You know, if you replaced the pilot with remote control system, it could carry GBU-39s. Or even something smaller, like the size of RPG warheads. The idea is that you launch loads of these things from B52s and they would swarm over a combat zone killing tanks and sending video feeds back.
I don't have ads on my tech news site... because they are now so intrusive and annoying. Why not have Inline Infotainment? I found out InfoTourettes patented scripting system will add tailored product DIET COKE! placements that don't MARLBORO LIGHTS! LO FAT VEGETARIAN SALAD! disrupt the flow of the article TAMPONS! WONDERBRA! and adapt your site's likely audience PONIES! so as not to annoy them or seem intrusive PERSONAL TRAINERS! MANOLO BLAHNIKS!
You probably haven't even noticed, but I'm using it now.
...I'm sick of the hypocritical and ignorant slamming that's prevalent here on slashdot. Just a thought, but have you considered looking for some other forum more to your liking? Perhaps this isn't the right place for you. Yeah, that way this place can turn into even more of an echo chamber. Great idea.
Actually population control may be a disaster for China. Other, richer neighbouring countries like Japan and Korea have a problem of shrinking, aging population.
Now it seems like the One Child policy China has may cause a nightmare situation where Japan-like demographics happen before the country gets rich enough to support all the retired people.
I think the basic lesson is that people don't have enough information to implement things like population control. It's easy to extrapolate a high birth rate to Malthusian chaos in a few decades, but a lot can change in that time. And it rich countries the problem is birth rate being too low, not too high.
Maybe Africa is a brutish place that selects for brutish people? You can sort of see a hint of this in this article. Non brutish people exist in Africa but they won't do very well. Either they'll stay poor or leave for Europe or the US. I've met lots of them running businesses and raising familes in London, and none of them had any intention of going back 'home' because they couldn't do either there.
Brutish people get rich and powerful but mostly from corruption. Rich and powerful people tend to have lots of kids and those kids have a greater than average chance of being rich and powerful. In fact Kenyans have a word for people like this, Mabenzi for Mecedes Benz driver.
You are not going to destroy the only living legend Kenyans have had in a long time without me saying something. If Kip Keino had an ego, he would be in politics not in charitable organisations. Mark my word Kip, if Kip Keino decided to stand for elective office, he would win by the largest margin in Kenya's history.
I am one of the many Kenyans who felt cheated that I never saw the man run. I only realized how great Kipchoge Keino was when I left the country. I have met many non-Kenyans who would recite all the great Keino races as if it happened yesterday. I had a chance to meet Keino twice, once in Kenya and another in the USA. What a contrast? In the USA he was being mobbed and I only saw a glimpse of him. In the country of his birth, I could not believe what I was seeing.
This was on Kenyatta Avenue next to the GPO. The busiest thoroughfare in the country. Kip was crossing the street just like any other Kenyan minding their business. Here comes a Mabenzi with his stolen wealth arrogantly shoving his way past the great one and almost knocking him off balance. The great one just smiled and continued with his majestic walk. The Mabenzi couldn't even smile. Kept looking over his shoulder. A sure sign of stress and unease.
Kip walked from GPO to New Stanley and very few people recognized him. Which is a good thing. The bad of it is that we worship European soccer players but do not recognize our own.
Smart Africans like the ones I met in London don't want to have their businesses confiscated by these parasites so they leave. The end result is a mass of poor people and a few Mabenzi with all the money, power and women. So you could say that evolutionary pressure selects for Mabenzi.
And before you suggest more aid from the West, it's aid that sustains the Mabenzi. The Economist did a wonderfully cynical study that showed the correlation between sales of high end European cars to Africa and aid money.
Why? Some countries are going to succeed and some will fail. Some cultures are good and some are bad. Why give welfare to failing cultures? If people from those cultures want go somewhere else where they'll be appreciated let 'em.
That's a bit patronizing. I suspect most of people in these countries notice their government is screwing them, and if they're educated they're just more likely to know exactly what is likely to happen if they speak up.
Yeah, but I've met math PhDs who look at you resentfully if you say "Do you want fries with that? That'll be $15.97 in total, which by the way is a the Phi times Pi to 2 decimal places"
The most fun software projects I've done have involved reverse engineering. Telling people that they need to have source code stops them learning about debugging, or IDA or Ethereal. They'll just turn into Web 2.0 script monkeys who don't know about things like this.
Which means if they ever get a real job and need to work with third party binary components, they'll be fucking useless when those components don't work 100%.
