Basically computers as they are now are all screwed up, everything is the wrong way around! Right now to use a computer you have to learn how the computer works, you have to train yourself around a system that if you have no experience with is like few things you likely have seen before.
The reason why you "have it down pat" is because you fortunatly have likey spent a good portion of your life working with computers, you know how they work, and you can use them to their full potential. But is this the most efficient way to use computers? Yes, you say because it's all you know. I dont think it is.
For probably the first time in my life i have read MS-marketing fud and actually thought they were onto something. Computers are insanely stupid right now, so many things about them are border-line idiodic. Some of those basic 'luser' questions (scenarios as Gates called them) in that article are eye opening when you look at them from at least one perspective.
Makes you think, how did the design of so much in PC UI's get to such a 'odd' state?
I agree that it's time to redesign things in a big way, most of the annoying things are artifacts of limitations of the past, for a classic example look at that qwerty keyboard your using....
ps. I dont think this "Longhorn" plan is in any way about, just another way to let your boss/govt/etc spy on you...
Really? Show me where Microsoft spends 10s of millions on Windows Update. They're smarter then that. Besides, I hardly consider security updates "support", and I hardly consider $10s of millions a significant percentage of their overhead. It's less then their monthly engineering payroll.
Have you seen Technet? Sure the CD in a folder version costs you $1000/year, but all of that information is free on the web; technical notes, service packs, problem fixes, installation guides, deployment guides, migaration tools / guides, etc, etc. Which all cost's money.
If you havn't used technet, then frankly you have not used the single best support resource available for free in the world. (But that's not the point here) I would think MS's tech-support costs are also increased up by phone support, as contarary to common knowledge when an MS bug causes your server to crash, those support calls are free. Also when you call for a fix that is not freely available, those calls are free. (nb, i said server there for a reason, I don't mean your home copy of Win98! But it would include your work pc.) That all add's up to ten's of millions of dollars...
Not interfering with market forces is a very new concept. It's quite alright to 'dabble' in alternate methods of capitalist government, but history has shown time and time again that monopolies are bad, think Standard Oil, AT&T, for some big American examples in the 20th century.
If the Republican party is happy to ignore so much that has been learned from history, and at the same time accept millions of dollars from today's monopolistic compaines then in my opinion they deserve every negative accusation that can by thrown at them!
As I understand the way it all works, it is not a legal requirement that NOBODY in Australia can access site 'xyz', ie mass-censorship such as in China. As someone else has already pointed out there are two parts to it all, firstly any 'offending' site hosted in.au can be shutdown if complained about. In a similar way as when you post Scientoligist secret on/. they tend to disappear..
Secondly ISP's must have the facility to block certain sites. This is the big one, as it means essentially ISP's would be censoring the Internet as a whole. BUT this is not how this is implemented, in fact as I understand it, there is mearly a provision in the law that ISP's must 'provide a means to censor', what that mean's in _reality_ is they bundle NetNanny with their accounts to families. No transparent proxy ip blocking, no DNS blocking, for you me and my next door neighbour, NOTHING. But when the family across the street ask's their ISP about 'protecting their kids', the sales person says yes we can provide you with this software to "protect your children".
Notice Venus in this list - an Earth-sized planet has a gravity well deep enough to hold an inhospitably thick atmosphere.
Venus's development into what it is today has as much to do with its proximity to the sun as it's ability to hold such a large atmosphere, well at least in most material I have read. Earth too one day will end up very similar (although not such a thick atmosphere) but essentially Venus is often referred to as having a Green house effect out of control.
Eventually in the next couple of billion years Earth will heat up as the Sun expands further to the point where eventually we will be constantly covered in clouds, and eventually the oceans will boil.
An interesting idea, if the planets Venus and Mars were swapped around, both would likely be far closer to being habitable.
I really wanted to take your post seriously, that is until I read the word "audiophiles". Audiophiles, i.e. morons who buy pure silver speaker cables and special sound-improving lotions to bathe their CDs in (I'm not kidding) at horrendous prices can't possibly be taken seriously.
Despite being completly off-topic (and also not being an audiophile) your description of Audiophiles would sit right next to my description of many Gaming enthusiasts / overclocker, who would spend $700 on a video card to give an extra 20fps (total of 150fps) on their 80hz monitor. Or even better someone who would spend even more on a liquid cooled case in order to overclock a cpu to give a 3% real performance increase!
