With hindsight, all decisions are easy. Carter caught a lot of flak for being a president with self-doubt in a nation that was very much in doubt over its future. Carter didn't like what the CIA was doing all over the world at the time (and still is), and it was not clear whether the US status as a superpower would continue for long.
I take that over GWB's blunders and his righteous attitude, but each to their own. Reagan returned a lot of confidence to the nation, but he made a few mistakes as well (Iran-Contra, perhaps?). Reagan got a lot of credit for killing off the USSR, but in reality most of the change in Russia was coming from within. The changes that happen in the world can rarely be attributed to a single person.
In time it may well be that historians recognize Carter's attitude and achievements better than they are now.
Of course Carter inherited the Iranian crisis. This is something that had been brewing for decades.
First the West, including the USA, forced a democratically elected government out of office in the 1950s. From Wikipedia :
In 1951, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, a nationalist, received the vote required from the parliament to nationalize the British-owned oil industry, in a situation known as the Abadan Crisis. Despite British pressure, including an economic blockade which caused real hardship, the nationalization continued. Mossadegh was briefly forced from power in 1952 but was quickly re-elected by an overwhelming majority, returned, and forced the Shah to flee. Mossadegh then declared a republic, but a few days later the Shah returned and again forced Mossadegh from office on August 19 with U.S. CIA and government support -- Operation Ajax. Mossadegh was arrested and a new prime minister was appointed.
Second, the West including the US, started exploiting the Iranian oil fields (same source)
In return for the US support the Shah agreed, in 1954, to allow an international consortium of British (40%), American (40%), French (6%), and Dutch (14%) companies to run the Iranian oil facilities for the next 25 years, with profits shared equally. The international consortium agreed to a fifty-fifty split of profits with Iran but would not allow Iran to audit their accounts to confirm the consortium was reporting profits properly, nor would they allow Iran to have members on their board of directors.
If anything, Carter can be blamed for trying to curb the power of the CIA, which at the time was very involved in overturning non-US-friendly government all over the world, most notably in Chile.
I have great trouble believing the hostage rescue fiasco had anything to do with lack of resources in the US army. It seems to me to have been poorly planned and executed, but there are plenty of examples of such poor planning all over the world : Omaha Beach, Bay of Pigs, Munich hostage disaster, etc.
How you rewrite history on Iraq is almost unbelievable. The UN sanctions and the regime of inspections on Iraq were enforced just fine, and they worked. As we now know, Saddam no longer had any WMD. He had complied! What the West was not ready to do was to *lift* the sanctions. They had worked, and now they were just oppressing the Iraqi people.
Bush was desperate to invade to (yet again) grab the Iraqi oil and change the regime to settle a long-standing score with Saddam. In international law, at the UN, no one can force a country to change their regime. It has to come from within, but the West and the US in particular was not ready to wait.
Now I'm not so sure that Saddam's regime, horrible as it was, was not worse that what is yet to come to Iraq, not to mention the rest of the world. Iraq is now a wonderful breeding ground for terrorists of all descriptions, surely the result that Bush wanted most to avoid.
As far as I'm aware, Greenpeace had little to do with this story, more like grassroot protesters and Apple's own shareholders, who rightly said Dell and HP had both better policies. Apple did appear with a bad score in a Greenpeace report, but that's one voice amongst many.
Recycling is important, Apple is flush with cash and rides on the image of a modern, innovative, user-friendly company. It should be recycling more, but doesn't. In particular, currently its recycling program is limited to the continental US. I think this is not good enough. Fortunately, other companies have much better policies, whose goal is to become global.
It's interesting so watch what happens when reality intrudes harshly on the image Apple wants to give of itself.
Excel is only nice if you've never used anything else to do number crunching. For a start Excel is inaccurate and sometimes downright wrong. Microsoft has known this for a long time and not done much to correct the situation.
The thought that Excel is used to do anything serious involving decision making beyond simple spreadsheet calculations in the real world gives me the creeps.
I'm assuming basic free choice, yes, but not in the direction you assume.
In many countries with population problems, even very poor ones like African nations and India, contraceptives are available freely : condoms, the Pill, IUD and even chirurgy where available, up to free abortions. Education about family planning is also widespread. These are very cheap options compared to increased population burden. Family planning are very big items in the government of such nations.
