I've seen other footage of insurgents brazenly fighting in the streets (usually RPG holders, I guess they think they are bad-asses).
Yes, I've seen footage of an Iraqi kneeling in the middle of the street with an RPG like Rambo. I'm not even that dumb when I'm playing Call of Duty. I still think it's a crowd of civilians though.
You say you're in the air force. If you were ordered to bomb a crowd like that, would you do it? Or would you protest?
When I was a young I was in the Air Cadets here in the UK. Fortunately my eyesight got really bad, otherwise I also might be blowing up crowds of civilians and saying "Aw Dude" (or perhaps Roger Wilco). Protecting your country is one thing, but turning Iraq into Stalingrad so that Halliburton et al can make some more money, is just not on.
Towns are full of civilians and you can't treat everyone like a terrorist. If the NYPD received reports that some terrorists were taking shelter in a Manhattan apartment, which of these do you think would happen?
1. A swat team is sent to arrest and if necessary kill the terrorists.
2. An F16 is sent to bomb the entire apartment without warning or evacuating neighbouring apartments.
It seems to me that option 2 is fine for Iraq, but unthinkable in the US.
Iraqi oil belongs to Iraq, not to Bush's chums.
Absolutely, but control of the oil is strategically important for the US, which explains many things. Most of the theft though is from your pocket. Money is being transferred in copious amounts from the public to the big companies. It doesn't matter if the exercise as a whole is loss making, since only the public loses, which is fine. The big companies are happy no-matter what.
There's no way you can tell what that is, it could be a pole for getting extra leverage on tractor wheel nuts, absolutely anything. Although he runs and throws it, he walks back fairly calmly.
There's no controversy over this because few people in the media seem to care. Just like there was little controversy over the Iraq wedding party that was blown up. All they have to say is that they were terrorists and everyone stands around nodding in sheep-like agreement.
It's a frightening development. In a war, if too many of your troops get killed it becomes politically difficult to continue. With robots there is no problem. If a robot kills a civillian, you can just say it was malfunctioning and dismantle it.
Imagine if robots had been sent into combat in Vietnam rather than soldiers (not possible with the technology I know). It wouldn't matter if 50,000 were killed. In fact it would be great since increased orders would give the economy a boost. Even a robotic Jane Fonda peace-bot would have little effect.
Governments around the world would love to get their hands on robo-soldiers. They could even turn them on their own people if they got out of line.
What makes you so sure they were not fighters? Source?
Good question. According to Channel 4 news, a doctor at a Fallujah hospital said they were fleeing civilians. The Pentagon at the time was said to be investigating. I would not trust the US military if they told me they were fighters, nor would I neccesarily trust the Local Iraqis. Again all we can really trust is the footage.
The footage was shot at night and I don't know of any civilians in their right mind who would rome around "mob style" in a KNOWN battle zone.
We'll I don't know if it was day or night. It's thermal and I can't make out any time in the footage, so it's difficult to tell. Actually, it makes more sense for anyone to try to move at night, civilians or otherwise. If your neighborhood was being bombed, you might not behave rationally either. I doubt any people in Fallujah were at all "in their right mind".
The pilot says "We have numerous individuals on the road. Do you want me to take those out?" to which the response is "Take'em out". It does not seem that the crowd has been positively identifed as fighters at all. I've seen plenty of footage of rebels and they tend not to wander around in groups like that in urban areas. For one thing, if you need to open fire, it's no good if you're all standing in front of each other. Fighters tend to spread out. Also in urban areas you stick to the walls rather than wandering down the middle of the street. If these people are fighters, they're pretty stupid. From the footage it's not possible to identify any weapons, and from that distance I doubt if the pilots could either. At no point does anyone ask whether they were armed or posing a threat, which is surely important in a civilian area.
There seems to be about 25-30 people in the footage, and there is nothing unique in scale about 30 people being killed by mistake. The US military have admitted killing similar quantities of civilians on a number of occasions, and not just in Iraq, but also Afghanistan.
Obviously mistakes will happen, but there really does seem to be a wanton disregard for civilians. It's a case of shoot first, ask questions later. It's these tactics that have resulted in the increased insurgency (or resistance depending on your viewpoint).
Well yes, it was a bit off-topic. But the part about the swine fever is more relevant. There was also a similar incident with Dengue fever. The US has supplied biological weapons to some rather nasty groups and regimes.
