see, my experience is exactly the opposite. i was brought in as IT Director of a medium-sized company. about a half-dozen of the senior execs had blackberries, but none were really happy with them. i was issued one, asked to evaluate it, and make a recommendation. after a little while using the things, i understood why the Blackberries were so unloved. the proposed replacement (this was coming up on 3 years ago; the Treo 600 wasn't around yet) was a Tungsten M. it went over really, really well. everyone who got one thought it was an improvement over the Blackberry. we dumped the Blackberries within a month. folks have subsequently upgraded to Treo 600s and 650s. now we've got a pair of new execs in from other companies; they brought their Blackberries with them, sadly. and unlike the last batch, these guys are addicted and unwilling to try anything else. i'm not in IT any more, so i don't have the "joy" of dealing with them directly... i just get the stupid email restrictions and whatnot that come with their awful service.
I've actually been in church when some guy took a cell phone call. My mother was at a funeral when someone was gabbing on the cell in the back. That when CPA is REALLY a problem.
no, this is when a lack of common courtesy and basic decency is a problem. CPA (although i'd not have described it that way before) is crucial to my ability to do my job effectively. then, so is managing it, and being able to decide whether to devote CPA or Real Attention to something. if i'm in a status meeting being given by my boss to the rest of the management here... i pretty much know what he's going to tell them ahead of time, because we've discussed it ahead of time. i use Real Attention for the pre-meeting conversation, and give CPA during the meeting, which doing other background tasks, like checking other status mail. i'd rather be able to do the job using just Real Attention - it would certainly be faster and more efficient, in the long run. context switches aren't free, ever. but in many modern work environments, that's not even an option. but when i go see a movie, or a friend in a show, or one of my kids' performances, or to a funeral... that's a different issue. Real Attention there is often nice (but i'm not going to make blanket statements about what people's internal states should be at funerals), but turning off the distractions is just basic human decency to the people around you.
"digits"? please. the thing that annoys me most about what many of the VoIP people are doing is their insistence on keeping the worst part of the network - unintelligent, uninformative, unintuitive identifiers. direct-dial numbers were wonderful a few decades ago - the ability to have modern phone numbers was huge. but we should be done with that by now. especially aggravating the VoIP providers who give me things that look just like phone numbers, but aren't (as in: aren't routable on the PSTN). people - everyone who's going to be up for VoIP, anyway - are just as familiar and comfortable with email-style addresses as they are with phone numbers.
so how many digits will be in the phone numbers of the future? 0.
i used to think the whole deal with him being exceedingly arrogant was overblown - i'd been on mailing lists with him, and he was arrogant, but no more so than a dozen or so other really good programmers i could name. than i read the mail exchange between him and the NetBSD folks. the amusing thing is that Theo posted that thread, seemingly in an attempt to exonerate himself, but i just kept thinking "shut up before you make even more of an ass out of yourself." it was really amazing.
still, as was pointed out elsewhere, while he's frequently an ass, he's right at least as often and produces some very, very good results. you don't have to be an ass to be good (the fathers of Unix are uniformly good guys, in my experience), but it does earn you some slack.
people get it wrong because the Linux community spent a really long time yelling very loudly that the old model was so simple to understand, and getting really frustrated when people got it wrong. they worked for years to get people to understand the old model (to the extent that people ever really did; x.y.z... which one's significant here again?). it shouldn't be surprising at all that people "still" get this wrong - after all, if there's still multiple trees under active development (2.4.33-pre2 hit a month ago tomorrow), shouldn't one expect to have some sort of standard rule for what goes where, or what to look for where? tracking changes to the linux development model isn't particularly high up on the list of most people's priorities, and, despite whatever you seem to think, such changes aren't, in anything resembling absolute terms, high-profile items. it's also not mentioned on the kernel.org front page, which is, i believe, still the official repository for kernel versions.
or, more simply: yelling "we have these arbitrary rules we made up, that are totally different from our old arbitrary rules; why is everyone stuck on the old arbitrary rules we spent years yelling at them about?" over and over makes you look like a foolish git.
are nuanced, complex, well-reasoned, long-term answers which still show my hatred for Bush allowed? or shortsighted answers which have nothing to do with Bush?
the obvious bias in the question makes it not worth answering. it's also amusing that, not having mentioned any political figures in my earlier post, the assumption seems to be that anyone who believes there's poverty in America and actually cares about that fact can't possibly be a Bush supporter. actually, that sounds about right.
