I appreciate anyone taking the time to think about the important political issues of the day but your post is so riddled with inaccuracies and illogical conclusions that I feel an obligation to point out why this post really, really is not insightful:
"China has more than two countries capable of long term war" - Japan and Taiwan? Japan is an economic powerhouse, but certainly not a military one. The same goes for Taiwan. Both countries rely on American military power. All you are really saying here is that the US is capable of launching a long term war against China. Considering how overstretched the US military already is in Afghanistan, Iraq, and potentially Iran even that apparently obvious conclusion is a little flaky.
Russia? They are struggling to suppress the unrest across the disintegrated mess that was once the USSR.
"Then there is Mayamar, or Burma, or whatever the hell the country is calling itself this week." - For someone taking the time to write such a long post on geopolitical issues it is worth the effort to learn the names of the countries you want to discuss. It really isn't that hard. Myanmar was the name promoted by the military junta since 1989, but the US has continued to refer to the country as Burma. They are the number 1 producer of heroin (and a major producer of amphetamines) in the region, but this hardly constitutes a threat to the military capabilities of China. Especially considering how the US has weathered the storm of drugs coming from South America over all these years.
"Unlike the USA, where we must deal with Cambodia, Burma shares a border with China." - ??!?
"And then there is North Korea right next to China" - North Korea is a major threat to Japan, not China. This also means North Korea is a threat to the US. It only has any real dialogue with China, so in this delicate web of diplomacy China actually gains from this situation.
"China also shares borders with India and Pakistan" - So? The Himalayas pose a problem to any bizarre notions of a pointless land war to conquer worthless tracks of high-altitude land. The resource wars between China and India are all along economic lines, and these will potentially be far more important and devastating to countries in the region.
"A nuclear war could break out there any time." Relations between India and Pakistan have been improving dramatically over the last half year, with a new public bus route opening up from Srinigar in India across the Pakistan border, and a bunch of other important diplomatic meetings taking place indicating Things Are Getting Much Better.
"And here is the bottom line... If the USA stopped supplying exports of food, China would have one of the worst epidemics of famine the world has ever seen." - Business week said 6 hours ago: "China is one of the largest foreign investors in U.S. Treasury securities, with its holdings of $244 billion, second only to Japan." It is making so much money from shifting exports to the US that it is now effectively using that money to prop up a US economy weighed down by disasterous decisions that continue to be made by the Whitehouse.
Your post plumbs the depths of ignorance to levels I have seen before. But to see a post at such a level rated insightful is... absolutely astouding. Even after considering this is Slashdot. Don't be disheartened, keep offering your opinions, but remember in this case that you have got it utterly wrong. This just means you can only but improve.
"They don't work well with the browser interface, breaking all sorts of different things, and they don't use standard controls. Not very usable."
Uneducated bullshit. Flash apps are web apps more than any other technology out there. Instead of verbose, unwieldy XML-based communication we now have fast, binary communication in Flash remoting, which allows you to pass objects from php, asp, java directly into Flash with no parsing. For the last few years it has been easy to develop applications that retain state and work with back and forward buttons - so they can work well within the browser interface. For the last few years there have also been standard interface components, developed in collaboration with usability knobhead Jacob Nielsen.
Once developed, they DO NOT require testing across browsers. Any browser that supports the plugin will behave the same. Instead of addressing my statement you rambled on with some more nonsense like: "Flash is'nt installed everywhere" (er, yes, except that it is the most ubiquitious plugin on the planet - 97 percent), "Flash isn't available for all platforms" (not much is), and "I've seen it break in newer version!" ( yes this sucks, but we've had to deal with this in Java for oh so many years).
"AJAX helps because there was a set of desktop applications that could not formerly be made into equivalent web applications"
Rubbish. For a long time now developers have been able to create rich desktop-style apps using Flash. Apps that are far richer and easier to build than equivalent AJAX apps. Oh, and they work across all browsers, and don't require testing to make sure.