With regards to the footage of the farmers, it's true you can never know with 100% certainty that they weren't fighters, but that's true of every man in Iraq you that you could take a thermal picture of. All we have to go on is the evidence we can see. One of the men seems to be working on the tractor on the left, which is rather a strange thing for an insurgent to be doing. Any farmer in the whole of Iraq would be handling tools that could be judged to be potential IEDs when viewed through a grainy heat camera. I don't think its acceptable to shoot unarmed people who look very much like farmers working on a tractor. If they had AK47s and RPGs could clearly be identified, that would be another matter, but that was clearly not the case. From what I've seen of IEDs, they tend to be converted artillery shells (of which there are plenty) and I cannot see any such thing in the footage.
I'm sure plenty of sites say they were insurgents. Plenty of others, including the one I linked to at Indymedia conclude that they were farmers. Based on the video evidence I do not believe my reasoning is "screwed".
What really annoys me is the one sided censorship. When those US workers/mercenaries (we don't exactly know which) were beaten and burned in Fallujah the news channels showed graphic footage of it. I don't recall any fuss being made about the Apache footage. I believe it was shown once on ABC News, and I've not seen it on UK TV at all.
I'm sick and tired of people criticising the US. I'm mean, what have they done that's so bad?
[Heckler]- Well they toppled democracies in Chile, Iran, Guatemala, and other countries.
Ok, but apart from those misunderstandings.
[Heckler]- Well apart from toppling democracies they have supported and continue to support brutal dictatorships around
the world. These include Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Saudi Arabia, Suharto in Indonesia (hundreds of thousands were
Slaughtered). Most recently of course is Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan who likes to have demonstrators mown down with
machine guns.
Yeah, ok maybe there were some mistakes made. But apart from toppling democracies and supporting dictatorships, what
has the US ever done? I mean, what about the Kurds, we've really helped them out haven't we?
[Heckler] - Yes they're in a strong position now. Let's just hope they forget US support for Saddam while he was gassing
them. And lets hope they never realise that the US massively stepped up military aid to Turkey and looked the other way
while they were bombing the Kurds.
Ok, but apart from toppling democracies, supporting dictatorships and screwing the Kurds, what is the US so guilty of?
[Heckler] - Well how about the support for terrorist acts against Cuba, and other countries? For example, Luis Posada
Carriles, a CIA agent was behind the bombing of a Cuban Airliner in 1976. The US refused to extradite him.Then there was
the Cuban hotel bombings in 1997, also involving Luis Posada Carriles. And what about those poor Cuban pigs? CIA-Backed
anti-Castro terrorists introduced swine fever into Cuba in 1971. This economic sabotage resulted in the slaughter of 500,000
pigs.
Hold on. Cuba is a special situation. It's a dictatorship, so we're just trying to topple it and bring freedom to the Cubans.
[Heckler] - Ok, forget Cuba. We must not forget the 1985 Beirut car bombing. That was a CIA-backed attempt to
assassinate Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah. They missed him but killed 85 civilians. Lets also not forget the support
for terrorism in Nicaragua. It got so intense that the World Court made a decision in 1986 against the US, ordering it to
terminate the unlawful use of force and illegal economic warfare.
Alright, alright, but apart from toppling democracies, supporting dictatorships, screwing the Kurds and supporting terrorism,
what has the US ever done?
[Heckler] - Well lets not forget about the vast numbers of civilians killed by US military action. A well-researched article
in the Lancet concluded that around 100,000 Iraqis have died since the war started, mostly as a result of "coalition" air
strikes. Lets also not forget the several million civilians bombed to death in Vietnam. They weren't all bombed of course, we
mustn't forget the My Lai massacre.
We also must not forget the thousands killed during the invasion of Panama in 1989, who's purpose was to removed another
CIA-backed dictator, Manuel Noriega.
Okay okay. We've made some past mistakes. But now we're setting it all right in Iraq.
Yes. That's exactly what I thought when I watched footage of a US helicopter slice several farmers
apart while one of the pilots says "He's wounded. Hit him!". Or the F16 footage showing a crowd of civilians (not fighters as has been claimed) being bombed while the pilot says "Aw, dude!".
We already have an enormous free fusion reactor called the Sun. We get something like 1 kilowatt per square meter, so why is so little money being invested in ways to exploit it?
How plausible does this sound?
"Scientists at Cambridge University have announced the discovery of modified polyethylene compound which can act as a solar cell with 60% efficiency. The projected cost of the cells is $10 per square metre."
