Granted, the US has problems, but I would argue that it is better than most other countries. It is clearly better than Japan. Let's start with your concept of the Bush family "oligarchy". Japan has had a documented oligarchy since the transition from the emperor-daimyo system that occurred after Commodore Perry's visit to the country in the 1860's. Said oligarchy brought Japan to be a major world player by defeating Russia in a war in 1904-1905. Japan orchestrated the construction of an empire by means as brutal as any documented in history. Just ask Chinese or Koreans who are old enough to remember. With respect to your comment about foreign policy involving killing people, it is important to remember the Great Helmsman's aphorism that "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
By the way, Kennedy was responsible for subverting foreign leaders and attempts to do so; what about the "Bay of Pigs."
The Kennedy oligarchy is demonstrably based more on immoral businesses as Joe Kennedy's fortune was made smuggling liquor during the prohibition.
Your comment "U.S. citizens often live in a mental fantasy land in which they view themselves as the best, and cannot hear anything else. " could well apply to the US Democratic party. Al Gore had every electoral advantage and lost to Bush who two years prior no one would even have imagined would have been able to get the Republican nomination.
With respect to health care in Japan vs US; I lived in Japan for two years and can say that the quality of care there is less than in the US. I had a friend come down with a kidney infection and at the hospital in Fujisawa(southwest of Tokyo) the nurses spent their free time at the nurse station smoking! Seriously! Also had another friend who was studying to become a dentist there and he told me that fluoride was not included in toothpaste products made in Japan. Some nonsense about toxic effects; the result is most Japanese have horrible teeth. All the posters today who are running down the US in favor of Japan are full of it. Most Japanese live in homes/apartments that even most Silicon Valley geeks would find totally unacceptable in terms of price, cleanliness and size. In Tokyo there are hundreds of housing projects consisting of 5 to 10 seven story walkup apartment buildings constructed of concrete. If you walk up the staircases you'll see paint peeling everywhere and giant cobwebs in the corners. Even the nicer apartments basically have enough room for a hot plate, a small fridge, a squeeze in bathroom, and a few tatami to roll out one's futon upon. Anyone ever wondered why the Japanese use futons? It's because there is no room in their apato's for furniture. They roll up the futon in the morning and stick it in the closet so they'll have someplace to eat. Americans complain about traffic; how would you like to be physically stuffed into a train for a commute that lasts forty five minutes. Your stuffed in so tight that you could fall asleep standing up and not fall over. Food prices over there are sky high because of the government's protectionist agricultural policies. A ten pound bag of rice that would cost $3 here costs in the range of $20 over there. Japanese society is one of the most racist on Earth. They don't allow naturalization because they don't want their race to be diluted. The few folks of Korean descent or Korean-Japanese descent have historically been severely discriminated against. The Japanese educational system has been controlled by the national government since the early 20th century and textbooks and teachers are carefully monitored to make sure that no ugly facts that would reflect negatively on Japan or its culture are taught in school. Don't get me wrong, Japan has many positive aspects about it but I will finish by saying this:
All you morons that are badmouthing the US as opposed to Japan should shut your mouths as you don't know what you are talking about.
The stealthiness of the F-117 and B-2 planes was due in large part to the geometrical structure of the airplanes' skin which acted to scatter the radar so that the radar footprint was extremely small. Anyone know if such shaping could be applied to light wavelengths?
I agree with you; I have not been in Africa myself. Anyone interested in the subject of Africa and what effects international aid have should read the following excellent book by Paul Theroux "Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town." Mr. Theroux worked with the Peace Corps in Africa some 40 years ago and recently traveled from Cairo to Cape Town (literally) observing and taking notes on what he saw. One of the main theses of his book is that the international aid organizations are doing more harm than good and that handouts such as the one referenced in this Slashdot story generally fail. BTW, Mr. Theroux has written a number of novels and travelogues. I highly recommend any of his writings....
I wish that the editors would only post stories that actually had some specs or detailed description of the tech behind new devices. Just a press release and some hype would only warrant a couple of sentences.
This type of increase isn't orders of magnitude larger than the increases in storage media seen in the computer industry. If someone had said a few years ago that soon we would have tiny removable cards that could hold up to 4GB of data, I believe that many would have called this a snake oil claim. In 1995 at my office I had a hard drive with 300 MB capacity and thought that was pretty good.