- non-linear mutation of laws of physics. That's easy to deal with. You just remodulate the shield harmonics and then reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.
During peace time the Prime Minister is just that - he's just the leader of the party who have the most seats. He doesn't have any special powers. Yes he does, it's just that convention is he doesn't use them. When shit goes down he can though. In the US there are always limits on Presidential power and the President often bumps up against them.
So the two systems are not really the same. A PM has essentially unlimited power but chooses not to use it. A President has large but not unlimited power and uses it completely.
I wish Americans that think that Europe/China/whereever was better than American would try to actually visit those places before mouthing off on the Internet.
It's highly annoying to those of us that have lived in most of those places and know the downside.
Don't stores often have a sign saying "we reserve the right to refuse service for any reason"? That, and the fact that the store is private property makes me think it is legally ok to refuse to service to someone who has stolen from you in the past.
The metaphor is like a very powerful searchlight. Even though a simple concept is quite light, like maybe early afternoon daylight, the metaphor makes it even lighter, like noon.
Our equivalent of the president is the queen. And she has the good grace not to do anything. Jealous?;) Having a Queen as head of state is a bit of a con. Sure the Queen doesn't do much in the way of government. But in a UK descended political system the absolute powers of a medieval monarch are still there, they are just exercised by the Prime Minister. Someone called the resulting system an elective dictatorship or the Prime Minister an "elected monarch".
Of course in peacetime this looks like a democracy. In fact it's quite a good system since unpopular Prime Ministers will often be toppled by a vote of confidence by their own MPs who are scared of losing their seats in a General Election.
But if the shit hits the fan the Prime Minister has enormous reserve powers, enough to rule as dictator by suspending elections, a free press and habeas corpus. In fact Winston Churchill was literally a Dictator, albeit a temporary one on Roman Republican lines as opposed to a permanent like a 20th Century dictator or medieval monarch. During WWII he suspended elections, censored the press and interned fascist sympathisers. After WWII his dictatorship expired and the public rather wisely declined to reelect him, preferring the distinctly non charismatic Clement Attlee.
Oddly enough Churchill was aware of the precedent and in the 1930's while he was in the political wilderness (and a decade before his own 'dicatorship') he described Roosevelt (who he admired) as a "roman dictator" - http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=613 CHURCHILLâ(TM)S account of statesmanship in Great Contemporaries culminates in his biographies of eight monarchical leaders. Three are essays about hereditary monarchs: ex-Kaiser Wilhelm, King George V and Alfonso XIII. Two essays are about men whose innate ability to lead makes them examples of natural kingship: Lawrence of Arabia and Boris Savinkov. Two are presented as tyrannical leaders: Hitler and Trotsky. Finally, Churchill describes Franklin Roosevelt as a type of temporary dictator, not unlike the ancient republican Roman dictator who ruled for six months with emergency powers. [In editions of Great Contemporaries published after America joined the Grand Alliance, Roosevelt, like Trotsky and Savinkov, was temporarily expunged from the text. -Ed.]
Specialists are already arguing that patients may have to pay for more drugs themselves, with the issue becoming pressing as new drugs are developed.
But some patients offering to pay for a cancer drug are being told they would have to meet all their care costs.
Not only will the NHS not pay for some drugs, but they won't let you pay for them either, unless you opt out completely and pay for everything!
And Doctors can only prescribe drugs which the NHS advisory board accepts as being cost effective.
Around half the drugs submitted to the English NHS advisory body NICE are for the treatment of cancer.
Some, like Herceptin for breast cancer, have won NICE backing as being cost effective for the health service. Others like Tarceva, which can extend the life of lung cancer patients, have been turned down.
So it is possible that a drug to cure you can be too expensive
Mr Allen is terminally ill with kidney and lung cancer and had been told he only had six months to live.
NHS funding for the drug recommended for him was refused, with letters explaining the health service has limited resources and faces very tough decisions.
He managed to find an NHS trust which allowed co-payment (i.e. he would pay only for the drugs the NHS wouldn't but they would still pay for the ones they could) and thus could spend 'only' an extra $1000 per week to stay alive until his granddaugther is born.
It will get worse apparently. There are lots of drugs which the NHS will never be able to afford and the official policy is still that either you have NHS care and don't have the drugs you need, or you opt out and pay the total cost of your healthcare -
In England, the official policy of the Department of Health is that allowing patients to contribute towards NHS care - known as co-payment - is against the principles and values of the NHS. The government says it could lead to a two tier system.