In many nations, people exercise free choice in the direction of large families despite strong government incentives to have fewer children. The situation is particularly intense in China in that regard.
There are still some countries where governments disapprove of contraception, but these are in the minority.
Exactly, this sort of extravagant sum is not something the vast majority of people can ever pay up. Talk about destroying someone's life for something relatively petty.
Sorry, are you sure you know what you are talking about ?
> right now the single biggest thing in which windows kicks linux's ass is ease of software installation/uninstallation
No way. Please uninstall Internet Explorer for me on your XP install please, I'd like to see how you can achieve that.
There is nothing under Windows that matches aptitude or yumex. Simply browse for available software, select it with a click of the mouse and it gets installed.
Compare that with the nightmare of typical GUI-based installers for most software under Windows, that require administrator rights for installing the said software (not just power-user) and administrator rights to/run/. I'm talking about mainstream stuff like Doom3 for example.
Actually the evidence is rather on the side that if you can reliably feed everyone in a country, then natality drops like a brick there.
People in underdeveloped countries that tend to have lots of children need them in later life to take care of their aged parent who would otherwise starve.
People in more developed countries have way fewer children because they by and large want to do something else with their life than care for lots of brats. I'm saying this as a parent.
My own argument against MOND and suchlike gravity mods is that they are totally ad-hoc. Modifying gravity is nice, but to be convincing it would be better to come up with beliveable first principles from which such a modified theory would emerge, rather than adding random free parameters with no basis in reality.
Actually Special Relativity might be a mathematical curiosity because a simple set of equations predict some interesting observation, but SR really explains little.
In contrast, General Relativity is not what I would call a mathematical curiosity. Indeed Einstein was all the way guided by simple yet deep physical first principles : that things should remain local (no strange instantaneous interaction at a distance) and that essentially acceleration and gravity are one and the same thing. Indeed Einstein had a great deal of trouble expressing these principles in mathematical form, and required considerable help in that matter, for example from Grossman and Hilbert. Hilbert however, even though he was one of the most gifted mathematician of his time, was unable to complete GR unlike Einstein, because simply playing with the mathematics does not give any sense of direction.
Einstein in contrast, was able to finally express GRT precisely because of these guiding principles.
So in this case, mathematics was a tool that later allowed predictions to be made precisely in mathematical form, but mathematics did not by itself predict anything.
You make good points, but the devil is in the details. Long post follows :
Relative to your point (2) Some scientists have proposed that indeed gravity doesn't work as simply as General Relativity explains it, in particular, the simplest one called MOND assumes that gravity weakens with distance. It is sufficient to explain the rotating galaxy artifacts that you mention, however MOND is purely phenomenological, in other words it does not provide a mechanism by which gravity should weaken. It can be adjusted to rotating galaxies observations by modifying a couple of parameters, but it explains nothing.
With regards to (1), scientists are loath to abandon GRT because it is funded on very simple principles (essentially everything is local and the effects of acceleration and gravity cannot be distinguished) and explains so much with so little. There are myriads of ways to extend GRT in such a fashion as to explain observations by playing with the equations but AFAIK none can be derived from simple first principles unlike plain Jane GRT.
Indeed the simplest explanation to the observations is to admit that there is a great deal of matter in the universe that doesn't interact with normal matter as usual (it doesn't heat up in the same way for example) and is therefore dark, but does possess mass and affects observations. Of course it looks as if an enormous list of free parameters has just been added to GRT, but this is not innocuous. Dark matters, if it exists, should show up in observations other than with rotating galaxy data.
Now the new data is not derived from rotating stars but from large clouds of galaxies attracting each other. This is precisely why this is interesting, because it does look as if the new data confirms the existence of some kind of matter that doesn't heat up in the normal way and attracts normal matter, but this time not in a rotating framework, more in a translating framework. This is something that MOND does not explain.
Also perhaps we can design experiments that would prove the existence of dark matter in the lab. We already know about neutrinos, which fits the description of a kind of dark matter. Neutrinos do not interact through the electro-magnetic force or the strong force, they don't interact with normal matter, they don't heat up. They are very hard to observe due to this fact, and to characterize. However we have been able to prove their existence in the last few decades via indirect effects, and to prove they have mass. Neutrinos are very light though, we would need absolute humongous amounts of them to explain the vast quantities of dark matter that would explain the observation, and thus a mechanism that would generate such huge quantities of neutrinos.
