Well I'm not so sure. There was never any risk of any of the journalism about the Iraq war bringing down the government in the UK for example. The UK has libel laws that protect the rich and famous and most journalists stick to reporting gossip about the government rather than actually trying to prove wrongdoing like Woodward and Bernstein.
I'm not saying that there's some sort of arrangement - most UK journalists truly hate most UK governments. Labour was popular with them in 1997 but has not been since before Iraq and that's the only case I can think of of a government that was popular with journalists. They would love to uncover evidence of Watergate style wrongdoing by them. It's just that gossip is easy, safe and sells papers. Woodward and Bernstein style investigations probably don't.
Still the end result is that lots of people criticize the government but the government is probably not going to be toppled like Nixon no matter what they do as a result of anything in a newspaper. Of course elections are another matter. Still Blair managed to win an election after Iraq, even though the vast majority of the population and the coverage in the press was extremely hostile.
Mind you I can accept something like Cold War era CoCom restrictions on high tech exports to hostile, illiberal states. When it comes to imports though I think you're probably in danger of repeating Smoot Hawley - especially as you say this should apply to all imports, not just ones from China. That's pretty much guaranteed to lead to the affected countries putting a tariff on American imports and that leads you into a serious economic crisis.
Well this is true too - in fact this shows the T bills are far more important to China than they are to the US. Without them the Chinese currency would appreciate and their trade surplus with the US would reduce. On the other hand Chinese domestic demand would grow. Of course there are lots of other places that want to export to the US - Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are obvious ones. All of them would buy T bills to weaken their currencies.
In fact if China started to unload them quickly the price would drop and they would lose money. The other export driven economies would pick them up. I've read that China is becoming less competitive even with an artificially weakened currency and factories are moving to places like Vietnam and Malaysia.
Vietnam is actually an ideal candidate to copy the Chinese model where foreign currency is seized from private owned factories and put into a state run fund that buys T bills to weaken the currency. Then again Vietnam doesn't much (any?) treasuries at the moment, presumably for political reasons. Malaysia does of course and it would make sense for them to buy more if they are already competing successfully on cost with China. In fact if they did and Vietnam didn't it would seem to make even more sense.
I don't disagree. Still World War II was not something the US had a choice about. It's arguable that Afghanistan was necessary but invading Iraq was almost pure adventurism.
Eventually the Chinese are going to wise up and stop lending us money, and that'll be that for a whale of a lot of things, with things like NASA getting the axe first.
I do wish people would stop saying that.
Total US debt in 2009 $12,867.5 Billion. Total debt owned by China 789.6 Billion. China owns only about 6% of US debt and the odds are they will reduce that gradually to reduce their risks if the dollar depreciates or there is inflation in the US. The Iraq war is forecasted to cost $2 trillion by the CBO - Afghanistan is a bargain at a mere $500 Billion. The US spends almost that much a year on defense. $8.3 trillion evaporated in the financial crisis, way more than any of these numbers.
So even if the Chinese T bills were destroyed instantaneously it would still be a shock 10x less severe than the financial crisis, or less than half an Iraq war.
Of course the Chinese gradually diversifying away from US debt is likely to have much less effect than that.
If only there was a company who had licensed H264 and distributed a plug in for free that worked with all major browsers - their business model would be to make money from the authoring tools.
In fact, since this is going to be used for video, wouldn't it be even better if that plugin supported a Javascript like language, perhaps compiled to byte code and JITted to native code to get decent performance. Perhaps a custom graphics library that allowed people to make players with custom controls show a list of related clips once the video ended.
Then open source browsers could use the plugin to show H264 videos.
Captain Murphy: Until we find the thief, I am declaring Martian law! Sparks: Um, I think its martial law. Captain Murphy: Silence! Under Martian law... uh... what are my powers, exactly? Sparks: Under martial law, you could suspend habeas corpus, empower a posse comitatus... Captain Murphy: That's crap. Mars is wild, untamed. I'm forming a cadre of Martian knights charged with enforcing Martian law.