In principle I think something like this is quite possible. The problem that I see is that bugger all money is being spent on solar research. In contrast governments seem happy to spend $10 Billion on Iter (a big fusion torus). Given the enormous potential of solar power, you have to ask yourself why $10 Billion is not being spent on Solar Cell research.
I think the answer lies with big business and the balance of power. As long as the world depends on oil, big oil companies can keep making lots of money, and the localised nature of oil fields enables governments to control them and wield power. In contrast, solar power would be open to lots of smaller companies and the resource, sunlight, is abundant and cannot be controlled by anyone. That's why BPs Solar Division is just a propaganda exercise, they could never make as much money with solar power as they can with oil. Someday though, dirt cheap and highly efficient solar cells will be created and the balance of power will change. Africa for example could become the power house of the world.
We've got this enormous fusion reactor in space belting down tonnes of abundant energy upon us and instead of trying to use it we prefer to kill each other over bits of black grease in a desert. How dumb is that?
I'd sort of heard of it, but I hadn't investigated fully. It looks pretty good. Conversion might not be too bad, and it is cross platform and even has inheritance.
The main drawback is that its proprietary again and its a small company. I've been playing with Java and Eclipse today and I'm quite impressed. Aside from being cross platform it looks like you can even compile to native code with tools like Excelsior.
Yes we tried the conversion wizard. The time estimated to convert the project kept getting bigger and bigger. Besides which I wouldn't trust the mess spewed out by it.
VB6 had deterministic finalization due to its reference counting..Net is garbage collected, so you can't reliably convert your code, even in principle. e.g. You have a VB6 class that closes a file when it destructs, in VB.Net the file may be left open for ages.
We don't intend to stick with VB6, but a total rewrite is not really going to happen at the moment. When you rewrite an application it should be because of business reasons, not because your tool vendor has dumped you.
It's not the first time the BCS has vomited their FUD upon us and it won't be the last.
Most software that's developed is bespoke software (e.g. Demand Forecasting system for predicting Electricity Usage) and this type of software is not threatened by Open Source, but benefits from it (i.e. Free tools).
It's only the big boys writing consumer off-the-shelf software that need to worry. Unfortunately its these people that make up all the advertising revenue for Computer magazines, so we are treated to their point of view.
Maybe that's what the Open Source community should really be concentrating on. A totally open source standardised modern language fit for serious business development. Something that can be enhanced over the years.
There are some pretty smart people out there coming up with languages like Ruby and Python, so its not an impossibility.
It would seem to be a better idea than trying to copy Microsoft with Mono.
What features do we need?
Classes, Inheritance etc
Garbage Collection
Reflection
Aspect Oriented Facilities?
Generics...
Your right of course Mr Conspiracy. Microsoft needs us to keep moving away from what we have, otherwise they won't make money.
I have certainly thought about Java, but we have a lot of Microsoft "inertia" so it would be a big scary move. Then again having to rewrite a huge application again later is more scary.
Of course Java is a proprietary language as well, but I get the impression that Sun are less likely to screw all the developers, at least while they are less powerfull than Microsoft.
It would be nice to use a totally non-proprietary language. C++ would be an attractive option if it wasn't so dangerous. Some sort of C++ with Garbage Collection added and some newever features would be good. There are lots of non-proprietary scripting languages like Python and Ruby of course, but they do not seem suitable for a big business application.
C# is a nice language, but the problem is I just don't trust Microsoft anymore. From a business perspective sticking with Microsoft has proven to be a mistake.
I work for a software house in London and we have a large VB6 application that has been built up over many years. VB6 has effectively been dumped by Microsoft, so our application is slowly rotting away. There is absolutely no way we can rewrite it in C# or VB.Net, we just don't have the resources. I suggested that we at least write all new components in C# and use interop, but that turned out to be a real pain, especially when trying to debug.
So what do we do? Spend a fortune rewriting our product in C# while our competitors (who may be using Java) continue to improve their products. And once we have eventually finished the rewrite, will Microsoft just dump.NET and move on to something else?
I have to wonder. If there had been a number of VB6 vendors, rather than just Microsoft, they could never have dumped VB6. In that situation we would have all just moved over to another vendor.
I enjoyed reading his earlier book "Joel On Software", but I think you will learn far more from...
"Analysis Patterns" by Martin Fowler
"Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" by Martin Fowler.
