People with UIDs that low don't just not read the article, they don't read the summary either. The longer you're here in fact, the less you read. The limiting case is the editors who can't read anything anymore, not even the warning labels on stuff. Which explains the high turnaround of editors we see.
I'm not sure I should even bother to type this, since your UID is much lower than mine.
If you read this far in fact, I'll reward you with this top tip: Avoid the "hard to open" jars in the cabinet in your bathroom. They are not candy.
It's probably better for his career to get kicked out for this than for raping the lab animals for example. Or getting wasted on random chemicals and waking up in bed with the Dean's wife who's for some reason very dead.
If you could find a way to design a self replicating spaceship, you could send them off programmed to replicate and occasionally fly through a black hole that was likely traversable. If they survived, they'd work out what the rules for traversal, and then fly off to find the right kind of blackholes to make their way back to the spacetime coordinates they started from. Essentially, they'd solve the problem of flying in a closed timelike curve back to their point of origin via lots of wormholes by a sort of evolutionary brute force - lots would fail, but that doesn't matter since the only ones you care about are the survivors.
If it all worked, you'd send one ship off, and then lots of it's distant descendants would come back, with the data you need to travel in space and time using blackholes.
Then you could do all sorts of cool stuff. E.g. ship that travels somewhere millions of light years away at 0.9999c but make a detour via a wormhole. Sure decades or centuries of ship time would pass for the crew members, but you could probably put them in suspended animation. But the big problem of millions of years of time passing from the POV of an observer at rest could be fixed if you could make a wormhole journey that takes the ship millions of years back in time somewhere along the way.
So from the POV of a crew member, they get in the ship, get frozen or whatver and wake up millions of light years away.
From the POV of someone on Earth the ship arrives at it's destination quickly maybe even instantaneously, and it could come back quickly too, since unlike a normal relativistic rocket it doesn't arrive millions of years in future from a rest observer's POV.
From the POV of the ship itself, millions of years pass each journey, but that's no big problem.
In fact, theorists say one variety of wormhole wraps back onto itself, so that it leads not to another universe, but back to its own entrance.
I think they should call these "Scenic Tours"
"Greetings Crew. Our esteemed leader, Star Captain 91805, will explain the reason for this meeting, and then the view screen and instruments panel will be unveiled."
"Esteemed crew members. I checked the calendar this morning and it is Earth Day 2,345,621,341 of our voyage. We have been in the wormhole for 6,426,359 Earth Years. After many generations of no readings in the void between the universes our instruments have recently picked up energy signatures of a star system. Curvature readings indicate we are approaching the mouth of the wormhole. Many generations ago, our distant ancestors set forth on this great journey, and they predicted this day, Emergence Day, even though they thought the journey would only take 867 days, or just under two and a half Earth Years. Luckily, we have a food generator, and our medical bay was able to clone members of our all male crew when they became too old to work or were executed. The first captain's clone became the new captain when he died of old age, and that pattern has been repeated 91805 times for all crew members. We have, I think you all agree, made sacrifices to complete this journey. I found that before the voyage, the food generator could make any known food. Unfortunately, Science Officer 23 accidentally erased most of the its memory crystals whilst attempting an experiment to turn the ship around, and we have since all lived on a rather limited diet of "condensed milk", "dog biscuits" and "toothpaste", the only meals the food generator can since produce.
Crew morale has improved since my ancestor, the Lawgiver, Captain 25 reprogrammed the maintainance droids to keelhaul crew members for violating His Law or disrespecting His Person but we still felt that the Date of Emergence be kept secret to keep the ship functioning smoothly. But according to our instruments we will reach the wormhole throat in five minutes time. I will therefore ask Science Officer 92843 to unveil the instruments and viewscreen. For comparison, he will have a picture of the wormhole entrance displayed on another viewscreen with, in an ultra rare trinary star system, so you can see how different the two star systems are. He will also calculate the time/space coordinates of both the entry and exit, and the distance between them"
Personally, I wish Denmark would just join the Euro. Our money is so ugly now that my eyes wants to cry every time I see them. I think this is a conspiracy to make the Danish want to join the Euro. (It works on me, too!)
Yeah, because having pretty notes makes up for the fact that you have interest rates set over the whole eurozone by the somewhat inscrutable ECB, rather than set by (I guess) an independant central bank in Denmark.
