If I need to simplify a huge mess of an equation that I don't want to do myself, my first stop is my TI-89, then Maple, and then by hand. My TI-89 does simplification better than Maple 9/10 times. I don't know why, but it does.
Additionally, my TI-89 supports units, which makes Physics class a lot faster.
And lastly, my TI-89 has pretty print and is symbolic, which makes looking at equations and their solutions that much better.
There's nothing wrong with sequels. There's only something wrong with too many sequels. And, of course, "too much" varies depending on your game/franchise.
After having suffered through an entire generation of console games and console gamers, I was beginning to think that, too. And then I played Okami, and Persona, and Lost Odyssey, and branched off to some more lesser-"mainstream" games. I found out that I was still capable of enjoying myself like a child.
I realized that the mainstream game companies nowadays are no different than anime companies.
Throughout the 80's and 90's, anime was awesome. It was a new medium and everyone had their own idea of how it should be; there was tons of creativity, and love and care was put into each series. Nowadays, after a few decades, anime companies have the next "hit" anime down to an almost mathematical formula. Love and care are replaced by cheap Korean illustrators. Storylines are often painfully forced to be different, yet they always seem to follow an almost identical structure.
If you want a really good anime, it's mostly done by small company startups; and they're usually founded by some old-time veterans that are disillusioned and want to be creative for the sake of being creative, again, not creative for the sake of being profitable.
And now look at the game industry. It's the same thing.
I'd recommend Lost Odyssey if you haven't played it, yet. Also, the Persona series. They don't suffer the "I'm a bitchy kid that turns into a bitchy adult at the expensive of everybody around me, and then after I've turned into a bitchy adult, I take all of the credit for saving the world!" mechanic that JRPGs have suffered from since the end of the PS1 era. I'd also keep an eye out for The Last Story. That one looks (hopefully) to be good, coming out on the Wii next year.
Zhao Ziyang, however, is thrust into irrelevancy until his death because of his beliefs.
The difference between the two, both very powerful men in the PRC, is that Premier Wen is near the end of his political career, so locking him up would only cause more attention to his ideals. Zhao Ziyag still had much life in him when they decided to shut him up.
If China moves to take Taiwan by force, it would be a disastrously huge destabilization of that entire part of the globe, ultimately resulting either in total war with many parties that do not like China (i.e., everyone in that part of the world) or else resulting in China becoming the single, monopolizing hegemon of the entire region -- all of the ASEAN countries, and everyone -- up to Japan, which would upset the current balance of every market of everything worldwide.
And even if, for some reason, nobody cared at all about Taiwan being taken over militarily, and the other ASEAN countries didn't take the aggressive military take-over of a de facto sovereign nation as a forewarning of how China will deal with them when negotiations break down, the entire globe can expect the prices of everything computer-related to skyrocket probably several thousand percent and move backwards in time as so much of the R&D and highly-advanced manufacturing equipment on the island is damaged.
China has not moved to take over Taiwan because, having missed their opportunity shortly after the civil war, the modern era's situation is that entire planet has too much to lose over such an unimaginably, disastrously irresponsible thing.
Between the Liu Xiaobo, his wife, and the Nobel issues, its increasingly aggressive stance in US military talks, its now clearly-visible use of de facto economic sanctions (let alone their petty sanctions, like canceling concerts and tourism) to solve political issues (e.g., Senkakus; coming up next will be the South China Sea), its claim of the entire South China Sea as a "core interest", its generals violent, angry, disrespectful rants to US diplomats and US military generals during talks, its ambassadors literally screaming at US ambassador about Taiwan arms sales (as if they're anything new?), its siding with North Korea in the Cheonan sub incident, its often-siding with Iran even as Russia goes against Iran, its harassment of all regional neighbors (Japan, India, and all of ASEAN... find one country near China that doesn't border issues with China, more often than not severe border issues), its very "coincidental" purchase of tons of Japanese bonds just as Japan was trying to weaken the yen, its reactor sales to Pakistan, its excessively predatory trade practices (you're a high-tech company that wants to do business in China? You'd better be willing to give domestic Chinese companies your technology), its industrial espionage (Everyone spies on everyone, but the CIA does not spy on Japan and give Ford technology secrets. China doesn't have this moral dilemma, however), its threatening maneuvers, war games, and military actions against regional powers (especially US, South Korea, and Japan), its dishonest military practices (this seems like a weird thing to say, but China literally has fleets militarized civilian fishing boats so that it can claim that innocent citizens are being targeted if there is an armed conflict. I'm pretty sure the Western Powers don't do this. This is another reason Tokyo takes the fishing inside of its borders so seriously.)... Between all of these issues and so many more, China has already crossed the tipping point.
- The government of Japan is using all of its spare budget for this year to invest in rare earth metal mines in Mongolia and abroad while Japanese companies are pumping R&D money into negating the need for rare earth metals at all. The United States is also pushing to restart its rare earth mining operations.
- The Japanese Self Defense Forces has asked for a budget to study the possibility of setting up a permanent base on Yonakuni island -- an island 100 km from Taiwan. And, of course, where there are Japanese forces, there are inevitably US forces.