Also, I'm still waiting for my damned hoverboard. Back to the Future Part II is full of lies, I tell you, lies! (I realize that the events in BttF2 don't occur to 2015, but we should be seeing regular hover technology by now if we are to meet the deadline of mass production for hoverboards that can be used by everyday kids.)
nah. after the end of the (or this, at least) world in 2012, when magic starts working again, it'll all pick up much faster. i'm just not sure why BttF2 didn't have elfs and orks roaming around.;-)
Everyone's jumping on this guy for pronouncing the death of innovation. But that's not really what he said (or not all of it, anyway). His argument is more that innovation will be focused on services and social changes. Is that really so hard to believe? Certainly all the folks looking to push innovation who were around in the last century seem to be gradually shifting to a service-based model, and there's very sound economic reasons for this. Those same reasons point to a focus on innovation in services over product.
That being said, the guy does say that product-based innovation is over, and that's just nonsense. The focus may be shifting, but there's nothing exclusive about one segment or the other. I suspect the primary motivation here really is for IBM to continue to look innovative despite a dwindling product portfolio (and i think they genuinely are innovative, despite a dwindling product portfolio; it's just this guy's job to sell that image).
Rest assured, innovation is alive and well, the economics of bringing new things out have just changed somewhat. I've got the Next Big Thing right here, actually... or one of 'em, anyway. I know two or three other people who also have the (a?) Next Big Thing. Plenty of innovation going on, if you know how to find it. And if anybody's got some excess cash lying around...
that's largely not the point. hell, i'd take the deal if offered. but i don't have a documented history of abusing my power over millions of people, nor specifically violating terms of deals between me and ICANN. sure, part of the problem is the single point of control, but that's a hard one to solve. the much more obvious, and much easier to solve, problem is who they went with: an abusive, power-hungry company with a really bad track record.
i'm sorry. i'm feeling ill. i stopped reading when i got to this:
The average home owned by a person classified as "poor" has three bedrooms, one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio.
For the past 12 years or so, i've participated in a project called Appalachia Service Project; we go down south and do home repair for people who can't afford or aren't able to do it themselves, making homes warmer, safer, and dryer. i've worked on plenty of three bedroom, one-and-a-half bathroom homes down there; pretty much all of them have had a porch or patio. of course, the bathroom typically has a soft floor and no sewage or hot water, at least two of the bedrooms are less than fifty square feet, there's a whole in a corner of one and a leak in another, no insulation in most or all rooms... you get the idea. of course, all these places have a porch, three bedrooms, whatever, so they must not be "truly" poor, right? bite me.
i've done plenty of inner-city missions work, too, although not nearly as extensive. you want me to give you a tour of west philadelphia some time? oakland? brooklyn, around where my father grew up? DC? let me take you for a walk around some of the neighborhoods where even the sort of poverty you don't think is "true" poverty is a pipe dream.
i've heard the argument that there's no "true" poverty in this country before. it continues to just make me angry, and demonstrate the profound, saddening ignorance of the speaker. poverty in America is not hard to find; hell, if you live in the right places, it's hard to avoid. are there interesting questions about how we define and deal with poverty? are there problems with our classifications and definitions? is our understanding of the situation less-than-perfect? of course. but you conclusion that there's "almost no true poverty in the US" is ludicrous, stupid, offensive, ignorant, blind, and downright incorrect.
I'm an American. I love my country. But we're maybe a little bit crazy right now. Please, for the good of everyone involved, stop enabling us to continue to be crazy bastards. Stop putting up with our shit.
I am entirely certain a coordinated Europe can build a fighter every bit as good at what comes out of the US; same for Japan and Canada, at the least. Why are you jumping through random hoops to get ours? We've become lazy, in many ways - don't make that mistake yourself. It's good for your country to build your own in many cases. Give it a shot! I think you'll find you like it.
You can get by entirely fine without our weapons manufacturers, without our Department of Defense. You shouldn't be following our example in IP law, either, nor paying any attention to what our crazy Department of Homeland Security is doing. We're off the rails right now. With your help, we can get ourselves straightened out, but we need some tough love from our older relatives. We need to be kicked in the bum and tossed from the house. We'll come around.