Maybe now that the mainstream Developer Massiv are finally clueing up that they can build apps that don't need page reloads they'll finally get what many of us were loving about Flash all those years ago.
Gosh it took awhile.
http://www.openlaszlo.org/
Used properly Flash is first class when it comes to building Rich Internet Apps that do away with this whole 'Refresh' to change page state idea.
Javascript, XHTML, and CSS can of course do what Flash can do (considering Flash's ActionScript is based on the same ECMAScript), but we're only *now* starting to see good implementations of these technologies that really deliver good web applications thanks to Google maps.
Now with Actionscript 2.0 you have access to a language that's finally emerging as a solid OOP language, but with a VM (the Flash plugin) that craps over anything else when it comes to building client apps. I've quit Java dev for the joys and rewards of developing in Flash. I'm not one of those 'web developers' you love to hate who created the whole skip intro thing, I'm a slashdot-reading, programming geek who sees what an awesome tool Flash is to create astounding next-generation applications.
It never ceases to amaze me how blinkered this tech-aware community is when it comes to Flash. Any technology can be poorly implemented, but the days of horrible sliding text skip-intro multiple alpha-tween flash movies are long, long gone. But just to rile you up here's a *nice* piece of heavy flash work. It's a great promo for an ad agency, integrates audio, video, and has a real 'application' feel, so for those who still don't load frames or images you won't be happy with this:
http://www.agencynet.com/
But not inconsistent
Only in light of your attempt to clarify your position. I would still maintain it is odd, and inconsistent, and certainly not parochial. The US government's interests are not even in the same street as yours, let alone town, so it's hardly a provincial outlook. A naive, nationalistic viewpoint? Perhaps. Anyway, you were just jesting.
Oh, I don't think you have to be a US basher to see that the US government is very good at controlling information, and getting much, much better at it.
You're jesting, of course, but you seem quite happy for the US government to maintain the internet in it's interests, which is a little odd for someone railing against governing bodies attempting to regulate global communications.
"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes."
Don't really need to edit do I? You say he was only talking about tear gas. Why is that? Oh - that's right - your quoting the arguments off www.winstonchurchill.org - a worthy site for sourcing critical, harsh analyses of this controversial figure - right?
Re:So will they finally get rid of that stupid thi
on
Yahoo buys Flickr
·
· Score: 1
...which only appears if the Flickr account holder decides to allow downloads.
If not you can still see the Flashified photos but you cannot view any other sizes and easily download photos.
There are obviously other reasons for using Flash here - the preloader is nice and clean, and obviously more efficient than using some horrible DHTML solution.
Winston Churchill is to blame for the original mess in Iraq, when Britain created that country, and wondered (before being PM) why anyone would have a problem with gassing the natives before dividing up the state.
All anyone recalls to point to his greatness are the one or two 'great' speeches he gave, which were written for him.
The Brits are great at puffing up a man who in reality was a monster:
"[I advocate] using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes [and] against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment. [I do not understand] the squeamishness about the use of gas [...] We cannot in any circumstances acquiesce in the non-utilisation of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier."
- Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State at the British War Office, authorising RAF Middle East Command to attack rebelling Iraqis with chemical weapons, 1919
Re:So will they finally get rid of that stupid thi
on
Yahoo buys Flickr
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Why? Because it stops you from downloading the photos to yr desktop cause you couldn't be arsed doing a screengrab.
Can't see what other reason there would be to get annoyed at this, and maybe that's just what they want.
The slideshow application is fantastic IMHO, and yes it uses Flash.
I like your comment's anti-anti rant. Except the quote you pulled wasn't about G L O B A L I S A T I O N. It was about a free trade agreement whereby the United States uses ths agreement to insert it's own laws into another countries' laws.
This was recently done to Australia, and included extending copyright to 'harmonise' with the United States, and legalise software patents in that country as well. Other nice things included an attempt by the United States pharmaceutical industry to force the Australian government to abolish their subsidy system which makes medicines more affordable for citizens.
I can only assume the author is pointing out that further kow-towing to the United States legal system will mean further sillyness in the Patent office.