Or perhaps there exists other kinds of weakly interactive particles that are much more massive. This is not predicted by the standard model of quantum mechanics though.
So right now physics is at an impasse : either GRT is wrong or QM is wrong. Probably both in fact, but what we do like is a smallish set of first principles that would guide us towards a better, more comprehensive theory. It was hoped that superstrings would be it, but it's too complicated and right now untestable.
The key points in conclusion : yes you can propose changes in the way gravity works to explain older observations, and some scientists have done so. However these changes are not popular because they are essentially ad hoc and explain nothing. Furthermore the latest observations seem to imply they are not sufficient anyway. Dark matter explains both old and new observations, but we don't know what dark matter is, how it is produced and how to characterize it. Right now this is not satisfactory, but this means new awesome discoveries are awaiting us in the (hopefully near) future. Stay tuned !
12" is not too small for me. it fits comfortably in a plane or train tray where the 15" would be too big -- especially in economy with no elbow room; the display is not hi-res but sufficient for on-the-road work. At the office, I plug it in a large monitor and external keyboard + mouse so it's not an issue. The 12" is more compact in a bag and lighter. The autonomy is sufficient (I've actually worked on the thing continuously for 4h+)
I've upgraded my iBook to a larger disk and DVD writer, now the 1GHz CPU is too slow for some tasks like serious development work, but it's sufficient for most other work. It's not running hot like the new MB and MBP.
I've had it for 2 years, It's changed the way I work completely : I work on various documents all the time (papers, lectures, presentations, application development, etc). I always have everything with me because the computers is so light yet capable. I have all of my e-mails, nearly all of my reference documents, etc.
Most other laptop owners I know (especially PC laptops) don't work that way : their huge laptops (15" +) are either too big and heavy to carry around everywhere, or way too light (subnotebooks, without optical drive typically, a smaller keyboard sometime, and reduced autonomy -- they can't replace a desktop). They are great things but somehow the 12" strikes an imperfect but workable balance *for me*.
I'd mention that I don't like OS/X very much - especially it's humongous memory footprint -- but I cope with it (I prefer Linux).
I just wanted to say thanks for the long, interesting and considerate answer.
For a few more quick points, first let's say that many Australians also have a deep distrust of GWB's motives, but I'm pretty sure neither Europeans by and large or Australians want Bush to fail. I think by now the point has been made that Iraq's invasion was considerably tougher than expected, and no one has a solution. Cut'n run is not going to have positive effects, and on the other hand, Americans will probably not accept another few thousands troop deaths. The US army is not going to like it either, this is dreadful for its future (recruitment, etc). I imagine fewer are signing up for ROTC today. Ultimately this is not so good for US society.
The only way out I can see is to go the UN (which in this context is just a forum) and have a multinational force sent in under US supervision, but including troops from nearby Arab countries. This might mean that Israel will be asked to tone down its bombing of Lebanon and resume talks with Palestinians, etc.
The situation is very complex in the Middle East. I think it would have been easier to wait out on Saddam Hussein and not intervene, but now it is too late. Everyone should join in to defuse the powder keg that is Iraq today.
The last thing I wanted to point out is that one should perhaps not limit one's impression of a country based on what can be read in newspapers. Even though the dispute between old Europe and the US on Iraq was really quite robust, in actual fact anti-terrorism collaboration between the EU and the US is widely regarded as excellent.
What the "little guys" do is perhaps interesting because it's not NASA doing it, but in all honesty, they are doing the same little hops NASA and the Russians were doing in the fifties.
The little guys have a long way to go before they put someone in orbit, let alone reliably.
Thanks for this opinion, it helps understand why there is so little understanding between the US and the rest of the world.
For the record, I'm Australian, and so perhaps somewhat neutral. If I may respond:
> Europeans hold America to a higher standard than you do yourselves
This may be the perception, however Europeans by and large don't pretend to save the world from itself, while simultaneously bombing everyone and pretending to be restoring democracy everywhere in the process. The US government pretends to do this all the time. The US Gov went to the UN in NYC, and basically said "We are going to restore democracy in Iraq" "The Iraqi are going to welcome us with open arms". Don't you remember this ?