And don't worry about us going all isolationist. We're too built up into depending on other markets for trade. Get a few key players on board, and it won't take long until even the most conservative politicians change course, even if only for market reasons. Give us a few years, though: we've got to get rid of the mad git running things right now. But get Canada, Japan, China, and western Europe (most significantly the UK, but the EU would be best) to agree, and we'll be right as rain again in three years time. C'mon, give a friend a hand.
The first attrocities (like killing prisoners) came from Muslim forces. Then as a response Crusaders did the same.
i'm curious where you're getting this from. can you cite? before the first Crusaders even got to Jerusalem, they stopped off in random towns to exterminate the Jewish population; there's certainly no parallel on the muslim side. while the muslim fighters certainly practiced slavery and killing prisoners (as did the western europeans), i'm not aware of any documentation of who did it "first". there's strong evidence that the europeans - particularly the beloved King Richard - took it to the next level, executing literally thousands of prisoners outside the city walls so that Salah al-Din's troops could observe the killings. actually, the contrast between Richard and Salah al-Din around the second and third crusades is a fairly constant contrast between the (then) fairly barbaric west and the more civilized east.
note that this trend during the period of the Crusades doesn't seem to be a Christian/Muslim split, nor a European/Asian one, and should not be read as such. the eastern europeans had a wonderful advanced civilization, and they and the muslim world both profited from trade, diplomacy, and exchange of knowledge. the eastern Christians had no problems with muslims living in their cities; they only called for help when the muslims started taking military/political control. until the western Christians got there, Christians, Muslims, and Jews routinely lived in peace together in eastern europe and western asia. it wasn't until this idea was brought back from the crusades that it became even considered possible in most of western europe (Frederick II is an interesting early example, and encountered heavy resistance for it).
to say that either side was innocent, in any meaningful sense of that word, is to be ignorant of history. but so is to say that both sides were more or less the same. also, the specific discussion at hand was as to why the muslim world declined in prominence after about 1300, and a discussion of history is particularly relevant to that, i think.
sigh. this is somewhere between false and obscenely simplistic.
the first crusade was a clear military win for the western europeans, and a clear loss for the muslims (it was also a pretty clear loss for the jews, who got slaughtered along the way, but that's incidental to the conversation at hand). the second and third crusades (in addition to the so-called Children's Crusade and the People's Crusade, which weren't "official" but happened around the same time) were clear military losses for the western europeans and clear wins for the muslims. the fourth crusade was a really odd botch; it's difficult to identify a "winner" there. the western europeans never met their initial objective, that's for sure, but the re-defined it mid-stream - and sacked Byzantium, then the greatest city in Europe - instead. so the eastern europeans and the eastern roman empire were pretty clearly losers there. the fifth crusade was kinda an all-around win: Fred II came in and got the Holy Land back with virtually no fighting, through negotiations - and the muslim in charge was happy to not have to worry about one more flank for a while. after that, it gets a little sketchy about which fights were or weren't crusades (i think the Catholics don't officially recognize the 4th, since the combatants decided to re-define their objectives away from what the Pope had set up). regardless, it's clear that no one side has any sort of solid claim to having "won the Crusades".
but the bigger problem here is that it's really totally irrelevant. let's assume the muslims had a clear military victory in every case. that says nothing about the impact of fighting that war on the culture as a whole. as the western europeans came in and slaughtered whole towns, decimated (in the literal, old sense of the word) populations in full view of the opposing forces, looted lands they occupied... even more modern history is full of plenty of examples of a country fighting a war only to have the cost undo them. the crusades killed thousands, disrupted centers of learning and science throughout the region, fostered a culture of intolerance in what was once the most tolerant region on the planet (it's odd now to think that 1000 years ago, the most important center for Jewish thought was in Baghdad), and ended with the destruction of the muslim world's largest external trading partner, the Byzantine Empire (the eastern half of the old Roman Empire).
this isn't a question of "blame the west for everything" - this is a question of facing up to the ugly parts of our history. the crusades were probably about as ugly as western europe's history gets.
