason why hurricane storm-surge models have been wildly wrong in pretty much every hurricane since 1940 -- the surge models -- like Global Warming Flood Models -- assume the existence of a natural coastline that hasn't existed for *decades*.
Are sea levels rising? Probably. Are they going to rise more? Almost certainly. Are waterfront neighborhoods going to be abandoned to rising water? No way in hell. They'll just get rebuilt on taller foundations every 50 years or so when a major hurricane blows away whatever's there now.
Only if efficient spectrum use is a concern. Years ago, dishes were needed mainly because satellites could only transmit weak signals. Now, dishes are mainly to allow spectrum reuse by adjacent satellites (combining highly-directional transmission antennas and relatively small spotbeam footprints with high-gain receiving antennas that attenuate strong signals from adjacent satellites). If you have continent-wide spectrum, you can live without dishes as long as spectrum reuse isn't a concern -- just look at Sirius and satellite cell phones.
IMHO, an ideal satellite-based internet service would use PPP multilink to combine a low-speed terrestrial link (probably IDSL) with high-speed satellite link, and intelligent routing that sends everything via both links, and just aborts the one that doesn't finish first.
Hmmm. You know, if China quietly told the US it intended to invade Iran, somehow got permission from Russia, Germany, France, and Britain to do it, and could somehow convince the Pentagon that it could pull it off without getting Israel nuked in the process... it would be politically awkward (to put it mildly), but almost an epic win for the US.
On one hand, it would put China in direct control of much of the world's oil. On the other hand, China would buy most of Iran's oil output *anyway*.
It would nicely allow the US to outsource a nasty, bloody war, and would let CHINA's army get beaten up for once instead of ours. Americans could look at horrible things done by the PLA in Iran, say "Tsk.", and celebrate the return of $2/gallon unleaded. With China firmly in control of Iran's oil, global markets would be flooded by it (or at least, flooded by cheaper oil from elsewhere no longer being purchased by China).
The big wildcard is Israel. It wouldn't take much for Iran to destroy it, and for obvious political reasons, Israeli troops can't be allowed to go anywhere *near* Iran regardless of what happens there. I suspect that if China could convince Israel that it can be its reliable protector & get tacit (if grudging) support from Russia & European leaders, approval by the US would almost be a formality.
> There's no "moderate" Muslims out there- those you think are that are practicing Taqiyaa or they're Apostate.
Maybe, but that happens to account for the overwhelming majority of them. The fact is, most Muslims are about as religious as most Christians and Jews -- it's cultural background noise they mostly buy into because they grew up surrounded by it, and maybe feel a tiny bit guilty if they don't at least pay lip service to.
The Bible commands Christians (and Jews) to do lots of silly, abhorrent things for seemingly stupid reasons, and the overwhelming majority of Christians have no problem ignoring the more embarrassing parts. Why is it so difficult to give Muslims the same benefit of doubt? Remember, to an average Turk or urban Egyptian, Americans are foaming-at-the-mouth Jesus-crazed lunatics. Muslim extremists are better at doing global public relations to make support for their cause look widespread, but we have plenty of (nominally) Christian loonies of our own roaming around America.
Most Americans don't seem to grasp that the Mullahs in Iran are in basically the same legal position as the RIAA/MPAA in America -- they own the courts & run the government, but normal people hate them... especially young Iranians. And attempts by Iranians to fight them are usually about as successful as attempts by Americans to fight the MPAA & RIAA -- lots of skirmishes, occasional random victories, but mostly a trail of personal devastation (cue up John Cougar Mellencamp's "Authority Song").
The point is, Iran is a very awkward situation. It has a government that's extremely belligerent to the rest of the world, and a populace that's largely powerless to do anything about it because the Mullahs effectively have veto power over everything. The best thing the US can do is to maintain the status quo... kick Iran down every time it gets uncomfortably close to having nuclear bombs, and basically just wait for the Revolution generation to die off and get kicked aside by younger Iranians who'd rather be a secular, nominally-Muslim-ish republic.
A full-blown nuclear war with Iran would be a horrific human tragedy that would likely wipe Israel (and Tehran, and a dozen or so other cities) completely off the map. Nobody sane wants that to happen. MAD worked against the Soviet Union, because the Soviet Union's leaders were basically sane & shared most of the same goals as their counterparts in America. They didn't want to see their countries get destroyed, and didn't want their families to die in horrible ways.
