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Tiananmen Square is very much ongoing for China. Zhao Ziyang - who was effectively the Chinese Gorbachev - was planning to liberalise Chinese society substantially. Students were demonstrating peacefully. A handful of hardliners used the army to crush the students, illegally deposed Zhao and have turned China into a vicious police state where old ladies get sent for reeducation camps for requesting permission to complain that developers have kicked them out of their houses. Before Tiananmen most people thought that China would liberalise just like Eastern Europe. After there was no chance of that. All the tensions with Taiwan and Japan greatly intensified following Tiananmen. It was a coup, plain and simple and a noticably fascist regime took over from a much more liberal one.
Based on this, we can say that if a country wishes to modernize, not only should it implement a market economy, it must also adopt a parliamentary democracy as its political system. Otherwise, this nation will not be able to have a market economy that is healthy and modern, nor can it become a modern society with a rule of law. Instead it will run into the situations that have occurred in so many developing countries, including China: commercialization of power, rampant corruption, a society polarized between rich and poor.
Zhao Ziyang, RIP.
More to the point one year after Tiananmen similar demonstrations broke out in Taiwan, which was at that point a one party state and effectively a mirror image on China where the KMT was the ruling party instead of the CCP. President Lee Teng Hui met the students and agreed to their demands for free elections, which he proceeded to win until he run into newly reintroduced term limits. Now Taiwan is a vibrant democracy and China isn't.
If it hadn't been for Tiananmen I'm quite sure China would have gone the same way. I also think Lee Teng Hui and Zhao Ziyang would have been able to negotiate some sort of way for Taiwan and China to coexist. Reading Zhao's book, the similarities with LTH seem quite striking. I think they would have got on pretty well.
I bought the English edition in Taiwan. I had to reserve a copy because it had sold out in both Chinese and English. I'm told the Chinese edition has sold out in Hong Kong. Inevitably it's been scanned as a pdf and is circulating on the internet inside China where equally inevitably it has been banned. A great injustice happened to the Chinese people at Tiananmen and has continued in the years since. While most people are scared to talk about it, it most certainly has not been forgotten.
I just wish more programs would be written in 64 bit code, I run 75% of my applications as x86.
I make sure all my Windows stuff builds as 64bit and I test on Vista64, but really for most applications there's no point.
If you need >4GB of address space it would be useful, but most applications can be written not to. Databases are apparently an exception. Still it's a bad idea to assume that you can memory map a huge file into memory, and that's the killer app for 64 bits.
In terms of performance most benchmarks put 64 and 32 bit neck and neck - ±a few percent%. Sure you have more registers, but all x86 chips use caching and register renaming to make that less significant than you'd think. 32 bit code thunks on 64 bit Windows, but the thunking mechanism is very lightweight. I've never checked but I imagine that integers are movzx'd from the stack to a register and pointers are movsx'd. You apparantly need far jump to switch from 32 to 64 bit too. But my guess is that all this stuff was agreed by Microsoft and AMD so that it ends up being efficient.
I'm not convinced that Chinese public opinion would allow them to do this sort of thing these days. Plus it's good for China for NK to stir up trouble and back down for a while only after China intervenes diplomatically.
Actually from a strategic point of view, you've got to admire the North Koreans in this respect. They had some artillery from the Russians and Chinese from the Korean war. They bought some since, and manufactured copies locally. None of this was very expensive, even for a basket case like North Korea. And yet it gives them something which can deter American or South Korea just as effectively as a stock of ICBMs.
After. The same guy also told me that Iran executes a lot of people. Occasionally they are proved innocent. The mullah's response to this is to wheel some old dude out who explains that according to Islam, innocent people who are executed go to heaven, as if that makes it all ok.
I've met other Iranians who left shortly after the revolution. They told me that back when the Shah was in power if you opposed him politically you would die, but if you stayed away from politics the regime stayed away from you. Post revolution gangs of thugs would beat up women for not wearing the veil, despite the fact that pre revolution Iran was a very westernised place. The same people wrecked the economy.