- The Japanese and US military are staging some war games to simulate a hostile Chinese military takeover of the Senkaku Islands so that they can prepare strategies to take the islands back by force.
- ASEAN has de facto agreed to begin setting up a bloc to contain and push back against increasingly aggressive and greedy Chinese hegemony and demands in the region. They are also asking the US to come back into this and re-assert its power in Asia. This has led to some very unusual alliances (US-Vietnam military alliance? wtf?). Because of China's aggressiveness, quite literally every rising or current Asian country (except China, of course), is gravitating back towards the US geopolitical sphere of influence.
- The Taiwanese public can only handle so much of their national image and sovereignty eroded and humiliated before they expect China to actually do something (like remove the 1500+ missiles aimed at their homes), and that tipping point is rapidly approaching (President Ma's popularity is tanking like Bush's was).
- The US is being increasingly aggressive against the Chinese yuan and their many, many, many other predatory and unfair trading practices (though to be fair to China on this one, the US's demands of an immediate yuan revaluing of +25% would be insanely destabilizing; I assume the US just set the bar high to give room to bargain downwards).
If Bittorrent-like technology were implemented into every web browser, it could bring about a evolution of the internet.
I'm imagining the internet like a real spider web. I don't think "bittorrent", exactly, is a good idea, because that implies that after you finish a download, you'll be invisibly seeding it. What I'm imagining is that if you click to download a file, it first starts downloading it via http, like normal. While it's downloading, your browser will check in the background for other people who are downloading the same file at the same time that you are, or it will check for additional servers that it has been provided. If you are able to download from other users who are downloading at the same time as you are and at an equal or greater speed than the HTTP download, it will give priority to downloading from those other users.
Basically, what this is doing is it's downloading via HTTP from a server (e.g., ubuntu.com). Ubuntu.com is the host of the file and that will not change. However, if there is a large burst of activity (e.g., new canonical release), there will likely be other people downloading it at the exact same time as you are. There will also be multiple servers hosting the ubuntu release. Your web browser will download from one of those servers, but it will also try to download chunks from other users and the other servers to distribute the load. It will give priority to downloading from users, such that it will download as much as possible from other users so long as downloading from users is faster than downloading from the server.
As soon as your download finishes, the connections will close and you will stop seeding to others. This kind of system would mean that smaller files would usually be downloaded by http, but it would have the added benefit that larger files that have many users simultaneously downloading them (new releases, maybe even extend this to watching videos online) would download faster through multiple, sometimes closer connections, and servers would have reduced load because of the users sharing with each other.
In short, the kind of system I am describing of would mean that the servers still host all of the data all of the time, but users or would supplement the servers by offering some of the data some of the time.
The entire internet would be connected to each other like a gigantic spider web, with any given piece of data being downloaded from the closest, fastest point at any given time.
You can also maybe describe it as some kind of internet bandwidth-sharing collectivism or communism, but I like spiders better.:-)
There are 29.6 million small businesses in the United States. 70% of all jobs created in the past 10 years were due to small business. More than half of the non-farming US GDP is from small businesses. And this percentage can easily change. Think of all of the Japanese mega-corporations and all of the office workers working for huge faceless corporations. 90% of Japanese are, in fact, employed by small businesses.
The evil super-rich who own the means of production and all the wealth on the planet represent not even a fraction of all of the businesses and not much of the jobs that are out there. People only remember the truck driver that ran them off the road, never the tens of thousands of truck drivers that changed lanes for you.
If unions are to be organized, let them be organized and protected like they are in Japan -- on a per-company, per organization basis. Under no circumstances should there be an "auto workers union", or a "teachers union", or an "actors union". Perhaps there could be a "Ford union", a "Southern Ohio District Teachers Union", or a "Paramount Pictures Actors Union". And different unions could talk to each other to compare their conditions.
But as it stands, unions are too large to accurately represent anyone, they are literally bursting at the seams with corruption, they have zero checks and balances, you are forced to join the union for most union jobs (unless you your administration to be pressured by the union to fire you or you like working 2 hours per week), they destroy companies or at the very least make them extremely uncompetitive from their often ridiculous demands, and most of their assets are private and completely unscrutinizable (unless you like be demonized by unions).
Lawyers prevent basically all of the conditions that required unions to once exist to begin with. A modern company is not capable of systematically depriving their employees of rights, abusing them with harsh conditions or work hours, endangering their lives, or trying to make workers disposable by firing them and hiring news ones as soon as one loses an arm in an unsafe machine without a fleet of lawyers suing them into the ground.
Simply put, unions were needed before there were laws regarding: sexual harassment, discrimination, minimum wages, work safety (most industrial machines are designed at great pains to not even allow you to run them in a way that would injure or kill someone), employee health, employee break/vacation time, improper or baseless job termination, or any of the other thousands of laws that I've forgotten.
"Liberal" in the US means "Democrat", which, as was elegantly stated before by Boberfett, refers to an authoritarian leftist. Democrats are notoriously pro-union, and unions are as important to Democrats as hard-line Christians are to Republicans. "Right-winger" or "The Right" (you can usually add condescending sub-human remarks of any amount to that) are what the Left refers to the Right as, which is are basically authoritarian rightists.