The same can't necessarily be said about Iran. I personally think Ahmadinejad just wants to have a big nuclear penis to wave in front of Israel's face, and that he personally wouldn't go through with a suicidal attack that would likely result in the deaths of a quarter of Iran's population... but the big danger is that whomever *replaces* him after he tells the Mullahs, "Erm, no. I'm not going to go through with it" might not be quite as secretly-sane.
> how did anyone ever think a "start" button an eighth of an inch wide was a good idea??
This is the same company that, had they purchased Macromedia instead of allowing Adobe to do it, would have completely and utterly destroyed Dreamweaver within 2 versions by trying to make it work the same way as Microsoft Office, even if doing so completely borked it for the expert users whose professional lives revolved around it. Kind of like they did with FrontPage.
Microsoft just has this obsession with trying to staple "uniform" user interfaces across disparate apps and platforms. Hell, look at how eager they are to completely destroy windows 8 for the sake of making it tablet-friendly.
The sad thing is, Windows Mobile really wasn't that bad, as long as you viewed your phone as a pocket laptop instead of a device for making and receiving voice calls. WinMo phones were utterly dysfunctional out of the box, but if you spent a month or two tweaking it, you could end up with a really sweet phone that blew everything else available circa 2004-2007 away. They did, however, generally suck for making voice calls... especially when manufacturers like HTC got brilliant ideas, like eliminating the "menu" and "ok" hardkeys, then creating phones like the Touch that could activate in your pocket when you received an incoming call or text message, then have Bad Random Things Happen afterward as things on the screen were randomly touched.
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I think you have the numbers backwards, and wildly exaggerated to boot. In most cases, the drugs people buy online are fairly cheap to make, to the point where it would cost more to convincingly adulterate a drug than to just make it properly. Plus, the profit margins on those drugs sold to Americans are so *astronomically* high compared to their local markets (because we're used to getting anally-raped as the normal course of things), they really ARE better off selling the real thing to happy repeat buyers who'll spread the word to all their friends who take long-term maintenance drugs that are expensive, a pain, or both, to buy in the US.
As a general rule, the more mundane a maintenance drug is (blood pressure, cholesterol, and proton-pump inhibitors come to mind), the more likely that what you're getting from a foreign pharmacy is going to be perfectly good.
Keep in mind also that most "no prescription" online pharmacies aren't technically "no prescription" -- they're just taking advantage of local laws allowing "telemedicine" that are loosely enforced to allow a staff (usually, retired) doctor to rubber-stamp the prescriptions after an online "consultation" (where you checked the box that says, "these are my symptoms, and I have no known allergies").
If they were made in India, they might differ in size, shape, or color because India doesn't recognize pharmaceutical patents for uses or chemicals -- it only recognizes patents for manufacturing processes. So, when somebody like Pfizer patents a drug in India, they get a patent on the specific process they use to manufacture the drug. If somebody comes up with a different way to make the same drug, they can patent it and sell the drug in India with complete legality. Cipla is notorious (among American/European pharma companies) for doing this. Because they have to come up with a different manufacturing process to legally avoid infringement, the alternate generics usually WILL be different in form (capsule vs tablet, color, taste, etc).
In America, you can take an old drug like finasteride or doxepin (marketed for treating an enlarged prostate or depression), change the dosage slightly, then get a new 18-year patent for it as a treatment for hair loss or insomnia. In India, you'd be laughed at and get told to stick your silly American "use" patent where the sun doesn't shine.
Indian drugs often taste a hell of a lot better than their American versions, because many American drugs are intentionally formulated to taste bad so kids won't "think they're candy". American atenolol is one specific example -- it tastes AWFUL. The Indian Atenolol I've been buying for the past couple of years, in contrast, is gelcoated.
Would I buy imported chemotherapy drugs? No. There's too much at stake, over a relatively short period of time.
I have no qualms about buying long-term "maintenance" drugs like atenolol, though, that are so cheap to make, it would almost cost more for them to try and convincingly fake it. The key is to sample new batches slowly, and be alert for any noticeable differences. The biggest real risk is that an unethical foreign supplier might repackage one drug as another of equivalent dosage, like repackaging propranolol as atenolol, or omeprazole as esomeprazole. The nice thing about drugs from India is that they come in foil packets instead of bottles, so substituting one for another requires larger-scale fraud than merely shipping 60 tablets from bottle #2 instead of bottle #1. The foil also keeps them fresh longer, so you can buy them a year's worth at a time and be through with it, instead of screwing around with refills every month and dealing with "we know you're going on vacation out of the country for two weeks, but your health insurance won't approve payment for the refill until 3 days from now" bullshit.