Actually that sounds rather Chinese. In fact Hong Kong's dodgy 'functional constituencies' are a way to make sure that pro China types have effectively more than one vote
Pro-democracy supporters criticise the functional constituency system for giving a minority too much power and influence. The right of corporations and legal entities to vote is also controversial, as it gives some individuals multiple votes. For example, in 1998, Sino Group chairman Robert Ng and companies he controlled held roughly 3-4% of the votes in the real estate constituency, according to an analysis by the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor; they described this as being equivalent in voting power to 15,940 people in a geographical constituency.
Of course it's a lot easier for the Chinese to lobby the functional constituencies than the regular people, and in practice the functional constituencies tend to vote for whatever the Chinese government wants.
In an odd sort of way it takes the US idea of corporate personhood to a new level. Imagine the last US election if Haliburton and Blackwater had this sort of voting power.
You know I always liked the way Dan Brown could write complete horseshit that wasn't contradicted by any well known sources. Then he'd drag out those well known sources and say "Well my theory could still be true". I also liked the way back when I read the book I was thinking "You know it wouldn't be that hard to turn this into a movie - it's already written like a screenplay".
Now people that believe in literature will no doubt be horrified by the poor characterisation and dialog. Still it reminds me someone commenting on why all Hitchcock films are based on pulp books. "Good literature is about internal motivations and character development. Bad literature is about action - you can film that shit. Hitchcock understood this"
I bet the Chinese Government are buying those shares (and the voting rights attached to them) as fast as they can. People said Larry and Sergei were crazy pissing them off but maybe it's all part of the plan.
I'd like to see that study. Actually QOS seems like a better option if used properly. I could prioritise packets from things that are latency sensitive (Skype, Games and to a lesser extent HTTP) and de-prioritize ones from things that aren't (Torrents). I could imaging it working very well if the backbone supported it.
E.g. in USB isochronous streams and interrupt endpoints are allocated bandwidth up front they are handled at the start of a frame. Bulk transfers get whatever is left. So your mouse is guaranteed to be responsive even if you're copying a huge file to a disk. Adding capacity won't do this if you have applications that are designed to use all the capacity available. Like Bittorrent.
The classic case for throttling people is that you have a bunch of people with cheap and thus heavily contended connections. Once someone torrents they use up essentially all of the bandwidth to the point that Skype is unusable and even HTTP is painfully slow. People complain and the ISP decides to throttle Bitorrent. Of course this isn't quite right technically - really all the applications on the network should say truthfully what they actually need. Of course there's little chance of that happening - if the network supported QOS applications trying to Bittorrent would just lie to get better transfer rates. So you end up with the ISP throttling torrents. Now you could say that the ISP should reduce contention ratios. Actually they offer a range of contention ratios at different prices, the problem is that people who expect to max out their connection pay for the cheapest one.
It's actually worth pointing out that this case is not one that really supports "network neutrality". A neutral network right now would be saturated with bittorrent packets to the point where it was unusable for latency sensitive things like gaming. Even a QOS network that trusted users would. These guys would be happier if the ISP throttled bittorrent more aggressively so that there was always some spare bandwidth to be used for latency sensitive applications like games and Skype.
I.e. using the salad bar metaphor you have
A minority that must get at least one olive on their place every minute (the gamers, Skype users etc) vs a minority that will empty the salad bar regardless of size (the torrenters). It seems like the gamers would be in favour of reducing plate size - i.e. the salad bar equivalent of throttling. That limits the speed of torrents a bit but it makes latency sensitive applications keep working. It's still an all you can eat buffet of course, so long as they let you stay as long as you want.
BTW; if you are concerned about Flash CPU usage, use 10.1 beta which has GPU decoding under Windows. I have seen it using almost nothing while playing 1080P video over youtube.
Oh wow. I've got an Asus 1005HA netbook. I.e. an Intel 945 graphics chip which I'm pretty sure doesn't have much in the way of video acceleration for H264 - I think it supports iDCTs in hardware but it's not on the list of supported chipsets for hardware acceleration for flash 10.1. Now it uses ~90% CPU but plays smoothly. If you right click on the video there's an Video Info window and you can see it drops a few frames. Still 720p video actually works pretty well - before it was choppy as heck and/or would lose audio synchronisation and now it's actually quite usable.