Yeah, Europeans should be very worried. Their stores are getting flooded by cheap american imports that local companies can not compete with under a 50% premium
A weak currency is a good move if you're China. I'm not sure it works that well for the US. It won't even help the US trade deficit, since most imports come from countrys with central banks that buy dollar denominated securities to make their currencies stay weak.
Which is a weird state of affairs actually - the dollar hasn't dropped even further only because China, Japan and so on are propping it up.
Yeah, but look at it in software terms. You've got one piece of code which is a bit poorly understood but has been running for a long time. Or you can switch to something which seems better theoretically but hasn't been tested.
The odds are that the next hundred years will be like the last hundred years, i.e. +0.74 (± 0.18) Degrees Celsius. Or you can try something new, to try to reduce CO2 to pre industrial levels, which is risky because no one has tried it, outside of highly questionable computer models. And it would cost a fortune. And the oceans might compensate anyway, as this dude pointed out.
Seems like a no brainer to stick with the status quo. It's not like we have any choice really, since no one has the kind of control of humanity to influence them to all work together to change the trend, and no one really understands what the long term effects of trying to change it are anyway. If increasing CO2 causes some kind of climate flip, we'll just have to live with the new climate. My guess is that we can extrapolate the last hundred year's trend, which means that we have a few centuries before something really nasty happens. By which time, humans will hopefully have stopped burning fossil fuels and have the kind of science and technology which could actually control the climate. But it's not something you or I or even our children needed to worry too much about.
I find this idea somewhat concerning. All too often the human race is guilty of doing things because they can, before they learn whether or not they should. I'm all for reducing carbon emissions, but in all honesty, what the hell will we break if we start trying to extract too much carbon from the atmosphere.
I agree! The precautionary principle says that you should change with the natural world unless you know it's safe. Historically, atmospheric CO2 levels have been rising slowly for a hundred years or so. Possibly some of that is caused by humans, but it seems we should stick with the status quo until we have more evidence as to how much, and whether increased CO2 is a good thing, a bad thing or doesn't matter at all.
It's possible that lowering CO2 suddenly might cause the climate to flip into a new stable state, like a new Ice Age. Since the costs of this would be vast, it's very important not to take any measures which could allow it to happen. If irresponsible Europeans persist in sequestering carbon, the US should increase it's carbon emissions to compensate to ensure that the current trends continue.
The most important difference is in the ISA, which allows the compiler to express dataflow graphs to directly to the hardware, which will work best (compared to convention) in ultra-small technologies where the wires are quite slow. To get a similar dependence graph in a RISC or CISC ISA, a superscalar processor must reconstruct it on the fly, instruction by instruction, using register renaming and issue window tag broadcasting. Thanks for reading.
That reminds me of EPIC aka Itanium.
It seems like the original RISC idea was to design the ISA so it was easy to build a scalar, pipelined processor. But in a modern superscalar chip, scheduling lots of instructions requires huge amounts of hardware, and that tends to limit clock speed. x86 chips have figured out how to break x86 instructions into something which can be executed efficiently, but both x86 and Risc chips are held back by scheduling instructions.
So EPIC tried to move the scheduling logic back to compile time. Which all sounded like a good idea in theory, but in practice EPIC seemed to be a massive disappointment. I remember reading that mid range x86 outperformed them in SpecInt when both were running native code for example, despite the fact that mid range x86 chips were much cheaper to buy, and presumably to manufacture. Even Risc back in it's prime (e.g. Alpha) had a performance advantage in this sort of test, though nowhere near enough to take over.
So where do you think EPIC went wrong? What does your architecture get right that Intel/HP didn't?
As far as democracy is concerned, you don't live in a democracy (assuming you live in the U.S. or Europe). The U.S. is a constitutional republic, and the important aspect of such a government is the constitutional limits, not the elections.
Actually the UK is closer to a democracy than a constitutional republic. Just the ask those Islamist dudes interned in Belmarsh now, or the IRA guys in the 1970's, or blackshirts in WWII.
The EU Human Rights Act the press and judiciary dilute this admittedly, but historically in the UK Prime Ministers can use all the powers a medieval king had to lock up people they don't like. The government still needs to win a vote of confidence for really unpopular things, and an election every few years. But they can call the election when they are at the height of their popularity cycle, so you need to be be pretty ghastly before they'll use them against you.
Someone described as an elective dictatorship, and I think it's a fair summary. It's worked pretty well in practice actually, for longer than the US has been around. And most of the people who got screwed by the system thoroughly deserved it.