A Centrist, or an Undecided Voter, is what the rest of us are -- typically socially liberal and fiscally conservative. The resounding problem with the US two-party system is that Republicans have to go insane rightist to win their primaries, and Democrats have to go insane leftist to win their primaries. In the end, the "undecided" voters usually have to weigh which they prefer -- social responsibility of some of the Democrats, or fiscal responsibility of some of the Republicans (note: not all Republicans are Christ-warriors, and not all Democrats are authoritarian-socialist nut jobs. In fact, most aren't.). Fortunately, the entire country is moving more centrist -- partly by necessity, but also partly because IMO, most of the country is more center than they are left or right (leftwingers have to face the reality that their utopian visions can't be funded realistically, and rightwingers face the reality that free market with no regulation results in the glory of Wall St.!).
On that note, most of this crap occurs with national-level politics. The national politicians always try to stir up partisanism and nationalism -- usually successfully. Most local races, and some state races, are remarkably level-headed.
Lots of internal reforms are also going on that a foreign observer might not notice: the economy is the elephant in the room, but there's a big freedom of speech and religion battle (i.e., NY mosque) that will force the US to become a little more liberal on the religion front; education reform is getting pretty big (78% or so give US public schools a "C" or "D" grade); immigration reform keeps coming up and is unavoidable (bring us your huddled masses longing to be free?); increasing attention is being brought to ailing infrastructure, and there are calls for "rebuilding America"; more and more people are paying attention on the energy and technology front as the US tries to become greener, and the national broadband plan; US products are getting a little better (e.g., Ford, Chevy) as people have grown increasingly tired of shit-tier products and we're trying to double our exports; we're trying to get along better with our neighbors and act more responsibly as a mediator in the world (instead of micromanaging it brutishly); and, most importantly, the vast majority of the US population is extremely fed-up with the federal government -- both parties -- which will hopefully force things to become more sane and responsible.
They DO benefit from it. If Adobe puts a new image processing trick in Photoshop, then Photoshop is the only software that has it. PS isn't open source, so if they don't want to disclose how they did it, the only way to understand how they did it is by being actively involved in image processing research areas of mathematics. By the time someone else comes up with the same or a similar trick in Gimp, or something, Adobe will have already benefited from their idea -- assuming that they were business-smart and marketed, that is.
What one generation accepts......The NEXT generation embraces.
Because all of us here on the internet (the younger generations) are accepting of the majority of now middle-aged Americans that support monitoring of the internet, support outlawing gay marriage, support a zero-tolerance war on drugs, etc...
And on that note, just as how all the hippies of the 1970's were totally acceptant of the rules imposed on them by the post-WWII generation and the big federal government...
BTW, how is what the leakers did any different than people that gave classified docs to the Soviets and Chinese? Motivation? It's the same motivation. My government is wrong, and the best way to change that is to help their enemies.
EXCUSE ME? Giving classified docs to the Soviets is giving classified docs to enemies. But what Wikileaks did was give classified docs to the public. Since when is the public classified as an enemy of the state? That'd be a much more important development than the mere leak of documents.
The first thing to do if you're being detained at the airport is tell them reasonable things that they should need to know. True, maybe you're not constitutionally obligated to do so, but what harm lies in telling the people who are doing you detaining the kinds of things that you would tell a complete stranger while chatting in line? Being friendly in the beginning (even if they are assholes) and giving them the information that they need to know is more than likely to get you released from whatever side-room (all airports I've been in have a room set up just next to the security lines, not a "back room" at all).
For instance, when I was going to Japan to study for a year, I wasn't pulled aside. But if I was, I would tell them:
Here, I am a US citizen, here is my flight ticket and passport. I am going abroad to study Japanese at such and such university in Tochigi Prefecture, Japan.
If they must know,
I am a Japanese major at such and such university in Indiana
In most cases those kind of simple answers, which I think most reasonable people would not think is exceptionally intrusive, would go a long way to getting you out of that room as soon as possible. Only if they start asking weird things, like "what is your mother's name" and "where did you grow up", or even "how much money do you make", should you start declining questions.
Almost every time I've ever tried to have the TI-89 factor or simplify something for me that was more than an already easily-simplifiable equation, I have ended up with an equation that is far, far worse and almost impossible to work with. I would strongly advise against using the TI-89 for any kind of simplification beyond the kind that is simple enough to do without a calculator.
Who the hell needs a graphing calculator on a standardized test? Why do standardized tests allow them at all? Hell, at the level of middle and high school standardized tests, you needn't even a calculator at all. I just graduated with a B.S. in Physics, and all but a very, very few times did we ever need calculators; tests were done with abstract variables, as you don't need numbers to show that you understand how to solve a problem.
And if you must absolutely have a calculator for a test, I can think of absolutely zero times where a graphing calculator is required. The TI's fantastic Scientific TI-3X lineup is much, much more than is sufficient for anything that you'll ever need below graduate school. And even in graduate school, you're more likely to need to use a computer, not the paltry processing power of a graphing calculator.
To date, the only real use for a graphing calculator I've ever had that I couldn't use a simpler calculator for is the TI-89's fantastic units, so I could calculate long strings of physics equations without ever needing to convert the units (since the calculator did the unit converting for me).
