When my wife's homeland was occupied by a liberating power, by a people with a similar culture, some of whom even spoke the same language, there was within a couple years a massecre of unarmed civilians estimated in the range of 20 to 30 thousand people. The next 4 decades were spent under martial law, with free speech not existing, with regular executions of political prisoners and even family members - children included, being murdered, not accidently but as targets. Even overseas political opponents of the government were attacked and killed.
And this was one of those countries were the occupation was comparatively less brutal. No gulags, no death camps.
If you need to be reminded of the difference between that and U.S. attempts to avoid civilian casualties, U.S. forces working with the local government (rather than trying to be the permanent local government), U.S. forces being held accountable for their actions (the guards of the infamous prison photos are now prisoners themselves), and the U.S. leaving after a short occupation, (10 years vs 40 years, for example), then I think the problem is with you.
If they were going to make a game about an evil empire successfully invading the U.S., wouldn't it have made more sense to use China, a rising imperialistic power (just ask there neighbors, with most of whom they have territorial disputes) with a large enough population to support an occupation army?
Thank you RandcidPeanutOil and Dominoes. You've given me something to think about and research. As for not realizing the sounds are different in my own language, I guess that's a possibility. I never realized there were two different "th" sounds until someone pointed it out to me.
What are the limits we truly face in the long term?
How much energy is hitting the earth from the Sun? How much energy is available from the Sun to a ship in space? How much energy is there on earth (from every source including geothermal (there is a lot of heat under the earth's crust) and nuclear power?
What are the limits of genetic engineering (maybe humans of today can't travel far, but what about humans of the future?
There are limits - the earth is pretty darn small and Space is pretty darn big. When you hear those comparisons "peanut in Reading and a small walnut in Johannesburg, and other such dizzying concepts" it seems amazing that a bacteria from the peanut could find its way to the walnut. Apparently we've done it, but how much of the peanut did we destroy in process? How many times can we repeat it? And can we find find a place to go to that makes the trip worthwhile?
You mention the example of the word "West". but that sure sounds like "she" to me. As for not being able to distinguish, there are two "sh" sounds that are very similar. Sometimes I can tell them apart and sometimes I can't, but neither sounds like "C". Pinyin uses "xi" and "sh" for the sounds. Yale uses "shi" and "sh". Zhuyin uses a "T" like character and a character that looks a bit like a "?" but with straight lines.
When I was teaching in Taiwan I tried to teach a couple of older ladies (in their 60s now) their ABCs. They natively spoke Taiwanese of course (and at least one of them spoke Hakka natively too), but when Chiang Kai-shek showed up he made everyone learn Mandarin Chinese. I found interesting (and frustrating) that these ladies had no problem with the initial S sound for words like "Song"(not the music but the dynasty) and "san" (3) or even the mid-word S in "Cheesuu" (Cheese by someone who can't do a final S), but they could not say the letter "C". It always came out "she". All these years later and I still don't understand it.
The Japanese language is similar in that their S sounds are sa, shi, su, se, so. I don't know how much trouble Japanese people have saying "si" (C).
Excellent point. Also they don't want people looking at the past and discovering that what they've been told is full of lies. And they don't want people looking at what the CPC did to destroy so much of China and kill so many Chinese people. Nor would they want people looking at the history of China's relationship with Taiwan and discovering that maybe Taiwan isn't part of China after all. Nor would they want people realizing that China has a history (both past and current) of imperialism just like the British whom they so love to hate.
(yes, I know this is nearly an exact copy of my previous post, but I didn't have the good sense to preview that one:P)
Excelly point. Also they don't want people looking at the past and discoving that what they've been told is full of lies. And they don't want people looking at what the CPC did to destroy so much of China and kill so many Chinese people. Nor would they want people looking at the history of China's relationship with Taiwan and discovering that maybe Taiwan isn't part of Taiwan after all. Nor would they want people realizing that China has a history (both past and current) of imperialism just like the British whom they so love to hate.