Of course im not implying you are such a person, just that in every 'hobby' there are such extremes that people will go to for probably not a lot of good reasons!:)
Reiser are not the only ones working on this, the guys over at M$ are hard at it, basically it will be a part of.NET in the future, once MSSQL is embeded into every copy of Windows, NTFS.NET (whatever) will be just like you say on every windows boxen out there...
I think it's a great idea, especially that the Reiser people are doing it too, it really sucks watching Linux play catch-up..
Our perception of distance is changing quite rapidly, two hundred years ago Australia was impossibly far away, 50 years ago the Moon was impossibly far away, today Mars is impossibly far away. In one hundred years, Alpha Centauri? One thousand years???
Try not to think about it, the future that is, has never been something we (as people) proved to be good at.
I would generally disagree with this one, basically for two reasons firstly instinct is a very strong thing, all lifeforms share the primary instinct of survival, and to back that up my second reason, being that we simply havn't destroyed ourselves yet.
That is a very interesting article on why we are alone, but in this field the only thing we do know is that we no almost nothing. There are so many other theoretical reasons why life could be rare or abundant, the parant article on galactic habitable zones has been thrown around for a while. But even as it proposes the rarity of life it states the fact that all of our neighbours share the same ideal part of the galaxy, makes it interesting when you look at the types of stars in our neighbourhood.
I personnally found one article intriguing (sorry forgot link), regarding our Earth's formation, and the formation of the moon, which essentialy had a big part in how we ended up. To summarise, the geography of the earth, created by plate-techtonics was only made possible by the massive collision of a planetoid which lead to the formation of the moon. Basically plate-techtonics are rare (earth is only body in solar system with them!), and only the launch of a percentage of the Earth's crust into orbit (see moon) created this, but more importantly the only reason our planet is not one big waterworld is a result of the constant movement and formation of land masses by plate-techtonics. So in otherwords if this is another rare fluke the earth benifited from, it would imply that most other planets in such habitable zones are completly water logged!
Leaving the question of how and why would a fish / marine animal evolve to use tools, etc...
Sounds like the pc speaker to me, if there is a buzzer on the m/b then you will still hear it without your other speaker.. Most likely it is a conflict with the video card / mouse, ive seen similar things before, do you know if it is the same sound as you get when your computer locks up and you keep moving the mouse until it starts clicking?
I would like to see the quality of a nice digital projector, I've seen a few projectors on pc's and i wouldnt call them top of the line, but the quality was simply pathetic. The contrast was bad, the colours were icky, but yeah it was big..
I setup a plasma sceen on a PC a few weeks back, basically the quality at 1280x1024 was brilliant! Standing back just 3m it looked _directly_ comparable to my Sony Trinitron monitor! It was truly unbelievable and i would seriously doubt a projector could get anything near as good, even if you spend $50k on it!
If given the choice between a projector with 5x the screen size, i would take the plasma ANYDAY!
Noise is easy to solve if you dont have high requirements such as with this system. Ie a P3 / P4 is by standard quite quiet, just use a 'quiet psu' (power supply) and some quiet fans, and you shouldnt have a problem. Also there are a lot of very quiet hdd's out there from people like Seagate and Maxtor..
This system being mainly for video / dvd, etc wouldnt need much more than the entry level cpu (think 1.1ghz - 1.4ghz even that's overkill).
Noise comes from needing an Athlon with some monstrous 6000rpm fan to keep it cool!:(
Good headphones mean you won't even hear the fans, and a much cheaper then an equivalent speaker baes system. Of course that does kind of limit the viewership, but heh this isn't exactly a party system is it?
Sorry do you mind if i ask What are you smoking?!?!? Hi-Fi PC setup, i think the gazillion dollar speaker setup is there LONG before the $2 pc!:) I dont know about you but I would never even consider watching tv / dvd's with a set of headphones, you may as well be sitting at your computer desk while your at it!
So you're gonna stop a DOS attack with a firewall? If they're "Masters of the Obvious" I guess that makes you "Masters of the Impossible". A firewall is not going to save you from a saturated link, aka DOS attack.