You can get some idea of what happened economically. Here's GDP per capita in 1979
100 Serbia and Montenegro: $3,453.28 per capita 2006 101 Algeria: $3,440.30 per capita 2006 102 Fiji: $3,305.98 per capita 2006 103 Peru: $3,287.74 per capita 2006 *** 104 Iran: $3,223.16 per capita 2006 105 Thailand: $3,186.54 per capita 2006 106 Dominican Republic: $3,180.89 per capita 2006 107 Namibia: $3,106.82 per capita 2006 108 Macedonia, Republic of: $3,050.85 per capita 2006 109 Ecuador: $3,041.85 per capita 2006 110 Tunisia: $2,990.30 per capita 2006 111 Colombia: $2,981.74 per capita 2006 112 Albania: $2,911.90 per capita 2006
Iran has slipped from 50 to 104. Before it was within spitting distance of Portugal, now it's heading towards Albania. Of course the people that took part in the revolution expected political liberalisation, not a descent into worse tyranny. It's quite possible that if the Islamists hadn't hijacked it, Iran would actually have ended up quite a decent place.
I'm not sure I get your point - I said that Iran's ideology is vastly different to our own, but that they run a functional government nonetheless.
An Iranian guy once told me a joke.
Mossad, the CIA and the Iranian Intelligence service decide to hold a contest. Each team must go out, wrestle bears and bring them back alive. The first team to come back is Mossad. They have one bear each, beaten unconscious and carried on their backs. All of the bears but one die over their injuries soon after they return. A bit later the CIA team come back. They have one bear tied up and hooded in a high tech cage they have presumably assembled from the contents of their packs.
There is a long wait. Mossad and the CIA decide the Iranians aren't coming back and start to pack up. Suddenly the Iranians return. They have a dear on a leash, looking very scared and clearly badly beaten. The dear says "I'm a bear! I'm a bear!"
The odd thing about North Korea is that even without nukes it is offlimits for US military action for three reasons
First most people think the North Korean army would fight if attacked, unlike the Iraqi one. Their equipment is outdated, but they have numbers and determination would most likely kill enough Americans to trigger a Vietnam style withdrawal. I'd guess China would keep them supplied too.
Secondly North Korea has vast amounts of artillery aimed at Seoul, the capital of South Korea. It is theorized that if attacked they would shell Seoul. By the time the artillery had been destroyed by US airpower millions of South Koreans would be dead, and probably thousands of US pilots. The US government would most likely not be able to accept that loss.
Finally it's widely believed that China has told the US that NK is under its protection and that attacking it would move the US and China into an open state of hostility.
Now they do have nukes they could use them on US forces, Japan or South Korea. Actually I think that Japan or the US would probably be able to shoot down NK missiles or destroy them on the ground as they are liquid fueled and thus take time to set up. Also there are questions of whether they would be able to build a warhead that would fit on a missile. So compared to their conventional military and powerful allies, their nukes are not particularly useful.
Of course even a few dummy missile launches at Japan may trigger an extreme overreaction on Japan's part. Their current pacifism could be revoked quite quickly and while pointedly non nuclear it is widely believed that they could build a large nuclear arsenal very quickly if threatened. China would no doubt react by building up its own military. So an attack on NK would most likely leave South East Asia looking like a much more threatening place.
Well human races can interbreed. The point of the article is that for purely mechanical reasons big dogs can't interbreed with small dogs. From the definition of species - i.e. able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring they are a different species.
Social hierarchies in animals are just as dysfunctional as they are in humans. I saw some documentary where one of the younger dominant females kept taking food out of the mouth of one of the subordinates ones. It wasn't that she was particularly hungry because she got priority access to the best food. As far as anyone could tell she was doing because her status let her get away with it.
It's not really amusing when people in other countries put on a cowboy hat and do a Bush impersonation of Americans, and it's not really amusing when Americans do a turban/jihad/terrorist impression of Muslim countries. How the hell can there be any constructive dialogue when a large percentile of the populace is busy acting like 14 year olds?
Someone once said "an MLRS means never having to say you're sorry". It strikes me that you could that's even more true of a large number of unemployable but highly aggressive teenagers.
Given that Earth is basically covered in humans it would be almost impossible to wipe them out completely. There'd be a few bunkers full of people, scientific outposts in Antarctica and so on.