BTW, instead of calling BS when they see a claim they feel is wrong, now slashdotters can call "snake oil."
I am totally in agreement with you. It is not that hard to build your own box and do what you want with it. I don't have the time or budget to do it right now; but this is the way to go for anyone who can really consider themselves to be even a rookie hacker. A relative of mine has had TIVO for about a year and I have not been that impressed with it. Granted, some of the features are nice but one problem I've noticed is that there is a delay between when you push a button on the remote and when the machine reacts.
Personally, I wouldn't mind having an ad bar running ads along the bottom of the browser window if it meant free service. Given that a WiFi connection would mean more bandwidth than a dialup connection, it wouldn't interfere with my reading of the web pages I click to.
I use Google and Gmail all the time right now and the ads they place on each page loaded don't bother me at all.
The problem with services such as NetZero (which I had for over a year) was that at dialup speeds the ads hogged enough of the bandwidth that eventually I got sick of it and quit.
Also, in terms of TV/radio I don't think ads are necessarily bad. If the ad creators did a better job of producing their ads then folks wouldn't necessarily skip them. I know a lot of you don't skip the beer commercials during sports programming because you want to see those hot chicks.
True, but typically in infantry firefights I believe that a rifleman is not expected to take down enemy fighters one bullet at a time but rather through bursts or full auto covering fire...
Very interesting comments..thanks. A really bad example of UI design IMO is Cisco VOIP phones. At a former job our company switched to these, and it turned out that to perform a speed dial you had to press almost as many buttons as simply dialing the number yourself. I don't know if this was a SNAFU on the part of our IT staff but it seemed to me that this was the out of the box functionality.
I have been an accountant for over ten years and most of the software I have seen is indeed awful. I would like to see a UI where navigation is done via hyperlinks rather than the MS button/drop down box model. Also push most of the processing to the server and keep the client as thin as possible...accounting departments are always last on the list for PC upgrades. I am currently stuck using a Lawson setup where it takes longer for the GUI to switch from the report launcher screen to the output screen than the actual processing of the report. That's a flaming joke...
Agreed...it quoted one researcher as saying that the distance to the magnetar could have been as low as 30,000 light years. And it said the magnetic field generated by this star could wipe a credit card that was 160,000 kilometers away.
Why wouldn't IBM open source its already existing office suite known as SmartSuite? I would hope that IBM employees have been using this product inhouse up until this point. My impression was that Smartsuite was a decent product that just got outmaneuvered by Microsoft.
I totally disagree with the idea that IT is a support organization. IT is absolutely the heart of any business with more than 5 employees or so. IF the IT guys at any company all took a week off with no means to contact them, that company would grind to a halt by the end of the week.
I agree that HP calculators were solid products and I owned a financial calculator for a number of years. However, I finally got rid of it because it seems pointless to me to do calculations on a machine with tiny memory and a difficult interface when you could do all the calculating you wanted on a spreadsheet or by programming on a PC, workstation or whatever. I guess there is nostalgia value to an HP calculator now, but to me it would be nothing beyond that.
IMO, HP needs to focus more on its enterprise business. The SNAFU with their own internal ERP systems should have been grounds for Fiorina's termination. How can you sell anyone on your ability to give them systems integration advice when you show that you can't do it yourself.
The problem with this idea is that at least on the west coast of the US most of the lighthouses are in locations where the cell reception would only go a couple of miles. Try driving down the Oregon coast..those lighthouses are really remote. It's a beautiful drive.
What JP Morgan and other Wall Street firms use message queuing software for is trading in the financial markets. So if the software bugs out, they stand to lose millions of dollars per minute or more depending on the size of the trades they are executing. So I see this story as a positive for open source software because if Wall Street people think they can get a usable mission critical piece of software out of the open source community then no other potential target for OSS is invulnerable.
True...Galaxyquest was a brilliant spoof of the franchise. I also thought of something else; in the old days of TV and radio shows the producers never felt a need to wrap up everything in an hour. Typically when an hour show was nearing its end the plot would move to a cliffhanger to get you to watch when the next episode came out. Doing something like this could allow for improved plotting.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, the US has problems, but I would argue that it is better than most other countries. It is clearly better than Japan.
Let's start with your concept of the Bush family "oligarchy". Japan has had a documented oligarchy since the transition from the emperor-daimyo system that occurred after Commodore Perry's visit to the country in the 1860's. Said oligarchy brought Japan to be a major world player by defeating Russia in a war in 1904-1905.