Yes it is a little vague, firewalls only do a part of the job, routers do a lot, and rest is done by the administrator. (last part being the security patches) Most DOS/DDos attacks should be non-existant, except for the huge number of idiot administrators out there who dont understand simple concepts such as; Ingres filtering and bug-traq. (or for the non-administrator type that annoying button called "Windows Update")
Smaller is better, i so much agree with you! I've been planning my own tiny pc for a while, basic requirements for me (which most other posters so far have far exceded) are; maximum size XBox size, even that is huge! So im looking at FlexATX / NLX at most, perhaps something like this: http://www.jetway.com.tw/evisn/oem/thin-800e.htm
What im thinking is slot loading DVD, laptop HDD, no floppy, with hopefully something along the lines of a nForce board inside.. I once found a manufacturer of a case which was far smaller than an xbox, probably about 2/3 the size, exactly what i was looking for, even came in black. Perfect for that setup unit! I only wish i could find that link..:(
A very good comment, I must say. Unfortunatly I believe with your closing remark it is not just a case of "thinking about the consequences", as we cannot stop progress, to do so would only allow someone else to catch up. That is definatly a huge problem in itself. (Cold War, etc)
I do like your thinking though, although my views are quite different, I see advances such as these largly making conventional war obsolete. In general it is a positive move, as long as the country at the top is not an irratic dictatorship of some kind. History has shown the United States is not such a country, hopefully nothing brings a change to this state. (That's a whole new topic!)
The specific problem of Islamic fundamentalism has been developing long before Bin Laden, I believe it is accepted to have started in the late 70's in Egypt, sorry cant remember the names.. But of course there are so many deep seated reasons for so much of what we now have to deal with, such as this.
Of course it's an impossibly complex problem to solve, certainly there is no quick fix. "Fortress America" certainly wouldnt help a bit, neither would bombing to oblivion certain undesirable people/nations. A lot more thought and effort should be put into looking for real solutions, i would think.
In my opinion winning a conflict _is_ preventing conflict, In the longer term sense at least. War is an unfortunate part of life, why not because as some would say it is our instinct to fight, but progress is a battle. Back to my original point, the United States has developed a good position to prevent war, its quite simple, if you wage war then you die. This in no way prevents all wars, of course not, if the US wants to wage war against someone then, nobodys going to stop them.
The real issue you made, is not the battles we fight now, its the battles we _are_ slowly winning. Your comment "we somehow need better people." is correct but, I would state that we are working on it. Of course despite the fact that we are all so impaitent and short lived, these changes take time. Lots of time. Over the past 100 years we have evolved as people to a very very different world, with a much more significant proportion of maybe lets call them; "Good willed, free loving" people. In my opinion we need at minimum another hundred years, maybe more, but it is not a question of how can we, or when will we, but a question of simply how much more pain we will have to endure in the mean time.
Conflict or war is a part of evolution, my reference being evolution of society. Largly gone are the days when wars were simply fought over land, not that it still doesnt happen, but i dont see Australia invading New Zealand, or simiar. That maybe an extremem over-simplification, yes India is seriously thinking about invading Pakistan right now, Isreal still occupies Palistine, etc, etc. But it comes back to my previous point, politically western nations (in general) have put in the past such disputes, the few remaining ones are purley idological.
Slowly these idological battles will be resolved, and with time eventually all peoples and nations, will realise there is a better way. One day..
Okay, first thing you need to understand is in Australia nobody get's free bandwidth. At least in the sense of bandwidth in the States, every meg here is payed for, usually by the wholesaler Telstra since they are the ones with the biggest pipes to the states, that's where the cost comes from.
Actual rates may shock you but here is some rough prices from Connect.com.au (usually considered No.2 after Telstra):
FrameRelay 2Mbit (E-1 equiv), min monthly: AU$6800 (inc tax), international traffic $0.25, less for Australian traffic. That cost includes traffic upto that amount, so if it were all US traffic it would include about 24gig. A 10Mb Fiber connection you are looking at around AU$8800/month minimum same traffic costs..
The key difference with Everyone else (Aust, Europe, etc) against the US, is that a significant proportion of Internet traffic goes to the United States, those underwater cables dont come cheap. Also, i was under the impression that American bandwidth providers have a simple policy; Bandwidth cost to Americans; $0, everyone else $something.:(
Every question you asked has been revealed in ep1 & 2, well except the where did Darth Maul come from..