I would be cautious of extended-release formulations, because it's definitely possible that the difference could matter. On the other hand, it could end up being better. Once again, if it's a drug you've been taking for years, and will be taking for years, after a while... you're going to have a pretty good idea whether your new supply is or is not the same. If anything, you're more likely to experience variations with drugs bought from somewhere like Wal Mart, where they might change suppliers every couple of months, and there's abundant evidence online that different generics ABSOLUTELY differ in their pharmacokinetics (google "bupropion budeprion teva" for one of the more infamous examples of this). Unlike American pharmacies, most online pharmacies will at least let you pick the brand as well as the drug itself.
Insofar as Indian quality goes, keep in mind that probably 90% of the generic drugs at Wal Mart come from the same plants in India as the drugs sold online. The irony is that India actually has tighter requirements on generic bioequivalence than the FDA does (ie, the FDA allows up to 20% variance; I think it's 5% or less in India).
Ultimately, it comes down to how much time and research you're willing to invest, and your tolerance for risk. If you're a MBTI xxxJ, online pharmacies probably aren't for you. The anxiety from the abstract risk and fear of disobeying authority will kill you. If you're a MBTI xNTP who can explain a drug's pharmacokinetics and metabolization path better than your own doctor can, online pharmacies are a gift from ${deity}.
> Without the CRTC there would be no commercial outlet for Canadian content.
Err... right. Because Americans seem to just totally hate Canadian artists. Well except for Celine Dion, Sum 41, Starting Line, Bryan Adams, Soul Decision, Kon Kan, and somewhere between and ~8-14% of the songs playing on the radio at any given moment in time.
Or, for that matter, about a quarter of the TV shows on HGTV, Discovery, Bravo, Comedy Central, and other popular cable channels...
The truth is, media is one of Canada's biggest and most profitable exports. The problem is, the CRTC is run by the same people who, back in college, were the "indie kids" who automatically hated anyone who dared to achieve commercial popularity. As far as they're concerned, the moment a Canadian artist gets a #1 hit in the US, they cease to be "authentically Canadian" by virtue of having "sold out". Now they're in a position of power & authority, and aren't shy about using it to make everyone else listen to "better" (in their opinion) music.
Actually, I made a slight typo. I've seen cheap LCD TVs that, given synthetic 30fps 1920x1080 content presented to the TV *as* genuine 1080p30 via HDMI, will *still* produce weave artifacts, because internally one part of the TV's own LCD controller pipeline is kludging it to fake 1080i60.
In fact, it gets even worse. My parents have a 19" LCD TV from Wal Mart in their kitchen whose video pipeline appears to be crudely weaving 1080p30 into 1080i60, then brutally bobbing it down to 1920x540 before resizing it to 1366x768 (as opposed to just resizing each frame from 1920x1080 down to 1366x768). It's almost as if the ASICs were designed by somebody who understood 1080i60 well, then handed off to summer interns who "kind of" understood 720p60, but had no real concept of what the other video modes actually were, and who just crudely stapled everything else on top of the chips' 1080i60 support.
Oh... just to add... in case anybody is wondering why interlacing is a NEW problem, it's because old videogames and home computers tricked TVs into scanning EVERY field as if it were an "odd" field, instead of scanning odd fields, then even fields. That's why they had black scanline artifacts between every other row of pixels. In effect, they tricked CRT TVs into pseudo-progressive 60fps mode by scanning the same field over and over again & leaving the even field's scanlines dark, instead of alternating between the odd and even fields (refreshing each 30 times per second).
There's a bigger problem lurking with "true" HD video -- 50 & 60 fps isn't fast enough to climb out of the "Uncanny Valley". It turns out, the white papers written back in the 80s and 90s were biased by the physical behavior of film and CRT displays, and made lots of assumptions that fall apart when you're talking about an inherently progressive display like a LCD, and source video that's basically rendered to digital film of infinite sensitivity one frame of infinitely-short duration at a time. It turns out, motion blur encodes a hell of a lot of extra visual information into each frame that naive attempts to apply Nyquist to synthetic video content fail to appreciate.
The PC videocard industry and gaming industry started to become painfully aware of the problem about 10 years ago, and they're still working on it. The current band-aid is to simulate motion-blur... but motion blur itself becomes visually-tedious after a while.
