Others have already posted to your comment so I will keep it short. First of all, no civilization was wiped out when Moors where removed from Spain, what happened was the removal of governing Muslim elite and replacing it with a christian king and nobles. What stayed the same were the peoples, their language and their habits and culture which in any case were there before Moor conquers. It should be noted that civilization, religion, nation, language i.e. don't mean the same thing. Civilization can be mix of many religions, nations, languages i.e. that are bond together. In Spain, the majority of people where Christians, they spoke the same language and had similar habits, which in later terms made them a nation that can be counted to western civilization.
Also on a note Europe and western powers made a rise because of their highly organized states and armies, more evolved banking and finance sectors, appraisal for knowledge and education and on a later date ability harness finance&scientific knowledge to serve industrialization. This was which raised western civilization from the drain. You also note that christian societies have attempted to control and dominate Islamic societies, but you forget that in 19th and 20th century the focus of European imperial powers was to control and dominate the whole world, not just Muslims. And before that if you make a note about crusades, you should understand that crusades were an attempt to take back old christian lands from Muslim conquers. In the view of these, there isn't any grand christian plot to suppress Muslims as you try to suggest.
Also on a note when you say that the socially mobile tend to follow the ways of a dominant power, you should also understand than in previous times there were no immigration. When Europe and west started to raise, that didn't succumb able part of other cultures to Europe because there still was religion, language and ethnic barriers. What we have seen in Islamic societies in middle east, in last 1000 years are the effects on what it does when the leading elite doesn't embrace trade, banking, formal organization of government, formalization of armies, science, knowledge and education of masses. What happened to Islamic civilization was not that it failed in absolute terms, it just didn't keep up with the rest and thus in 18th and 19th centuries was very much behind western world.
Just to give you example on what I am discussing in practical terms. In example in Finland Mikael Agricola, a priest, formed the Finnish written language in 16th century which teaching was started even to the simple masses. Of course the literature rate didn't rise quickly, but in time of several centuries it made quite big part of Finnish able to read and write, which in turn made possible to further educate more and more people. Also in western Europe kings and nobles started to understand the practically of stable banking and finance sectors and in time became more tolerant and took more responsibilities to pay their debts and not just wipe out debts to bankers. The fact that western civilization got first to industrial revolution and later on became first modern and birth cradle for global civilization is nothing to do with suppressing or exploiting other civilizations, it's everything to do on using own strengths and continues building and evolution of everything in societies.
I'm sorry to say but costs and competition are poor excuses for having no broadband available or having it cost much. You state that in other countries where broadband adoption is higher the government through state owned telco has made it priority to have broadband adoption high, its not true either. Just to give you an example...
Finland is a country of 5 million peoples. The population density is 16/km. There is only one metropolitan area, Helsinki, with little over 1 million inhabitants. The other few major towns are barely over 200 thousand inhabitants. Broadband is available almost in all corners of Finland, except some northern and eastern rural areas. Even in these rural communities, usually broadband is at least available in the centre of the community. If you live in a town you can get 8mb dsl-connection with 39 and 24mb with 49. I myself have 1mb connection which costs 24.90. Even if you live in a rural area, like my parents: 5km to community centre (community total population little over 6000) and 20km to nearest town (36000) you can get broadband connection with acceptable price. You may think that government has lend a hand in here, but that isn't the case like I said. In Finland before 90s telecoms sector consisted from independent local phone companies and state owned Tele. After deregulation in the beginning 90s markets because free to competition and local phone companies loosed their monopoly to their wires. In example you can start virtual operator in broadband or in mobile business very easily by renting other operators wires and equipment as needed. And to say it again, Finnish government didn't put any pennies to build up the infrastructure, the playing field was totally left open to companies.
When you compare Finland to US states, in population density Finland is in the same bar as Colorado or Maine.
And on a note on competition. Competition really does work. Here in Finland local telecom operators have had to update their networks and try as hard as possible to get people take broadband because otherwise soon they wouldn't have no customers at all. In here mobile operators have been very aggressive and almost everybody have mobile phone and more and more people use it as their only phone. Also by introduction of GPRS and later EDGE and UTMS networks, there is pressure from mobile operators to get customers adopt mobile broadband from them. So competition and costs of operation are not real reasons for not having or having costly broadband access.
I don't think that nobody with a rational mind can really hate America or Americans. Yes it's true that American government does from time to time very fucked up things. Yes it's true that most Americans seem more or less ignorant or straight stupid from the eyes of the rest of the world. Even so, that really doesn't make justifiable to hate America or Americans. When you look at other nations and previous superpowers, they have done and do same things and at times have seemed to the rest of the world as bunch of morons. Then again, many nations and peoples have hated English, Germans, French, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and so on. So what sets America and Americans a part from the previous group? Well at least that you guys laugh actively to yourself and you always have some people arguing against the majority that does stupid things. Actually this is just what an episode of Southpark was about, where Cartman dreamed to the times of making the independence declaration.