Even in a nuked out US you'd have small colonies of people who'd survive pretty much anything upto an including an attack with thousands of warheads. People being people they'd join up and end up with an evolutionarily viable effective population size. And that's just in one country. Also the US government has an extreme survival instinct as an organisation - political and military leaders would probably arrange bunker space for themselves and emerge later to make ensure that the political system they knew would recolonise the country. Post apocalyptic movies tend to exaggerate the political effects - my guess is that the US would survive this sort of thing, no doubt with sufficient firepower to stomp any competition.
What about if you had solar cells and a tether? It seems like you could use the solar cells to generate electrical power and use the electrical power to generate lift using the tether.
The downside I can think of is that over very long periods of time micro meteorites would slowly destroy the solar arrays and the power supply would gradual fail. Maybe a better option would be to use the tether to move the satellite into a very high orbit over a long time. Essentially you'd design the thing so that if it failed in a few decades it would still end up in a very high orbit.
Another option would be a Voyager type mission to put something into a very high orbit. You could make it come back every ten years or so and beam it's stored data back to Earth.
What's the point? It's an interesting engineering idea. You could justify it as a time capsule basically - you could store lots of data like the Library of Congress, DNA samples, and so on. If we blow ourselves to bits, aliens or a future human civilisation could learn a lot from the contents of the satellite.
I like the last couple of episodes, and there were a few other good ones. Still by and large a lot seemed like filler.
It also had the usual problem with American TV that they hint at a story arc that isn't really present because they actually write the episodes as they are commissioned. Plus I liked Termninator 1, but it seems like the Terminator universe isn't really complex enough to set a show in. Of course they could add a lot more stuff, much in the way that SG1 did with the Stargate universe. And actually if they'd done that and planned out a two season arc they would most likely have ended up running to far more seasons, like SG1 did. Now SG1 run out of material in the end but the reason it lasted so long is because they started off with enough material for a few seasons and you could see that.
Also SG1 kind of knew it was recycling sci fi cliches - it had a self awareness about its derivative nature that made it quite enjoyable if you've spent far too much time watching bad sci fi. Other less shows take themselves far too seriously - the whole "darker and grittier, real flawed characters" thing is irritating unless you really do it well. Actually when SG1 started to take itself seriously it stopped being watchable.
Looking through laptops and digital cameras for porn to share with other employees.
This "looking through laptops for porn" thing must be really common. If you look at pedophiles who get arrested usually they took a defective machine back to a shop and the geek squad types 'just happened to find something illegal while they were fixing the machine'. Now I don't have porn, legal or illegal on my machine. Still the idea of someone browsing my files and happening to find something commercially sensitive, either to my company or my clients companies is enough to convince me to Truecrypt all my documents because if some leaked I would most likely lose the client.
Actually when I bring laptops back I normally mumble something about needing to get some vital data off the hard disk remove it and take it away with me. That way I know I'm the only one with access.
It's sad really - every time I've had to fix/upgrade someone's machine I've made a conscious effort to have them present, and ask them before I open any of their documents. 99% of the time there's no need to files they created and so the issue never comes up. Hell if they're into porn, I really don't want to know. But quite clearly most people employed to mess around with other people's machines don't have the same approach. As far as I know no one faced any disciplinary action for catching pedos for example, even though it seems almost certain that they were on a porn hunt when they found the illegal pictures rather than trying to actually fix the machine. If they did it once, it seems likely to me that it's SOP where they work. And that is really bad.
Treason is to act against your own countrymen in the service of another country. But is that really what it boils down to when you prevent more deaths through dissemination of state secrets? Is it really an offense worthy of death to act according to your own morality?
Meh. What the Rosenbergs did - giving atomic secrets to a hostile tyranny is treason. I'm no fan of the death penalty, but it's definitely a serious crime. And I'm sure if the sort of people the Rosenbergs had favoured had ended up running the country there would have been a lot more people executed under treason charges who were just 'acting under their own morality', treason being a popular though spurious charge in Stalinist show trials.
The Whigs and Tory parties have been around for about as long as the Parliamentary system. Even before that there were factional grouping that were analogous to parties.