Microsoft is NOT just one of many companies playing this game of course. They are the biggest company in the world, and are setting the agenda on software patents as a key plank in their business model. Pointing things like this out is about speaking truth rather than company bashing.
The title of the page is "traffic, estimator, traffic estimates, traffic tool, estimate traffic Google Adwords Support:..."
You can't seriously attribute that to lousy technical writing or editing?
It's Google's site so I don't see why they can't up their pages in rankings. They should have just used a transparent mechanism for doing it instead of using the techniques they ban others from using. That's where they haven't been smart - just be honest and treat certain Google pages like advertised links.
I think your first sentence is trying to say that violence exists throughout society and therefore it is pointless to analyse and manage violent activities in the real world. That's just plain fishy logic, and hardly insightful.
Your second sentence makes no sense so we'll just ignore it.
My question is this: at what point would YOU accept that shoot-em ups have become so realistic, and so violent that they should not be made. There has to be a line that will eventually be crossed, won't there? Let's say from now until the point where you can switch on a VR chip stuck in your head and *really* go and strangle, rape, and dismember people in full glorious virtual reality. Surely there has to be a point where SANE people start to realise that we don't need studies to tell us these games aren't contributing to healthy mental activities.
I used to have the same teen-gamer attitude as you, and scoff at any notion that there are ill effects from these games. But after seeing my 13 year old cousin showing how he can shoot and hack and dismember people in such vivid, realistic ways I was really stunned. Sure the kid isn't going to turn into a serial killer, but is it really contributing to his development as a happy, peaceful, and non-aggressive soul?
It has nothing to do with rights. Let's all get that straight. It's not like a bunch of teenagers have been lobbying congress for increasingly violent video games and taking to the streets to get their voices heard. As if this is a battle for freedom. Quit with that malarky and join real battles like www.nosoftwarepatents.org. Leave the sane ones among us to reflect to some extent on whether it is a good idea to have our children spending hours a week engaging in ever more realistic bloodshed.
wow.
I guess Google didn't have the advantage of reading this interesting post before poaching a key microsoft engineer.
well, you know, 20/20 vision is hindsight, or something. Maybe Google realises now what a mistake they made, after reading this +5 interesting post.
Thank God for Slashdot Mods, or what would I be thinking!
Gosh, where is your IANAL disclaimer!
Copyright infringement is not 'a form of theft', it is copyright infringement.
Theft involves stealing something so that you have deprived the owner of that 'something', whether it is a bike, a car, a camera etc.
When you infringe the copyright of an artist by duplicating their work you have not materially deprived them of that piece of work. They still have it, they can still sell it to others, but they MAY not have gotten a sale from you that they should have.
They ARE NOT losing money, they may have just not gained one sale for every copy that is made. There is a difference.
Your post is far too fishy to be insightful.
that just doesn't work. GPS is providing a service similar to what lighthouses provide, and boat owners are paying for that service when they buy and use GPS products.
Your analogy would only work if, say, the music and movie industries were suing people who bought independant movies and records. In that case customers are turning to alternative product offerings to satisfy similar needs. Note that in both cases they are still paying for a product.
I know you're trying to be funny, but it only works if it makes sense. Thankfully for you Slashdot hardly *ever* makes sense.
I've been travelling throughout Asia and India over the last 8 months - and *all* the local population in internet cafes use Yahoo. Google is unheard of until I introduce it to them. Coke signs are, of course, EVERYWHERE (even places you wouldn't think have paint and brushes to paint the damn things).
There's something fishy about developers who use XML for Rich Web Client Desktop-Like Application Applets. You should be using a string and two cans instead. Technology stinks when SnapperHeads get their hands on it.
Slashdot Mirror
So if you had two different DVDs, and compared the output to identify all personalised data - you could then erase the differing information?
I bought one of these a few months ago: http://www.skypejournal.com/blog/archives/2005/08/ i_like_going_co.php and am very satisfied. Two buttons so you can choose to dial via landline or Skype, and with the Skype In number I can receive calls like a normal landline...