"Design patterns : elements of reusable object-oriented software" by Eric Gama et al
And for database stuff I would recommend
"Agile Database Techniques" by Scott W. Ambler
If I have to choose between being safe or being free; I chose to be free. Continual erosion of our civil liberties leads us towards a police state, which is far more frightening than any terrorist organisation. If you divide the number of civilians killed by terrorists by the number of civilians killed governments, you get virtually zero. Yet we are supposed to be afraid of terrorists, not governments. That has to be the biggest propaganda coup in history.
500GB is not so hard to fill up.
For example a friend of mine has all of Farscape on Divx, which takes up about 30GB, and that's only at 512x384 resolution. Every episode of STTNG will take up about 50GB and the same for Voyager and DS9.
Add to that the average DVD film collection, which would probably take up another 100GB.
Video takes up a lot of space, even when compressed. It doesn't matter how big the storage device is, we will always fill it up with something.
I agree. Where I work we have had some of our best ideas while writing text adventure games or playing soduku.
And I'm sure my boss has some brilliant flashes of business genius while he spends the day porn surfing.
New York Times 2010 Eye gougings are up 20% this month since the introduction of the new Visa-Eye card, which owes its high security to the uniqueness of the user's iris pattern.
I think that the concept of Regional Coding is largely dead now anyway since they tend to release everything at the same time to avoid piracy. Regional Coding was really a violation of WTO rules anyway.
I don't like the idea of hardware that reports back to base. If we go in that direction our TVs will report us when we channel flip to avoid commercials.
YOUR TV HAS BEEN DISABLED. SKIPPING COMMERCIALS IS THEFT!
You're right of course, but its always been the bad guys doing the bribing so far.
There is also a lot of delayed bribery going on.
I know Bush Snr, James Baker and John Major (former British PM) got their rewards from the defence industry in the form of directorships in the Carlisle Group.
"Hey thanks for giving us so much public money during Desert Storm. We could really use you as a director now..."
Actually this is going to make spacecraft a lot cheaper. NASA will be producing future vessels in kit form with components attached to a large plastic framework. Construction will be a simple matter of twisting off the right parts and gluing them in place.
Why don't we just bribe the government directly?
It's called taxes.
Since taxation is compulsory, it can hardly be considered a bribe.
And yes, of course, bribery is illegal but it doesn't seem to stop big business getting their way.
It doesn't seem to matter who you vote for, no matter how amazingly liberal and "for the people" the are. As soon as they are in power they change. You can see this clearly with the Labour party in the UK. Everyone thought they were going to be amazingly refreshing but they have turned out worse than the Conservatives.
As for my hat made from tinfoil, surely it is sufficient to criticise someone's arguments/ideas on a point by point basis without resorting to logical fallacies.
This is slightly off-topic but I was thinking about why governments do not protect workers from outsourcing and I had an idea...
The Government makes decisions that favour big business, since big business is the government's paymaster. Sometimes these decisions involve sending us to war and getting us killed just so they can get more bribes and directorships from companies like Halliburton. I have a radical proposal. Why don't we just bribe the government directly?
Imagine if everyone in the country gave £10 a year to a special government bribe fund. You would have several hundred million pounds (or dollars if you're American) with which to bribe the right people. Suddenly we might be able to create legislation that benefits the public at the expense of big business.
Bribing the government to get what you want would be a lot better for your health than protesting. When you protest, you have to stand out in the rain and get clubbed over the held by riot police. You don't see the board of directors of Raytheon protesting in the street. They are smart enough to know that bribery is far more effective.
For example, if the government was being bribed by arms companies to invade Iran, we could counter-bribe and prevent it. This kind of thing could even work internationally. Many people around the world would be better off if the U.S. did not invade Iran. On an international scale you would have many billions of dollars in the bribe kitty!
How can we go about pulling this off?
My boss is always looking to outsource our jobs to India, China or Poland. Fortunately they are so paranoid about people stealing our business ideas, they never go through with their plans.
You will notice a distinct lack of protectionism when it comes to outsourcing jobs. When our industries are being undermined by cheaper foreign imports, the government starts introducing tariff barriers and/or quotas. This is because the rich people at the top of the chain are being affected. In contrast, job outsourcing benefits these same rich people, so there is no reason for the government to introduce protective measures. The government only protects its direct paymasters, not the little fish.
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I've seen other footage of insurgents brazenly fighting in the streets (usually RPG holders, I guess they think they are bad-asses).