Japan orchestrated the construction of an empire by means as brutal as any documented in history. Just ask Chinese or Koreans who are old enough to remember.
With respect to your comment about foreign policy involving killing people, it is important to remember the Great Helmsman's aphorism that "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
By the way, Kennedy was responsible for subverting foreign leaders and attempts to do so; what about the "Bay of Pigs."
The Kennedy oligarchy is demonstrably based more on immoral businesses as Joe Kennedy's fortune was made smuggling liquor during the prohibition.
Your comment "U.S. citizens often live in a mental fantasy land in which they view themselves as the best, and cannot hear anything else. " could well apply to the US Democratic party. Al Gore had every electoral advantage and lost to Bush who two years prior no one would even have imagined would have been able to get the Republican nomination.
With respect to health care in Japan vs US; I lived in Japan for two years and can say that the quality of care there is less than in the US. I had a friend come down with a kidney infection and at the hospital in Fujisawa(southwest of Tokyo) the nurses spent their free time at the nurse station smoking! Seriously!
Also had another friend who was studying to become a dentist there and he told me that fluoride was not included in toothpaste products made in Japan. Some nonsense about toxic effects; the result is most Japanese have horrible teeth.
All the posters today who are running down the US in favor of Japan are full of it. Most Japanese live in homes/apartments that even most Silicon Valley geeks would find totally unacceptable in terms of price, cleanliness and size.
In Tokyo there are hundreds of housing projects consisting of 5 to 10 seven story walkup apartment buildings constructed of concrete. If you walk up the staircases you'll see paint peeling everywhere and giant cobwebs in the corners. Even the nicer apartments basically have enough room for a hot plate, a small fridge, a squeeze in bathroom, and a few tatami to roll out one's futon upon.
Anyone ever wondered why the Japanese use futons? It's because there is no room in their apato's for furniture. They roll up the futon in the morning and stick it in the closet so they'll have someplace to eat.
Americans complain about traffic; how would you like to be physically stuffed into a train for a commute that lasts forty five minutes. Your stuffed in so tight that you could fall asleep standing up and not fall over.
Food prices over there are sky high because of the government's protectionist agricultural policies. A ten pound bag of rice that would cost $3 here costs in the range of $20 over there.
Japanese society is one of the most racist on Earth. They don't allow naturalization because they don't want their race to be diluted. The few folks of Korean descent or Korean-Japanese descent have historically been severely discriminated against.
The Japanese educational system has been controlled by the national government since the early 20th century and textbooks and teachers are carefully monitored to make sure that no ugly facts that would reflect negatively on Japan or its culture are taught in school.
Don't get me wrong, Japan has many positive aspects about it but I will finish by saying this:
All you morons that are badmouthing the US as opposed to Japan should shut your mouths as you don't know what you are talking about.
Bravo, my sentiments exactly. The mainstream media always conveniently omit this fact from their articles.
The gentleman probably took a long a case of Diet Coke to help him out...:)
The stealthiness of the F-117 and B-2 planes was due in large part to the geometrical structure of the airplanes' skin which acted to scatter the radar so that the radar footprint was extremely small. Anyone know if such shaping could be applied to light wavelengths?
I agree with you; I have not been in Africa myself. Anyone interested in the subject of Africa and what effects international aid have should read the following excellent book by Paul Theroux "Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town." Mr. Theroux worked with the Peace Corps in Africa some 40 years ago and recently traveled from Cairo to Cape Town (literally) observing and taking notes on what he saw. One of the main theses of his book is that the international aid organizations are doing more harm than good and that handouts such as the one referenced in this Slashdot story generally fail.
BTW, Mr. Theroux has written a number of novels and travelogues. I highly recommend any of his writings....
You gotta love pointy haired bosses. I'd say it's time for y'all to start looking for a new job. What a sad story...
I wish that the editors would only post stories that actually had some specs or detailed description of the tech behind new devices. Just a press release and some hype would only warrant a couple of sentences.
This type of increase isn't orders of magnitude larger than the increases in storage media seen in the computer industry. If someone had said a few years ago that soon we would have tiny removable cards that could hold up to 4GB of data, I believe that many would have called this a snake oil claim. In 1995 at my office I had a hard drive with 300 MB capacity and thought that was pretty good.