So nobody hates you guys, but if you keep on your current track, the real danger is that you become indifferent to the rest of the world. Indifferent meaning that the rest of the world doesn't anymore look up to you and say "oh my god, we must do exactly like the Americans" and instead say "America? What ever, I don't care". But hey, it's not too late to repair the damage, just execute your lawyers and think-of-the-children people and I say your again ahead of the world.
I just have wonder what is wrong in Exxon-Mobile. Every other major oil company in the world has admitted that global warming is for real and it's probably caused by man. In example Jorma Ollila who is the chairman of Shell has said it an interview that global warming is real and the only way to tackel it is to reduce carbon emissions. He continued and said that when he came to work in Shell, he was amazed by the concern that Shell employees had about global warming. So the question is what is wrong in Exxon-Mobile? Are their executives so locked into an equation (oil = money) that they have forgotten that it's really (oil = energy = money) and that a company can have other forms of energy sources than just oil?
Why 21 is better drinking age than 18? As it is, at least here in Finland, almost everybody have drank alcohol long ago before turning to 18. In other parts of Europe young people also drink alcohol very young, and this haven't flushed the continent under the table. What I have heard, both from European exchange students visiting US and from Americans, is that young people instead of drinking alcohol, because it's so hard to get, blow pot. So one 'bad habit' is traded to another one.
On a note, when one turns to 18, he is adult, he usually moves to own his/her place, he can vote, he can be elected and he can/has to go to a army. So why not give all the rights to 18 year old at the same time when he/she comes fully liable on his/her own life?
Could you enlighten little more about the connection between Nokia and Estonia? It's true that many Nokias partners and contractors moved their manufacturing businesses to Estonia and even R&D units, but if I recall correctly, Nokia itself didn't build any manufacturing or R&D units to the country.
To this day, the only place where Nokia has had very deep impact on whole society has been Finland and in here the impact has been concentrated primarily to Helsinki, Tampere and Oulu.
You've got mail got computers quite right. They used normal everyday computers, they used the Internet and they used e-mail as they were back then. I actually liked the film lot because it had a very positive theme and it showed two people fall in love who would maybe never in daily life done the same - which was kind a good message for me, because back then I was nerd, still am but at least now I get ladies;)
We haven't reached Kyoto levels of pollution in Europe, so we really can't beat our chest loudly. Further more the levels of pollution are that of 1990, which still means quite heavy pollution: remember the biggest industrial base in the world is in Europe and although European factories and plants do clean emissions, they aren't 100% clean. Actually what is happening in Europe largely is that by trying to achieve Kyoto levels we only have been able to decrease the increase of pollution.
On June 28, 2006, the German government announced it would exempt its coal industry from requirements under the Kyoto agreement. Claudia Kemfert, an energy professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin said, "For all its support for a clean environment and the Kyoto Protocol, the cabinet decision is very disappointing. The energy lobbies have played a big role in this decision."
To date (October 2006), there is no legislative framework in place within the UK to guarantee year-on-year reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases.
The position of the EU is not without controversy in Protocol negotiations, however. One criticism is that, rather than reducing 8%, all the EU member countries should cut 15% as the EU insisted a uniform target of 15% for other developed countries during the negotiation while allowing itself to share a big reduction in the former East Germany to meet the 15% goal for the entire EU. Also, emission levels of former Warsaw Pact countries who now are members of the EU have already been reduced as a result of their economic restructuring. This may mean that the region's 1990 baseline level is inflated compared to that of other developed countries, thus giving European economies a potential competitive advantage over the U.S.
The good thing is that we are really doing something to make a difference, but we aren't making real progress in the issue. Further more many countries in the European Union have really unrealistic energy politics going i.e. Germany and Sweden who both made political decision to stop using nuclear power and who now buy more and more gas from Russia and electricity from other member countries. Today only Finland is building more nuclear power and France is the next country to do the same. If not all member countries don't educate their citizens and start to have rational energy policy which includes nuclear power, we as Europeans don't really have a position to shout to the US or rest of the world "Fuck you, you irresponsible pollution loving lunatics" when we are just as bad.
I have a small software company and we use Gmail for domains. We get Gmail with out domain and calendar services. They are more than sufficient for a small company. Of course as we grow our needs are going to grow also, but at that time we think that Google will either offer an extended version of their service or even sell Gmail boxes for companies.
In China the rich families, at least if they were traders or bankers, became poor because actions of government and emperor who nationalized their fortunes. When looking at Europe same was partly true in the middle ages were loans from bankers and traders were from time to time nullified. Thought after enlightenment European bankers and traders were quite safe from the actions of government. While China wasn't so feudal, it was very backwards towards trading classes. Same in Japan.