Yes, I've seen footage of an Iraqi kneeling in the middle of the street with an RPG like Rambo. I'm not even that dumb when I'm playing Call of Duty. I still think it's a crowd of civilians though.
You say you're in the air force. If you were ordered to bomb a crowd like that, would you do it? Or would you protest?
When I was a young I was in the Air Cadets here in the UK. Fortunately my eyesight got really bad, otherwise I also might be blowing up crowds of civilians and saying "Aw Dude" (or perhaps Roger Wilco). Protecting your country is one thing, but turning Iraq into Stalingrad so that Halliburton et al can make some more money, is just not on.
Towns are full of civilians and you can't treat everyone like a terrorist. If the NYPD received reports that some terrorists were taking shelter in a Manhattan apartment, which of these do you think would happen?
1. A swat team is sent to arrest and if necessary kill the terrorists. 2. An F16 is sent to bomb the entire apartment without warning or evacuating neighbouring apartments.
It seems to me that option 2 is fine for Iraq, but unthinkable in the US.
Iraqi oil belongs to Iraq, not to Bush's chums.
Absolutely, but control of the oil is strategically important for the US, which explains many things. Most of the theft though is from your pocket. Money is being transferred in copious amounts from the public to the big companies. It doesn't matter if the exercise as a whole is loss making, since only the public loses, which is fine. The big companies are happy no-matter what.
There's no way you can tell what that is, it could be a pole for getting extra leverage on tractor wheel nuts, absolutely anything. Although he runs and throws it, he walks back fairly calmly.
There's no controversy over this because few people in the media seem to care. Just like there was little controversy over the Iraq wedding party that was blown up. All they have to say is that they were terrorists and everyone stands around nodding in sheep-like agreement.
It's a frightening development. In a war, if too many of your troops get killed it becomes politically difficult to continue. With robots there is no problem. If a robot kills a civillian, you can just say it was malfunctioning and dismantle it.
Imagine if robots had been sent into combat in Vietnam rather than soldiers (not possible with the technology I know). It wouldn't matter if 50,000 were killed. In fact it would be great since increased orders would give the economy a boost. Even a robotic Jane Fonda peace-bot would have little effect.
Governments around the world would love to get their hands on robo-soldiers. They could even turn them on their own people if they got out of line.
What makes you so sure they were not fighters? Source?
Good question. According to Channel 4 news, a doctor at a Fallujah hospital said they were fleeing civilians. The Pentagon at the time was said to be investigating. I would not trust the US military if they told me they were fighters, nor would I neccesarily trust the Local Iraqis. Again all we can really trust is the footage.
The footage was shot at night and I don't know of any civilians in their right mind who would rome around "mob style" in a KNOWN battle zone.
We'll I don't know if it was day or night. It's thermal and I can't make out any time in the footage, so it's difficult to tell. Actually, it makes more sense for anyone to try to move at night, civilians or otherwise. If your neighborhood was being bombed, you might not behave rationally either. I doubt any people in Fallujah were at all "in their right mind".
The pilot says "We have numerous individuals on the road. Do you want me to take those out?" to which the response is "Take'em out". It does not seem that the crowd has been positively identifed as fighters at all. I've seen plenty of footage of rebels and they tend not to wander around in groups like that in urban areas. For one thing, if you need to open fire, it's no good if you're all standing in front of each other. Fighters tend to spread out. Also in urban areas you stick to the walls rather than wandering down the middle of the street. If these people are fighters, they're pretty stupid. From the footage it's not possible to identify any weapons, and from that distance I doubt if the pilots could either. At no point does anyone ask whether they were armed or posing a threat, which is surely important in a civilian area.
There seems to be about 25-30 people in the footage, and there is nothing unique in scale about 30 people being killed by mistake. The US military have admitted killing similar quantities of civilians on a number of occasions, and not just in Iraq, but also Afghanistan.
Obviously mistakes will happen, but there really does seem to be a wanton disregard for civilians. It's a case of shoot first, ask questions later. It's these tactics that have resulted in the increased insurgency (or resistance depending on your viewpoint).
Well yes, it was a bit off-topic. But the part about the swine fever is more relevant. There was also a similar incident with Dengue fever. The US has supplied biological weapons to some rather nasty groups and regimes.