I think the default state of a parliamentary system or any reasonably free group of humans is for factions to form around individuals. Later on those factions become bound by ideology and become parties. Actually even inside a political party there are always competing factions based around individuals. The winning individual gets to define the ideology to some extent so long as they are party leader. Actually that defining process is really a test whether they still are leader - most British Prime Ministers go because the rest of their party opposes on some ideological issue and unseats them. Arguably even the ones that lose elections have already lost the suppport of their own party.
So I'm not sure what you mean by "the British originally had no political parties". Even during the days of absolute monarchy there were competing factions at court. In fact there were regular uprisings where one faction would try to take over. Post Glorious Revolution the power of the monarchy was limited and the factions moved to Parliament. Formal parties formed soon after. Actual the Conservative party was very informal until quite recently - it was much more like a club or faction, 17th Century style. E.g. leaders 'emerged' rather than being elected until 1965.
A free society is really a set of rules that everyone agrees to on how to decide which faction is in charge peacefully. Those factions would still exist in an unfree society, it's just that they would have to compete for power in a non peaceful way. Given the pressure of open competition factions will turn into parties with more formalised rules eventually. Though the Conservatives managed to do OK as an informal 'faction' for a hundred and thirty years.
Actually the LDP is Japan is an interesting example. It has been in power for most of the time since Japan was a democracy. Still it is highly factional and the policies of one LDP faction can be completely different from another. Back before it lost elections it was widely touted as an alternative model to a multi party system - essentially a single party which contained mutiple competing factions. Even now it's longevity is probably due to the fact that it is not really one party in the normal sense.
Zhao Ziyang, the Chinese Premier said to Gorbachev that "in the short term we will democratize the [Chinese Communist]Party but in the long run a multi party system is inevitable". Of course he was deposed and imprisoned by more traditional types and Leninist party discipline was reimposed ruthlessly. Still it's easy to imagine that his model would work a bit like the LDP in Japan for a while until some factions turned themselves into alternative parties.
Actually the KMT in Taiwan used to be the only party but looks like it has managed to transition to being a Conservative style natural party of government in a democracy. Quite possibly if the CCP had followed Zhao's advice it would have been able to pull off the same trick.
I'd say C# and.Net was designed to kill C++/MFC and Visual Basic, i.e. it's a good environment to develop client side applications quickly in. Of course most client side Java apps end up running on Windows boxes, and the Microsoft toolchain always seemed more friendly to me, so killing Java in enterprise environments might be a result of that. I know if you look at job listing there's a lot of demand for.net and less and less for Java.
Still, unlike Java it was never really meant to be run on other OSs. Though I think if third parties want to port it MS won't sue them. Of course if those third parties want something that actually works they'll pretty much need to pay MS for help sooner or later.
One interesting thing is that a.Net application is cross processor. So if Windows ever ends up running on anything other than x86/x64/IA64.Net applications would probably run faster than native applications that are emulated. Also.Net applications are built for "Any CPU" will run 64 bit on a 64 bit OS and 32 bit on a 32 bit one, i.e. they adjust their bittedness automatically.
Now theoretically, distributing code as an intermediate format that is JITted to native could be faster than native too, because the JITter could generate code that is optimised for the specific CPU you have. It could even profile and then take extra care on the hotspots in the application. Of course in practice both C# and Java are high level languages and they don't tend to produce very efficient native code, so native C/C++ optimised for the latest available chip at build time is going to end up being faster than C# or Java compiled to intermediate code and then JITted to the exact chip/usage pattern you have.
The problem is that C/C++ compilers are very mature and C/C++ is horrifically low level. Plus C programmers tend to be more enthusiastic about profiling and optimising - back in the old days people would write the really performance critical stuff in hand optimised assembler. Mind you these days optimised C code is probably better than 90% of assembler programmers could do.
Anyhow, I'm rambling. I do like the tools for.Net, I just don't like the hassles of deploying the runtime. Also Windows in C/C++ has a certain twisted charm to it, a bit like solving a crossword puzzle. Still realistically if I were writing code for some client it's too slow a process.