If the attitudes towards bankers and traders would have been more friendlier and them be treated as an integral element of society, industrialization would have started either from China or Japan. Because Europe was fragmented and people could move away from oppression, advanced banking system developed itself in Europe and as times showed its' advances it spread over the continent and in the end destroyed last remaining bits of aristocracy in the French revolution as bourgou took the power from the king and land lords.
I know I'm little bit of the chain, but when speaking about feudal times, one key factor which is not usually discussed is the treatment of trading classes.
I think that we could easily up the 15% to 25% or 30% just by telling our moms, dads, brothers, sisters and friends that we won't support computers whos user uses Internet Explorer. I myself have got everybody from my family to use Firefox by installing and deleting Internet Explorer icons and warning them about the perils of using Internet Explorer. The only thing todo now is to convert them to Linux. Next time when my familys home computer is updated I will give my ultimatum "I do not support any other systems than Linux", this is great because then I will not be bothered with help desk issues and if they indeed fold, then I can lock the machine so deep that they can't screw it. Ha!
On a different note, I like Firefox 2.0, thought it's not so visible upgrade to 1.5, but it still rocks. Actually I really don't care what browser people are using as long as it supports standards and don't open huge security holes to the system.
I too think that this Microsoft orchestrated TCO evaluation is complete FUD. In my own experience as an web application & virtual appliance developer, deploying and running a Linux solution is much easier than a Windows solution. First of all, with Linux you can easily make a bare bone installation and then add specifics that you need. With Windows, you can't really make a bare bone installation, thus you have to spend time closing unneeded services. In second there is the big fact that open source software doesn't cost and I'm not just talking about Linux and Apache, but software as Tripwire, Netfilter/Iptables etc.. In Windows world, there isn't so much free software to use.
All in all, I can't really see even a point in this TCO comparison. I myself believe that in the future all web serving and applications are run from virtual servers that are provided by the application developers themselves. You just plug in an virtual appliance to another and you are go. In virtual appliance markets, cost of Windows is too high, unless they change their licensing dramatically. Oh well, I will still happily continue using Linux, Apache, Tomcat, JBoss and MySQL as my preferred environment in web serving.
On a different note, the study said that labor costs are lower in Windows, in another words Windows administrators are cheaper, but did they account costs that those cheap Windows administrators bring? My friend is working in subsidiary of a Finnish multinational company, they had for an almost a week no web and email in their office. The server, Windows Server 2003, in their office had rebooted because of power-outage in night. The next morning people couldn't connect to web and read their mails. Only application that worked was Skype which my friend and others used to communicate back to Finland. The miserable administrators first argued that it was telecoms fault that web and mail didn't work. After few days they gave up on blaming telecom operator and developed a theory that there was something wrong with the server. After a third day they suggested a complete re-installation to fix it, but web and email were still cut out in fourth day. After the weekend had gone, the system was working. In their case they probably had something wrong either with proxy or dns-settings, because Skype was working fine, but this they didn't realize. Complete four days wasted because incompetent administrators, makes could TCO!
If we think that natural selection just means survival of the strongest or fittest, then the humankind should have died a long a go. For almost its entire history humankind has been dinner in dishes of predators. If you put a human and a lion one against another, the lion wins. The key in success of man has been group work, working together to achieve common goals: hunting, defending against predators etc.. In this backdrop having a bad eyesight or asthma doesn't matter so much, individuals with these negative attributes could still specialise on some other talent form. And keeping in mind that there has always been more individuals wanting to join a successful group than there has been inner need in that group, has kept the competition going on and 'natural' selection has taken it's care.
If we look at our current society where almost every baby is been saved and poor people have more children than rich, it could look like there is no natural selection going on, and thus one could think that degeneration of human genetic code is going on. I don't think that this is the case. It could be the case if there would be strong social barriers between different classes of society, but now there isn't, and people can mix and match on their own basis, selecting the most suitable partner for them. Also one variable to consider is that humans have developed very much information regarding how to live life and how groups should work, and thus the race is also going on in a cultural front. If we look a child, he/she gets very much cultural information from the beginning that influence ones later success in life. All in all I think that we are running in the right direction.
On a different note, I also applaud genetic screening for defects, but only on clear cases like the mentioned Down syndrome. Screening something like the 'criminal' or 'gay' gene, would not yield success and if used in a large scale would lead to a shift in society: there has to be enough aggressive people and people liking to dress pink;)
His parents are Iranian and born in Iran, he is American and born in United States. His own country is USA.