But isn't "mission critical" just anything that a particular business can't live without?
basically, no.
the term is so horribly over-used and misused that it's impossible to draw anything resembling a reliable definition from usage, but take a look at the comparative impact of systems or components. i used to work for a financial services company that provided systems and services to stock trading companies. at the time, this company cleared over half of all trades on the NASDAQ, and small portion of NYSE trades as well. the ITS managers, as well as the entire corporate management, knew exactly how much money, measured in millions of dollars per second, would be lost to our collective customers if our systems went down. that's mission-critical. downtime was simply not an option. by way of contrast, i currently work for a company who's primary business is providing roaming clearing services to mobile operators. we clear several billion dollars a year, have something like 90% of CDMA operators as our customers and something like 20% of all GSM operators as our customers. averaged flow is on the order of a million dollars an hour. that's still a truck load of money, but the business flow is very different - much more batched. if every computer we have is inoperable for a week, our customers will surely be quite angry, and we'd probably lose a few over it, but neither we nor they will get sued over it.
still, it's more complicated than that, really. my current company might not have mission-critical systems, as defined above, but we certainly have mission-critical data - data on customers businesses and traffic that their competitors (often also our customers) would pay dearly for. doing inappropriate things with that data (like giving it to inappropriate people) would get lots of people in lots of trouble.
as it is, though, the term's really more of a marketing buzzword. it doesn't really have a meaning beyond "something the speaker or listener thinks is really important". but it used to, and it was something at least roughly approximated by the above.
one might think that, and it would probably be a sensible way for antitrust law to work, but it seems not to be the way ours works. co-mingling of content creation and distribution seems to just not be a problem for our legal system.
I see this as vaporware before it even comes to release 1.0.
you keep using that word. i do not think it means what you think it means.
the point of "vaporware" is generally that it never gets to 1.0. indeed, most would say that it never hits 0.1, at least not in a form anyone ever gets to look at. the next Duke Nukem is the canonical example - people've been talking about it for years, but hardly anybody expects to ever actually see it. as long as the app is real/available and more-or-less does what it claims, it's not vaporware, no matter how useless (not, incidentally, that i'm endorsing a position that this particular app is useless; i'm reserving judgement on that).
Am I reading it correctly that CNet doesn't understand the difference between launching an executeable stored on an external media device, and somehow running it "on" the media device?
the only thing that surprises me here is that you seem to expect them to. sure, most people can probably deal with the distinction when we're talking about a floppy or CD. but iPods? c'mon, they, y'know, do stuff. the iPod can run software. it's not so crazy to think that it might be doing stuff in this case, too. the fact that it doesn't happen to be in this case is hardly relevant.
CNet's primary audience is not geeks. the closest their target audience gets is ITS managers, and they go more businessy from there.
i had two friends who used to work as bank tellers. their PCs - the ones used to do their job as tellers - had some IM program installed. certainly not company policy: the actual AIM executable was somehow blocked, but these folks had just gone out and gotten some other one (the only instance i'm aware of where non-technical people had actually gone out to get some client other than the default one for that service). this was apparently common practice at the bank. i asked one of them if they were aware of the security risk that caused: "yeah, but the managers don't know." sigh.
so you have to register. big friggin' deal. if it bothers you, plug in bogus data like most of the rest of the world. there's well-known technical work-arounds, like BugMeNot, as well. personally, i'm glad to have people posting links to sources like the NYT and Washington Post, rather than some random blog, where quality of writing is important (hey, that's not to say they uniformly achieve it, but it's a goal there, at least). what annoys me is the stupid disclaimer that every NYT link gets after it. just point me at the info!
actually, 20 years for patents filed today. been the case for a while, thanks (in large part, anyway) to the WTO. there's variation: design patents (as in for artwork, icons, or such) last 14 years. 20 is the general case in any country which signed the relevant WTO agreement (most where patents are likely to be relevant).
first of all, stop the horrible doublethink word games. Stalin wasn't "liquidating" people, he was murdering or assassinating them. calling it otherwise is simply gross.
and no, "history" certainly has not shown that Stalin's rise to power was "best" for Soviet Russia. obvious flaws with that claim include the fact that it obviously wasn't better for the 20+ million Stalin had killed; the resulting Soviet internal economy reinforced a split between Inner and Outer party members, with just as much exploitation of the working class as under a capitalist system (exactly as Trotsky predicted); and, most obviously, without comparative examples it's totally vacuous to claim that history has "proved" anything about a situation. i contend that it would have been much better for Russia, certainly their immediate neighbors, and the world, if Stalin had never come to power, instead having Russia go in a Trotskyite, Marxist direction of actually protecting the working class rather then selling out to it.