I ship USPS to Taiwan all the time. No matter what it is, it just sits there in customs for 1 to 2 weeks. It doesn't matter if it's a fucking box of chocolates (my girlfriend lives there), they open it up and inspect it at great length.
If I ship UPS, it gets there on top and my package isn't mutilated by Taiwan customs, for some unknown reason. That said, it's 2~3x cheaper to ship USPS...
Amidst all the pessimism surrounding this controversy, surely I'm not the only one excited about the potential benefits of what Google was doing?
Google was collecting information about wifi hotspots. Think about how this could benefit Google Maps, and your own life. Imagine searching for "coffee shop near indianapolis", and there are icons next to each of the names that show whether or not the coffee shop has free wifi. Or how about a "Search for wifi hotspots near this area button? This would be incredibly useful.
I don't wish to attack any airline pilots; I've known a few throughout my life and they're usually very friendly. In fact, in the last flight I had in Indianapolis, the flight was delayed by an hour and a half due to a cracked panel near the wing, during which time we all were sitting in the plane waiting for news, and the pilot personally bought the entire plane popcorn for their trouble. I do wish to attack the airlines management, however.
I've flown to and from Japan more than half a dozen times in the past two years, and all I can say is that compared to the US, air travel there is quick, pleasant, and usually cheap. In Japan, air travel must be competitive with bullet train travel, so it might compete in terms of price, ease, and timeliness.
- There, flight attendants are still friendly, helpful and polite (they're actually trained on how to best smile). - The food is still pretty good, and they often even give you metal silverware! - JAL has been offering a series of outreach programs where they bring in thousands of gradeschool children and show them the science behind flight, show them neat physics lift experiments, let them sit in a real cockpit, etc..., because you need to make children excited about flying if you wish to have a future. - Security is comparatively lax and comfortable -- after all, it has to compete with the bullet train, where you take whatever you want, stick it in as many suitcases as you can carry, and lug them onto a train where nobody stops you to inspect them, ever (and I might note that no trains have been blown up due despite the almost non-existent security). It's always unpleasant to arrive from Asia to the Land of the Free and be treated like a criminal in O'Hare. I feel bad for the tourists who know little English but are asked questions by angry-looking security and have to fill out tons of English-language customs forms, since no other foreign language forms are offered (in Japan, you could get the customs forms in several languages). - The airline companies still work relatively for the people, not for the people's money. By that I mean that when I was on my way back permanently to the US after a year studying abroad in Japan, I had (if I recall correctly) a 41.5 kg suitcase, which is 1.5 kg over the 40kg limit for international flights at the time. The airline (JAL) was very friendly and let me continue on without any fees or any trouble since it was such a minor weight overage, and due to my circumstances (being a student who was carrying everything he had back to the US).
In fact, if you cut just the CEO's salary to $1 million per year (more than enough money for a huge mansion and a Bentley), you could raise all of United's 7800, or so, pilots' salaries by $5000 each.
Unfortunately, with the United States' archaic 25% foreign control and 49% foreign investment cap on airline companies, we'll likely never have a superior Asian airline come in and displace the old, greedy, out-of-date and ready-to-die US airline companies, much like nearly happened with the US auto industry. We'll probably just continue to prop up the current airlines with billions of dollars of taxpayer money (and by prop up, I mean continue laying off pilots and underlings while raising CEO salaries).
That's not really a good analogy because there are HUGE, INCONCEIVABLY LARGE swaths of land that are at the very least undeveloped, if not almost completely untouched by more than a handful or less of humans.
A better analogy would be if something like a small town, or even a medium sized town affects the farmland and empty fields and ecosystems that are on the outlying areas of the town. In some ways, yes, they do affect the outlying areas.
For instance, cities are noticeably hotter than their rural outlying areas. However, rural areas nearby the city are still hotter than they would be if the city wasn't there until you get out sufficiently far from the city.
On the other hand, you're still going to see deer, you're still going to see trees, you're still going to see an ecosystem that from a glance looks identical to how it has always looked. And unless you look really, scientifically in depth at the surrounding ecosystems a little bit away from the city, you're going to be hard-pressed as a layperson to see any affect at all on the really rural areas.
So now replace individual cities and towns and their corresponding rural areas to every city on earth combined's affect on every rural area on earth combined, and you're probably going to see something similar.
So I assume that the Tibetians, Zimbabweans, and even Afghanis are responsible for the acts of their government. All of their respective countries hold elections, after all. And I guess that Canadians vastly approve of the increasingly worse-than-DMCA copyright acts flowing through their legislature, since they were voted in. And you know, most British enjoy 80+ hours of daily surveillance, because if they didn't, they wouldn't have voted in their government, either.
Slashdot Mirror
If I need to simplify a huge mess of an equation that I don't want to do myself, my first stop is my TI-89, then Maple, and then by hand. My TI-89 does simplification better than Maple 9/10 times. I don't know why, but it does.
Additionally, my TI-89 supports units, which makes Physics class a lot faster.
And lastly, my TI-89 has pretty print and is symbolic, which makes looking at equations and their solutions that much better.