"Chinese" is more complicated than that. First, there are many languages of China. Second, the official language (Mandarin) has far more sounds than Japanese. It is comparable to English in the number of sounds available - including a sound like an L and a couple sounds that resemble and R.
Checking for Japanese using a simple test like that has some sense, but testing for "Chinese" at that time with a simple test makes little sense because the Chinese spoke so many different languages at the time ("Chinese" is like "European" except that Europe was rarely united under a single tyrant the way China often was).
Also, Taiwan was still part of Japan during WWII and many Taiwanese had Chinese ancestry and spoke the same language as people from Fujian province so a Japanese spy from Taiwan could easily pass for Chinese.
And when Tolkien killed of a character (Borimir, Theoden) they stayed dead. (though one could argue about Merry who we were told "saw no more" in what seemed a very final way after the battle with the witch-king)
There are a lot of people who think 'legal' and 'moral' are synonyms. This includes those who want to outlaw everything they think is immoral, and it includes those who will say that as long as someone's behavior ws legal it was alright.
It may not be possible to stop those already addicted for the reasons you state, but making it legal will lower the pricen,make it seem 'ok' to try, and cause more people to become addicted. And they'll run out of money too and have to turn to something else. It would be better to limit the supply so fewer people have the chance to experiment. A good start would be a secure border, but that won't happen because a secure border would also keep out illegal aliens and make rich people pay more to their employees and servants.
My company's hardware is assembled in China, however, many of the base electrical components, switches, capacitors and such, are manufactured in Japan. The assembly lines in China cant build what we need if they can't get the parts.
I'm not sure I see your point. Like Japan, Taiwan does a lot of high-tech manufacturing. Like Japan, Taiwan outsources a lot of low-skilled assembly work to China and other places in Asia.
Good point. Japan hasn't been a low-cost manufacturing location for a long, long time. That begs the question of why not go with Taiwan production even before the quake. I think that you're onto the answer to that question with your post...
Taiwan hasn't been low cost manufacturing for a while also. It's a developed country that does a lot of high-tech manufacturing.
I'm not sure which bothers me more, that we're going in so late (perhaps too late to ensure Quadaffi's removal) or that we're going in after the UN approved it. Why did we wait for the operation to be tainted with the UN's morally handicapped participation?
Couldn't disagree more. Neither party is in favor of freedom.
My post was about right vs left more than it was about parties. The Republicans usually get the votes from the right because they are closer to being right than the Democrats. But sometimes, like 2006 after the Republicans had gone on a spending spree, the Republiicans lose a lot of support from the right.
I have to admit I don't understand the business model that allows the internet to work.
Damn straight you don't. It's good that you know your own limitations, but you charge ahead blindly and make statements that... well... you wouldn't make if you did understand.
Why did the government do that and interfere with the marketplace.
Because there was no marketplace. It did not exist. Where there was just phone lines, the government funded some research to develop it into automated message forwarding sort of thing that grew up into the Internet. They didn't interfere, because there was nothing there to interfere with. Some eggheads had some ideas that something could do something cool, and the government gave them some cash with the expectation that it'd help the military.
So you're saying that without the brilliant government people, no on in the private sector would have seen the potential to make money by connecting their small networks together to form larger networks, and that no one would have seen the potential to make money by offering a service that provides a standard way of connecting those networks and provides cool things like electronic mail? I have confidence that greedy people would have seen the economic benefits of connecting computers and found ways to make money by doing so in ways that neither you nor I can imagine.
I remember at the time that companies like AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy were attempting to start their own networks. If the government hadn't stepped in with the government supported service, mightn't those companies have succeed?
The "government supported service" otherwise known as "the internet", was started well before all those companies tried making their own network. Remember, these companies existed for the purpose of connecting people to the Internet. The reason that they started their own network is because they didn't want to pay THEIR ISP for bandwidth and hosting their own network was cheaper. But this was ultimately doomed because open and free systems are inherently better.
"open and free systems are inherently better". See that's where my confusion come in. The internet was free? So no one had to manage the distribution of addresses and domain names? No one had to provide dns servers? No one had to provide high capacity lines to carry data from one part of the country to the other? Because surely those things cost money and somebody had to pay for it. When taxpayers pay for something, it's not "free".