But that isn't true today. The crushing tyranny has produced stability when "other" governments have created economic chaos. Bullshit. China is in economic chaos now compared to either the US or Europe. They have a vast, very poor, underclass and a ultra rich elite. I read that there were tends of thousands of disturbances every year, caused by the elite arbitrarily taxing the rural poor, many of who live on less than one US dollar per day
Jiangxi is one of China's poorest and most rural provinces
Once other overheads had been deducted the farmers have an annual income of about $12 per acre.
Compare that to Europe where most people are probably too secure economically, or to the US which I think gets it right by protecting property rights (unlike China - the local party boss can take what he wants and call it taxation), but not creating high tax/high benefits society like Europe.
China now effectively owns the USA, and has the humanpower to overwhelm it in every way short of military might (though I would not call a nuclear defeat a win). China owns a load of Treasury Bills, but that's not quite the same thing. If they fought a war with the US, the US government would probably confiscate them.
I would call myself a supporter of "raising" the people of China to middle class standards of "the west" but the west seems determined to eradicate the middle class leaving only lords and serfs. Lords and serfs is a pretty good description of rural China right now. Or rural China at any time in the last several thousand years, which is really my point. Europe and the US have moved away from feudalism towards democratic capitalism. Which, if you have any ambition at all, allows you to stop being a serf.
That perfect bureaucracy wasn't good for them. A unified Chinese state has existed for a very long time and has been able to crush opposition.
But in chaotic, divided Europe it was possible to escape a tyrannical government by moving to a neighbouring more liberally governed country. So tyranny tended to be moderated by a fear of losing people. And relatively liberal governments like the one in England gained massively from population movements. So liberalism had an economic advantage.
That wasn't true in China, and the result was tyranny and economic and technological stagnation.
I dunno, I think there is something deeply Russian about old Soviet ways. And maybe there is something deeply Beijing Chinese about God Emperors like Mao. But if you look at the USSR it was much stricter than current Russia. It was also bigger. Some of the successor states will end up liberal democracies like the Baltic States, and some will end up illiberal democracies like Russia. And some will slide back into vicious autocracy under a tyrant like Uzbekistan. With a bit of luck liberal democracy will spread over a few centuries.
Liberal democracy isn't for everyone, but that doesn't mean that you should let people who it is not for like the Russians dominate people who would probably choose it like the Balts.
I think if the Chinese Communist Party lost its monopoly on power something similar would happen to China.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, if you replaced the pilot with remote control system, it could carry GBU-39s. Or even something smaller, like the size of RPG warheads. The idea is that you launch loads of these things from B52s and they would swarm over a combat zone killing tanks and sending video feeds back.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-39_Small_Diameter_Bomb
You probably haven't even noticed, but I'm using it now.
Just a thought, but have you considered looking for some other forum more to your liking? Perhaps this isn't the right place for you. Yeah, that way this place can turn into even more of an echo chamber. Great idea.
I do like the way 4chan-isms like "full of win" are slowly spreading into the rest of the net.
;-)
Africa - made of fail and AIDs
Actually population control may be a disaster for China. Other, richer neighbouring countries like Japan and Korea have a problem of shrinking, aging population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan
Now it seems like the One Child policy China has may cause a nightmare situation where Japan-like demographics happen before the country gets rich enough to support all the retired people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#The_.22Four-Two-One.22_problem
I think the basic lesson is that people don't have enough information to implement things like population control. It's easy to extrapolate a high birth rate to Malthusian chaos in a few decades, but a lot can change in that time. And it rich countries the problem is birth rate being too low, not too high.
Maybe Africa is a brutish place that selects for brutish people? You can sort of see a hint of this in this article. Non brutish people exist in Africa but they won't do very well. Either they'll stay poor or leave for Europe or the US. I've met lots of them running businesses and raising familes in London, and none of them had any intention of going back 'home' because they couldn't do either there.
Brutish people get rich and powerful but mostly from corruption. Rich and powerful people tend to have lots of kids and those kids have a greater than average chance of being rich and powerful. In fact Kenyans have a word for people like this, Mabenzi for Mecedes Benz driver.
http://www.mambogani.com/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t2760.html
Kip,
You are not going to destroy the only living legend Kenyans have had in a long time without me saying something. If Kip Keino had an ego, he would be in politics not in charitable organisations. Mark my word Kip, if Kip Keino decided to stand for elective office, he would win by the largest margin in Kenya's history.