There's nothing wrong with sequels. There's only something wrong with too many sequels. And, of course, "too much" varies depending on your game/franchise.
After having suffered through an entire generation of console games and console gamers, I was beginning to think that, too. And then I played Okami, and Persona, and Lost Odyssey, and branched off to some more lesser-"mainstream" games. I found out that I was still capable of enjoying myself like a child.
I realized that the mainstream game companies nowadays are no different than anime companies.
Throughout the 80's and 90's, anime was awesome. It was a new medium and everyone had their own idea of how it should be; there was tons of creativity, and love and care was put into each series. Nowadays, after a few decades, anime companies have the next "hit" anime down to an almost mathematical formula. Love and care are replaced by cheap Korean illustrators. Storylines are often painfully forced to be different, yet they always seem to follow an almost identical structure.
If you want a really good anime, it's mostly done by small company startups; and they're usually founded by some old-time veterans that are disillusioned and want to be creative for the sake of being creative, again, not creative for the sake of being profitable.
And now look at the game industry. It's the same thing.
I'd recommend Lost Odyssey if you haven't played it, yet. Also, the Persona series. They don't suffer the "I'm a bitchy kid that turns into a bitchy adult at the expensive of everybody around me, and then after I've turned into a bitchy adult, I take all of the credit for saving the world!" mechanic that JRPGs have suffered from since the end of the PS1 era. I'd also keep an eye out for The Last Story. That one looks (hopefully) to be good, coming out on the Wii next year.
Wen does, in fact, still favor political reform. He's so powerful that he's going around southern China talking about it without any consequence.
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2010/10/02/2003484323
Zhao Ziyang, however, is thrust into irrelevancy until his death because of his beliefs.
The difference between the two, both very powerful men in the PRC, is that Premier Wen is near the end of his political career, so locking him up would only cause more attention to his ideals. Zhao Ziyag still had much life in him when they decided to shut him up.
If China moves to take Taiwan by force, it would be a disastrously huge destabilization of that entire part of the globe, ultimately resulting either in total war with many parties that do not like China (i.e., everyone in that part of the world) or else resulting in China becoming the single, monopolizing hegemon of the entire region -- all of the ASEAN countries, and everyone -- up to Japan, which would upset the current balance of every market of everything worldwide.
And even if, for some reason, nobody cared at all about Taiwan being taken over militarily, and the other ASEAN countries didn't take the aggressive military take-over of a de facto sovereign nation as a forewarning of how China will deal with them when negotiations break down, the entire globe can expect the prices of everything computer-related to skyrocket probably several thousand percent and move backwards in time as so much of the R&D and highly-advanced manufacturing equipment on the island is damaged.
China has not moved to take over Taiwan because, having missed their opportunity shortly after the civil war, the modern era's situation is that entire planet has too much to lose over such an unimaginably, disastrously irresponsible thing.
Between the Liu Xiaobo, his wife, and the Nobel issues, its increasingly aggressive stance in US military talks, its now clearly-visible use of de facto economic sanctions (let alone their petty sanctions, like canceling concerts and tourism) to solve political issues (e.g., Senkakus; coming up next will be the South China Sea), its claim of the entire South China Sea as a "core interest", its generals violent, angry, disrespectful rants to US diplomats and US military generals during talks, its ambassadors literally screaming at US ambassador about Taiwan arms sales (as if they're anything new?), its siding with North Korea in the Cheonan sub incident, its often-siding with Iran even as Russia goes against Iran, its harassment of all regional neighbors (Japan, India, and all of ASEAN... find one country near China that doesn't border issues with China, more often than not severe border issues), its very "coincidental" purchase of tons of Japanese bonds just as Japan was trying to weaken the yen, its reactor sales to Pakistan, its excessively predatory trade practices (you're a high-tech company that wants to do business in China? You'd better be willing to give domestic Chinese companies your technology), its industrial espionage (Everyone spies on everyone, but the CIA does not spy on Japan and give Ford technology secrets. China doesn't have this moral dilemma, however), its threatening maneuvers, war games, and military actions against regional powers (especially US, South Korea, and Japan), its dishonest military practices (this seems like a weird thing to say, but China literally has fleets militarized civilian fishing boats so that it can claim that innocent citizens are being targeted if there is an armed conflict. I'm pretty sure the Western Powers don't do this. This is another reason Tokyo takes the fishing inside of its borders so seriously.)... Between all of these issues and so many more, China has already crossed the tipping point.
- The government of Japan is using all of its spare budget for this year to invest in rare earth metal mines in Mongolia and abroad while Japanese companies are pumping R&D money into negating the need for rare earth metals at all. The United States is also pushing to restart its rare earth mining operations.
- The Japanese Self Defense Forces has asked for a budget to study the possibility of setting up a permanent base on Yonakuni island -- an island 100 km from Taiwan. And, of course, where there are Japanese forces, there are inevitably US forces.
- The Japanese and US military are staging some war games to simulate a hostile Chinese military takeover of the Senkaku Islands so that they can prepare strategies to take the islands back by force.