also, you're simply wrong about there not being workers uprisings in other places. it certainly wasn't happening as rapidly or dramatically as Trotsky (or Marx) expected/hoped, but it was happening. witness the huge socialist trend in the United Kingdom or much of Europe today - the "global Communist" movements of the era is where the effects we have today come from. and, of course, it was much more global than that. look at south-east asia, south america, or africa, for example, for numerous examples. not to mention the trade unions in nearly every industrialized country in the world, including the poster child for capitalism, the United States. the fact that it was spreading was the basis for the Red Scare in the United States.
finally, Stalin's psychotic tendency to eliminate anyone in his military who didn't entirely tow the entire party line (that is, his line), including his top generals and lieutenants, dramatically weakened the Soviet army. this is why Russia performed so tremendously poorly in the Winter War. the fact that this war served as a wake-up call to Stalin led him to temper this policy in time to avoid sure defeat at the hands of the Nazis, but the fact remains that they had certainly not recovered to the point before Stalin started his massacres.
Stalin killed Communism not just by selling out the ideas, but also by turning it into a ideological pariah. he strove after personal power only, as evidenced by the military nature of his conquests of his neighbors and the cult of personality he built up around him. it's hard to find more then a small handful who've done more to hurt all of humanity through malice or sheer disregard.
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see, my experience is exactly the opposite. i was brought in as IT Director of a medium-sized company. about a half-dozen of the senior execs had blackberries, but none were really happy with them. i was issued one, asked to evaluate it, and make a recommendation. after a little while using the things, i understood why the Blackberries were so unloved. the proposed replacement (this was coming up on 3 years ago; the Treo 600 wasn't around yet) was a Tungsten M. it went over really, really well. everyone who got one thought it was an improvement over the Blackberry. we dumped the Blackberries within a month. folks have subsequently upgraded to Treo 600s and 650s.
now we've got a pair of new execs in from other companies; they brought their Blackberries with them, sadly. and unlike the last batch, these guys are addicted and unwilling to try anything else. i'm not in IT any more, so i don't have the "joy" of dealing with them directly... i just get the stupid email restrictions and whatnot that come with their awful service.
CPA (although i'd not have described it that way before) is crucial to my ability to do my job effectively. then, so is managing it, and being able to decide whether to devote CPA or Real Attention to something. if i'm in a status meeting being given by my boss to the rest of the management here... i pretty much know what he's going to tell them ahead of time, because we've discussed it ahead of time. i use Real Attention for the pre-meeting conversation, and give CPA during the meeting, which doing other background tasks, like checking other status mail. i'd rather be able to do the job using just Real Attention - it would certainly be faster and more efficient, in the long run. context switches aren't free, ever. but in many modern work environments, that's not even an option.
but when i go see a movie, or a friend in a show, or one of my kids' performances, or to a funeral... that's a different issue. Real Attention there is often nice (but i'm not going to make blanket statements about what people's internal states should be at funerals), but turning off the distractions is just basic human decency to the people around you.
"digits"? please.
the thing that annoys me most about what many of the VoIP people are doing is their insistence on keeping the worst part of the network - unintelligent, uninformative, unintuitive identifiers. direct-dial numbers were wonderful a few decades ago - the ability to have modern phone numbers was huge. but we should be done with that by now. especially aggravating the VoIP providers who give me things that look just like phone numbers, but aren't (as in: aren't routable on the PSTN). people - everyone who's going to be up for VoIP, anyway - are just as familiar and comfortable with email-style addresses as they are with phone numbers.
so how many digits will be in the phone numbers of the future? 0.
you're a fun toy. thanks for the entertainment.
i used to think the whole deal with him being exceedingly arrogant was overblown - i'd been on mailing lists with him, and he was arrogant, but no more so than a dozen or so other really good programmers i could name. than i read the mail exchange between him and the NetBSD folks. the amusing thing is that Theo posted that thread, seemingly in an attempt to exonerate himself, but i just kept thinking "shut up before you make even more of an ass out of yourself." it was really amazing.
still, as was pointed out elsewhere, while he's frequently an ass, he's right at least as often and produces some very, very good results. you don't have to be an ass to be good (the fathers of Unix are uniformly good guys, in my experience), but it does earn you some slack.
people get it wrong because the Linux community spent a really long time yelling very loudly that the old model was so simple to understand, and getting really frustrated when people got it wrong. they worked for years to get people to understand the old model (to the extent that people ever really did; x.y.z... which one's significant here again?). it shouldn't be surprising at all that people "still" get this wrong - after all, if there's still multiple trees under active development (2.4.33-pre2 hit a month ago tomorrow), shouldn't one expect to have some sort of standard rule for what goes where, or what to look for where? tracking changes to the linux development model isn't particularly high up on the list of most people's priorities, and, despite whatever you seem to think, such changes aren't, in anything resembling absolute terms, high-profile items. it's also not mentioned on the kernel.org front page, which is, i believe, still the official repository for kernel versions.