It is very hard to compete with taxpayer-subsidies systems, but not because those systems are "inherently better".
Woiuldn't competition between them have led to a better way of doing the internet?
No. It turns out that competition between EVERYONE is far better then competition between a couple of corporations. Go figure.
Wait. You're saying that EVERYONE has their own internet, each with its own protocols??
competing firms work hard to offer things the users want. They would have met these demands.
Except that EVERYONE IN THE WORLD being connected to the Internet out-competed their little private networks into the ground. They failed to meet the demands. Now, given time and a hell of a lot of money, sure Prodigy probably could have created something comparable to the Internet on the whole. But oh wait, the internet did all that for free or at a fraction of the price. So Prodigy didn't get the chance.
So who paid for the infrastructure of that internet that out-competed all those little private networks? How money did they get from taxpayers?
their network was free of viruses and malware?
Then it would have had to have been free of user-created content (which it was). And tha
I have to admit I don't understand the business model that allows the internet to work. I do understand that it was started by the government. Why did the government do that and interfere with the marketplace. I remember at the time that companies like AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy were attempting to start their own networks. If the government hadn't stepped in with the government supported service, mightn't those companies have succeed? Woiuldn't competition between them have led to a better way of doing the internet? You can raise your questions about interoperability between systems, or about this service or that service, but we all know that competing firms work hard to offer things the users want. They would have met these demands.
Which brings me to the biggest "what if..". What if those companies in trying to compete with each other had made a determined effort to show that their network was free of viruses and malware? What technologies would they have developed? With the internet being "free" and everyone using the same protocol, there is no competition to see who can build the best network.
People often point to the internet as an example of the benefits of a government sticking its fingers into everything. But think the internet would be better if the government had not gotten involved.
In the U.S. the right has a strong libertarian streak. American rightists like freedom. This indeed make the American right way off from most of the world. 1 billion people in China have a government that does not respect individual rights. Another billion in Africa live under corrupt governments that have little or no limits on their power. The America right is the polar opposite of these, making us very extreme indeed relative to the world. Europe is somewhere in the middle with some rights guaranteed but a lot of economic restrictions as well as free speech restrictions and less respect for religious freedom than America.
you fools gave your houses to the right wing party. right wing parties anywhere around the world, always support corporations over people..
In America, the right-wing tends to support letting the corporations do whatever they want with their own money and resources. The left-wing tends to support letting the government do whatever it wants with the people's money and resources. This includes of course, taking the people's money and giving it to the corporations.
Actually, both political parties take the people's money and distribute it to their favored groups. But at least the Republicans recently have been making efforts to reduce the amount that gets distributed. (They promised to do that before but when power distributed even more money. See the 2006 election to see how conservative and independent voters turned against them at that time.)
If I understand correctly, one of the major problem with ethanol from corn is that corn requires fertilizer, and fertilizer these days comes from natural gas. Or to put it another way, ethanol is a fossil fuel! One of the other problems with ethanol is that it takes land that could be used for growing food and converts it to land used for growing fuel.
How is this grass-based fuel any different? To make it in large quantities won't we still need fossil fuel based fertilizers and large tracts of land?
The biggest thing I didn't get in college was how to plan a project and ask for what I need to make it happen. In high school and college, your time is pretty worthless to the school you're atttending, and they don't care much about new ideas or process improvements you might think of. When you get a job making 10s of 1000s of dollars, you're time is pretty valuable I didn't realize it in that way. My disk drive was slow? Who was I too ask for a faster one? Disk drives are expensive, right? Not when you're company is paying you to sit around waiting for the drive to act.
The switch from a mode of thinking you're on your own making the best of extremely limited resources to a mode of thinking about how to allocate large amounts of money is huge.
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When my wife's homeland was occupied by a liberating power, by a people with a similar culture, some of whom even spoke the same language, there was within a couple years a massecre of unarmed civilians estimated in the range of 20 to 30 thousand people. The next 4 decades were spent under martial law, with free speech not existing, with regular executions of political prisoners and even family members - children included, being murdered, not accidently but as targets. Even overseas political opponents of the government were attacked and killed.