- ASEAN has de facto agreed to begin setting up a bloc to contain and push back against increasingly aggressive and greedy Chinese hegemony and demands in the region. They are also asking the US to come back into this and re-assert its power in Asia. This has led to some very unusual alliances (US-Vietnam military alliance? wtf?). Because of China's aggressiveness, quite literally every rising or current Asian country (except China, of course), is gravitating back towards the US geopolitical sphere of influence.
- The Taiwanese public can only handle so much of their national image and sovereignty eroded and humiliated before they expect China to actually do something (like remove the 1500+ missiles aimed at their homes), and that tipping point is rapidly approaching (President Ma's popularity is tanking like Bush's was).
- The US is being increasingly aggressive against the Chinese yuan and their many, many, many other predatory and unfair trading practices (though to be fair to China on this one, the US's demands of an immediate yuan revaluing of +25% would be insanely destabilizing; I assume the US just set the bar high to give room to bargain downwards).
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If Bittorrent-like technology were implemented into every web browser, it could bring about a evolution of the internet.
I'm imagining the internet like a real spider web. I don't think "bittorrent", exactly, is a good idea, because that implies that after you finish a download, you'll be invisibly seeding it. What I'm imagining is that if you click to download a file, it first starts downloading it via http, like normal. While it's downloading, your browser will check in the background for other people who are downloading the same file at the same time that you are, or it will check for additional servers that it has been provided. If you are able to download from other users who are downloading at the same time as you are and at an equal or greater speed than the HTTP download, it will give priority to downloading from those other users.
Basically, what this is doing is it's downloading via HTTP from a server (e.g., ubuntu.com). Ubuntu.com is the host of the file and that will not change. However, if there is a large burst of activity (e.g., new canonical release), there will likely be other people downloading it at the exact same time as you are. There will also be multiple servers hosting the ubuntu release. Your web browser will download from one of those servers, but it will also try to download chunks from other users and the other servers to distribute the load. It will give priority to downloading from users, such that it will download as much as possible from other users so long as downloading from users is faster than downloading from the server.
As soon as your download finishes, the connections will close and you will stop seeding to others. This kind of system would mean that smaller files would usually be downloaded by http, but it would have the added benefit that larger files that have many users simultaneously downloading them (new releases, maybe even extend this to watching videos online) would download faster through multiple, sometimes closer connections, and servers would have reduced load because of the users sharing with each other.
In short, the kind of system I am describing of would mean that the servers still host all of the data all of the time, but users or would supplement the servers by offering some of the data some of the time.
The entire internet would be connected to each other like a gigantic spider web, with any given piece of data being downloaded from the closest, fastest point at any given time.
You can also maybe describe it as some kind of internet bandwidth-sharing collectivism or communism, but I like spiders better. :-)
There are 29.6 million small businesses in the United States. 70% of all jobs created in the past 10 years were due to small business. More than half of the non-farming US GDP is from small businesses. And this percentage can easily change. Think of all of the Japanese mega-corporations and all of the office workers working for huge faceless corporations. 90% of Japanese are, in fact, employed by small businesses.
The evil super-rich who own the means of production and all the wealth on the planet represent not even a fraction of all of the businesses and not much of the jobs that are out there. People only remember the truck driver that ran them off the road, never the tens of thousands of truck drivers that changed lanes for you.
If unions are to be organized, let them be organized and protected like they are in Japan -- on a per-company, per organization basis. Under no circumstances should there be an "auto workers union", or a "teachers union", or an "actors union". Perhaps there could be a "Ford union", a "Southern Ohio District Teachers Union", or a "Paramount Pictures Actors Union". And different unions could talk to each other to compare their conditions.
But as it stands, unions are too large to accurately represent anyone, they are literally bursting at the seams with corruption, they have zero checks and balances, you are forced to join the union for most union jobs (unless you your administration to be pressured by the union to fire you or you like working 2 hours per week), they destroy companies or at the very least make them extremely uncompetitive from their often ridiculous demands, and most of their assets are private and completely unscrutinizable (unless you like be demonized by unions).
Lawyers prevent basically all of the conditions that required unions to once exist to begin with. A modern company is not capable of systematically depriving their employees of rights, abusing them with harsh conditions or work hours, endangering their lives, or trying to make workers disposable by firing them and hiring news ones as soon as one loses an arm in an unsafe machine without a fleet of lawyers suing them into the ground.
Simply put, unions were needed before there were laws regarding: sexual harassment, discrimination, minimum wages, work safety (most industrial machines are designed at great pains to not even allow you to run them in a way that would injure or kill someone), employee health, employee break/vacation time, improper or baseless job termination, or any of the other thousands of laws that I've forgotten.
A handy guide for the US:
"Liberal" in the US means "Democrat", which, as was elegantly stated before by Boberfett, refers to an authoritarian leftist. Democrats are notoriously pro-union, and unions are as important to Democrats as hard-line Christians are to Republicans.
"Right-winger" or "The Right" (you can usually add condescending sub-human remarks of any amount to that) are what the Left refers to the Right as, which is are basically authoritarian rightists.