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Tiananmen Square is very much ongoing for China. Zhao Ziyang - who was effectively the Chinese Gorbachev - was planning to liberalise Chinese society substantially. Students were demonstrating peacefully. A handful of hardliners used the army to crush the students, illegally deposed Zhao and have turned China into a vicious police state where old ladies get sent for reeducation camps for requesting permission to complain that developers have kicked them out of their houses. Before Tiananmen most people thought that China would liberalise just like Eastern Europe. After there was no chance of that. All the tensions with Taiwan and Japan greatly intensified following Tiananmen. It was a coup, plain and simple and a noticably fascist regime took over from a much more liberal one.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/world/asia/15zhao-transcript.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1
Based on this, we can say that if a country wishes to modernize, not only should it implement a market economy, it must also adopt a parliamentary democracy as its political system. Otherwise, this nation will not be able to have a market economy that is healthy and modern, nor can it become a modern society with a rule of law. Instead it will run into the situations that have occurred in so many developing countries, including China: commercialization of power, rampant corruption, a society polarized between rich and poor.
Zhao Ziyang, RIP.
More to the point one year after Tiananmen similar demonstrations broke out in Taiwan, which was at that point a one party state and effectively a mirror image on China where the KMT was the ruling party instead of the CCP. President Lee Teng Hui met the students and agreed to their demands for free elections, which he proceeded to win until he run into newly reintroduced term limits. Now Taiwan is a vibrant democracy and China isn't.
If it hadn't been for Tiananmen I'm quite sure China would have gone the same way. I also think Lee Teng Hui and Zhao Ziyang would have been able to negotiate some sort of way for Taiwan and China to coexist. Reading Zhao's book, the similarities with LTH seem quite striking. I think they would have got on pretty well.
You should read his book
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_the_State:_The_Secret_Journal_of_Premier_Zhao_Ziyang
I bought the English edition in Taiwan. I had to reserve a copy because it had sold out in both Chinese and English. I'm told the Chinese edition has sold out in Hong Kong. Inevitably it's been scanned as a pdf and is circulating on the internet inside China where equally inevitably it has been banned. A great injustice happened to the Chinese people at Tiananmen and has continued in the years since. While most people are scared to talk about it, it most certainly has not been forgotten.
Looks like we all need to check the Euler Diagram of the UK
http://qntm.org/?uk
I just wish more programs would be written in 64 bit code, I run 75% of my applications as x86.
I make sure all my Windows stuff builds as 64bit and I test on Vista64, but really for most applications there's no point.
If you need >4GB of address space it would be useful, but most applications can be written not to. Databases are apparently an exception. Still it's a bad idea to assume that you can memory map a huge file into memory, and that's the killer app for 64 bits.
In terms of performance most benchmarks put 64 and 32 bit neck and neck - ±a few percent%. Sure you have more registers, but all x86 chips use caching and register renaming to make that less significant than you'd think. 32 bit code thunks on 64 bit Windows, but the thunking mechanism is very lightweight. I've never checked but I imagine that integers are movzx'd from the stack to a register and pointers are movsx'd. You apparantly need far jump to switch from 32 to 64 bit too. But my guess is that all this stuff was agreed by Microsoft and AMD so that it ends up being efficient.
I suffer terribly from ADHD and I've been working on a solution. The idea is to use microshock to flip the brain out of its
Ooh look! A Kestrel! I'll go and get my binoculars.
Actually China doesn't have a very good record with invading other countries. Look what happened with Vietnam.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War
I'm not convinced that Chinese public opinion would allow them to do this sort of thing these days. Plus it's good for China for NK to stir up trouble and back down for a while only after China intervenes diplomatically.
Oh dear. That's even worse.
Actually from a strategic point of view, you've got to admire the North Koreans in this respect. They had some artillery from the Russians and Chinese from the Korean war. They bought some since, and manufactured copies locally. None of this was very expensive, even for a basket case like North Korea. And yet it gives them something which can deter American or South Korea just as effectively as a stock of ICBMs.
After. The same guy also told me that Iran executes a lot of people. Occasionally they are proved innocent. The mullah's response to this is to wheel some old dude out who explains that according to Islam, innocent people who are executed go to heaven, as if that makes it all ok.
I've met other Iranians who left shortly after the revolution. They told me that back when the Shah was in power if you opposed him politically you would die, but if you stayed away from politics the regime stayed away from you. Post revolution gangs of thugs would beat up women for not wearing the veil, despite the fact that pre revolution Iran was a very westernised place. The same people wrecked the economy.