Look at the score card, and tell me whose standards weren't upheld again?
> You treat immigrants with such disdain, and then preach about human rights?
Europe has exactly the same problems regarding immigration than the US does. I seem to hear that the federal goverment wants to build a huge wall along the Rio Grande to keep wetbacks out. I heard that Arizona wanted to specifically tax recent immigrants to help build that wall. That's more than disdain, that's downright humiliation.
> You have domestic terrorism problems that you can't solve, and then you presume to tell us how to solve our terrorism problems?
Actually I think Europeans are slowly solving them. The Lockerby Lybians were found and charged thanks to international cooperation. We know who masterminded the Paris Metro attacks, he was recently arrested and extradited to France via the UK. This particular procedure was very long, but European countries have signed an international agreement for faster processing recently.
Notice that the UK didn't bomb Lybia as a result of Lockerby (the US did for other reasons, though!) and that France didn't bomb Algeria for the metro attacks.
Notice as well that internal terrorism is also hopefully being resolved. IRA vowed to disarm a year ago, and went ahead a few month later despite considerable doubt in the Protestant camp that this would ever happen.
The bottom line is that Europe has been coping with terrorism longer than the US have. I hear that the US got some tips from the Israeli. This is good, because if there is a country knows about terrorism, that is Israel. Note that they, too, despite considerable military and financial help from the US, still haven't resolved that issue.
> You are more than willing to ask for our help when things like Bosnia get out of control, but then your population would prefer to snub the US when it needs help?
Bosnia was the best US deed from recent memory. Thanks. However on the Iraq issue the US was not *asking* for help, it was *demanding* it. As in strongarming, refusing debate and even calls to the most basic rule of reason. Note that in the case of Afghanistan, where terrorists and 9/11 masterminds were harboured, *many* nations responded to the call. Even the French, who count 7 casualties so far in Afghanistan.
Regarding Iraq, it was well-known that Iraq was not involved. GWB wanted to go there to settle some kind of score and grab the 2nd largest known reserves of oil in the process. Some European refused, insisting that Iraq was not going to be the easy walk in that GWB was hoping for. Can we blame them?
> Well, from my perspective, you all look like a bunch of racist spoiled children
A very slippery slope here. When I studied in the US, I saw very few African-Americans doing advanced degrees like master's and PhD's. Why is that do you think ? when did the African-Americans acquire
Not racism, which is an important point. Under communism, everyone is opressed equally !
Also fascism advocates a system of society where big corporations are given preferential treatement by governemnt (see automobile and weapons manufacturers in both fascist Italy and Germany). Under communism (of the kind practiced by USSR and China) there are no independent corporation, everything is own by the state.
Correct about the success of the TV shows, but two things :
1- TV shows are low-res. 2- TV shows are purchased, not rented.
This is not the same thing. However if movie rental has good enough resolution and is quite cheap, I'd be tempted for sure. Here in Europe new movie rental costs anywhere between 2 and 4.5 Euros for 24h.
Also note that both in the US and Europe, people can subscribe to Netflix-like services, which start at about 10 Euros/months here. These are the services an iTMS (M for movies) would have to compete againsts.
The XPS is a gaming rig. It looks great on specs but few companies will buy it. Companies who buy DELL for the sort of work done on macs typically buy the "Precision" line.
However, it doesn't change much to your conclusion. A decent dual-core, dual cpu rig powermac G5 from Apple with 2GB of RAM, the Nvidia 7800 graphics card and a 20-inch monitor costs about 5k, whereas the similarly specced Dell Precision costs 3.5k. The difference is substantial.
However the Powermacs are nice, well made and powerful enough, at these prices only relatively rich companies buy them, but evidently Apple wants to be in that market.
Actually, just wanted to point out that really recent video cameras store their video on disks, so the GP might be right and might actually be recording very high quality video.
Except in a few corner cases, SSE2 doesn't improve FP performances by 100%. Real-world applications may see an improvement of a few %, if that. Unless you are doing matrix multiplications all day, it won't matter as much. If you do, sorry, you chose the wrong chip.
Most applications, including the kernel, use exclusively integer computations. I think you'd notice if your kernel was running at 100MHz. You woulnd't be happy.