Notice all that talk about how the Dark side clouds things? Notice how the Jedi council concedes that it's vision has been shrouded for the past 10 years (in ep2) That's the dark side of the force, or more accuratly The Emperor Palpatine, that's how he so brilliantly manipulated his way to the top, as is said so many times in the series, Lies and deception are the ways of the dark side.
Every conflict in ep1 & 2 has been instigated by Palpatine, in ep1 the trade federation was tricked into believing they could take Naboo with senate support, but that was just a ploy to get palpatine as emperor, and as they said in ep2 they were decieved. But again in ep2 he uses CL to play the other side..
This is the best done plot in the saga imo, they skill with which Palpatine manipulates everyone so brilliantly yet so subtley!
Okay well it was expected, every second character being CGI, but am I alone in thinking that Yoda looked a thousand times more real and believable back in the 70's???? Okay so sure some things you probably cant do so well with a puppet, but every scene with a close up of Yoda i just though, argh bring back the damn puppet!
Most of the other characters were not so noticeably cg, but i would say that's most likely because of lack of familiarisation, everyone remembers yoda from ep5/6..
The only way to look seriously at scenes like this is to put it in perspective, look at everything you know about the story, ie the Force, I hate to sound like some SW geek but like they say always use the force for knowledge and defence, not for meager things like walking without a stick.
So if someone can pick up a space cruiser with his mind alone when 900 years old, just think what he could do when he puts him mind to a task like a duel.
The whole scene was like some drug induced frenzy, the drug being the force. I absolutly loved it, maybe a little cheezy (the bruce-lee flex?) but exactly what I _wanted_ to see!
I watched it too in Sydney last night, and i couldnt help but die laughing (with the rest of the audience) when Bobba Fett (the kid) first talked, that NewZealand accent oh my god!!! All i could think of, as with others who yelled it out was: "Choice Bro!" For those who listen to Nova96.9 in Sydney! (you know) =)
It really took something from the scene, that accent is so heavy i just wanted him to shut up!:)
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You have it the wrong way around!
Basically computers as they are now are all screwed up, everything is the wrong way around! Right now to use a computer you have to learn how the computer works, you have to train yourself around a system that if you have no experience with is like few things you likely have seen before.
The reason why you "have it down pat" is because you fortunatly have likey spent a good portion of your life working with computers, you know how they work, and you can use them to their full potential. But is this the most efficient way to use computers? Yes, you say because it's all you know. I dont think it is.
For probably the first time in my life i have read MS-marketing fud and actually thought they were onto something. Computers are insanely stupid right now, so many things about them are border-line idiodic. Some of those basic 'luser' questions (scenarios as Gates called them) in that article are eye opening when you look at them from at least one perspective.
Makes you think, how did the design of so much in PC UI's get to such a 'odd' state?
I agree that it's time to redesign things in a big way, most of the annoying things are artifacts of limitations of the past, for a classic example look at that qwerty keyboard your using....
ps. I dont think this "Longhorn" plan is in any way about, just another way to let your boss/govt/etc spy on you...
Really? Show me where Microsoft spends 10s of millions on Windows Update. They're smarter then that. Besides, I hardly consider security updates "support", and I hardly consider $10s of millions a significant percentage of their overhead. It's less then their monthly engineering payroll.
Have you seen Technet? Sure the CD in a folder version costs you $1000/year, but all of that information is free on the web; technical notes, service packs, problem fixes, installation guides, deployment guides, migaration tools / guides, etc, etc. Which all cost's money.
If you havn't used technet, then frankly you have not used the single best support resource available for free in the world. (But that's not the point here) I would think MS's tech-support costs are also increased up by phone support, as contarary to common knowledge when an MS bug causes your server to crash, those support calls are free. Also when you call for a fix that is not freely available, those calls are free. (nb, i said server there for a reason, I don't mean your home copy of Win98! But it would include your work pc.) That all add's up to ten's of millions of dollars...
Not interfering with market forces is a very new concept. It's quite alright to 'dabble' in alternate methods of capitalist government, but history has shown time and time again that monopolies are bad, think Standard Oil, AT&T, for some big American examples in the 20th century.
If the Republican party is happy to ignore so much that has been learned from history, and at the same time accept millions of dollars from today's monopolistic compaines then in my opinion they deserve every negative accusation that can by thrown at them!