You can get some idea of what happened economically. Here's GDP per capita in 1979
http://www.nationmaster.com/red/graph/eco_gdp_percap-economy-gdp-per-capita&date=1979
and here it is now
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_gdp_percap-economy-gdp-per-capita
Iran has slipped from 50 to 104. Before it was within spitting distance of Portugal, now it's heading towards Albania. Of course the people that took part in the revolution expected political liberalisation, not a descent into worse tyranny. It's quite possible that if the Islamists hadn't hijacked it, Iran would actually have ended up quite a decent place.
I'm not sure I get your point - I said that Iran's ideology is vastly different to our own, but that they run a functional government nonetheless.
An Iranian guy once told me a joke.
Mossad, the CIA and the Iranian Intelligence service decide to hold a contest. Each team must go out, wrestle bears and bring them back alive. The first team to come back is Mossad. They have one bear each, beaten unconscious and carried on their backs. All of the bears but one die over their injuries soon after they return. A bit later the CIA team come back. They have one bear tied up and hooded in a high tech cage they have presumably assembled from the contents of their packs.
There is a long wait. Mossad and the CIA decide the Iranians aren't coming back and start to pack up. Suddenly the Iranians return. They have a dear on a leash, looking very scared and clearly badly beaten. The dear says "I'm a bear! I'm a bear!"
I think that joke tells you a lot.
The odd thing about North Korea is that even without nukes it is offlimits for US military action for three reasons
First most people think the North Korean army would fight if attacked, unlike the Iraqi one. Their equipment is outdated, but they have numbers and determination would most likely kill enough Americans to trigger a Vietnam style withdrawal. I'd guess China would keep them supplied too.
Secondly North Korea has vast amounts of artillery aimed at Seoul, the capital of South Korea. It is theorized that if attacked they would shell Seoul. By the time the artillery had been destroyed by US airpower millions of South Koreans would be dead, and probably thousands of US pilots. The US government would most likely not be able to accept that loss.
Finally it's widely believed that China has told the US that NK is under its protection and that attacking it would move the US and China into an open state of hostility.
Now they do have nukes they could use them on US forces, Japan or South Korea. Actually I think that Japan or the US would probably be able to shoot down NK missiles or destroy them on the ground as they are liquid fueled and thus take time to set up. Also there are questions of whether they would be able to build a warhead that would fit on a missile. So compared to their conventional military and powerful allies, their nukes are not particularly useful.
Of course even a few dummy missile launches at Japan may trigger an extreme overreaction on Japan's part. Their current pacifism could be revoked quite quickly and while pointedly non nuclear it is widely believed that they could build a large nuclear arsenal very quickly if threatened. China would no doubt react by building up its own military. So an attack on NK would most likely leave South East Asia looking like a much more threatening place.
Well human races can interbreed. The point of the article is that for purely mechanical reasons big dogs can't interbreed with small dogs. From the definition of species - i.e. able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring they are a different species.
Social hierarchies in animals are just as dysfunctional as they are in humans. I saw some documentary where one of the younger dominant females kept taking food out of the mouth of one of the subordinates ones. It wasn't that she was particularly hungry because she got priority access to the best food. As far as anyone could tell she was doing because her status let her get away with it.
Birds can most certainly be racist, or at least speciesist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbing_behaviour#Mobbing_in_birds
It's not really amusing when people in other countries put on a cowboy hat and do a Bush impersonation of Americans, and it's not really amusing when Americans do a turban/jihad/terrorist impression of Muslim countries. How the hell can there be any constructive dialogue when a large percentile of the populace is busy acting like 14 year olds?
Someone once said "an MLRS means never having to say you're sorry". It strikes me that you could that's even more true of a large number of unemployable but highly aggressive teenagers.
Only a small percentage would survive.
The species can survive even if you get down to a (few) thousand individuals.
e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
Given that Earth is basically covered in humans it would be almost impossible to wipe them out completely. There'd be a few bunkers full of people, scientific outposts in Antarctica and so on.