Personnally, I never thought the Athlon was a great chip. Promising but running too hot. The Athlon64, on the other hand, was a different story.
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Free speech
A 1-minute search on Google reveals this.
Yeah, a whole lot better. An also the US loved the rest of the world better too. All we need is love.
Hi,
With hindsight, all decisions are easy. Carter caught a lot of flak for being a president with self-doubt in a nation that was very much in doubt over its future. Carter didn't like what the CIA was doing all over the world at the time (and still is), and it was not clear whether the US status as a superpower would continue for long.
I take that over GWB's blunders and his righteous attitude, but each to their own. Reagan returned a lot of confidence to the nation, but he made a few mistakes as well (Iran-Contra, perhaps?). Reagan got a lot of credit for killing off the USSR, but in reality most of the change in Russia was coming from within. The changes that happen in the world can rarely be attributed to a single person.
In time it may well be that historians recognize Carter's attitude and achievements better than they are now.
Of course Carter inherited the Iranian crisis. This is something that had been brewing for decades.
First the West, including the USA, forced a democratically elected government out of office in the 1950s. From Wikipedia :
Second, the West including the US, started exploiting the Iranian oil fields (same source)
If anything, Carter can be blamed for trying to curb the power of the CIA, which at the time was very involved in overturning non-US-friendly government all over the world, most notably in Chile.
I have great trouble believing the hostage rescue fiasco had anything to do with lack of resources in the US army. It seems to me to have been poorly planned and executed, but there are plenty of examples of such poor planning all over the world : Omaha Beach, Bay of Pigs, Munich hostage disaster, etc.
How you rewrite history on Iraq is almost unbelievable. The UN sanctions and the regime of inspections on Iraq were enforced just fine, and they worked. As we now know, Saddam no longer had any WMD. He had complied! What the West was not ready to do was to *lift* the sanctions. They had worked, and now they were just oppressing the Iraqi people.
Bush was desperate to invade to (yet again) grab the Iraqi oil and change the regime to settle a long-standing score with Saddam. In international law, at the UN, no one can force a country to change their regime. It has to come from within, but the West and the US in particular was not ready to wait.
Now I'm not so sure that Saddam's regime, horrible as it was, was not worse that what is yet to come to Iraq, not to mention the rest of the world. Iraq is now a wonderful breeding ground for terrorists of all descriptions, surely the result that Bush wanted most to avoid.
Interesting to note that amongst the 8 members there are no women. Sometimes I wonder if Apple is so progressive after all.
As far as I'm aware, Greenpeace had little to do with this story, more like grassroot protesters and Apple's own shareholders, who rightly said Dell and HP had both better policies. Apple did appear with a bad score in a Greenpeace report, but that's one voice amongst many.
Recycling is important, Apple is flush with cash and rides on the image of a modern, innovative, user-friendly company. It should be recycling more, but doesn't. In particular, currently its recycling program is limited to the continental US. I think this is not good enough. Fortunately, other companies have much better policies, whose goal is to become global.
It's interesting so watch what happens when reality intrudes harshly on the image Apple wants to give of itself.
Excel is only nice if you've never used anything else to do number crunching. For a start Excel is inaccurate and sometimes downright wrong. Microsoft has known this for a long time and not done much to correct the situation.
The thought that Excel is used to do anything serious involving decision making beyond simple spreadsheet calculations in the real world gives me the creeps.
I'm assuming basic free choice, yes, but not in the direction you assume.
In many countries with population problems, even very poor ones like African nations and India, contraceptives are available freely : condoms, the Pill, IUD and even chirurgy where available, up to free abortions. Education about family planning is also widespread. These are very cheap options compared to increased population burden. Family planning are very big items in the government of such nations.
In many nations, people exercise free choice in the direction of large families despite strong government incentives to have fewer children. The situation is particularly intense in China in that regard.
There are still some countries where governments disapprove of contraception, but these are in the minority.
Exactly, this sort of extravagant sum is not something the vast majority of people can ever pay up. Talk about destroying someone's life for something relatively petty.
If she shared them, then it's considered redistributing. She would be accused of bootlegging and the penalties are much more severe.
Sorry, are you sure you know what you are talking about ?
/run/. I'm talking about mainstream stuff like Doom3 for example.