As I understand the way it all works, it is not a legal requirement that NOBODY in Australia can access site 'xyz', ie mass-censorship such as in China. As someone else has already pointed out there are two parts to it all, firstly any 'offending' site hosted in .au can be shutdown if complained about. In a similar way as when you post Scientoligist secret on /. they tend to disappear..
Secondly ISP's must have the facility to block certain sites. This is the big one, as it means essentially ISP's would be censoring the Internet as a whole. BUT this is not how this is implemented, in fact as I understand it, there is mearly a provision in the law that ISP's must 'provide a means to censor', what that mean's in _reality_ is they bundle NetNanny with their accounts to families. No transparent proxy ip blocking, no DNS blocking, for you me and my next door neighbour, NOTHING. But when the family across the street ask's their ISP about 'protecting their kids', the sales person says yes we can provide you with this software to "protect your children".
Notice Venus in this list - an Earth-sized planet has a gravity well deep enough to hold an inhospitably thick atmosphere.
Venus's development into what it is today has as much to do with its proximity to the sun as it's ability to hold such a large atmosphere, well at least in most material I have read. Earth too one day will end up very similar (although not such a thick atmosphere) but essentially Venus is often referred to as having a Green house effect out of control.
Eventually in the next couple of billion years Earth will heat up as the Sun expands further to the point where eventually we will be constantly covered in clouds, and eventually the oceans will boil.
An interesting idea, if the planets Venus and Mars were swapped around, both would likely be far closer to being habitable.
A very good article on this can be found here. Although this is a slightly different advantage that the moon gave the earth, ie the landmass..
I really wanted to take your post seriously, that is until I read the word "audiophiles". Audiophiles, i.e. morons who buy pure silver speaker cables and special sound-improving lotions to bathe their CDs in (I'm not kidding) at horrendous prices can't possibly be taken seriously.
Despite being completly off-topic (and also not being an audiophile) your description of Audiophiles would sit right next to my description of many Gaming enthusiasts / overclocker, who would spend $700 on a video card to give an extra 20fps (total of 150fps) on their 80hz monitor. Or even better someone who would spend even more on a liquid cooled case in order to overclock a cpu to give a 3% real performance increase!
Of course im not implying you are such a person, just that in every 'hobby' there are such extremes that people will go to for probably not a lot of good reasons! :)
Reiser are not the only ones working on this, the guys over at M$ are hard at it, basically it will be a part of .NET in the future, once MSSQL is embeded into every copy of Windows, NTFS.NET (whatever) will be just like you say on every windows boxen out there...
I think it's a great idea, especially that the Reiser people are doing it too, it really sucks watching Linux play catch-up..
That link: The Moon And Plate Tectonics: Why We Are Alone
Our perception of distance is changing quite rapidly, two hundred years ago Australia was impossibly far away, 50 years ago the Moon was impossibly far away, today Mars is impossibly far away. In one hundred years, Alpha Centauri? One thousand years???
Try not to think about it, the future that is, has never been something we (as people) proved to be good at.
I would generally disagree with this one, basically for two reasons firstly instinct is a very strong thing, all lifeforms share the primary instinct of survival, and to back that up my second reason, being that we simply havn't destroyed ourselves yet.
Of course we have a long way to go still...
That is a very interesting article on why we are alone, but in this field the only thing we do know is that we no almost nothing. There are so many other theoretical reasons why life could be rare or abundant, the parant article on galactic habitable zones has been thrown around for a while. But even as it proposes the rarity of life it states the fact that all of our neighbours share the same ideal part of the galaxy, makes it interesting when you look at the types of stars in our neighbourhood.
I personnally found one article intriguing (sorry forgot link), regarding our Earth's formation, and the formation of the moon, which essentialy had a big part in how we ended up. To summarise, the geography of the earth, created by plate-techtonics was only made possible by the massive collision of a planetoid which lead to the formation of the moon. Basically plate-techtonics are rare (earth is only body in solar system with them!), and only the launch of a percentage of the Earth's crust into orbit (see moon) created this, but more importantly the only reason our planet is not one big waterworld is a result of the constant movement and formation of land masses by plate-techtonics. So in otherwords if this is another rare fluke the earth benifited from, it would imply that most other planets in such habitable zones are completly water logged!