I appreciate anyone taking the time to think about the important political issues of the day but your post is so riddled with inaccuracies and illogical conclusions that I feel an obligation to point out why this post really, really is not insightful:
"China has more than two countries capable of long term war" - Japan and Taiwan? Japan is an economic powerhouse, but certainly not a military one. The same goes for Taiwan. Both countries rely on American military power. All you are really saying here is that the US is capable of launching a long term war against China. Considering how overstretched the US military already is in Afghanistan, Iraq, and potentially Iran even that apparently obvious conclusion is a little flaky.
Russia? They are struggling to suppress the unrest across the disintegrated mess that was once the USSR.
"Then there is Mayamar, or Burma, or whatever the hell the country is calling itself this week." - For someone taking the time to write such a long post on geopolitical issues it is worth the effort to learn the names of the countries you want to discuss. It really isn't that hard. Myanmar was the name promoted by the military junta since 1989, but the US has continued to refer to the country as Burma. They are the number 1 producer of heroin (and a major producer of amphetamines) in the region, but this hardly constitutes a threat to the military capabilities of China. Especially considering how the US has weathered the storm of drugs coming from South America over all these years.
"Unlike the USA, where we must deal with Cambodia, Burma shares a border with China." - ??!?
"And then there is North Korea right next to China" - North Korea is a major threat to Japan, not China. This also means North Korea is a threat to the US. It only has any real dialogue with China, so in this delicate web of diplomacy China actually gains from this situation.
"China also shares borders with India and Pakistan" - So? The Himalayas pose a problem to any bizarre notions of a pointless land war to conquer worthless tracks of high-altitude land. The resource wars between China and India are all along economic lines, and these will potentially be far more important and devastating to countries in the region.
"A nuclear war could break out there any time." Relations between India and Pakistan have been improving dramatically over the last half year, with a new public bus route opening up from Srinigar in India across the Pakistan border, and a bunch of other important diplomatic meetings taking place indicating Things Are Getting Much Better.
"And here is the bottom line... If the USA stopped supplying exports of food, China would have one of the worst epidemics of famine the world has ever seen." - Business week said 6 hours ago: "China is one of the largest foreign investors in U.S. Treasury securities, with its holdings of $244 billion, second only to Japan." It is making so much money from shifting exports to the US that it is now effectively using that money to prop up a US economy weighed down by disasterous decisions that continue to be made by the Whitehouse.
Your post plumbs the depths of ignorance to levels I have seen before. But to see a post at such a level rated insightful is... absolutely astouding. Even after considering this is Slashdot. Don't be disheartened, keep offering your opinions, but remember in this case that you have got it utterly wrong. This just means you can only but improve.
"They don't work well with the browser interface, breaking all sorts of different things, and they don't use standard controls. Not very usable." Uneducated bullshit. Flash apps are web apps more than any other technology out there. Instead of verbose, unwieldy XML-based communication we now have fast, binary communication in Flash remoting, which allows you to pass objects from php, asp, java directly into Flash with no parsing. For the last few years it has been easy to develop applications that retain state and work with back and forward buttons - so they can work well within the browser interface. For the last few years there have also been standard interface components, developed in collaboration with usability knobhead Jacob Nielsen. Once developed, they DO NOT require testing across browsers. Any browser that supports the plugin will behave the same. Instead of addressing my statement you rambled on with some more nonsense like: "Flash is'nt installed everywhere" (er, yes, except that it is the most ubiquitious plugin on the planet - 97 percent), "Flash isn't available for all platforms" (not much is), and "I've seen it break in newer version!" ( yes this sucks, but we've had to deal with this in Java for oh so many years).
"AJAX helps because there was a set of desktop applications that could not formerly be made into equivalent web applications"
Rubbish. For a long time now developers have been able to create rich desktop-style apps using Flash. Apps that are far richer and easier to build than equivalent AJAX apps. Oh, and they work across all browsers, and don't require testing to make sure.