With regards to the footage of the farmers, it's true you can never know with 100% certainty that they weren't fighters, but that's true of every man in Iraq you that you could take a thermal picture of. All we have to go on is the evidence we can see. One of the men seems to be working on the tractor on the left, which is rather a strange thing for an insurgent to be doing. Any farmer in the whole of Iraq would be handling tools that could be judged to be potential IEDs when viewed through a grainy heat camera. I don't think its acceptable to shoot unarmed people who look very much like farmers working on a tractor. If they had AK47s and RPGs could clearly be identified, that would be another matter, but that was clearly not the case. From what I've seen of IEDs, they tend to be converted artillery shells (of which there are plenty) and I cannot see any such thing in the footage.
I'm sure plenty of sites say they were insurgents. Plenty of others, including the one I linked to at Indymedia conclude that they were farmers. Based on the video evidence I do not believe my reasoning is "screwed".
What really annoys me is the one sided censorship. When those US workers/mercenaries (we don't exactly know which) were beaten and burned in Fallujah the news channels showed graphic footage of it. I don't recall any fuss being made about the Apache footage. I believe it was shown once on ABC News, and I've not seen it on UK TV at all.
I'm sick and tired of people criticising the US. I'm mean, what have they done that's so bad?
[Heckler]- Well they toppled democracies in Chile, Iran, Guatemala, and other countries.
Ok, but apart from those misunderstandings.
[Heckler]- Well apart from toppling democracies they have supported and continue to support brutal dictatorships around the world. These include Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Saudi Arabia, Suharto in Indonesia (hundreds of thousands were Slaughtered). Most recently of course is Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan who likes to have demonstrators mown down with machine guns.
Yeah, ok maybe there were some mistakes made. But apart from toppling democracies and supporting dictatorships, what has the US ever done? I mean, what about the Kurds, we've really helped them out haven't we?
[Heckler] - Yes they're in a strong position now. Let's just hope they forget US support for Saddam while he was gassing them. And lets hope they never realise that the US massively stepped up military aid to Turkey and looked the other way while they were bombing the Kurds.
Ok, but apart from toppling democracies, supporting dictatorships and screwing the Kurds, what is the US so guilty of? [Heckler] - Well how about the support for terrorist acts against Cuba, and other countries? For example, Luis Posada Carriles, a CIA agent was behind the bombing of a Cuban Airliner in 1976. The US refused to extradite him.Then there was the Cuban hotel bombings in 1997, also involving Luis Posada Carriles. And what about those poor Cuban pigs? CIA-Backed anti-Castro terrorists introduced swine fever into Cuba in 1971. This economic sabotage resulted in the slaughter of 500,000 pigs.
Hold on. Cuba is a special situation. It's a dictatorship, so we're just trying to topple it and bring freedom to the Cubans.
[Heckler] - Ok, forget Cuba. We must not forget the 1985 Beirut car bombing. That was a CIA-backed attempt to assassinate Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah. They missed him but killed 85 civilians. Lets also not forget the support for terrorism in Nicaragua. It got so intense that the World Court made a decision in 1986 against the US, ordering it to terminate the unlawful use of force and illegal economic warfare.
Alright, alright, but apart from toppling democracies, supporting dictatorships, screwing the Kurds and supporting terrorism, what has the US ever done?
[Heckler] - Well lets not forget about the vast numbers of civilians killed by US military action. A well-researched article in the Lancet concluded that around 100,000 Iraqis have died since the war started, mostly as a result of "coalition" air strikes. Lets also not forget the several million civilians bombed to death in Vietnam. They weren't all bombed of course, we mustn't forget the My Lai massacre.
We also must not forget the thousands killed during the invasion of Panama in 1989, who's purpose was to removed another CIA-backed dictator, Manuel Noriega.
Okay okay. We've made some past mistakes. But now we're setting it all right in Iraq.
Yes. That's exactly what I thought when I watched footage of a US helicopter slice several farmers apart while one of the pilots says "He's wounded. Hit him!". Or the F16 footage showing a crowd of civilians (not fighters as has been claimed) being bombed while the pilot says "Aw, dude!".
We'll you obviously just hate freedom!
We already have an enormous free fusion reactor called the Sun. We get something like 1 kilowatt per square meter, so why is so little money being invested in ways to exploit it?
How plausible does this sound?
"Scientists at Cambridge University have announced the discovery of modified polyethylene compound which can act as a solar cell with 60% efficiency. The projected cost of the cells is $10 per square metre."