Between glasses-free 3D and refresh rates fast enough to make motion-blur unnecessary, there's still plenty of room for future advancement in videogame and TV technology. We have a long, long way to go before you'll be able to dress up a monitor like a fake window & feel like you're looking outside at a real scene... made longer by the fact that the advancements needed to take videogames to this level go WAY beyond what mass-market consumers are likely to care about, much less demand, for TV-watching purposes. This means the quantum leap that occurred over the past 10 years is more of a fluke than anything, and isn't likely to be sustainable in the long run.
At some point, the cost burden is going to shift from mass-market consumers subsidizing the technology through billions of general TV sales back to mere millions of high-end gamers driving the market for outrageously expensive (compared to what you'd pay for even an *expensive* TV at Wal Mart) cutting-edge hardware. Think: the gigantic cost leap seen today when you go from 1920x1080 to any higher res (like 2560x1920), but even worse.
> The big joke of the last 3 generations is that Nintendo has put together under-performing hardware
You're overlooking the 400-ton elephant wearing a pink tutu standing over in the corner -- 1080i60. As much as we'd like for it to be true, native 1080pAnything is far from universal. You'd be horrified if you saw the architectural mess inside most mass-market sub-$400 LCD TV controller ASICs -- it makes the parallelport-semi-SCSI-kludged-to-USB trainwreck that evolved with scanners look downright elegant by comparison.
The raw panels themselves can do 24p, 30p, and 60p without drama, but the brain-damaged controllers driving them were value-engineered to just kludge anything besides 720p60 the same way they always have -- they bob it (ie, they treat 1920x1080 16:9 interlaced video as 1920x540 16:9 progressive video, then resample it to 1366x768).
When presented with 1080p24, instead of just natively showing it at 24fps, they stupidly apply 3:2 pulldown to emulate 1080i60 and pass it to the same braindamaged controller. I've seen cheap LCD TVs that somehow managed to end up with weave artifacts out of 1080p30 source. And today's Walmart crap is the semi-high-end from 5 years ago.
Put another way, it's going to be at least another 10 years before you can confidently throw out 1080p60 video and expect butter-smooth artifact-free rendering on the TVs in most living rooms. With current TVs out "in the wild", modes like 1080p24 and 1080p30, let alone 1080p60, are too inconsistently-implemented to risk depending on... and true 1080i60 looks like crap on anything besides a 240hz set that uses oversampling to emulate interlace fade. So we get the least common denominator -- 1080p30 pretending to be 1080i60, that 10-20% of TVs still manage to screw up and butcher.
Of course, 720p60 works well on just about everything. Unfortunately, 720p60 isn't sexy enough for the marketing department. So instead of getting judder-free butter-smooth 1280x720 60fps video without glitches, and with enough filtering to be almost indistinguishable from real-life, we end up with 1080i60 video that looks like crap.
That's the sad truth. 720p60 isn't good enough for the marketing department, 1080i60 rendered AS 1080i60 looks like crap on most TVs. 1080p60 is a fantasy in 94% of the homes in America, 1080p24 is badly-implemented in at least a quarter of the TVs out there, and 5-10% somehow manage to even screw up 1080p30 encoded as fake 1080i60.
I should mention that the bug I'm describing most certainly DOES affect Windows 7, too. But just to re-emphasize for the benefit of context (in case future replies separate this post from the parent), the bug ONLY manifests itself when you have an enterprise network with certain specific group policies that look individually innocent, but collectively have the effect of preventing local admin group members (and ONLY members of this group) from using mklink to create symlinks.
It usually does. The bug only surfaces when you're part of an enterprise active directory network that has group policies & domain admins, and it only crops up with specific combinations of group policy settings that look innocent in and of themselves, but have disabling the creation of symlinks by local admin members (but nobody else) as an unintended side effect. To make them work, you have to set some other policy that looks like it's imposing a restriction upon local admins, but actually has the opposite effect.
He's not. Lost amidst the orgy of hate for Vista was the fact that it did, in fact, finally give us real, honest-to-god symlinks, so it's no longer necessary to use NTFS junctions to kludge directory symlinks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mklink
The bad news is, there's an ambiguous set of Group Policy settings that work together in non-obvious ways to create a perverse scenario where the only users who CAN'T create symlinks are users with local admin privileges. In other words, anybody who doesn't have local admin rights (including the guest user) can create symlinks wherever they're allowed to create files, but if you DO have local admin rights, mklink will fail.