Maybe now that the mainstream Developer Massiv are finally clueing up that they can build apps that don't need page reloads they'll finally get what many of us were loving about Flash all those years ago. Gosh it took awhile. http://www.openlaszlo.org/
Used properly Flash is first class when it comes to building Rich Internet Apps that do away with this whole 'Refresh' to change page state idea.
Javascript, XHTML, and CSS can of course do what Flash can do (considering Flash's ActionScript is based on the same ECMAScript), but we're only *now* starting to see good implementations of these technologies that really deliver good web applications thanks to Google maps.
Now with Actionscript 2.0 you have access to a language that's finally emerging as a solid OOP language, but with a VM (the Flash plugin) that craps over anything else when it comes to building client apps. I've quit Java dev for the joys and rewards of developing in Flash. I'm not one of those 'web developers' you love to hate who created the whole skip intro thing, I'm a slashdot-reading, programming geek who sees what an awesome tool Flash is to create astounding next-generation applications.
It never ceases to amaze me how blinkered this tech-aware community is when it comes to Flash. Any technology can be poorly implemented, but the days of horrible sliding text skip-intro multiple alpha-tween flash movies are long, long gone. But just to rile you up here's a *nice* piece of heavy flash work. It's a great promo for an ad agency, integrates audio, video, and has a real 'application' feel, so for those who still don't load frames or images you won't be happy with this: http://www.agencynet.com/
But not inconsistent
Only in light of your attempt to clarify your position. I would still maintain it is odd, and inconsistent, and certainly not parochial. The US government's interests are not even in the same street as yours, let alone town, so it's hardly a provincial outlook. A naive, nationalistic viewpoint? Perhaps. Anyway, you were just jesting.
Oh, I don't think you have to be a US basher to see that the US government is very good at controlling information, and getting much, much better at it.
You're jesting, of course, but you seem quite happy for the US government to maintain the internet in it's interests, which is a little odd for someone railing against governing bodies attempting to regulate global communications.
"I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes."
Don't really need to edit do I? You say he was only talking about tear gas. Why is that? Oh - that's right - your quoting the arguments off www.winstonchurchill.org - a worthy site for sourcing critical, harsh analyses of this controversial figure - right?
...which only appears if the Flickr account holder decides to allow downloads.
If not you can still see the Flashified photos but you cannot view any other sizes and easily download photos.
There are obviously other reasons for using Flash here - the preloader is nice and clean, and obviously more efficient than using some horrible DHTML solution.
Winston Churchill is to blame for the original mess in Iraq, when Britain created that country, and wondered (before being PM) why anyone would have a problem with gassing the natives before dividing up the state.
All anyone recalls to point to his greatness are the one or two 'great' speeches he gave, which were written for him.
The Brits are great at puffing up a man who in reality was a monster:
"[I advocate] using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes [and] against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment. [I do not understand] the squeamishness about the use of gas [...] We cannot in any circumstances acquiesce in the non-utilisation of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier."
- Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State at the British War Office, authorising RAF Middle East Command to attack rebelling Iraqis with chemical weapons, 1919
Why? Because it stops you from downloading the photos to yr desktop cause you couldn't be arsed doing a screengrab. Can't see what other reason there would be to get annoyed at this, and maybe that's just what they want. The slideshow application is fantastic IMHO, and yes it uses Flash.
I like your comment's anti-anti rant. Except the quote you pulled wasn't about G L O B A L I S A T I O N. It was about a free trade agreement whereby the United States uses ths agreement to insert it's own laws into another countries' laws.
This was recently done to Australia, and included extending copyright to 'harmonise' with the United States, and legalise software patents in that country as well. Other nice things included an attempt by the United States pharmaceutical industry to force the Australian government to abolish their subsidy system which makes medicines more affordable for citizens.
I can only assume the author is pointing out that further kow-towing to the United States legal system will mean further sillyness in the Patent office.
Microsoft is NOT just one of many companies playing this game of course. They are the biggest company in the world, and are setting the agenda on software patents as a key plank in their business model. Pointing things like this out is about speaking truth rather than company bashing.