A Centrist, or an Undecided Voter, is what the rest of us are -- typically socially liberal and fiscally conservative. The resounding problem with the US two-party system is that Republicans have to go insane rightist to win their primaries, and Democrats have to go insane leftist to win their primaries. In the end, the "undecided" voters usually have to weigh which they prefer -- social responsibility of some of the Democrats, or fiscal responsibility of some of the Republicans (note: not all Republicans are Christ-warriors, and not all Democrats are authoritarian-socialist nut jobs. In fact, most aren't.). Fortunately, the entire country is moving more centrist -- partly by necessity, but also partly because IMO, most of the country is more center than they are left or right (leftwingers have to face the reality that their utopian visions can't be funded realistically, and rightwingers face the reality that free market with no regulation results in the glory of Wall St.!).
On that note, most of this crap occurs with national-level politics. The national politicians always try to stir up partisanism and nationalism -- usually successfully. Most local races, and some state races, are remarkably level-headed.
Lots of internal reforms are also going on that a foreign observer might not notice: the economy is the elephant in the room, but there's a big freedom of speech and religion battle (i.e., NY mosque) that will force the US to become a little more liberal on the religion front; education reform is getting pretty big (78% or so give US public schools a "C" or "D" grade); immigration reform keeps coming up and is unavoidable (bring us your huddled masses longing to be free?); increasing attention is being brought to ailing infrastructure, and there are calls for "rebuilding America"; more and more people are paying attention on the energy and technology front as the US tries to become greener, and the national broadband plan; US products are getting a little better (e.g., Ford, Chevy) as people have grown increasingly tired of shit-tier products and we're trying to double our exports; we're trying to get along better with our neighbors and act more responsibly as a mediator in the world (instead of micromanaging it brutishly); and, most importantly, the vast majority of the US population is extremely fed-up with the federal government -- both parties -- which will hopefully force things to become more sane and responsible.
They DO benefit from it. If Adobe puts a new image processing trick in Photoshop, then Photoshop is the only software that has it. PS isn't open source, so if they don't want to disclose how they did it, the only way to understand how they did it is by being actively involved in image processing research areas of mathematics. By the time someone else comes up with the same or a similar trick in Gimp, or something, Adobe will have already benefited from their idea -- assuming that they were business-smart and marketed, that is.
This makes me wonder if we could then start referring to overweight people as not fat, but "bold."
That's why Japan, motherland of modern gaming, and Korea, land of professional gaming and gaming addiction, are the fattest countries in the world!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Obesity_country_comparison_-_path.svg
It could be that sleep is nature's way of forcing us to die. If we could defeat sleep and stand 100% of the time...
What one generation accepts... ...The NEXT generation embraces.
Because all of us here on the internet (the younger generations) are accepting of the majority of now middle-aged Americans that support monitoring of the internet, support outlawing gay marriage, support a zero-tolerance war on drugs, etc...
And on that note, just as how all the hippies of the 1970's were totally acceptant of the rules imposed on them by the post-WWII generation and the big federal government...
BTW, how is what the leakers did any different than people that gave classified docs to the Soviets and Chinese? Motivation? It's the same motivation. My government is wrong, and the best way to change that is to help their enemies.
EXCUSE ME? Giving classified docs to the Soviets is giving classified docs to enemies. But what Wikileaks did was give classified docs to the public. Since when is the public classified as an enemy of the state ? That'd be a much more important development than the mere leak of documents.
The first thing to do if you're being detained at the airport is tell them reasonable things that they should need to know. True, maybe you're not constitutionally obligated to do so, but what harm lies in telling the people who are doing you detaining the kinds of things that you would tell a complete stranger while chatting in line? Being friendly in the beginning (even if they are assholes) and giving them the information that they need to know is more than likely to get you released from whatever side-room (all airports I've been in have a room set up just next to the security lines, not a "back room" at all).
For instance, when I was going to Japan to study for a year, I wasn't pulled aside. But if I was, I would tell them:
Here, I am a US citizen, here is my flight ticket and passport. I am going abroad to study Japanese at such and such university in Tochigi Prefecture, Japan.
If they must know,
I am a Japanese major at such and such university in Indiana
In most cases those kind of simple answers, which I think most reasonable people would not think is exceptionally intrusive, would go a long way to getting you out of that room as soon as possible. Only if they start asking weird things, like "what is your mother's name" and "where did you grow up", or even "how much money do you make", should you start declining questions.
I am not comfortable answering that question.
Almost every time I've ever tried to have the TI-89 factor or simplify something for me that was more than an already easily-simplifiable equation, I have ended up with an equation that is far, far worse and almost impossible to work with. I would strongly advise against using the TI-89 for any kind of simplification beyond the kind that is simple enough to do without a calculator.
Who the hell needs a graphing calculator on a standardized test? Why do standardized tests allow them at all? Hell, at the level of middle and high school standardized tests, you needn't even a calculator at all. I just graduated with a B.S. in Physics, and all but a very, very few times did we ever need calculators; tests were done with abstract variables, as you don't need numbers to show that you understand how to solve a problem.
And if you must absolutely have a calculator for a test, I can think of absolutely zero times where a graphing calculator is required. The TI's fantastic Scientific TI-3X lineup is much, much more than is sufficient for anything that you'll ever need below graduate school. And even in graduate school, you're more likely to need to use a computer, not the paltry processing power of a graphing calculator.