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
is from the film - it was written by David Lynch, not Frank Herbert. Plus there's the wonderfully insane scene where Thufir Hawat has to milk an ugly captive cat every day to get the antidote to his poison.
Another major event in the calendar of the author desperate for public validation is the annual Public Lending Right award.
PLR is the right to get cash every time someone borrows a book from a public library, a bit like the money that Roy Wood gets every time someone hums I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day in the street.
Whether you're Stephen King, author of countless doorstep-sized bestsellers, or Steven King, author of PublishAmerica-released volume Why Are We Here?, you'll get the same PLR payment: 5.98p per borrowing.
If you're a famous author you're probably getting the maximum PLR payment possible, currently £6,600 – enough to buy a few ermine-covered yellow legal pads and a couple of gold-nibbed fountain pens for the writing of your next opus. I know a couple of mid-list writers who have occasionally earned the maximum: not a bad little earner that will pay the mortgage for a few months.
1. Internet Explorer 42.82% 2. Firefox 42.63% 3. Chrome 7.80% 4. Opera 3.11% 5. Safari 3.04%
I.e. Firefox and IE are neck and neck, big drop down to Chrome, another big drop down to Opera and Safari. Don't get me wrong, I prefer Opera myself but even for a geek site it's not that common.
I've noticed that too. My mobile phone is always complaining about how black people don't know their place, asking who that 'mulatto' is whenever Obama is on CNN and saying that women should be back home cooking for the husbands.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I'm not so sure. There was never any risk of any of the journalism about the Iraq war bringing down the government in the UK for example. The UK has libel laws that protect the rich and famous and most journalists stick to reporting gossip about the government rather than actually trying to prove wrongdoing like Woodward and Bernstein.
I'm not saying that there's some sort of arrangement - most UK journalists truly hate most UK governments. Labour was popular with them in 1997 but has not been since before Iraq and that's the only case I can think of of a government that was popular with journalists. They would love to uncover evidence of Watergate style wrongdoing by them. It's just that gossip is easy, safe and sells papers. Woodward and Bernstein style investigations probably don't.
Still the end result is that lots of people criticize the government but the government is probably not going to be toppled like Nixon no matter what they do as a result of anything in a newspaper. Of course elections are another matter. Still Blair managed to win an election after Iraq, even though the vast majority of the population and the coverage in the press was extremely hostile.
Actually Francis Crick - who was a very strong atheist - used to like making pseudo religious phrases to torment the religious
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_biology#Use_of_the_term_.22dogma.22
Any tax on imported goods is a tariff. And tariffs don't have a very good record.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot–Hawley_Tariff_Act#Economic_effects
Mind you I can accept something like Cold War era CoCom restrictions on high tech exports to hostile, illiberal states. When it comes to imports though I think you're probably in danger of repeating Smoot Hawley - especially as you say this should apply to all imports, not just ones from China. That's pretty much guaranteed to lead to the affected countries putting a tariff on American imports and that leads you into a serious economic crisis.
Well this is true too - in fact this shows the T bills are far more important to China than they are to the US. Without them the Chinese currency would appreciate and their trade surplus with the US would reduce. On the other hand Chinese domestic demand would grow. Of course there are lots of other places that want to export to the US - Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are obvious ones. All of them would buy T bills to weaken their currencies.
In fact if China started to unload them quickly the price would drop and they would lose money. The other export driven economies would pick them up. I've read that China is becoming less competitive even with an artificially weakened currency and factories are moving to places like Vietnam and Malaysia.
Vietnam is actually an ideal candidate to copy the Chinese model where foreign currency is seized from private owned factories and put into a state run fund that buys T bills to weaken the currency. Then again Vietnam doesn't much (any?) treasuries at the moment, presumably for political reasons. Malaysia does of course and it would make sense for them to buy more if they are already competing successfully on cost with China. In fact if they did and Vietnam didn't it would seem to make even more sense.
I don't disagree. Still World War II was not something the US had a choice about. It's arguable that Afghanistan was necessary but invading Iraq was almost pure adventurism.