The title of the page is "traffic, estimator, traffic estimates, traffic tool, estimate traffic Google Adwords Support:..."
You can't seriously attribute that to lousy technical writing or editing?
It's Google's site so I don't see why they can't up their pages in rankings. They should have just used a transparent mechanism for doing it instead of using the techniques they ban others from using. That's where they haven't been smart - just be honest and treat certain Google pages like advertised links.
I think your first sentence is trying to say that violence exists throughout society and therefore it is pointless to analyse and manage violent activities in the real world. That's just plain fishy logic, and hardly insightful.
Your second sentence makes no sense so we'll just ignore it.
My question is this: at what point would YOU accept that shoot-em ups have become so realistic, and so violent that they should not be made. There has to be a line that will eventually be crossed, won't there? Let's say from now until the point where you can switch on a VR chip stuck in your head and *really* go and strangle, rape, and dismember people in full glorious virtual reality. Surely there has to be a point where SANE people start to realise that we don't need studies to tell us these games aren't contributing to healthy mental activities.
I used to have the same teen-gamer attitude as you, and scoff at any notion that there are ill effects from these games. But after seeing my 13 year old cousin showing how he can shoot and hack and dismember people in such vivid, realistic ways I was really stunned. Sure the kid isn't going to turn into a serial killer, but is it really contributing to his development as a happy, peaceful, and non-aggressive soul?
It has nothing to do with rights. Let's all get that straight. It's not like a bunch of teenagers have been lobbying congress for increasingly violent video games and taking to the streets to get their voices heard. As if this is a battle for freedom. Quit with that malarky and join real battles like www.nosoftwarepatents.org. Leave the sane ones among us to reflect to some extent on whether it is a good idea to have our children spending hours a week engaging in ever more realistic bloodshed.
wow.
I guess Google didn't have the advantage of reading this interesting post before poaching a key microsoft engineer.
well, you know, 20/20 vision is hindsight, or something. Maybe Google realises now what a mistake they made, after reading this +5 interesting post.
Thank God for Slashdot Mods, or what would I be thinking!
Only in America.
No, some of them are not peer-reviewed, they're inconclusive but they're still food for thought.
- Radiation20jun02.htm
e en_mobile_phones/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4113989.stm
http://www.mindfully.org/Health/2002/Mobile-Phone
http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/08/link_betw
http://www.microwavenews.com/clearerpicture.html
http://www.emrnetwork.org/schools/macopinion.htm
dude - everyone has 50 invites to give out now, so I don't know why you need to add this to your sig.
ha ha herrrr. sigh.
Gosh, where is your IANAL disclaimer! Copyright infringement is not 'a form of theft', it is copyright infringement. Theft involves stealing something so that you have deprived the owner of that 'something', whether it is a bike, a car, a camera etc. When you infringe the copyright of an artist by duplicating their work you have not materially deprived them of that piece of work. They still have it, they can still sell it to others, but they MAY not have gotten a sale from you that they should have. They ARE NOT losing money, they may have just not gained one sale for every copy that is made. There is a difference. Your post is far too fishy to be insightful.
that just doesn't work. GPS is providing a service similar to what lighthouses provide, and boat owners are paying for that service when they buy and use GPS products.
Your analogy would only work if, say, the music and movie industries were suing people who bought independant movies and records. In that case customers are turning to alternative product offerings to satisfy similar needs. Note that in both cases they are still paying for a product.
I know you're trying to be funny, but it only works if it makes sense. Thankfully for you Slashdot hardly *ever* makes sense.
I've been travelling throughout Asia and India over the last 8 months - and *all* the local population in internet cafes use Yahoo. Google is unheard of until I introduce it to them. Coke signs are, of course, EVERYWHERE (even places you wouldn't think have paint and brushes to paint the damn things).
640k is already way too much!
There's something fishy about developers who use XML for Rich Web Client Desktop-Like Application Applets.
You should be using a string and two cans instead.
Technology stinks when SnapperHeads get their hands on it.