That's wonderful - can we see the prototype please? There isn't one? Let's leave the marketing hype timescales to the drug addled Eloi in public relations.
That explains why I'm so hungry as I gaze at the PR bunnies at the tradeshows through my sunglasses.
So RTFM meant, loosely, "Read The Fine Manual". I wrote that abbreviation (and why is "abbreviation" such a long word?) so many times my fingers kind of took over there for a moment.
If you using the Emacs usenet client to do tech support for noobs on the Linux kernel forums, you might like to know that you can type "Read The Fine Manual" quickly with Meta3-Ctrl-~ Shift-R Shift-T Shift-F Shift-M Meta2-Ctrl-~ !-%-Esc-Alt-Meta-Escape-Return. You need to install lisp-acronym-expander obviously, and change the bindings from the default which needs a keyboard with Meta4 and Meta5 keys.
All those regimes are pretty crazy though. They've killed vast numbers of their own people, started unnecessary wars which killed even vaster numbers and don't have any idea how to deal with enemy countries apart from insane brinksmanship which mostly ends in a war that they lose.
Seriously, if you think American foreign policy sucks, try reading about the foreign policy of any of the countries you mentioned. E.g. people complain that Bush killed caused the deaths of a few thousand soldiers in Iraq. All of those regimes have killed millions of their own people in foreign policy foulups.
Insane is not really the right way too look at it. A better question is how much they understand the outside world. E.g. if you look at the PBS documentary on Iraq in Gulf War I, they asked Tariq Aziz why Iraq didn't back down. It seemed to be for two reaons, Saddam thought war was inevitable, since the US wanted it. Secondly, no one dared question him. The thing is, if he'd announced a pullout before the UN forces attacked, the coalition would have split despite the US's best efforts. As Kanan Makiya put it, Saddam had a very good understanding of Iraqi politics, but a very poor understanding of international politics.
I can see with Iran the same sort of misunderstanding of their opponents' bottom line could well doom them to a war with Israel for example, since inside Iran Israel is so demonised that it's hard for anyone there to make any attempt to understand what makes them tick.
And while the US has people that can do this about Iran, whether the current administration is listening to the right ones is an open question.
Only thing I'd point out is that India didn't use the NPT in quite the way I think you're suggesting -- they were never a signatory to it in the first place, and thus opted out from any assistance from the west, in return for never promising not to make weapons
Hmm, seems only North Korea (and allegedly Iran) did
Your aware of the concept of deterrence, right? Once they have nukes it's too late to attack them.
Actually, the US will never attack North Korea, even if they didn't have nukes. They have enough artillery to destroy Seoul in a couple of hours, missiles that can hit Japan, and probably some kind of Chinese backing to back them up should they get attacked. Plus the South Koreans don't like the idea even of peaceful reunification, since it would bankrupt their country.
So they didn't actually need nukes to deter the US, not that they somewhat autistic ruling clique can understand this.
While I'm no great fan of constructive engagement with China, engaging middle eastern despots doesn't seem unreasonable, especially in the context of the cold war. In fact, given that attempting to bring democracy to the region has failed in Iraq and they have a shared enemy in the form of Islamic radicals, I think the US will go back to doing this once Bush has left office.
And the good people at the UN have decided in the Non Proliferation Treaty that every state has the 'inalienable right' to develop nuclear power, as current Iranian president Ahmacrazyguy never tires of pointing out. The idea was that in return for signing it, the nuclear powers would help them with non proliferating power stations, under IAEA supervision. All of which is utterly laughable given the way India, Pakistan and now North Korea and Iran have stayed in the NPT long enough to build up a domestic nuclear industry and then quit just before detonating their first bomb.
Looking at the Shah's program, he would probably have pulled the same trick. As some expat Iranian pointed out to me, the Shah wasn't very nice, but he also wasn't stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Your sig
> If Vista has such great scheduling and other improvements under its hood,
> why does it run slower than XP?
Because it's bigger, and so it swaps more unless you have loads of Ram.
People with UIDs that low don't just not read the article, they don't read the summary either. The longer you're here in fact, the less you read. The limiting case is the editors who can't read anything anymore, not even the warning labels on stuff. Which explains the high turnaround of editors we see.
I'm not sure I should even bother to type this, since your UID is much lower than mine.
If you read this far in fact, I'll reward you with this top tip: Avoid the "hard to open" jars in the cabinet in your bathroom. They are not candy.