> right now the single biggest thing in which windows kicks linux's ass is ease of software installation/uninstallation
No way. Please uninstall Internet Explorer for me on your XP install please, I'd like to see how you can achieve that.
There is nothing under Windows that matches aptitude or yumex. Simply browse for available software, select it with a click of the mouse and it gets installed.
Compare that with the nightmare of typical GUI-based installers for most software under Windows, that require administrator rights for installing the said software (not just power-user) and administrator rights to
Who is kicking whose butt again ?
Actually the evidence is rather on the side that if you can reliably feed everyone in a country, then natality drops like a brick there.
People in underdeveloped countries that tend to have lots of children need them in later life to take care of their aged parent who would otherwise starve.
People in more developed countries have way fewer children because they by and large want to do something else with their life than care for lots of brats. I'm saying this as a parent.
My own argument against MOND and suchlike gravity mods is that they are totally ad-hoc. Modifying gravity is nice, but to be convincing it would be better to come up with beliveable first principles from which such a modified theory would emerge, rather than adding random free parameters with no basis in reality.
Actually Special Relativity might be a mathematical curiosity because a simple set of equations predict some interesting observation, but SR really explains little.
In contrast, General Relativity is not what I would call a mathematical curiosity. Indeed Einstein was all the way guided by simple yet deep physical first principles : that things should remain local (no strange instantaneous interaction at a distance) and that essentially acceleration and gravity are one and the same thing. Indeed Einstein had a great deal of trouble expressing these principles in mathematical form, and required considerable help in that matter, for example from Grossman and Hilbert. Hilbert however, even though he was one of the most gifted mathematician of his time, was unable to complete GR unlike Einstein, because simply playing with the mathematics does not give any sense of direction.
Einstein in contrast, was able to finally express GRT precisely because of these guiding principles.
So in this case, mathematics was a tool that later allowed predictions to be made precisely in mathematical form, but mathematics did not by itself predict anything.
You make good points, but the devil is in the details. Long post follows :
Relative to your point (2) Some scientists have proposed that indeed gravity doesn't work as simply as General Relativity explains it, in particular, the simplest one called MOND assumes that gravity weakens with distance. It is sufficient to explain the rotating galaxy artifacts that you mention, however MOND is purely phenomenological, in other words it does not provide a mechanism by which gravity should weaken. It can be adjusted to rotating galaxies observations by modifying a couple of parameters, but it explains nothing.
With regards to (1), scientists are loath to abandon GRT because it is funded on very simple principles (essentially everything is local and the effects of acceleration and gravity cannot be distinguished) and explains so much with so little. There are myriads of ways to extend GRT in such a fashion as to explain observations by playing with the equations but AFAIK none can be derived from simple first principles unlike plain Jane GRT.
Indeed the simplest explanation to the observations is to admit that there is a great deal of matter in the universe that doesn't interact with normal matter as usual (it doesn't heat up in the same way for example) and is therefore dark, but does possess mass and affects observations. Of course it looks as if an enormous list of free parameters has just been added to GRT, but this is not innocuous. Dark matters, if it exists, should show up in observations other than with rotating galaxy data.
Now the new data is not derived from rotating stars but from large clouds of galaxies attracting each other. This is precisely why this is interesting, because it does look as if the new data confirms the existence of some kind of matter that doesn't heat up in the normal way and attracts normal matter, but this time not in a rotating framework, more in a translating framework. This is something that MOND does not explain.
Also perhaps we can design experiments that would prove the existence of dark matter in the lab. We already know about neutrinos, which fits the description of a kind of dark matter. Neutrinos do not interact through the electro-magnetic force or the strong force, they don't interact with normal matter, they don't heat up. They are very hard to observe due to this fact, and to characterize. However we have been able to prove their existence in the last few decades via indirect effects, and to prove they have mass. Neutrinos are very light though, we would need absolute humongous amounts of them to explain the vast quantities of dark matter that would explain the observation, and thus a mechanism that would generate such huge quantities of neutrinos.
Or perhaps there exists other kinds of weakly interactive particles that are much more massive. This is not predicted by the standard model of quantum mechanics though.
So right now physics is at an impasse : either GRT is wrong or QM is wrong. Probably both in fact, but what we do like is a smallish set of first principles that would guide us towards a better, more comprehensive theory. It was hoped that superstrings would be it, but it's too complicated and right now untestable.