I am one of the many Kenyans who felt cheated that I never saw the man run. I only realized how great Kipchoge Keino was when I left the country. I have met many non-Kenyans who would recite all the great Keino races as if it happened yesterday. I had a chance to meet Keino twice, once in Kenya and another in the USA. What a contrast? In the USA he was being mobbed and I only saw a glimpse of him. In the country of his birth, I could not believe what I was seeing.
This was on Kenyatta Avenue next to the GPO. The busiest thoroughfare in the country. Kip was crossing the street just like any other Kenyan minding their business. Here comes a Mabenzi with his stolen wealth arrogantly shoving his way past the great one and almost knocking him off balance. The great one just smiled and continued with his majestic walk. The Mabenzi couldn't even smile. Kept looking over his shoulder. A sure sign of stress and unease.
Kip walked from GPO to New Stanley and very few people recognized him. Which is a good thing. The bad of it is that we worship European soccer players but do not recognize our own.
Smart Africans like the ones I met in London don't want to have their businesses confiscated by these parasites so they leave. The end result is a mass of poor people and a few Mabenzi with all the money, power and women. So you could say that evolutionary pressure selects for Mabenzi.
And before you suggest more aid from the West, it's aid that sustains the Mabenzi. The Economist did a wonderfully cynical study that showed the correlation between sales of high end European cars to Africa and aid money.
That's what happens to you when you fuck with Mammon!
Now if you excuse me, I feel the need to do some shopping.
Why? Some countries are going to succeed and some will fail. Some cultures are good and some are bad. Why give welfare to failing cultures? If people from those cultures want go somewhere else where they'll be appreciated let 'em.
That's a bit patronizing. I suspect most of people in these countries notice their government is screwing them, and if they're educated they're just more likely to know exactly what is likely to happen if they speak up.
Yeah, but I've met math PhDs who look at you resentfully if you say "Do you want fries with that? That'll be $15.97 in total, which by the way is a the Phi times Pi to 2 decimal places"
You can buy (more) bandwidth, but you can't buy (less) latency.
Seriously, WTF?
The most fun software projects I've done have involved reverse engineering. Telling people that they need to have source code stops them learning about debugging, or IDA or Ethereal. They'll just turn into Web 2.0 script monkeys who don't know about things like this.
Which means if they ever get a real job and need to work with third party binary components, they'll be fucking useless when those components don't work 100%.
So the two systems are not really the same. A PM has essentially unlimited power but chooses not to use it. A President has large but not unlimited power and uses it completely.
I wish Americans that think that Europe/China/whereever was better than American would try to actually visit those places before mouthing off on the Internet.
It's highly annoying to those of us that have lived in most of those places and know the downside.
What about driving bans? Most countries ban people from driving if they drink drive or break the speed limit enough times.
According to Internet Law, it's ok to ban someone from the Internet if you send him a cute cat macro
http://img162.imageshack.us/img162/1005/1210433134594su8.jpg
Don't stores often have a sign saying "we reserve the right to refuse service for any reason"? That, and the fact that the store is private property makes me think it is legally ok to refuse to service to someone who has stolen from you in the past.
The metaphor is like a very powerful searchlight. Even though a simple concept is quite light, like maybe early afternoon daylight, the metaphor makes it even lighter, like noon.
Trying to shut down debate about kangaroo courts eh? You know who else did that?
Of course in peacetime this looks like a democracy. In fact it's quite a good system since unpopular Prime Ministers will often be toppled by a vote of confidence by their own MPs who are scared of losing their seats in a General Election.
But if the shit hits the fan the Prime Minister has enormous reserve powers, enough to rule as dictator by suspending elections, a free press and habeas corpus. In fact Winston Churchill was literally a Dictator, albeit a temporary one on Roman Republican lines as opposed to a permanent like a 20th Century dictator or medieval monarch. During WWII he suspended elections, censored the press and interned fascist sympathisers. After WWII his dictatorship expired and the public rather wisely declined to reelect him, preferring the distinctly non charismatic Clement Attlee.