Leaving the question of how and why would a fish / marine animal evolve to use tools, etc...
Sounds like the pc speaker to me, if there is a buzzer on the m/b then you will still hear it without your other speaker.. Most likely it is a conflict with the video card / mouse, ive seen similar things before, do you know if it is the same sound as you get when your computer locks up and you keep moving the mouse until it starts clicking?
I would like to see the quality of a nice digital projector, I've seen a few projectors on pc's and i wouldnt call them top of the line, but the quality was simply pathetic. The contrast was bad, the colours were icky, but yeah it was big..
I setup a plasma sceen on a PC a few weeks back, basically the quality at 1280x1024 was brilliant! Standing back just 3m it looked _directly_ comparable to my Sony Trinitron monitor! It was truly unbelievable and i would seriously doubt a projector could get anything near as good, even if you spend $50k on it!
If given the choice between a projector with 5x the screen size, i would take the plasma ANYDAY!
Noise is easy to solve if you dont have high requirements such as with this system. Ie a P3 / P4 is by standard quite quiet, just use a 'quiet psu' (power supply) and some quiet fans, and you shouldnt have a problem. Also there are a lot of very quiet hdd's out there from people like Seagate and Maxtor..
:(
This system being mainly for video / dvd, etc wouldnt need much more than the entry level cpu (think 1.1ghz - 1.4ghz even that's overkill).
Noise comes from needing an Athlon with some monstrous 6000rpm fan to keep it cool!
Ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....
:) I dont know about you but I would never even consider watching tv / dvd's with a set of headphones, you may as well be sitting at your computer desk while your at it!
Good headphones mean you won't even hear the fans, and a much cheaper then an equivalent speaker baes system. Of course that does kind of limit the viewership, but heh this isn't exactly a party system is it?
Sorry do you mind if i ask What are you smoking?!?!? Hi-Fi PC setup, i think the gazillion dollar speaker setup is there LONG before the $2 pc!
Firewalls were invented to solve these problems
So you're gonna stop a DOS attack with a firewall? If they're "Masters of the Obvious" I guess that makes you "Masters of the Impossible". A firewall is not going to save you from a saturated link, aka DOS attack.
Yes it is a little vague, firewalls only do a part of the job, routers do a lot, and rest is done by the administrator. (last part being the security patches) Most DOS/DDos attacks should be non-existant, except for the huge number of idiot administrators out there who dont understand simple concepts such as; Ingres filtering and bug-traq. (or for the non-administrator type that annoying button called "Windows Update")
Smaller is better, i so much agree with you! I've been planning my own tiny pc for a while, basic requirements for me (which most other posters so far have far exceded) are; maximum size XBox size, even that is huge! So im looking at FlexATX / NLX at most, perhaps something like this: http://www.jetway.com.tw/evisn/oem/thin-800e.htm
:(
What im thinking is slot loading DVD, laptop HDD, no floppy, with hopefully something along the lines of a nForce board inside.. I once found a manufacturer of a case which was far smaller than an xbox, probably about 2/3 the size, exactly what i was looking for, even came in black. Perfect for that setup unit! I only wish i could find that link..
A very good comment, I must say. Unfortunatly I believe with your closing remark it is not just a case of "thinking about the consequences", as we cannot stop progress, to do so would only allow someone else to catch up. That is definatly a huge problem in itself. (Cold War, etc)
I do like your thinking though, although my views are quite different, I see advances such as these largly making conventional war obsolete. In general it is a positive move, as long as the country at the top is not an irratic dictatorship of some kind. History has shown the United States is not such a country, hopefully nothing brings a change to this state. (That's a whole new topic!)
The specific problem of Islamic fundamentalism has been developing long before Bin Laden, I believe it is accepted to have started in the late 70's in Egypt, sorry cant remember the names.. But of course there are so many deep seated reasons for so much of what we now have to deal with, such as this.
Of course it's an impossibly complex problem to solve, certainly there is no quick fix. "Fortress America" certainly wouldnt help a bit, neither would bombing to oblivion certain undesirable people/nations. A lot more thought and effort should be put into looking for real solutions, i would think.