The key points in conclusion : yes you can propose changes in the way gravity works to explain older observations, and some scientists have done so. However these changes are not popular because they are essentially ad hoc and explain nothing. Furthermore the latest observations seem to imply they are not sufficient anyway. Dark matter explains both old and new observations, but we don't know what dark matter is, how it is produced and how to characterize it. Right now this is not satisfactory, but this means new awesome discoveries are awaiting us in the (hopefully near) future. Stay tuned !
I hope this helps.
12" is not too small for me. it fits comfortably in a plane or train tray where the 15" would be too big -- especially in economy with no elbow room; the display is not hi-res but sufficient for on-the-road work. At the office, I plug it in a large monitor and external keyboard + mouse so it's not an issue. The 12" is more compact in a bag and lighter. The autonomy is sufficient (I've actually worked on the thing continuously for 4h+)
I've upgraded my iBook to a larger disk and DVD writer, now the 1GHz CPU is too slow for some tasks like serious development work, but it's sufficient for most other work. It's not running hot like the new MB and MBP.
I've had it for 2 years, It's changed the way I work completely : I work on various documents all the time (papers, lectures, presentations, application development, etc). I always have everything with me because the computers is so light yet capable. I have all of my e-mails, nearly all of my reference documents, etc.
Most other laptop owners I know (especially PC laptops) don't work that way : their huge laptops (15" +) are either too big and heavy to carry around everywhere, or way too light (subnotebooks, without optical drive typically, a smaller keyboard sometime, and reduced autonomy -- they can't replace a desktop). They are great things but somehow the 12" strikes an imperfect but workable balance *for me*.
I'd mention that I don't like OS/X very much - especially it's humongous memory footprint -- but I cope with it (I prefer Linux).
I just wanted to say thanks for the long, interesting and considerate answer.
For a few more quick points, first let's say that many Australians also have a deep distrust of GWB's motives, but I'm pretty sure neither Europeans by and large or Australians want Bush to fail. I think by now the point has been made that Iraq's invasion was considerably tougher than expected, and no one has a solution. Cut'n run is not going to have positive effects, and on the other hand, Americans will probably not accept another few thousands troop deaths. The US army is not going to like it either, this is dreadful for its future (recruitment, etc). I imagine fewer are signing up for ROTC today. Ultimately this is not so good for US society.
The only way out I can see is to go the UN (which in this context is just a forum) and have a multinational force sent in under US supervision, but including troops from nearby Arab countries. This might mean that Israel will be asked to tone down its bombing of Lebanon and resume talks with Palestinians, etc.
The situation is very complex in the Middle East. I think it would have been easier to wait out on Saddam Hussein and not intervene, but now it is too late. Everyone should join in to defuse the powder keg that is Iraq today.
The last thing I wanted to point out is that one should perhaps not limit one's impression of a country based on what can be read in newspapers. Even though the dispute between old Europe and the US on Iraq was really quite robust, in actual fact anti-terrorism collaboration between the EU and the US is widely regarded as excellent.
What the "little guys" do is perhaps interesting because it's not NASA doing it, but in all honesty, they are doing the same little hops NASA and the Russians were doing in the fifties.
The little guys have a long way to go before they put someone in orbit, let alone reliably.
Thanks for this opinion, it helps understand why there is so little understanding between the US and the rest of the world.
:
For the record, I'm Australian, and so perhaps somewhat neutral. If I may respond
> Europeans hold America to a higher standard than you do yourselves
This may be the perception, however Europeans by and large don't pretend to save the world from itself, while simultaneously bombing everyone and pretending to be restoring democracy everywhere in the process. The US government pretends to do this all the time. The US Gov went to the UN in NYC, and basically said "We are going to restore democracy in Iraq" "The Iraqi are going to welcome us with open arms". Don't you remember this ?
Look at the score card, and tell me whose standards weren't upheld again?
> You treat immigrants with such disdain, and then preach about human rights?
Europe has exactly the same problems regarding immigration than the US does. I seem to hear that the federal goverment wants to build a huge wall along the Rio Grande to keep wetbacks out. I heard that Arizona wanted to specifically tax recent immigrants to help build that wall. That's more than disdain, that's downright humiliation.