To date, the only real use for a graphing calculator I've ever had that I couldn't use a simpler calculator for is the TI-89's fantastic units, so I could calculate long strings of physics equations without ever needing to convert the units (since the calculator did the unit converting for me).
I ship USPS to Taiwan all the time. No matter what it is, it just sits there in customs for 1 to 2 weeks. It doesn't matter if it's a fucking box of chocolates (my girlfriend lives there), they open it up and inspect it at great length.
If I ship UPS, it gets there on top and my package isn't mutilated by Taiwan customs, for some unknown reason. That said, it's 2~3x cheaper to ship USPS...
Amidst all the pessimism surrounding this controversy, surely I'm not the only one excited about the potential benefits of what Google was doing?
Google was collecting information about wifi hotspots. Think about how this could benefit Google Maps, and your own life. Imagine searching for "coffee shop near indianapolis", and there are icons next to each of the names that show whether or not the coffee shop has free wifi. Or how about a "Search for wifi hotspots near this area button? This would be incredibly useful.
I don't wish to attack any airline pilots; I've known a few throughout my life and they're usually very friendly. In fact, in the last flight I had in Indianapolis, the flight was delayed by an hour and a half due to a cracked panel near the wing, during which time we all were sitting in the plane waiting for news, and the pilot personally bought the entire plane popcorn for their trouble. I do wish to attack the airlines management, however.
I've flown to and from Japan more than half a dozen times in the past two years, and all I can say is that compared to the US, air travel there is quick, pleasant, and usually cheap. In Japan, air travel must be competitive with bullet train travel, so it might compete in terms of price, ease, and timeliness.
- There, flight attendants are still friendly, helpful and polite (they're actually trained on how to best smile).
- The food is still pretty good, and they often even give you metal silverware!
- JAL has been offering a series of outreach programs where they bring in thousands of gradeschool children and show them the science behind flight, show them neat physics lift experiments, let them sit in a real cockpit, etc..., because you need to make children excited about flying if you wish to have a future.
- Security is comparatively lax and comfortable -- after all, it has to compete with the bullet train, where you take whatever you want, stick it in as many suitcases as you can carry, and lug them onto a train where nobody stops you to inspect them, ever (and I might note that no trains have been blown up due despite the almost non-existent security). It's always unpleasant to arrive from Asia to the Land of the Free and be treated like a criminal in O'Hare. I feel bad for the tourists who know little English but are asked questions by angry-looking security and have to fill out tons of English-language customs forms, since no other foreign language forms are offered (in Japan, you could get the customs forms in several languages).
- The airline companies still work relatively for the people, not for the people's money . By that I mean that when I was on my way back permanently to the US after a year studying abroad in Japan, I had (if I recall correctly) a 41.5 kg suitcase, which is 1.5 kg over the 40kg limit for international flights at the time. The airline (JAL) was very friendly and let me continue on without any fees or any trouble since it was such a minor weight overage, and due to my circumstances (being a student who was carrying everything he had back to the US).
And it probably helps that Japanese companies aren't like American companies that treat their employees like servant class and executives like aristocracy (United CEO $40 million salary, JAL CEO $100,000)
http://www.japanprobe.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/ceo.gif
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=united+airlines+ceo+salary
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=jal+ceo+salary
In fact, if you cut just the CEO's salary to $1 million per year (more than enough money for a huge mansion and a Bentley), you could raise all of United's 7800, or so, pilots' salaries by $5000 each.
Unfortunately, with the United States' archaic 25% foreign control and 49% foreign investment cap on airline companies, we'll likely never have a superior Asian airline come in and displace the old, greedy, out-of-date and ready-to-die US airline companies, much like nearly happened with the US auto industry. We'll probably just continue to prop up the current airlines with billions of dollars of taxpayer money (and by prop up, I mean continue laying off pilots and underlings while raising CEO salaries).
That's not really a good analogy because there are HUGE, INCONCEIVABLY LARGE swaths of land that are at the very least undeveloped, if not almost completely untouched by more than a handful or less of humans.
A better analogy would be if something like a small town, or even a medium sized town affects the farmland and empty fields and ecosystems that are on the outlying areas of the town. In some ways, yes, they do affect the outlying areas.
For instance, cities are noticeably hotter than their rural outlying areas. However, rural areas nearby the city are still hotter than they would be if the city wasn't there until you get out sufficiently far from the city.
On the other hand, you're still going to see deer, you're still going to see trees, you're still going to see an ecosystem that from a glance looks identical to how it has always looked. And unless you look really, scientifically in depth at the surrounding ecosystems a little bit away from the city, you're going to be hard-pressed as a layperson to see any affect at all on the really rural areas.
So now replace individual cities and towns and their corresponding rural areas to every city on earth combined's affect on every rural area on earth combined, and you're probably going to see something similar.
So I assume that the Tibetians, Zimbabweans, and even Afghanis are responsible for the acts of their government. All of their respective countries hold elections, after all. And I guess that Canadians vastly approve of the increasingly worse-than-DMCA copyright acts flowing through their legislature, since they were voted in. And you know, most British enjoy 80+ hours of daily surveillance, because if they didn't, they wouldn't have voted in their government, either.
You're a real ass, you know that?