In principle I think something like this is quite possible. The problem that I see is that bugger all money is being spent on solar research. In contrast governments seem happy to spend $10 Billion on Iter (a big fusion torus). Given the enormous potential of solar power, you have to ask yourself why $10 Billion is not being spent on Solar Cell research.
I think the answer lies with big business and the balance of power. As long as the world depends on oil, big oil companies can keep making lots of money, and the localised nature of oil fields enables governments to control them and wield power. In contrast, solar power would be open to lots of smaller companies and the resource, sunlight, is abundant and cannot be controlled by anyone. That's why BPs Solar Division is just a propaganda exercise, they could never make as much money with solar power as they can with oil. Someday though, dirt cheap and highly efficient solar cells will be created and the balance of power will change. Africa for example could become the power house of the world.
We've got this enormous fusion reactor in space belting down tonnes of abundant energy upon us and instead of trying to use it we prefer to kill each other over bits of black grease in a desert. How dumb is that?
I'd sort of heard of it, but I hadn't investigated fully. It looks pretty good. Conversion might not be too bad, and it is cross platform and even has inheritance.
The main drawback is that its proprietary again and its a small company. I've been playing with Java and Eclipse today and I'm quite impressed. Aside from being cross platform it looks like you can even compile to native code with tools like Excelsior.
Yes we tried the conversion wizard. The time estimated to convert the project kept getting bigger and bigger. Besides which I wouldn't trust the mess spewed out by it.
.Net is garbage collected, so you can't reliably convert your code, even in principle. e.g. You have a VB6 class that closes a file when it destructs, in VB.Net the file may be left open for ages.
VB6 had deterministic finalization due to its reference counting.
We don't intend to stick with VB6, but a total rewrite is not really going to happen at the moment. When you rewrite an application it should be because of business reasons, not because your tool vendor has dumped you.
It's not the first time the BCS has vomited their FUD upon us and it won't be the last.
Most software that's developed is bespoke software (e.g. Demand Forecasting system for predicting Electricity Usage) and this type of software is not threatened by Open Source, but benefits from it (i.e. Free tools).
It's only the big boys writing consumer off-the-shelf software that need to worry. Unfortunately its these people that make up all the advertising revenue for Computer magazines, so we are treated to their point of view.
Maybe that's what the Open Source community should really be concentrating on. A totally open source standardised modern language fit for serious business development. Something that can be enhanced over the years.
There are some pretty smart people out there coming up with languages like Ruby and Python, so its not an impossibility.
It would seem to be a better idea than trying to copy Microsoft with Mono.
What features do we need?
Classes, Inheritance etc
Garbage Collection
Reflection
Aspect Oriented Facilities?
Generics...
Your right of course Mr Conspiracy. Microsoft needs us to keep moving away from what we have, otherwise they won't make money.
I have certainly thought about Java, but we have a lot of Microsoft "inertia" so it would be a big scary move. Then again having to rewrite a huge application again later is more scary.
Of course Java is a proprietary language as well, but I get the impression that Sun are less likely to screw all the developers, at least while they are less powerfull than Microsoft.
It would be nice to use a totally non-proprietary language. C++ would be an attractive option if it wasn't so dangerous. Some sort of C++ with Garbage Collection added and some newever features would be good. There are lots of non-proprietary scripting languages like Python and Ruby of course, but they do not seem suitable for a big business application.
C# is a nice language, but the problem is I just don't trust Microsoft anymore. From a business perspective sticking with Microsoft has proven to be a mistake.
.NET and move on to something else?
I work for a software house in London and we have a large VB6 application that has been built up over many years. VB6 has effectively been dumped by Microsoft, so our application is slowly rotting away. There is absolutely no way we can rewrite it in C# or VB.Net, we just don't have the resources. I suggested that we at least write all new components in C# and use interop, but that turned out to be a real pain, especially when trying to debug.
So what do we do? Spend a fortune rewriting our product in C# while our competitors (who may be using Java) continue to improve their products. And once we have eventually finished the rewrite, will Microsoft just dump
I have to wonder. If there had been a number of VB6 vendors, rather than just Microsoft, they could never have dumped VB6. In that situation we would have all just moved over to another vendor.
Is anyone else here in a similar situation?
I enjoyed reading his earlier book "Joel On Software", but I think you will learn far more from...
"Analysis Patterns" by Martin Fowler
"Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" by Martin Fowler.