Well economic isolation definitely shut the Soviets up.
Eventually the Chinese are going to wise up and stop lending us money, and that'll be that for a whale of a lot of things, with things like NASA getting the axe first.
I do wish people would stop saying that.
Total US debt in 2009 $12,867.5 Billion. Total debt owned by China 789.6 Billion. China owns only about 6% of US debt and the odds are they will reduce that gradually to reduce their risks if the dollar depreciates or there is inflation in the US. The Iraq war is forecasted to cost $2 trillion by the CBO - Afghanistan is a bargain at a mere $500 Billion. The US spends almost that much a year on defense. $8.3 trillion evaporated in the financial crisis, way more than any of these numbers.
So even if the Chinese T bills were destroyed instantaneously it would still be a shock 10x less severe than the financial crisis, or less than half an Iraq war.
Of course the Chinese gradually diversifying away from US debt is likely to have much less effect than that.
Yeah, I read about them in a one line comment by an anonymous poster on the internet.
Opera lets you block content. So I could block *.js on a site if I wanted. Or more likely I'd block the irritating ad providers by URL on all sites.
He/She/It meant
Fixed that for you. Speciesist bastard.
If only there was a company who had licensed H264 and distributed a plug in for free that worked with all major browsers - their business model would be to make money from the authoring tools.
In fact, since this is going to be used for video, wouldn't it be even better if that plugin supported a Javascript like language, perhaps compiled to byte code and JITted to native code to get decent performance. Perhaps a custom graphics library that allowed people to make players with custom controls show a list of related clips once the video ended.
Then open source browsers could use the plugin to show H264 videos.
Well the Lord of the Rings is the literal word of Sauron. I dunno about the other two.
Captain Murphy: Until we find the thief, I am declaring Martian law!
Sparks: Um, I think its martial law.
Captain Murphy: Silence! Under Martian law... uh... what are my powers, exactly?
Sparks: Under martial law, you could suspend habeas corpus, empower a posse comitatus...
Captain Murphy: That's crap. Mars is wild, untamed. I'm forming a cadre of Martian knights charged with enforcing Martian law.
The place where they are detained is apparently known internally as "The Paradise Wing"
Actually that sounds rather Chinese. In fact Hong Kong's dodgy 'functional constituencies' are a way to make sure that pro China types have effectively more than one vote
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_constituency#Criticisms
Pro-democracy supporters criticise the functional constituency system for giving a minority too much power and influence. The right of corporations and legal entities to vote is also controversial, as it gives some individuals multiple votes. For example, in 1998, Sino Group chairman Robert Ng and companies he controlled held roughly 3-4% of the votes in the real estate constituency, according to an analysis by the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor; they described this as being equivalent in voting power to 15,940 people in a geographical constituency.
Of course it's a lot easier for the Chinese to lobby the functional constituencies than the regular people, and in practice the functional constituencies tend to vote for whatever the Chinese government wants.
In an odd sort of way it takes the US idea of corporate personhood to a new level. Imagine the last US election if Haliburton and Blackwater had this sort of voting power.
You know I always liked the way Dan Brown could write complete horseshit that wasn't contradicted by any well known sources. Then he'd drag out those well known sources and say "Well my theory could still be true". I also liked the way back when I read the book I was thinking "You know it wouldn't be that hard to turn this into a movie - it's already written like a screenplay".
Now people that believe in literature will no doubt be horrified by the poor characterisation and dialog. Still it reminds me someone commenting on why all Hitchcock films are based on pulp books. "Good literature is about internal motivations and character development. Bad literature is about action - you can film that shit. Hitchcock understood this"
I bet the Chinese Government are buying those shares (and the voting rights attached to them) as fast as they can. People said Larry and Sergei were crazy pissing them off but maybe it's all part of the plan.
I'd like to see that study. Actually QOS seems like a better option if used properly. I could prioritise packets from things that are latency sensitive (Skype, Games and to a lesser extent HTTP) and de-prioritize ones from things that aren't (Torrents). I could imaging it working very well if the backbone supported it.