It sounds more like some (Canadian?) environmental group unrelated to the asbestos purchaser was trying to block the sale by arguing that it shouldn't be legal for a Canadian company to export a product that's illegal to sell in Canada itself.
It's like the zoning and code-enforcement mess in the City of Hialeah, Florida. You could make it a college textbook case study. Basically, the zoning & code-enforcement office took a ~35-year lunch break, and by the time anyone started to really notice or care, they discovered that something like 95% of the single-family homes in the city had at least one *major* building or zoning code violation (mostly, illegal additions built without permits and/or illegal studio apartments the owners rent out for additional income).
Politically, you just can't fix a mess like that. If elected officials tried, angry citizens would force a recall election within a month or two, and they'd all end up getting thrown out of office. However, the same elected officials can't legally amend many of the laws to grandfather the status quo into compliance, because many of those same laws were basically dictated to the city by the county, state, and federal governments. So, the city does the only thing it can -- it keeps its code enforcement office grossly under-staffed so it physically CAN'T dredge up too many awkward problems.
There's a reason why Americans fly to London or Paris on Thursday night after work, sleep on the plane, spend Friday running around the city taking pictures, crash & burn Friday night, spend Saturday as a tourist, then leave mid-afternoon on Sunday. It's not because we're glamorous jet-setters... it's because we managed to take Friday off, and have to be in the office at 9am on Monday.
> creditors will take over the country like they did in Greece and force the US to sell its assets.
One big, huge difference -- US debt is denominated in our own currency. We could, with complete legality, have the Fed print 400 trillion dollars, lend it to the federal government at 0% interest, and use it to pay off those same foreign creditors. Greece couldn't do that, because it doesn't control its own currency.
Also, unlike Greece, the US is STILL sitting on more natural resources than just about any other country on earth (Canada probably beats us per-capita, though).
OK. Let's be intellectually honest here. Inflation benefits neither the poorest of poor nor the richest of rich. It does, however, benefit the middle-class majority. You know...the ones who have mortgages that are double the present market value of their homes, tens of thousands of dollars in student loans, etc.
First and foremost, inflation is ${deity's} way of forcing the wealthiest .5% to invest their money and put it to work, instead of putting it in a vault and just sitting on it.
It's because Oracle (formerly Sun) makes huge amounts of money licensing the rights to distribute installable copies of Java. Java is only free (as in beer) if you, the end user, personally download it from Oracle's official web site and install it yourself as a separate process distinct from installing any app that requires Java.
Officially, you (as a developer) aren't even allowed to try and automate the process. If you want to automate the process in any way, and/or bundle a Java installer with your app, you have to pay HUGE amounts of money for the rights to do it.
Java's licensing is brilliantly viral, because it imposes restrictions that developers never even *notice* until somebody points out their implications to naive end users. MySQL's licensing works more or less the same way -- free for end users to download & install themselves, but the moment an automated installer enters the picture (or a consultant is involved), the mandatory licensing fees kick in... and the fees are high enough that if you're running Windows servers anyway, you'll probably end up kicking yourself for having not just used SQL Server to begin with. I'm not talking about web serves you configure yourself... I'm talking about commercial apps that depend upon a database for their persistent backing store, and would normally be installed like a normal application.
99 times out of 100, when a user has problems running a Java app, it's because somebody specified an inappropriate version of Java in the manifest. There's an entire subtle range of possible values that have meanings like "The newest installed VM that's Java $N or newer", "The newest installed VM that's Java $N", "The newest installed VM that's at least Java $N.$V", and so on. The problems come about when some idiot doesn't know what he's doing, has an application that only NEEDS Java 4, then turns around and specifies in the manifest that it MUST run under Java 4, instead of "Java 4 or newer", so somebody who has Java 6, release 28 installed has to try and literally install a Java 4 VM to run it. It gets even worse with applets, because Sun's official docs totally borked the explanation of how CLSID values worked, and caused ENDLESS grief when some corporate apps decided to dictate specific releases of Java for no good reason.
The fact is, if you write a Java application and Jar it up in a way that says only that it must have a VM that's at least as old as some minimum version, the likelihood of users having real-world problems with it are pretty low. I have stuff I wrote 10+ years ago and compiled with a pre-alpha 1.4 JDK that still works today (which is a good thing, because the source code was lost when my old laptop died). I've seen corporate apps that anal-retentively specify that they must not be used with any JDK besides 2.6.0_19, then go a step beyond and die if you have a newer JDK even installed at all, because they're launched by webapps that use the CLSID that means "ignore the settings in the JPI control panel, always use the newest version installed", then turn around and use Javascript to test for JPI version & commit suicide if it's older than 2.6.0_19 (even if you have 2.6.0_19 installed, and bent over backwards to specify that precise JDK in the control panel). I've actually had to use Greasemonkey in some cases to dynamically fix the stupid CLSID embedded in the Object definition on the fly so it wouldn't ignore my JPI control panel settings. But don't get me started on that... grrrrrrr...