BTW, instead of calling BS when they see a claim they feel is wrong, now slashdotters can call "snake oil."
Yes, "glacial" was the word I was looking for..main reason I would never get a TIVO.
I am totally in agreement with you. It is not that hard to build your own box and do what you want with it. I don't have the time or budget to do it right now; but this is the way to go for anyone who can really consider themselves to be even a rookie hacker.
A relative of mine has had TIVO for about a year and I have not been that impressed with it. Granted, some of the features are nice but one problem I've noticed is that there is a delay between when you push a button on the remote and when the machine reacts.
Personally, I wouldn't mind having an ad bar running ads along the bottom of the browser window if it meant free service. Given that a WiFi connection would mean more bandwidth than a dialup connection, it wouldn't interfere with my reading of the web pages I click to.
I use Google and Gmail all the time right now and the ads they place on each page loaded don't bother me at all.
The problem with services such as NetZero (which I had for over a year) was that at dialup speeds the ads hogged enough of the bandwidth that eventually I got sick of it and quit.
Also, in terms of TV/radio I don't think ads are necessarily bad. If the ad creators did a better job of producing their ads then folks wouldn't necessarily skip them. I know a lot of you don't skip the beer commercials during sports programming because you want to see those hot chicks.
True, but typically in infantry firefights I believe that a rifleman is not expected to take down enemy fighters one bullet at a time but rather through bursts or full auto covering fire...
Very interesting comments..thanks. A really bad example of UI design IMO is Cisco VOIP phones. At a former job our company switched to these, and it turned out that to perform a speed dial you had to press almost as many buttons as simply dialing the number yourself. I don't know if this was a SNAFU on the part of our IT staff but it seemed to me that this was the out of the box functionality.
I have been an accountant for over ten years and most of the software I have seen is indeed awful.
I would like to see a UI where navigation is done via hyperlinks rather than the MS button/drop down box model. Also push most of the processing to the server and keep the client as thin as possible...accounting departments are always last on the list for PC upgrades. I am currently stuck using a Lawson setup where it takes longer for the GUI to switch from the report launcher screen to the output screen than the actual processing of the report. That's a flaming joke...
Agreed...it quoted one researcher as saying that the distance to the magnetar could have been as low as 30,000 light years. And it said the magnetic field generated by this star could wipe a credit card that
was 160,000 kilometers away.
Why wouldn't IBM open source its already existing office suite known as SmartSuite? I would hope that IBM employees have been using this product inhouse up until this point. My impression was that Smartsuite was a decent product that just got outmaneuvered by Microsoft.
I totally disagree with the idea that IT is a support organization. IT is absolutely the heart of any business with more than 5 employees or so. IF the IT guys at any company all took a week off with no means to contact them, that company would grind to a halt by the end of the week.
IMO, they don't want to cannibalize their TV sales.
The prices of TV's using DLP technology are a lot higher than this product.
I agree that HP calculators were solid products and I owned a financial calculator for a number of years. However, I finally got rid of it because it seems pointless to me to do calculations on a machine with tiny memory and a difficult interface when you could do all the calculating you wanted on a spreadsheet or by programming on a PC, workstation or whatever. I guess there is nostalgia value to an HP calculator now, but to me it would be nothing beyond that.
IMO, HP needs to focus more on its enterprise business. The SNAFU with their own internal ERP systems should have been grounds for Fiorina's termination. How can you sell anyone on your ability to give them systems integration advice when you show that you can't do it yourself.
The problem with this idea is that at least on the west coast of the US most of the lighthouses are in locations where the cell reception would only go a couple of miles. Try driving down the Oregon coast..those lighthouses are really remote. It's a beautiful drive.
What JP Morgan and other Wall Street firms use message queuing software for is trading in the financial markets. So if the software bugs out, they stand to lose millions of dollars per minute or more depending on the size of the trades they are executing. So I see this story as a positive for open source software because if Wall Street people think they can get a usable mission critical piece of software out of the open source community then no other potential target for OSS is invulnerable.
True...Galaxyquest was a brilliant spoof of the franchise. I also thought of something else; in the old days of TV and radio shows the producers never felt a need to wrap up everything in an hour. Typically when an hour show was nearing its end the plot would move to a cliffhanger to get you to watch when the next episode came out. Doing something like this could allow for improved plotting.
Do you have to own a copy of the game to spectate on line? I don't have time to master some of these games but I would enjoy watching skilled players.