E.g. in USB isochronous streams and interrupt endpoints are allocated bandwidth up front they are handled at the start of a frame. Bulk transfers get whatever is left. So your mouse is guaranteed to be responsive even if you're copying a huge file to a disk. Adding capacity won't do this if you have applications that are designed to use all the capacity available. Like Bittorrent.
The classic case for throttling people is that you have a bunch of people with cheap and thus heavily contended connections. Once someone torrents they use up essentially all of the bandwidth to the point that Skype is unusable and even HTTP is painfully slow. People complain and the ISP decides to throttle Bitorrent. Of course this isn't quite right technically - really all the applications on the network should say truthfully what they actually need. Of course there's little chance of that happening - if the network supported QOS applications trying to Bittorrent would just lie to get better transfer rates. So you end up with the ISP throttling torrents. Now you could say that the ISP should reduce contention ratios. Actually they offer a range of contention ratios at different prices, the problem is that people who expect to max out their connection pay for the cheapest one.
It's actually worth pointing out that this case is not one that really supports "network neutrality". A neutral network right now would be saturated with bittorrent packets to the point where it was unusable for latency sensitive things like gaming. Even a QOS network that trusted users would. These guys would be happier if the ISP throttled bittorrent more aggressively so that there was always some spare bandwidth to be used for latency sensitive applications like games and Skype.
I.e. using the salad bar metaphor you have
A minority that must get at least one olive on their place every minute (the gamers, Skype users etc) vs a minority that will empty the salad bar regardless of size (the torrenters). It seems like the gamers would be in favour of reducing plate size - i.e. the salad bar equivalent of throttling. That limits the speed of torrents a bit but it makes latency sensitive applications keep working. It's still an all you can eat buffet of course, so long as they let you stay as long as you want.
BTW; if you are concerned about Flash CPU usage, use 10.1 beta which has GPU decoding under Windows. I have seen it using almost nothing while playing 1080P video over youtube.
Oh wow. I've got an Asus 1005HA netbook. I.e. an Intel 945 graphics chip which I'm pretty sure doesn't have much in the way of video acceleration for H264 - I think it supports iDCTs in hardware but it's not on the list of supported chipsets for hardware acceleration for flash 10.1. Now it uses ~90% CPU but plays smoothly. If you right click on the video there's an Video Info window and you can see it drops a few frames. Still 720p video actually works pretty well - before it was choppy as heck and/or would lose audio synchronisation and now it's actually quite usable.
My religion isn't nuts. For a limited time only I'm offering the introductory course for a mere $99.
People always say that but this
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
is from the film - it was written by David Lynch, not Frank Herbert. Plus there's the wonderfully insane scene where Thufir Hawat has to milk an ugly captive cat every day to get the antidote to his poison.
You mean apart from here
Another major event in the calendar of the author desperate for public validation is the annual Public Lending Right award.
PLR is the right to get cash every time someone borrows a book from a public library, a bit like the money that Roy Wood gets every time someone hums I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day in the street.
Whether you're Stephen King, author of countless doorstep-sized bestsellers, or Steven King, author of PublishAmerica-released volume Why Are We Here?, you'll get the same PLR payment: 5.98p per borrowing.
If you're a famous author you're probably getting the maximum PLR payment possible, currently £6,600 – enough to buy a few ermine-covered yellow legal pads and a couple of gold-nibbed fountain pens for the writing of your next opus. I know a couple of mid-list writers who have occasionally earned the maximum: not a bad little earner that will pay the mortgage for a few months.
I get these figures on my site
1. Internet Explorer 42.82%
2. Firefox 42.63%
3. Chrome 7.80%
4. Opera 3.11%
5. Safari 3.04%
I.e. Firefox and IE are neck and neck, big drop down to Chrome, another big drop down to Opera and Safari. Don't get me wrong, I prefer Opera myself but even for a geek site it's not that common.
non-pc devices.
I've noticed that too. My mobile phone is always complaining about how black people don't know their place, asking who that 'mulatto' is whenever Obama is on CNN and saying that women should be back home cooking for the husbands.
Oh well, it's an old model I guess.
Libraries already pay a fee to the author each time a book is loaned out.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/jan/07/public-lending-right-library