or, more simply: yelling "we have these arbitrary rules we made up, that are totally different from our old arbitrary rules; why is everyone stuck on the old arbitrary rules we spent years yelling at them about?" over and over makes you look like a foolish git.
are nuanced, complex, well-reasoned, long-term answers which still show my hatred for Bush allowed? or shortsighted answers which have nothing to do with Bush?
the obvious bias in the question makes it not worth answering. it's also amusing that, not having mentioned any political figures in my earlier post, the assumption seems to be that anyone who believes there's poverty in America and actually cares about that fact can't possibly be a Bush supporter.
actually, that sounds about right.
Everyone's jumping on this guy for pronouncing the death of innovation. But that's not really what he said (or not all of it, anyway). His argument is more that innovation will be focused on services and social changes. Is that really so hard to believe? Certainly all the folks looking to push innovation who were around in the last century seem to be gradually shifting to a service-based model, and there's very sound economic reasons for this. Those same reasons point to a focus on innovation in services over product.
That being said, the guy does say that product-based innovation is over, and that's just nonsense. The focus may be shifting, but there's nothing exclusive about one segment or the other. I suspect the primary motivation here really is for IBM to continue to look innovative despite a dwindling product portfolio (and i think they genuinely are innovative, despite a dwindling product portfolio; it's just this guy's job to sell that image).
Rest assured, innovation is alive and well, the economics of bringing new things out have just changed somewhat. I've got the Next Big Thing right here, actually... or one of 'em, anyway. I know two or three other people who also have the (a?) Next Big Thing. Plenty of innovation going on, if you know how to find it. And if anybody's got some excess cash lying around...
that's largely not the point. hell, i'd take the deal if offered. but i don't have a documented history of abusing my power over millions of people, nor specifically violating terms of deals between me and ICANN. sure, part of the problem is the single point of control, but that's a hard one to solve. the much more obvious, and much easier to solve, problem is who they went with: an abusive, power-hungry company with a really bad track record.
aha! finally a sensible explanation: it's all a ploy by C-SPAN to boost ratings!
of course, the bathroom typically has a soft floor and no sewage or hot water, at least two of the bedrooms are less than fifty square feet, there's a whole in a corner of one and a leak in another, no insulation in most or all rooms... you get the idea. of course, all these places have a porch, three bedrooms, whatever, so they must not be "truly" poor, right? bite me.
i've done plenty of inner-city missions work, too, although not nearly as extensive. you want me to give you a tour of west philadelphia some time? oakland? brooklyn, around where my father grew up? DC? let me take you for a walk around some of the neighborhoods where even the sort of poverty you don't think is "true" poverty is a pipe dream.
i've heard the argument that there's no "true" poverty in this country before. it continues to just make me angry, and demonstrate the profound, saddening ignorance of the speaker. poverty in America is not hard to find; hell, if you live in the right places, it's hard to avoid. are there interesting questions about how we define and deal with poverty? are there problems with our classifications and definitions? is our understanding of the situation less-than-perfect? of course. but you conclusion that there's "almost no true poverty in the US" is ludicrous, stupid, offensive, ignorant, blind, and downright incorrect.
Dear RoW:
I'm an American. I love my country. But we're maybe a little bit crazy right now. Please, for the good of everyone involved, stop enabling us to continue to be crazy bastards. Stop putting up with our shit.
I am entirely certain a coordinated Europe can build a fighter every bit as good at what comes out of the US; same for Japan and Canada, at the least. Why are you jumping through random hoops to get ours? We've become lazy, in many ways - don't make that mistake yourself. It's good for your country to build your own in many cases. Give it a shot! I think you'll find you like it.
You can get by entirely fine without our weapons manufacturers, without our Department of Defense. You shouldn't be following our example in IP law, either, nor paying any attention to what our crazy Department of Homeland Security is doing. We're off the rails right now. With your help, we can get ourselves straightened out, but we need some tough love from our older relatives. We need to be kicked in the bum and tossed from the house. We'll come around.