Oddly enough Churchill was aware of the precedent and in the 1930's while he was in the political wilderness (and a decade before his own 'dicatorship') he described Roosevelt (who he admired) as a "roman dictator" -
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=613
CHURCHILLâ(TM)S account of statesmanship in Great Contemporaries culminates in his biographies of eight monarchical leaders. Three are essays about hereditary monarchs: ex-Kaiser Wilhelm, King George V and Alfonso XIII. Two essays are about men whose innate ability to lead makes them examples of natural kingship: Lawrence of Arabia and Boris Savinkov. Two are presented as tyrannical leaders: Hitler and Trotsky. Finally, Churchill describes Franklin Roosevelt as a type of temporary dictator, not unlike the ancient republican Roman dictator who ruled for six months with emergency powers. [In editions of Great Contemporaries published after America joined the Grand Alliance, Roosevelt, like Trotsky and Savinkov, was temporarily expunged from the text. -Ed.]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6652183.stm
Cancer doctors have told the BBC they fear the NHS will not be able to afford the new generation of cancer drugs.
Specialists are already arguing that patients may have to pay for more drugs themselves, with the issue becoming pressing as new drugs are developed.
But some patients offering to pay for a cancer drug are being told they would have to meet all their care costs.
Not only will the NHS not pay for some drugs, but they won't let you pay for them either, unless you opt out completely and pay for everything!
And Doctors can only prescribe drugs which the NHS advisory board accepts as being cost effective.
Around half the drugs submitted to the English NHS advisory body NICE are for the treatment of cancer.
Some, like Herceptin for breast cancer, have won NICE backing as being cost effective for the health service. Others like Tarceva, which can extend the life of lung cancer patients, have been turned down.
So it is possible that a drug to cure you can be too expensive
Mr Allen is terminally ill with kidney and lung cancer and had been told he only had six months to live.
NHS funding for the drug recommended for him was refused, with letters explaining the health service has limited resources and faces very tough decisions.
He managed to find an NHS trust which allowed co-payment (i.e. he would pay only for the drugs the NHS wouldn't but they would still pay for the ones they could) and thus could spend 'only' an extra $1000 per week to stay alive until his granddaugther is born.
It will get worse apparently. There are lots of drugs which the NHS will never be able to afford and the official policy is still that either you have NHS care and don't have the drugs you need, or you opt out and pay the total cost of your healthcare -
In England, the official policy of the Department of Health is that allowing patients to contribute towards NHS care - known as co-payment - is against the principles and values of the NHS. The government says it could lead to a two tier system.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/901567.stm
The group quoted farmers in Jiangxi as saying they made about US$48 a year from each acre of land but had to pay about $22 per year per acre in tax.
Jiangxi is one of China's poorest and most rural provinces
Once other overheads had been deducted the farmers have an annual income of about $12 per acre.
Compare that to Europe where most people are probably too secure economically, or to the US which I think gets it right by protecting property rights (unlike China - the local party boss can take what he wants and call it taxation), but not creating high tax/high benefits society like Europe. China now effectively owns the USA, and has the humanpower to overwhelm it in every way short of military might (though I would not call a nuclear defeat a win). China owns a load of Treasury Bills, but that's not quite the same thing. If they fought a war with the US, the US government would probably confiscate them. I would call myself a supporter of "raising" the people of China to middle class standards of "the west" but the west seems determined to eradicate the middle class leaving only lords and serfs. Lords and serfs is a pretty good description of rural China right now. Or rural China at any time in the last several thousand years, which is really my point. Europe and the US have moved away from feudalism towards democratic capitalism. Which, if you have any ambition at all, allows you to stop being a serf.
That perfect bureaucracy wasn't good for them. A unified Chinese state has existed for a very long time and has been able to crush opposition.
But in chaotic, divided Europe it was possible to escape a tyrannical government by moving to a neighbouring more liberally governed country. So tyranny tended to be moderated by a fear of losing people. And relatively liberal governments like the one in England gained massively from population movements. So liberalism had an economic advantage.
That wasn't true in China, and the result was tyranny and economic and technological stagnation.
I dunno, I think there is something deeply Russian about old Soviet ways. And maybe there is something deeply Beijing Chinese about God Emperors like Mao. But if you look at the USSR it was much stricter than current Russia. It was also bigger. Some of the successor states will end up liberal democracies like the Baltic States, and some will end up illiberal democracies like Russia. And some will slide back into vicious autocracy under a tyrant like Uzbekistan. With a bit of luck liberal democracy will spread over a few centuries.
Liberal democracy isn't for everyone, but that doesn't mean that you should let people who it is not for like the Russians dominate people who would probably choose it like the Balts.
I think if the Chinese Communist Party lost its monopoly on power something similar would happen to China.