And this was one of those countries were the occupation was comparatively less brutal. No gulags, no death camps.
If you need to be reminded of the difference between that and U.S. attempts to avoid civilian casualties, U.S. forces working with the local government (rather than trying to be the permanent local government), U.S. forces being held accountable for their actions (the guards of the infamous prison photos are now prisoners themselves), and the U.S. leaving after a short occupation, (10 years vs 40 years, for example), then I think the problem is with you.
If they were going to make a game about an evil empire successfully invading the U.S., wouldn't it have made more sense to use China, a rising imperialistic power (just ask there neighbors, with most of whom they have territorial disputes) with a large enough population to support an occupation army?
Thank you RandcidPeanutOil and Dominoes. You've given me something to think about and research. As for not realizing the sounds are different in my own language, I guess that's a possibility. I never realized there were two different "th" sounds until someone pointed it out to me.
What are the limits we truly face in the long term?
How much energy is hitting the earth from the Sun? How much energy is available from the Sun to a ship in space? How much energy is there on earth (from every source including geothermal (there is a lot of heat under the earth's crust) and nuclear power?
What are the limits of genetic engineering (maybe humans of today can't travel far, but what about humans of the future?
There are limits - the earth is pretty darn small and Space is pretty darn big. When you hear those comparisons "peanut in Reading and a small walnut in Johannesburg, and other such dizzying concepts" it seems amazing that a bacteria from the peanut could find its way to the walnut. Apparently we've done it, but how much of the peanut did we destroy in process? How many times can we repeat it? And can we find find a place to go to that makes the trip worthwhile?
You mention the example of the word "West". but that sure sounds like "she" to me. As for not being able to distinguish, there are two "sh" sounds that are very similar. Sometimes I can tell them apart and sometimes I can't, but neither sounds like "C". Pinyin uses "xi" and "sh" for the sounds. Yale uses "shi" and "sh". Zhuyin uses a "T" like character and a character that looks a bit like a "?" but with straight lines.
Or ask a Japanese speaker to say "world".
When I was teaching in Taiwan I tried to teach a couple of older ladies (in their 60s now) their ABCs. They natively spoke Taiwanese of course (and at least one of them spoke Hakka natively too), but when Chiang Kai-shek showed up he made everyone learn Mandarin Chinese. I found interesting (and frustrating) that these ladies had no problem with the initial S sound for words like "Song"(not the music but the dynasty) and "san" (3) or even the mid-word S in "Cheesuu" (Cheese by someone who can't do a final S), but they could not say the letter "C". It always came out "she". All these years later and I still don't understand it.
The Japanese language is similar in that their S sounds are sa, shi, su, se, so. I don't know how much trouble Japanese people have saying "si" (C).
Excellent point. Also they don't want people looking at the past and discovering that what they've been told is full of lies. And they don't want people looking at what the CPC did to destroy so much of China and kill so many Chinese people. Nor would they want people looking at the history of China's relationship with Taiwan and discovering that maybe Taiwan isn't part of China after all. Nor would they want people realizing that China has a history (both past and current) of imperialism just like the British whom they so love to hate.
:P)
(yes, I know this is nearly an exact copy of my previous post, but I didn't have the good sense to preview that one
Excelly point. Also they don't want people looking at the past and discoving that what they've been told is full of lies. And they don't want people looking at what the CPC did to destroy so much of China and kill so many Chinese people. Nor would they want people looking at the history of China's relationship with Taiwan and discovering that maybe Taiwan isn't part of Taiwan after all. Nor would they want people realizing that China has a history (both past and current) of imperialism just like the British whom they so love to hate.
"Chinese" is more complicated than that. First, there are many languages of China. Second, the official language (Mandarin) has far more sounds than Japanese. It is comparable to English in the number of sounds available - including a sound like an L and a couple sounds that resemble and R.