Of course, we've all had our "ohcrap" moments. I remember spending a week working on what was supposed to be a cross-platform videochat application written in Java (so it could run under Windows, Mac, and Linux) using JMF. It worked nicely under Windows. Then I went to test it under Linux, and discovered that JMF was basically broken to the point of uselessness under everything besides Windows due to codec licensing & implementation issues. That was when I learned the hard way that anytime you're explicitly writing something that HAS to work on a platform besides Windows, make sure it doesn't have "issues" with other platforms before investing lots of time in it... especially if it depends upon any extension or framework that's not a native part of bog-standard Java that gets installed by default. Especially anything based upon a JSR. I've lost count of the number of JSR-related extensions that were nothing but stubs & almost inevitably had Macintosh problems.
IMHO, Sun fucked up, and fucked up badly, when they handed over control of Macintosh Java to Apple. Jonathan Schwarz basically handed Steve Jobs the rope, and was too oblivious to notice Steve busily tying it into a noose. Java's main reason for existing as a platform for desktop applications is WORA, and allowing Apple to screw up Macintosh Java as badly as they did hurt that main purpose really badly.
... and that's why Italy's government already has plans to build a huge dike around Venice's lagoon, complete with locks to automatically flush its water into the Adriatic. "Global Warming" is almost irrelevant to Venice, because as you pointed out, subsidence due to water table depletion has already put it in a position of needing protection. The expensive part is getting the protection in place to begin with. Once you've committed to building it, it doesn't really make much of a difference to the cost whether you're building it to handle 1 meter, 3 meters, or even 6 meters of sealevel rise.
The truth is, Florida and the Netherlands would be the LEAST directly-affected by rising sea levels. Why? Because we ALREADY have water control structures in place. We have to. Without them, the land could never have been usefully developed at all. The places that will flood are swampy rural areas that will just end up turning into lakes, lagoons, and inland seas.
Need proof? Go to Manhattan, and TRY to make bodily contact with the Hudson River or East River. AFAIK, there's no public place where you can actually reach down and touch the water's surface, let alone wade into it or swim. Ditto, for downtown Chicago. The closest you can get is a dock, or maybe the edge of a manmade concrete cliff that's a good 18-30 feet above the high tide mark. Yes, I'm sure if you're determined, you can eventually find somewhere to climb down to some old access area and do it... but if you're standing in the middle of Park Avenue or in front of the Sears Tower (or whatever they changed its name to) and just spontaneously decide you want to touch the water's surface, you're likely to have a hell of a time finding anyplace where you can get close enough to the actual river surface to do it, because the adjacent land has been built up so much over the past few centuries.
No, you don't need tracking if you're content to accept grossly-inefficient spectrum usage. Just scan through all the bands when you power up (and periodically thereafter), note the IDs of every satellite with a signal that can be heard, and there's your sky map. My "untracked" example assumes you've got gobs of bandwidth and AREN'T trying to efficiently reuse spectrum, and you're just doing more or less what Sirius does (each satellite downlinks the same bitstream on a different frequency, with only a couple actively transmitting at once). It would be just about the worst possible way you could build a satellite broadband network (because your entire user base -- some fraction of 300 million -- would be sharing for 1/2 to 1/4 of your total available spectrum at the same time), but it DOES illustrate that it's possible to have satellite downlinks that don't require tracking or dishes.
Now, getting back to my real example (multilink combining low-latency low-speed IDSL with high-speed high-latency satellite in geostationary orbit), there's no need to track a moving satellite, so you're back to efficient small-footprint spot beams capable of delivering their entire bandwidth to a small region, and doing the same thing with the same spectrum in dozens of other small regions with their own spot beams. Most things that are truly latency-sensitive don't require LOTS of data, and most things that require LOTS of data can deal with a second or two of latency. Make the small http request in 20ms via IDSL, receive the whole HTML page back via IDSL before the satellite link has even finished sending the header. Send 70 http requests via IDSL for the linked files on the page, and start receiving them back via both IDSL and satellite. The small things finish sending via IDSL before the satellite finishes sending the header, the big files blast through over satellite and finish before the IDSL has finished sending 400k. It's so brute-force brilliant, I'm amazed nobody has ever done it yet (let's be honest... most people who rely on satellite internet aren't exactly poor, so $300/month for satellite + IDSL isn't likely to be a deal-breaker compared to $180/month for satellite alone.