It's probably better for his career to get kicked out for this than for raping the lab animals for example. Or getting wasted on random chemicals and waking up in bed with the Dean's wife who's for some reason very dead.
Shit, this guy will be ok in a couple of years.
If you could find a way to design a self replicating spaceship, you could send them off programmed to replicate and occasionally fly through a black hole that was likely traversable. If they survived, they'd work out what the rules for traversal, and then fly off to find the right kind of blackholes to make their way back to the spacetime coordinates they started from. Essentially, they'd solve the problem of flying in a closed timelike curve back to their point of origin via lots of wormholes by a sort of evolutionary brute force - lots would fail, but that doesn't matter since the only ones you care about are the survivors.
If it all worked, you'd send one ship off, and then lots of it's distant descendants would come back, with the data you need to travel in space and time using blackholes.
Then you could do all sorts of cool stuff. E.g. ship that travels somewhere millions of light years away at 0.9999c but make a detour via a wormhole. Sure decades or centuries of ship time would pass for the crew members, but you could probably put them in suspended animation. But the big problem of millions of years of time passing from the POV of an observer at rest could be fixed if you could make a wormhole journey that takes the ship millions of years back in time somewhere along the way.
So from the POV of a crew member, they get in the ship, get frozen or whatver and wake up millions of light years away.
From the POV of someone on Earth the ship arrives at it's destination quickly maybe even instantaneously, and it could come back quickly too, since unlike a normal relativistic rocket it doesn't arrive millions of years in future from a rest observer's POV.
From the POV of the ship itself, millions of years pass each journey, but that's no big problem.
"Greetings Crew. Our esteemed leader, Star Captain 91805, will explain the reason for this meeting, and then the view screen and instruments panel will be unveiled."
"Esteemed crew members. I checked the calendar this morning and it is Earth Day 2,345,621,341 of our voyage. We have been in the wormhole for 6,426,359 Earth Years. After many generations of no readings in the void between the universes our instruments have recently picked up energy signatures of a star system. Curvature readings indicate we are approaching the mouth of the wormhole. Many generations ago, our distant ancestors set forth on this great journey, and they predicted this day, Emergence Day, even though they thought the journey would only take 867 days, or just under two and a half Earth Years. Luckily, we have a food generator, and our medical bay was able to clone members of our all male crew when they became too old to work or were executed. The first captain's clone became the new captain when he died of old age, and that pattern has been repeated 91805 times for all crew members. We have, I think you all agree, made sacrifices to complete this journey. I found that before the voyage, the food generator could make any known food. Unfortunately, Science Officer 23 accidentally erased most of the its memory crystals whilst attempting an experiment to turn the ship around, and we have since all lived on a rather limited diet of "condensed milk", "dog biscuits" and "toothpaste", the only meals the food generator can since produce.
Crew morale has improved since my ancestor, the Lawgiver, Captain 25 reprogrammed the maintainance droids to keelhaul crew members for violating His Law or disrespecting His Person but we still felt that the Date of Emergence be kept secret to keep the ship functioning smoothly. But according to our instruments we will reach the wormhole throat in five minutes time. I will therefore ask Science Officer 92843 to unveil the instruments and viewscreen. For comparison, he will have a picture of the wormhole entrance displayed on another viewscreen with, in an ultra rare trinary star system, so you can see how different the two star systems are. He will also calculate the time/space coordinates of both the entry and exit, and the distance between them"
You must be in the process of defining this. Why don't you go cuss him out because the downloads aren't working?
Fuck me! That's fucking hilarious.
I'm rolling on the fucking floor, fucking laughing.
I hope you asked his estate before you used his trademarked name like that.
Personally, I wish Denmark would just join the Euro. Our money is so ugly now that my eyes wants to cry every time I see them. I think this is a conspiracy to make the Danish want to join the Euro. (It works on me, too!)
Yeah, because having pretty notes makes up for the fact that you have interest rates set over the whole eurozone by the somewhat inscrutable ECB, rather than set by (I guess) an independant central bank in Denmark.
Yeah, Europeans should be very worried. Their stores are getting flooded by cheap american imports that local companies can not compete with under a 50% premium
A weak currency is a good move if you're China. I'm not sure it works that well for the US. It won't even help the US trade deficit, since most imports come from countrys with central banks that buy dollar denominated securities to make their currencies stay weak.
Which is a weird state of affairs actually - the dollar hasn't dropped even further only because China, Japan and so on are propping it up.
Actually, switzerland is still using the franc.