Checking for Japanese using a simple test like that has some sense, but testing for "Chinese" at that time with a simple test makes little sense because the Chinese spoke so many different languages at the time ("Chinese" is like "European" except that Europe was rarely united under a single tyrant the way China often was).
Also, Taiwan was still part of Japan during WWII and many Taiwanese had Chinese ancestry and spoke the same language as people from Fujian province so a Japanese spy from Taiwan could easily pass for Chinese.
And when Tolkien killed of a character (Borimir, Theoden) they stayed dead. (though one could argue about Merry who we were told "saw no more" in what seemed a very final way after the battle with the witch-king)
There are a lot of people who think 'legal' and 'moral' are synonyms. This includes those who want to outlaw everything they think is immoral, and it includes those who will say that as long as someone's behavior ws legal it was alright.
It may not be possible to stop those already addicted for the reasons you state, but making it legal will lower the pricen,make it seem 'ok' to try, and cause more people to become addicted. And they'll run out of money too and have to turn to something else. It would be better to limit the supply so fewer people have the chance to experiment. A good start would be a secure border, but that won't happen because a secure border would also keep out illegal aliens and make rich people pay more to their employees and servants.
My company's hardware is assembled in China, however, many of the base electrical components, switches, capacitors and such, are manufactured in Japan. The assembly lines in China cant build what we need if they can't get the parts.
I'm not sure I see your point. Like Japan, Taiwan does a lot of high-tech manufacturing. Like Japan, Taiwan outsources a lot of low-skilled assembly work to China and other places in Asia.
Good point. Japan hasn't been a low-cost manufacturing location for a long, long time. That begs the question of why not go with Taiwan production even before the quake. I think that you're onto the answer to that question with your post...
Taiwan hasn't been low cost manufacturing for a while also. It's a developed country that does a lot of high-tech manufacturing.
I'm not sure which bothers me more, that we're going in so late (perhaps too late to ensure Quadaffi's removal) or that we're going in after the UN approved it. Why did we wait for the operation to be tainted with the UN's morally handicapped participation?
What would happen to .tw addresses under this plan?
In the U.S. the right likes to think they have a strong libertarian streak.
FTFY. There's nothing really libertarian about the American right wing. Libertarian is Whitman, who the Right would dismiss as a fag.
One can be against homosexuality and still be libertarian. One can be in favor of homosexuality and still be libertarian.
Couldn't disagree more. Neither party is in favor of freedom.
My post was about right vs left more than it was about parties. The Republicans usually get the votes from the right because they are closer to being right than the Democrats. But sometimes, like 2006 after the Republicans had gone on a spending spree, the Republiicans lose a lot of support from the right.
I have to admit I don't understand the business model that allows the internet to work.
Damn straight you don't. It's good that you know your own limitations, but you charge ahead blindly and make statements that... well... you wouldn't make if you did understand.
Why did the government do that and interfere with the marketplace.
Because there was no marketplace. It did not exist. Where there was just phone lines, the government funded some research to develop it into automated message forwarding sort of thing that grew up into the Internet. They didn't interfere, because there was nothing there to interfere with. Some eggheads had some ideas that something could do something cool, and the government gave them some cash with the expectation that it'd help the military.
So you're saying that without the brilliant government people, no on in the private sector would have seen the potential to make money by connecting their small networks together to form larger networks, and that no one would have seen the potential to make money by offering a service that provides a standard way of connecting those networks and provides cool things like electronic mail? I have confidence that greedy people would have seen the economic benefits of connecting computers and found ways to make money by doing so in ways that neither you nor I can imagine.
I remember at the time that companies like AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy were attempting to start their own networks. If the government hadn't stepped in with the government supported service, mightn't those companies have succeed?
The "government supported service" otherwise known as "the internet", was started well before all those companies tried making their own network. Remember, these companies existed for the purpose of connecting people to the Internet. The reason that they started their own network is because they didn't want to pay THEIR ISP for bandwidth and hosting their own network was cheaper. But this was ultimately doomed because open and free systems are inherently better.