Even in a nuked out US you'd have small colonies of people who'd survive pretty much anything upto an including an attack with thousands of warheads. People being people they'd join up and end up with an evolutionarily viable effective population size. And that's just in one country. Also the US government has an extreme survival instinct as an organisation - political and military leaders would probably arrange bunker space for themselves and emerge later to make ensure that the political system they knew would recolonise the country. Post apocalyptic movies tend to exaggerate the political effects - my guess is that the US would survive this sort of thing, no doubt with sufficient firepower to stomp any competition.
If Linux is The Highlander, then is Windows The Borg?
No, they're not The Borg, they're Vogons. Much, much worse.
Hey that's not fair!
[Looks at the source code of the app I'm working on]
Oh, um, nothing.
What about if you had solar cells and a tether? It seems like you could use the solar cells to generate electrical power and use the electrical power to generate lift using the tether.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodynamic_tether
The downside I can think of is that over very long periods of time micro meteorites would slowly destroy the solar arrays and the power supply would gradual fail. Maybe a better option would be to use the tether to move the satellite into a very high orbit over a long time. Essentially you'd design the thing so that if it failed in a few decades it would still end up in a very high orbit.
Another option would be a Voyager type mission to put something into a very high orbit. You could make it come back every ten years or so and beam it's stored data back to Earth.
What's the point? It's an interesting engineering idea. You could justify it as a time capsule basically - you could store lots of data like the Library of Congress, DNA samples, and so on. If we blow ourselves to bits, aliens or a future human civilisation could learn a lot from the contents of the satellite.
I like the last couple of episodes, and there were a few other good ones. Still by and large a lot seemed like filler.
It also had the usual problem with American TV that they hint at a story arc that isn't really present because they actually write the episodes as they are commissioned. Plus I liked Termninator 1, but it seems like the Terminator universe isn't really complex enough to set a show in. Of course they could add a lot more stuff, much in the way that SG1 did with the Stargate universe. And actually if they'd done that and planned out a two season arc they would most likely have ended up running to far more seasons, like SG1 did. Now SG1 run out of material in the end but the reason it lasted so long is because they started off with enough material for a few seasons and you could see that.
Also SG1 kind of knew it was recycling sci fi cliches - it had a self awareness about its derivative nature that made it quite enjoyable if you've spent far too much time watching bad sci fi. Other less shows take themselves far too seriously - the whole "darker and grittier, real flawed characters" thing is irritating unless you really do it well. Actually when SG1 started to take itself seriously it stopped being watchable.
Or a big ewok.
Looking through laptops and digital cameras for porn to share with other employees.
This "looking through laptops for porn" thing must be really common. If you look at pedophiles who get arrested usually they took a defective machine back to a shop and the geek squad types 'just happened to find something illegal while they were fixing the machine'. Now I don't have porn, legal or illegal on my machine. Still the idea of someone browsing my files and happening to find something commercially sensitive, either to my company or my clients companies is enough to convince me to Truecrypt all my documents because if some leaked I would most likely lose the client.
Actually when I bring laptops back I normally mumble something about needing to get some vital data off the hard disk remove it and take it away with me. That way I know I'm the only one with access.
It's sad really - every time I've had to fix/upgrade someone's machine I've made a conscious effort to have them present, and ask them before I open any of their documents. 99% of the time there's no need to files they created and so the issue never comes up. Hell if they're into porn, I really don't want to know. But quite clearly most people employed to mess around with other people's machines don't have the same approach. As far as I know no one faced any disciplinary action for catching pedos for example, even though it seems almost certain that they were on a porn hunt when they found the illegal pictures rather than trying to actually fix the machine. If they did it once, it seems likely to me that it's SOP where they work. And that is really bad.
I maybe a fatarse, but at least I can spell complete.
Treason is to act against your own countrymen in the service of another country. But is that really what it boils down to when you prevent more deaths through dissemination of state secrets? Is it really an offense worthy of death to act according to your own morality?
Meh. What the Rosenbergs did - giving atomic secrets to a hostile tyranny is treason. I'm no fan of the death penalty, but it's definitely a serious crime. And I'm sure if the sort of people the Rosenbergs had favoured had ended up running the country there would have been a lot more people executed under treason charges who were just 'acting under their own morality', treason being a popular though spurious charge in Stalinist show trials.
The Whigs and Tory parties have been around for about as long as the Parliamentary system. Even before that there were factional grouping that were analogous to parties.