Yeah, but they pronounce it "fronk"
Yeah, but look at it in software terms. You've got one piece of code which is a bit poorly understood but has been running for a long time. Or you can switch to something which seems better theoretically but hasn't been tested.
The odds are that the next hundred years will be like the last hundred years, i.e. +0.74 (± 0.18) Degrees Celsius. Or you can try something new, to try to reduce CO2 to pre industrial levels, which is risky because no one has tried it, outside of highly questionable computer models. And it would cost a fortune. And the oceans might compensate anyway, as this dude pointed out.
Seems like a no brainer to stick with the status quo. It's not like we have any choice really, since no one has the kind of control of humanity to influence them to all work together to change the trend, and no one really understands what the long term effects of trying to change it are anyway. If increasing CO2 causes some kind of climate flip, we'll just have to live with the new climate. My guess is that we can extrapolate the last hundred year's trend, which means that we have a few centuries before something really nasty happens. By which time, humans will hopefully have stopped burning fossil fuels and have the kind of science and technology which could actually control the climate. But it's not something you or I or even our children needed to worry too much about.
I find this idea somewhat concerning. All too often the human race is guilty of doing things because they can, before they learn whether or not they should. I'm all for reducing carbon emissions, but in all honesty, what the hell will we break if we start trying to extract too much carbon from the atmosphere.
I agree! The precautionary principle says that you should change with the natural world unless you know it's safe. Historically, atmospheric CO2 levels have been rising slowly for a hundred years or so. Possibly some of that is caused by humans, but it seems we should stick with the status quo until we have more evidence as to how much, and whether increased CO2 is a good thing, a bad thing or doesn't matter at all.
It's possible that lowering CO2 suddenly might cause the climate to flip into a new stable state, like a new Ice Age. Since the costs of this would be vast, it's very important not to take any measures which could allow it to happen. If irresponsible Europeans persist in sequestering carbon, the US should increase it's carbon emissions to compensate to ensure that the current trends continue.
The most important difference is in the ISA, which allows the compiler to express dataflow graphs to directly to the hardware, which will work best (compared to convention) in ultra-small technologies where the wires are quite slow. To get a similar dependence graph in a RISC or CISC ISA, a superscalar processor must reconstruct it on the fly, instruction by instruction, using register renaming and issue window tag broadcasting. Thanks for reading.
That reminds me of EPIC aka Itanium.
It seems like the original RISC idea was to design the ISA so it was easy to build a scalar, pipelined processor. But in a modern superscalar chip, scheduling lots of instructions requires huge amounts of hardware, and that tends to limit clock speed. x86 chips have figured out how to break x86 instructions into something which can be executed efficiently, but both x86 and Risc chips are held back by scheduling instructions.
So EPIC tried to move the scheduling logic back to compile time. Which all sounded like a good idea in theory, but in practice EPIC seemed to be a massive disappointment. I remember reading that mid range x86 outperformed them in SpecInt when both were running native code for example, despite the fact that mid range x86 chips were much cheaper to buy, and presumably to manufacture. Even Risc back in it's prime (e.g. Alpha) had a performance advantage in this sort of test, though nowhere near enough to take over.
So where do you think EPIC went wrong? What does your architecture get right that Intel/HP didn't?
I wish I had mod points, that's hilarious.
As far as democracy is concerned, you don't live in a democracy (assuming you live in the U.S. or Europe). The U.S. is a constitutional republic, and the important aspect of such a government is the constitutional limits, not the elections.
Actually the UK is closer to a democracy than a constitutional republic. Just the ask those Islamist dudes interned in Belmarsh now, or the IRA guys in the 1970's, or blackshirts in WWII.
The EU Human Rights Act the press and judiciary dilute this admittedly, but historically in the UK Prime Ministers can use all the powers a medieval king had to lock up people they don't like. The government still needs to win a vote of confidence for really unpopular things, and an election every few years. But they can call the election when they are at the height of their popularity cycle, so you need to be be pretty ghastly before they'll use them against you.
Someone described as an elective dictatorship, and I think it's a fair summary. It's worked pretty well in practice actually, for longer than the US has been around. And most of the people who got screwed by the system thoroughly deserved it.
In the Bible Jesus said "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth", and I think He was right.
Applying this to process scheduling, processes that have not run for a long time should be given a priority boost.
Jesus also said "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven"
I think in scheduler terms this means that processes which are taking an unfair amount of CPU time should have their priority lowered.