In my opinion winning a conflict _is_ preventing conflict, In the longer term sense at least. War is an unfortunate part of life, why not because as some would say it is our instinct to fight, but progress is a battle. Back to my original point, the United States has developed a good position to prevent war, its quite simple, if you wage war then you die. This in no way prevents all wars, of course not, if the US wants to wage war against someone then, nobodys going to stop them.
The real issue you made, is not the battles we fight now, its the battles we _are_ slowly winning. Your comment "we somehow need better people." is correct but, I would state that we are working on it. Of course despite the fact that we are all so impaitent and short lived, these changes take time. Lots of time. Over the past 100 years we have evolved as people to a very very different world, with a much more significant proportion of maybe lets call them; "Good willed, free loving" people. In my opinion we need at minimum another hundred years, maybe more, but it is not a question of how can we, or when will we, but a question of simply how much more pain we will have to endure in the mean time.
Conflict or war is a part of evolution, my reference being evolution of society. Largly gone are the days when wars were simply fought over land, not that it still doesnt happen, but i dont see Australia invading New Zealand, or simiar. That maybe an extremem over-simplification, yes India is seriously thinking about invading Pakistan right now, Isreal still occupies Palistine, etc, etc. But it comes back to my previous point, politically western nations (in general) have put in the past such disputes, the few remaining ones are purley idological.
Slowly these idological battles will be resolved, and with time eventually all peoples and nations, will realise there is a better way. One day..
Okay, first thing you need to understand is in Australia nobody get's free bandwidth. At least in the sense of bandwidth in the States, every meg here is payed for, usually by the wholesaler Telstra since they are the ones with the biggest pipes to the states, that's where the cost comes from.
:(
Actual rates may shock you but here is some rough prices from Connect.com.au (usually considered No.2 after Telstra):
FrameRelay 2Mbit (E-1 equiv), min monthly: AU$6800 (inc tax), international traffic $0.25, less for Australian traffic. That cost includes traffic upto that amount, so if it were all US traffic it would include about 24gig.
A 10Mb Fiber connection you are looking at around AU$8800/month minimum same traffic costs..
The key difference with Everyone else (Aust, Europe, etc) against the US, is that a significant proportion of Internet traffic goes to the United States, those underwater cables dont come cheap. Also, i was under the impression that American bandwidth providers have a simple policy; Bandwidth cost to Americans; $0, everyone else $something.
Every question you asked has been revealed in ep1 & 2, well except the where did Darth Maul come from..
Notice all that talk about how the Dark side clouds things? Notice how the Jedi council concedes that it's vision has been shrouded for the past 10 years (in ep2) That's the dark side of the force, or more accuratly The Emperor Palpatine, that's how he so brilliantly manipulated his way to the top, as is said so many times in the series, Lies and deception are the ways of the dark side.
Every conflict in ep1 & 2 has been instigated by Palpatine, in ep1 the trade federation was tricked into believing they could take Naboo with senate support, but that was just a ploy to get palpatine as emperor, and as they said in ep2 they were decieved. But again in ep2 he uses CL to play the other side..
This is the best done plot in the saga imo, they skill with which Palpatine manipulates everyone so brilliantly yet so subtley!
Okay well it was expected, every second character being CGI, but am I alone in thinking that Yoda looked a thousand times more real and believable back in the 70's???? Okay so sure some things you probably cant do so well with a puppet, but every scene with a close up of Yoda i just though, argh bring back the damn puppet!
Most of the other characters were not so noticeably cg, but i would say that's most likely because of lack of familiarisation, everyone remembers yoda from ep5/6..
The only way to look seriously at scenes like this is to put it in perspective, look at everything you know about the story, ie the Force, I hate to sound like some SW geek but like they say always use the force for knowledge and defence, not for meager things like walking without a stick.
So if someone can pick up a space cruiser with his mind alone when 900 years old, just think what he could do when he puts him mind to a task like a duel.
The whole scene was like some drug induced frenzy, the drug being the force. I absolutly loved it, maybe a little cheezy (the bruce-lee flex?) but exactly what I _wanted_ to see!
I watched it too in Sydney last night, and i couldnt help but die laughing (with the rest of the audience) when Bobba Fett (the kid) first talked, that NewZealand accent oh my god!!! All i could think of, as with others who yelled it out was: "Choice Bro!" For those who listen to Nova96.9 in Sydney! (you know) =)
:)
It really took something from the scene, that accent is so heavy i just wanted him to shut up!