I think the default state of a parliamentary system or any reasonably free group of humans is for factions to form around individuals. Later on those factions become bound by ideology and become parties. Actually even inside a political party there are always competing factions based around individuals. The winning individual gets to define the ideology to some extent so long as they are party leader. Actually that defining process is really a test whether they still are leader - most British Prime Ministers go because the rest of their party opposes on some ideological issue and unseats them. Arguably even the ones that lose elections have already lost the suppport of their own party.
So I'm not sure what you mean by "the British originally had no political parties". Even during the days of absolute monarchy there were competing factions at court. In fact there were regular uprisings where one faction would try to take over. Post Glorious Revolution the power of the monarchy was limited and the factions moved to Parliament. Formal parties formed soon after. Actual the Conservative party was very informal until quite recently - it was much more like a club or faction, 17th Century style. E.g. leaders 'emerged' rather than being elected until 1965.
A free society is really a set of rules that everyone agrees to on how to decide which faction is in charge peacefully. Those factions would still exist in an unfree society, it's just that they would have to compete for power in a non peaceful way. Given the pressure of open competition factions will turn into parties with more formalised rules eventually. Though the Conservatives managed to do OK as an informal 'faction' for a hundred and thirty years.
Actually the LDP is Japan is an interesting example. It has been in power for most of the time since Japan was a democracy. Still it is highly factional and the policies of one LDP faction can be completely different from another. Back before it lost elections it was widely touted as an alternative model to a multi party system - essentially a single party which contained mutiple competing factions. Even now it's longevity is probably due to the fact that it is not really one party in the normal sense.
Zhao Ziyang, the Chinese Premier said to Gorbachev that "in the short term we will democratize the [Chinese Communist]Party but in the long run a multi party system is inevitable". Of course he was deposed and imprisoned by more traditional types and Leninist party discipline was reimposed ruthlessly. Still it's easy to imagine that his model would work a bit like the LDP in Japan for a while until some factions turned themselves into alternative parties.
Actually the KMT in Taiwan used to be the only party but looks like it has managed to transition to being a Conservative style natural party of government in a democracy. Quite possibly if the CCP had followed Zhao's advice it would have been able to pull off the same trick.
I'd say C# and .Net was designed to kill C++/MFC and Visual Basic, i.e. it's a good environment to develop client side applications quickly in. Of course most client side Java apps end up running on Windows boxes, and the Microsoft toolchain always seemed more friendly to me, so killing Java in enterprise environments might be a result of that. I know if you look at job listing there's a lot of demand for .net and less and less for Java.
http://www.womenintechnology.co.uk/news/survey-reveals-in-demand-it-skills-news-19166530
Still, unlike Java it was never really meant to be run on other OSs. Though I think if third parties want to port it MS won't sue them. Of course if those third parties want something that actually works they'll pretty much need to pay MS for help sooner or later.
One interesting thing is that a .Net application is cross processor. So if Windows ever ends up running on anything other than x86/x64/IA64 .Net applications would probably run faster than native applications that are emulated. Also .Net applications are built for "Any CPU" will run 64 bit on a 64 bit OS and 32 bit on a 32 bit one, i.e. they adjust their bittedness automatically.
Now theoretically, distributing code as an intermediate format that is JITted to native could be faster than native too, because the JITter could generate code that is optimised for the specific CPU you have. It could even profile and then take extra care on the hotspots in the application. Of course in practice both C# and Java are high level languages and they don't tend to produce very efficient native code, so native C/C++ optimised for the latest available chip at build time is going to end up being faster than C# or Java compiled to intermediate code and then JITted to the exact chip/usage pattern you have.
The problem is that C/C++ compilers are very mature and C/C++ is horrifically low level. Plus C programmers tend to be more enthusiastic about profiling and optimising - back in the old days people would write the really performance critical stuff in hand optimised assembler. Mind you these days optimised C code is probably better than 90% of assembler programmers could do.
Anyhow, I'm rambling. I do like the tools for .Net, I just don't like the hassles of deploying the runtime. Also Windows in C/C++ has a certain twisted charm to it, a bit like solving a crossword puzzle. Still realistically if I were writing code for some client it's too slow a process.