So you see the Holy Bible has lots of inspiration for the writers of OS kernels, not just for people who write text editors.
And now a reading from The Book Of Mead, Chapter 80 Verse x86.
That's wonderful - can we see the prototype please? There isn't one? Let's leave the marketing hype timescales to the drug addled Eloi in public relations.
That explains why I'm so hungry as I gaze at the PR bunnies at the tradeshows through my sunglasses.
So RTFM meant, loosely, "Read The Fine Manual". I wrote that abbreviation (and why is "abbreviation" such a long word?) so many times my fingers kind of took over there for a moment.
If you using the Emacs usenet client to do tech support for noobs on the Linux kernel forums, you might like to know that you can type "Read The Fine Manual" quickly with Meta3-Ctrl-~ Shift-R Shift-T Shift-F Shift-M Meta2-Ctrl-~ !-%-Esc-Alt-Meta-Escape-Return. You need to install lisp-acronym-expander obviously, and change the bindings from the default which needs a keyboard with Meta4 and Meta5 keys.
All those regimes are pretty crazy though. They've killed vast numbers of their own people, started unnecessary wars which killed even vaster numbers and don't have any idea how to deal with enemy countries apart from insane brinksmanship which mostly ends in a war that they lose.
Seriously, if you think American foreign policy sucks, try reading about the foreign policy of any of the countries you mentioned. E.g. people complain that Bush killed caused the deaths of a few thousand soldiers in Iraq. All of those regimes have killed millions of their own people in foreign policy foulups.
Insane is not really the right way too look at it. A better question is how much they understand the outside world. E.g. if you look at the PBS documentary on Iraq in Gulf War I, they asked Tariq Aziz why Iraq didn't back down. It seemed to be for two reaons, Saddam thought war was inevitable, since the US wanted it. Secondly, no one dared question him. The thing is, if he'd announced a pullout before the UN forces attacked, the coalition would have split despite the US's best efforts. As Kanan Makiya put it, Saddam had a very good understanding of Iraqi politics, but a very poor understanding of international politics.
I can see with Iran the same sort of misunderstanding of their opponents' bottom line could well doom them to a war with Israel for example, since inside Iran Israel is so demonised that it's hard for anyone there to make any attempt to understand what makes them tick.
And while the US has people that can do this about Iran, whether the current administration is listening to the right ones is an open question.
Only thing I'd point out is that India didn't use the NPT in quite the way I think you're suggesting -- they were never a signatory to it in the first place, and thus opted out from any assistance from the west, in return for never promising not to make weapons
a tion_Treaty
Hmm, seems only North Korea (and allegedly Iran) did
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Non-Prolifer
India, Israel and Pakistan never signed it in the first place.
Your aware of the concept of deterrence, right? Once they have nukes it's too late to attack them.
Actually, the US will never attack North Korea, even if they didn't have nukes. They have enough artillery to destroy Seoul in a couple of hours, missiles that can hit Japan, and probably some kind of Chinese backing to back them up should they get attacked. Plus the South Koreans don't like the idea even of peaceful reunification, since it would bankrupt their country.
So they didn't actually need nukes to deter the US, not that they somewhat autistic ruling clique can understand this.
While I'm no great fan of constructive engagement with China, engaging middle eastern despots doesn't seem unreasonable, especially in the context of the cold war. In fact, given that attempting to bring democracy to the region has failed in Iraq and they have a shared enemy in the form of Islamic radicals, I think the US will go back to doing this once Bush has left office.
And the good people at the UN have decided in the Non Proliferation Treaty that every state has the 'inalienable right' to develop nuclear power, as current Iranian president Ahmacrazyguy never tires of pointing out. The idea was that in return for signing it, the nuclear powers would help them with non proliferating power stations, under IAEA supervision. All of which is utterly laughable given the way India, Pakistan and now North Korea and Iran have stayed in the NPT long enough to build up a domestic nuclear industry and then quit just before detonating their first bomb.
Looking at the Shah's program, he would probably have pulled the same trick. As some expat Iranian pointed out to me, the Shah wasn't very nice, but he also wasn't stupid.
If the government pays a private "enforcement" firm to be a Gestapo, it is still breaking the constitution.
Oh shit! Really? Damn, I thought that was a killer business model.
I'd rather screw the artwork on the discs and save the money. They're just buckets for bits anyway.
So's your head, but how would you feel if the doctors decided to let you be born with no fuckin' face to save a few bucks?