"open and free systems are inherently better". See that's where my confusion come in. The internet was free? So no one had to manage the distribution of addresses and domain names? No one had to provide dns servers? No one had to provide high capacity lines to carry data from one part of the country to the other? Because surely those things cost money and somebody had to pay for it. When taxpayers pay for something, it's not "free". It is very hard to compete with taxpayer-subsidies systems, but not because those systems are "inherently better".
Woiuldn't competition between them have led to a better way of doing the internet?
No. It turns out that competition between EVERYONE is far better then competition between a couple of corporations. Go figure.
Wait. You're saying that EVERYONE has their own internet, each with its own protocols??
competing firms work hard to offer things the users want. They would have met these demands.
Except that EVERYONE IN THE WORLD being connected to the Internet out-competed their little private networks into the ground. They failed to meet the demands. Now, given time and a hell of a lot of money, sure Prodigy probably could have created something comparable to the Internet on the whole. But oh wait, the internet did all that for free or at a fraction of the price. So Prodigy didn't get the chance.
So who paid for the infrastructure of that internet that out-competed all those little private networks? How money did they get from taxpayers?
their network was free of viruses and malware?
Then it would have had to have been free of user-created content (which it was). And tha
I have to admit I don't understand the business model that allows the internet to work. I do understand that it was started by the government. Why did the government do that and interfere with the marketplace. I remember at the time that companies like AOL, Compuserve and Prodigy were attempting to start their own networks. If the government hadn't stepped in with the government supported service, mightn't those companies have succeed? Woiuldn't competition between them have led to a better way of doing the internet? You can raise your questions about interoperability between systems, or about this service or that service, but we all know that competing firms work hard to offer things the users want. They would have met these demands.
Which brings me to the biggest "what if..". What if those companies in trying to compete with each other had made a determined effort to show that their network was free of viruses and malware? What technologies would they have developed? With the internet being "free" and everyone using the same protocol, there is no competition to see who can build the best network.
People often point to the internet as an example of the benefits of a government sticking its fingers into everything. But think the internet would be better if the government had not gotten involved.
In the U.S. the right has a strong libertarian streak. American rightists like freedom. This indeed make the American right way off from most of the world. 1 billion people in China have a government that does not respect individual rights. Another billion in Africa live under corrupt governments that have little or no limits on their power. The America right is the polar opposite of these, making us very extreme indeed relative to the world. Europe is somewhere in the middle with some rights guaranteed but a lot of economic restrictions as well as free speech restrictions and less respect for religious freedom than America.
you fools gave your houses to the right wing party. right wing parties anywhere around the world, always support corporations over people. .
In America, the right-wing tends to support letting the corporations do whatever they want with their own money and resources. The left-wing tends to support letting the government do whatever it wants with the people's money and resources. This includes of course, taking the people's money and giving it to the corporations.
Actually, both political parties take the people's money and distribute it to their favored groups. But at least the Republicans recently have been making efforts to reduce the amount that gets distributed. (They promised to do that before but when power distributed even more money. See the 2006 election to see how conservative and independent voters turned against them at that time.)
If I understand correctly, one of the major problem with ethanol from corn is that corn requires fertilizer, and fertilizer these days comes from natural gas. Or to put it another way, ethanol is a fossil fuel! One of the other problems with ethanol is that it takes land that could be used for growing food and converts it to land used for growing fuel.
How is this grass-based fuel any different? To make it in large quantities won't we still need fossil fuel based fertilizers and large tracts of land?
The biggest thing I didn't get in college was how to plan a project and ask for what I need to make it happen. In high school and college, your time is pretty worthless to the school you're atttending, and they don't care much about new ideas or process improvements you might think of. When you get a job making 10s of 1000s of dollars, you're time is pretty valuable I didn't realize it in that way. My disk drive was slow? Who was I too ask for a faster one? Disk drives are expensive, right? Not when you're company is paying you to sit around waiting for the drive to act.
The switch from a mode of thinking you're on your own making the best of extremely limited resources to a mode of thinking about how to allocate large amounts of money is huge.