"Design patterns : elements of reusable object-oriented software" by Eric Gama et al
And for database stuff I would recommend
"Agile Database Techniques" by Scott W. Ambler
If I have to choose between being safe or being free; I chose to be free. Continual erosion of our civil liberties leads us towards a police state, which is far more frightening than any terrorist organisation. If you divide the number of civilians killed by terrorists by the number of civilians killed governments, you get virtually zero. Yet we are supposed to be afraid of terrorists, not governments. That has to be the biggest propaganda coup in history.
500GB is not so hard to fill up.
For example a friend of mine has all of Farscape on Divx, which takes up about 30GB, and that's only at 512x384 resolution. Every episode of STTNG will take up about 50GB and the same for Voyager and DS9.
Add to that the average DVD film collection, which would probably take up another 100GB.
Video takes up a lot of space, even when compressed. It doesn't matter how big the storage device is, we will always fill it up with something.
I agree. Where I work we have had some of our best ideas while writing text adventure games or playing soduku.
And I'm sure my boss has some brilliant flashes of business genius while he spends the day porn surfing.
New York Times 2010
Eye gougings are up 20% this month since the introduction of the new Visa-Eye card, which owes its high security to the uniqueness of the user's iris pattern.
I think that the concept of Regional Coding is largely dead now anyway since they tend to release everything at the same time to avoid piracy. Regional Coding was really a violation of WTO rules anyway.
I don't like the idea of hardware that reports back to base. If we go in that direction our TVs will report us when we channel flip to avoid commercials.
YOUR TV HAS BEEN DISABLED. SKIPPING COMMERCIALS IS THEFT!
You're right of course, but its always been the bad guys doing the bribing so far. There is also a lot of delayed bribery going on. I know Bush Snr, James Baker and John Major (former British PM) got their rewards from the defence industry in the form of directorships in the Carlisle Group. "Hey thanks for giving us so much public money during Desert Storm. We could really use you as a director now..."
Given enough time, they may produce a mouse which is effectively immortal. The ensuing sword-fights between immortal mice should prove entertaining.
Actually this is going to make spacecraft a lot cheaper. NASA will be producing future vessels in kit form with components attached to a large plastic framework. Construction will be a simple matter of twisting off the right parts and gluing them in place.
Why don't we just bribe the government directly? It's called taxes.
Since taxation is compulsory, it can hardly be considered a bribe.
And yes, of course, bribery is illegal but it doesn't seem to stop big business getting their way.
It doesn't seem to matter who you vote for, no matter how amazingly liberal and "for the people" the are. As soon as they are in power they change. You can see this clearly with the Labour party in the UK. Everyone thought they were going to be amazingly refreshing but they have turned out worse than the Conservatives.
As for my hat made from tinfoil, surely it is sufficient to criticise someone's arguments/ideas on a point by point basis without resorting to logical fallacies.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
This is slightly off-topic but I was thinking about why governments do not protect workers from outsourcing and I had an idea... The Government makes decisions that favour big business, since big business is the government's paymaster. Sometimes these decisions involve sending us to war and getting us killed just so they can get more bribes and directorships from companies like Halliburton. I have a radical proposal. Why don't we just bribe the government directly? Imagine if everyone in the country gave £10 a year to a special government bribe fund. You would have several hundred million pounds (or dollars if you're American) with which to bribe the right people. Suddenly we might be able to create legislation that benefits the public at the expense of big business. Bribing the government to get what you want would be a lot better for your health than protesting. When you protest, you have to stand out in the rain and get clubbed over the held by riot police. You don't see the board of directors of Raytheon protesting in the street. They are smart enough to know that bribery is far more effective. For example, if the government was being bribed by arms companies to invade Iran, we could counter-bribe and prevent it. This kind of thing could even work internationally. Many people around the world would be better off if the U.S. did not invade Iran. On an international scale you would have many billions of dollars in the bribe kitty! How can we go about pulling this off?
My boss is always looking to outsource our jobs to India, China or Poland. Fortunately they are so paranoid about people stealing our business ideas, they never go through with their plans.
You will notice a distinct lack of protectionism when it comes to outsourcing jobs. When our industries are being undermined by cheaper foreign imports, the government starts introducing tariff barriers and/or quotas. This is because the rich people at the top of the chain are being affected. In contrast, job outsourcing benefits these same rich people, so there is no reason for the government to introduce protective measures. The government only protects its direct paymasters, not the little fish.