And don't worry about us going all isolationist. We're too built up into depending on other markets for trade. Get a few key players on board, and it won't take long until even the most conservative politicians change course, even if only for market reasons. Give us a few years, though: we've got to get rid of the mad git running things right now. But get Canada, Japan, China, and western Europe (most significantly the UK, but the EU would be best) to agree, and we'll be right as rain again in three years time. C'mon, give a friend a hand.
Thanks a lot,
A concerned American.
note that this trend during the period of the Crusades doesn't seem to be a Christian/Muslim split, nor a European/Asian one, and should not be read as such. the eastern europeans had a wonderful advanced civilization, and they and the muslim world both profited from trade, diplomacy, and exchange of knowledge. the eastern Christians had no problems with muslims living in their cities; they only called for help when the muslims started taking military/political control. until the western Christians got there, Christians, Muslims, and Jews routinely lived in peace together in eastern europe and western asia. it wasn't until this idea was brought back from the crusades that it became even considered possible in most of western europe (Frederick II is an interesting early example, and encountered heavy resistance for it).
to say that either side was innocent, in any meaningful sense of that word, is to be ignorant of history. but so is to say that both sides were more or less the same. also, the specific discussion at hand was as to why the muslim world declined in prominence after about 1300, and a discussion of history is particularly relevant to that, i think.
sigh. this is somewhere between false and obscenely simplistic.
the first crusade was a clear military win for the western europeans, and a clear loss for the muslims (it was also a pretty clear loss for the jews, who got slaughtered along the way, but that's incidental to the conversation at hand).
the second and third crusades (in addition to the so-called Children's Crusade and the People's Crusade, which weren't "official" but happened around the same time) were clear military losses for the western europeans and clear wins for the muslims.
the fourth crusade was a really odd botch; it's difficult to identify a "winner" there. the western europeans never met their initial objective, that's for sure, but the re-defined it mid-stream - and sacked Byzantium, then the greatest city in Europe - instead. so the eastern europeans and the eastern roman empire were pretty clearly losers there.
the fifth crusade was kinda an all-around win: Fred II came in and got the Holy Land back with virtually no fighting, through negotiations - and the muslim in charge was happy to not have to worry about one more flank for a while.
after that, it gets a little sketchy about which fights were or weren't crusades (i think the Catholics don't officially recognize the 4th, since the combatants decided to re-define their objectives away from what the Pope had set up). regardless, it's clear that no one side has any sort of solid claim to having "won the Crusades".
but the bigger problem here is that it's really totally irrelevant. let's assume the muslims had a clear military victory in every case. that says nothing about the impact of fighting that war on the culture as a whole. as the western europeans came in and slaughtered whole towns, decimated (in the literal, old sense of the word) populations in full view of the opposing forces, looted lands they occupied... even more modern history is full of plenty of examples of a country fighting a war only to have the cost undo them. the crusades killed thousands, disrupted centers of learning and science throughout the region, fostered a culture of intolerance in what was once the most tolerant region on the planet (it's odd now to think that 1000 years ago, the most important center for Jewish thought was in Baghdad), and ended with the destruction of the muslim world's largest external trading partner, the Byzantine Empire (the eastern half of the old Roman Empire).
this isn't a question of "blame the west for everything" - this is a question of facing up to the ugly parts of our history. the crusades were probably about as ugly as western europe's history gets.
dude, you get donuts?
the term is so horribly over-used and misused that it's impossible to draw anything resembling a reliable definition from usage, but take a look at the comparative impact of systems or components. i used to work for a financial services company that provided systems and services to stock trading companies. at the time, this company cleared over half of all trades on the NASDAQ, and small portion of NYSE trades as well. the ITS managers, as well as the entire corporate management, knew exactly how much money, measured in millions of dollars per second, would be lost to our collective customers if our systems went down. that's mission-critical. downtime was simply not an option.
by way of contrast, i currently work for a company who's primary business is providing roaming clearing services to mobile operators. we clear several billion dollars a year, have something like 90% of CDMA operators as our customers and something like 20% of all GSM operators as our customers. averaged flow is on the order of a million dollars an hour. that's still a truck load of money, but the business flow is very different - much more batched. if every computer we have is inoperable for a week, our customers will surely be quite angry, and we'd probably lose a few over it, but neither we nor they will get sued over it.