> Maybe because - for the most part - Samsung's phones don't *suck* the way some others' do.
Um, I suspect quite a few unhappy American Galaxy S owners would be inclined to disagree. The Froyo delay and dysfunctional GPS pretty much guaranteed that my next phone wasn't going to be from Samsung.
That said, I've been pretty disappointed by Motorola (Photon), too. They got off to a good start, then completely dropped the ball ~2 months ago. They're still wringing their hands over bootloader-unlocking (yes, hacks exist... but AFAIK, they all break 4G), and the video drivers in both the Photon and Xoom forcibly render all output to 16-bit through bad gamma curves that prematurely attenuate dark shades to black (Google "black crush").
> What about the ones that live in areas that are going to be covered in water?
Thanks to civil engineering, building permanent structures in areas that are submerged is quite do-able (think: causeway, oil rig). In stark contrast, glaciers are a very, very BIG problem. There's really no good way to build a permanent structure in the middle of a thick glacier field. If you build on top of the glacier, pressure melts the ice & causes the structure to slowly sink into it. If you refrigerate the contact points to keep the ice from melting, the structure moves with the glacier. If you try to bore holes down to the bedrock & build concrete pilings through the glacier, the glacier's motion will snap them like twigs. It's not necessarily *impossible*, but the engineering problems involved make open water look like a neatly-cleared urban vacant lot in a big city by comparison.
I'm still somewhat amused by sea-level alarmists whose flood maps just assume that people will passively abandon hundreds of billions of dollars worth of low-lying real estate & allow it to become submerged, instead of doing more or less the same thing developers in Florida have been doing for the past century -- digging holes for fill dirt, raising the terrain, and building on pilings where appropriate. Hell, my neighborhood, and the land my house sits on, was submerged under several feet of water for thousands of years on the day I was born. ~20 years later, the area was drained, dredged, filled, and turned into nice houses on a big manmade lake. I know, because my neighborhood's HOA has been fighting with FEMA for the past 10 years to update the official flood map for my neighborhood from -2 feet to 12 feet, because nobody ever bothered to update the official county elevation map after the developer terraformed the neighborhood into dry land.
Actually, this raises another point... lots of the Global Warming flood prediction maps based on land elevation for South Florida are just plain wrong, for the same reason as the map in my own neighborhood -- developers over the past 100 years dredged, filled, and raised the land, and nobody ever bothered to update the official terrain maps. The flood models are wrong, for the same reason why hurricane storm-surge models have been wildly wrong in pretty much every hurricane since 1940 -- the surge models -- like Global Warming Flood Models -- assume the existence of a natural coastline that hasn't existed for *decades*.
Are sea levels rising? Probably. Are they going to rise more? Almost certainly. Are waterfront neighborhoods going to be abandoned to rising water? No way in hell. They'll just get rebuilt on taller foundations every 50 years or so when a major hurricane blows away whatever's there now.
> Who puts an engine together without a test fire?
Who said they didn't test-fire it? They could have test-fired it, verified that it worked, then got a rag to clean it up for the real trip...
Only if efficient spectrum use is a concern. Years ago, dishes were needed mainly because satellites could only transmit weak signals. Now, dishes are mainly to allow spectrum reuse by adjacent satellites (combining highly-directional transmission antennas and relatively small spotbeam footprints with high-gain receiving antennas that attenuate strong signals from adjacent satellites). If you have continent-wide spectrum, you can live without dishes as long as spectrum reuse isn't a concern -- just look at Sirius and satellite cell phones.
IMHO, an ideal satellite-based internet service would use PPP multilink to combine a low-speed terrestrial link (probably IDSL) with high-speed satellite link, and intelligent routing that sends everything via both links, and just aborts the one that doesn't finish first.
Hmmm. You know, if China quietly told the US it intended to invade Iran, somehow got permission from Russia, Germany, France, and Britain to do it, and could somehow convince the Pentagon that it could pull it off without getting Israel nuked in the process... it would be politically awkward (to put it mildly), but almost an epic win for the US.