> You have domestic terrorism problems that you can't solve, and then you presume to tell us how to solve our terrorism problems?
Actually I think Europeans are slowly solving them. The Lockerby Lybians were found and charged thanks to international cooperation. We know who masterminded the Paris Metro attacks, he was recently arrested and extradited to France via the UK. This particular procedure was very long, but European countries have signed an international agreement for faster processing recently.
Notice that the UK didn't bomb Lybia as a result of Lockerby (the US did for other reasons, though!) and that France didn't bomb Algeria for the metro attacks.
Notice as well that internal terrorism is also hopefully being resolved. IRA vowed to disarm a year ago, and went ahead a few month later despite considerable doubt in the Protestant camp that this would ever happen.
The bottom line is that Europe has been coping with terrorism longer than the US have. I hear that the US got some tips from the Israeli. This is good, because if there is a country knows about terrorism, that is Israel. Note that they, too, despite considerable military and financial help from the US, still haven't resolved that issue.
> You are more than willing to ask for our help when things like Bosnia get out of control, but then your population would prefer to snub the US when it needs help?
Bosnia was the best US deed from recent memory. Thanks. However on the Iraq issue the US was not *asking* for help, it was *demanding* it. As in strongarming, refusing debate and even calls to the most basic rule of reason. Note that in the case of Afghanistan, where terrorists and 9/11 masterminds were harboured, *many* nations responded to the call. Even the French, who count 7 casualties so far in Afghanistan.
Regarding Iraq, it was well-known that Iraq was not involved. GWB wanted to go there to settle some kind of score and grab the 2nd largest known reserves of oil in the process. Some European refused, insisting that Iraq was not going to be the easy walk in that GWB was hoping for. Can we blame them?
> Well, from my perspective, you all look like a bunch of racist spoiled children
A very slippery slope here. When I studied in the US, I saw very few African-Americans doing advanced degrees like master's and PhD's. Why is that do you think ? when did the African-Americans acquire
Hello,
> lets see, communism matches all of that.
Not racism, which is an important point. Under communism, everyone is opressed equally !
Also fascism advocates a system of society where big corporations are given preferential treatement by governemnt (see automobile and weapons manufacturers in both fascist Italy and Germany). Under communism (of the kind practiced by USSR and China) there are no independent corporation, everything is own by the state.
No, DRM has gotten worse since iTMS debuted. It used to be that you could strip the DRM right off the files thanks to DVD Jon's work.
Since iTMS 5 this doesn't work anymore, and I've stopped buying music there, as a result.
Correct about the success of the TV shows, but two things :
1- TV shows are low-res.
2- TV shows are purchased, not rented.
This is not the same thing. However if movie rental has good enough resolution and is quite cheap, I'd be tempted for sure. Here in Europe new movie rental costs anywhere between 2 and 4.5 Euros for 24h.
Also note that both in the US and Europe, people can subscribe to Netflix-like services, which start at about 10 Euros/months here. These are the services an iTMS (M for movies) would have to compete againsts.
The XPS is a gaming rig. It looks great on specs but few companies will buy it. Companies who buy DELL for the sort of work done on macs typically buy the "Precision" line.
However, it doesn't change much to your conclusion. A decent dual-core, dual cpu rig powermac G5 from Apple with 2GB of RAM, the Nvidia 7800 graphics card and a 20-inch monitor costs about 5k, whereas the similarly specced Dell Precision costs 3.5k. The difference is substantial.
However the Powermacs are nice, well made and powerful enough, at these prices only relatively rich companies buy them, but evidently Apple wants to be in that market.
Actually, just wanted to point out that really recent video cameras store their video on disks, so the GP might be right and might actually be recording very high quality video.
A large proportion of HD cameras record on disk.
Except in a few corner cases, SSE2 doesn't improve FP performances by 100%. Real-world applications may see an improvement of a few %, if that. Unless you are doing matrix multiplications all day, it won't matter as much. If you do, sorry, you chose the wrong chip.
Most applications, including the kernel, use exclusively integer computations. I think you'd notice if your kernel was running at 100MHz. You woulnd't be happy.
Personnally, I never thought the Athlon was a great chip. Promising but running too hot. The Athlon64, on the other hand, was a different story.