still, it's more complicated than that, really. my current company might not have mission-critical systems, as defined above, but we certainly have mission-critical data - data on customers businesses and traffic that their competitors (often also our customers) would pay dearly for. doing inappropriate things with that data (like giving it to inappropriate people) would get lots of people in lots of trouble.
as it is, though, the term's really more of a marketing buzzword. it doesn't really have a meaning beyond "something the speaker or listener thinks is really important". but it used to, and it was something at least roughly approximated by the above.
one might think that, and it would probably be a sensible way for antitrust law to work, but it seems not to be the way ours works. co-mingling of content creation and distribution seems to just not be a problem for our legal system.
the point of "vaporware" is generally that it never gets to 1.0. indeed, most would say that it never hits 0.1, at least not in a form anyone ever gets to look at. the next Duke Nukem is the canonical example - people've been talking about it for years, but hardly anybody expects to ever actually see it. as long as the app is real/available and more-or-less does what it claims, it's not vaporware, no matter how useless (not, incidentally, that i'm endorsing a position that this particular app is useless; i'm reserving judgement on that).
CNet's primary audience is not geeks. the closest their target audience gets is ITS managers, and they go more businessy from there.
i had two friends who used to work as bank tellers. their PCs - the ones used to do their job as tellers - had some IM program installed. certainly not company policy: the actual AIM executable was somehow blocked, but these folks had just gone out and gotten some other one (the only instance i'm aware of where non-technical people had actually gone out to get some client other than the default one for that service). this was apparently common practice at the bank. i asked one of them if they were aware of the security risk that caused: "yeah, but the managers don't know."
sigh.
um, why?
so you have to register. big friggin' deal. if it bothers you, plug in bogus data like most of the rest of the world. there's well-known technical work-arounds, like BugMeNot, as well. personally, i'm glad to have people posting links to sources like the NYT and Washington Post, rather than some random blog, where quality of writing is important (hey, that's not to say they uniformly achieve it, but it's a goal there, at least). what annoys me is the stupid disclaimer that every NYT link gets after it. just point me at the info!
actually, 20 years for patents filed today. been the case for a while, thanks (in large part, anyway) to the WTO. there's variation: design patents (as in for artwork, icons, or such) last 14 years. 20 is the general case in any country which signed the relevant WTO agreement (most where patents are likely to be relevant).
this is all nonesense. you need a history lesson.
first of all, stop the horrible doublethink word games. Stalin wasn't "liquidating" people, he was murdering or assassinating them. calling it otherwise is simply gross.
and no, "history" certainly has not shown that Stalin's rise to power was "best" for Soviet Russia. obvious flaws with that claim include the fact that it obviously wasn't better for the 20+ million Stalin had killed; the resulting Soviet internal economy reinforced a split between Inner and Outer party members, with just as much exploitation of the working class as under a capitalist system (exactly as Trotsky predicted); and, most obviously, without comparative examples it's totally vacuous to claim that history has "proved" anything about a situation. i contend that it would have been much better for Russia, certainly their immediate neighbors, and the world, if Stalin had never come to power, instead having Russia go in a Trotskyite, Marxist direction of actually protecting the working class rather then selling out to it.
also, you're simply wrong about there not being workers uprisings in other places. it certainly wasn't happening as rapidly or dramatically as Trotsky (or Marx) expected/hoped, but it was happening. witness the huge socialist trend in the United Kingdom or much of Europe today - the "global Communist" movements of the era is where the effects we have today come from.
and, of course, it was much more global than that. look at south-east asia, south america, or africa, for example, for numerous examples. not to mention the trade unions in nearly every industrialized country in the world, including the poster child for capitalism, the United States. the fact that it was spreading was the basis for the Red Scare in the United States.
finally, Stalin's psychotic tendency to eliminate anyone in his military who didn't entirely tow the entire party line (that is, his line), including his top generals and lieutenants, dramatically weakened the Soviet army. this is why Russia performed so tremendously poorly in the Winter War. the fact that this war served as a wake-up call to Stalin led him to temper this policy in time to avoid sure defeat at the hands of the Nazis, but the fact remains that they had certainly not recovered to the point before Stalin started his massacres.
Stalin killed Communism not just by selling out the ideas, but also by turning it into a ideological pariah. he strove after personal power only, as evidenced by the military nature of his conquests of his neighbors and the cult of personality he built up around him. it's hard to find more then a small handful who've done more to hurt all of humanity through malice or sheer disregard.
clearly you weren't paying attention the first time.