On one hand, it would put China in direct control of much of the world's oil. On the other hand, China would buy most of Iran's oil output *anyway*.
It would nicely allow the US to outsource a nasty, bloody war, and would let CHINA's army get beaten up for once instead of ours. Americans could look at horrible things done by the PLA in Iran, say "Tsk.", and celebrate the return of $2/gallon unleaded. With China firmly in control of Iran's oil, global markets would be flooded by it (or at least, flooded by cheaper oil from elsewhere no longer being purchased by China).
The big wildcard is Israel. It wouldn't take much for Iran to destroy it, and for obvious political reasons, Israeli troops can't be allowed to go anywhere *near* Iran regardless of what happens there. I suspect that if China could convince Israel that it can be its reliable protector & get tacit (if grudging) support from Russia & European leaders, approval by the US would almost be a formality.
> There's no "moderate" Muslims out there- those you think are that are practicing Taqiyaa or they're Apostate.
Maybe, but that happens to account for the overwhelming majority of them. The fact is, most Muslims are about as religious as most Christians and Jews -- it's cultural background noise they mostly buy into because they grew up surrounded by it, and maybe feel a tiny bit guilty if they don't at least pay lip service to.
The Bible commands Christians (and Jews) to do lots of silly, abhorrent things for seemingly stupid reasons, and the overwhelming majority of Christians have no problem ignoring the more embarrassing parts. Why is it so difficult to give Muslims the same benefit of doubt? Remember, to an average Turk or urban Egyptian, Americans are foaming-at-the-mouth Jesus-crazed lunatics. Muslim extremists are better at doing global public relations to make support for their cause look widespread, but we have plenty of (nominally) Christian loonies of our own roaming around America.
Most Americans don't seem to grasp that the Mullahs in Iran are in basically the same legal position as the RIAA/MPAA in America -- they own the courts & run the government, but normal people hate them... especially young Iranians. And attempts by Iranians to fight them are usually about as successful as attempts by Americans to fight the MPAA & RIAA -- lots of skirmishes, occasional random victories, but mostly a trail of personal devastation (cue up John Cougar Mellencamp's "Authority Song").
The point is, Iran is a very awkward situation. It has a government that's extremely belligerent to the rest of the world, and a populace that's largely powerless to do anything about it because the Mullahs effectively have veto power over everything. The best thing the US can do is to maintain the status quo... kick Iran down every time it gets uncomfortably close to having nuclear bombs, and basically just wait for the Revolution generation to die off and get kicked aside by younger Iranians who'd rather be a secular, nominally-Muslim-ish republic.
A full-blown nuclear war with Iran would be a horrific human tragedy that would likely wipe Israel (and Tehran, and a dozen or so other cities) completely off the map. Nobody sane wants that to happen. MAD worked against the Soviet Union, because the Soviet Union's leaders were basically sane & shared most of the same goals as their counterparts in America. They didn't want to see their countries get destroyed, and didn't want their families to die in horrible ways.
The same can't necessarily be said about Iran. I personally think Ahmadinejad just wants to have a big nuclear penis to wave in front of Israel's face, and that he personally wouldn't go through with a suicidal attack that would likely result in the deaths of a quarter of Iran's population... but the big danger is that whomever *replaces* him after he tells the Mullahs, "Erm, no. I'm not going to go through with it" might not be quite as secretly-sane.
> how did anyone ever think a "start" button an eighth of an inch wide was a good idea??
This is the same company that, had they purchased Macromedia instead of allowing Adobe to do it, would have completely and utterly destroyed Dreamweaver within 2 versions by trying to make it work the same way as Microsoft Office, even if doing so completely borked it for the expert users whose professional lives revolved around it. Kind of like they did with FrontPage.
Microsoft just has this obsession with trying to staple "uniform" user interfaces across disparate apps and platforms. Hell, look at how eager they are to completely destroy windows 8 for the sake of making it tablet-friendly.
The sad thing is, Windows Mobile really wasn't that bad, as long as you viewed your phone as a pocket laptop instead of a device for making and receiving voice calls. WinMo phones were utterly dysfunctional out of the box, but if you spent a month or two tweaking it, you could end up with a really sweet phone that blew everything else available circa 2004-2007 away. They did, however, generally suck for making voice calls... especially when manufacturers like HTC got brilliant ideas, like eliminating the "menu" and "ok" hardkeys, then creating phones like the Touch that could activate in your pocket when you received an incoming call or text message, then have Bad Random Things Happen afterward as things on the screen were randomly touched.