What I can tell from the video is that there was definitely police brutality going on. Actually I can't even understand why they had to touch him in the first place? He was leaving. And I completely don't understand why they had to use tasers. From my experience and from lessons I got in the Finnish army in peace keeping is that when you out number your opponent with 3 to 1, you need only a little force to subdue your opponent. In this case the cops had him in hand cuffs, in that situation one can control easily hand cuffed person and two can move him/her without difficulty. What hear is going is just police brutality and usage of extreme force.
What this video has done, has got me rethinking again of coming to study to US: if this is what is happening, I definitely don't want to step in to american soil. In Europe, especially in Nordic countries, that kind of police work would have led automatically to firing of polices in question and warning notices to all other polices who led the situation happen.
If they would have kept their original ideas
on
Vista's Limited Symlinks
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· Score: 2, Informative
I remember back from the beginning of 90's, around the time when Windows NT 3.11 came to markets, that vision behind NT was that it would be as modular as possible and allow swapping of lots of components beginning from the kernel to file-system. This was actually reported in lots of computer news papers, but it seems from now that it was just hype and hopeful wishes. Now it seems that the code base of NT and it's successors is so mingled that trying to swap components from it would make the system die in a split second.
No news under the sun. Innovation is expensive.
on
Nokia the Next Gizmondo?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
This article is no news. Since after the half of the 90's there has been a constant complaining about phones getting new features and them becoming harder to use. This is just one complaint more.
What I don't understand why the article writer wants to paint so grim image of where Nokia is going. Nokia is a very big firm with biggest selection of mobile phones. They have more advanced models that are the cutting in the edge and then they have simple basic models. They also have a very short product life cycle. What this means is that Nokia can try new things with their cutting edge models and if they succeed, trasfer the innovations down the line to other phone models, and if they fail, they just try again and again until they succeed. This is what the article author should have remembered. Nokia is not like other mobile phone companies, they don't play with just one card, they have massive collection of phones and if few phones flop, that doesn't matter because they still have a big collection of phones that work.
It should also be noted that this isn't the first time when a mobile phone is not a mobile phone but something else. I can remember the end of the 90's and my Ericsson R380e which was by the words of Ericsson not a mobile phone but a terminal. Actually that phone has been the best phone that I have ever owned. It's just sad that Ericsson didn't follow with the design but moved to a more bulky design, the P-series.
On a different note, Nokia's management doesn't have any other direction to go than make mobile phone more than a mobile phone. If they would just stop and say that these features are all that users will ever want, eventually chinese no name manufactures and computer companies would get them. There is only one path to Nokia and that is to make mobile phone more than a phone.
I'm very happy that Sun is going to bring Java -platform to Open Source and under GPL license.
I believe that this move by Sun will increase development speed of Java and more importantly it will make Java more common. By having Java as a GPL, there is no reason left why Linux distributions wouldn't include Java in default installation. By becoming a standard part of Linux installations, it will gather more mind share from developers, both open source and commercial, and make developing of Java based applications more lucrative. It's interesting to see if this move will bring Java over a tipping point in desktop environments and lead to a situation where more and more applications are based on Java, leading to a total commodization of desktop.
When Java will become more standard part of a desktop, I believe that it will change deeply on how we build our applications. I think that the future is for applications that have desktop application component that is integrated to a server application. Already it's quite easy with Java to develop server software that works via multiple interfaces, ie. web and desktop. The only question for now has been, do all clients have Java, maybe in the future there is no need to ask this question.
I think that what Ballmer and Microsoft are up to is to take over the distribution chain. What Microsoft wants to do is to became a one stop house for all software customers. If a customer needs/wants a commercial linux with support he/she can go to Microsoft and buy it. A customer benefits because he has only a one channel to work with, one vendor how quarantines and provides all the he wants. Microsoft benefits because it can at the same sell try to persuade customer to go for Microsoft products. Also by being the first contact to the customer, Microsoft guarantees that Novell/other companies making the same deal won't try to persuade customers away from Microsoft products.
You might ask why is Microsoft changing it tactics to semi-embrace Linux? One answer is that Linux is not going away and the second is that today's and tomorrows computing environments will be multi-os and multi-vendor, because of advancements in virtualization and deeper standardization of communication between different enterprise application. In this environment for Microsoft to succeed, they need to be more closer to customers and be able to satisfy all customers need, of course at this position they have more power to bring customers to their software offerings.
Rank Order - GDP (purchasing power parity)
United States $ 12,310,000,000,000
European Union $ 12,180,000,000,000
China $ 8,883,000,000,000
Japan $ 4,025,000,000,000
India $ 3,666,000,000,000
European Union is a real thing and it has real power. Europeans are uniting, both in govermental and in commercial sectors.
And yes, Japan is three times smaller than Europea Union or United States. So they are small.
Developing, building and selling airliners is linked heavily to other activities, in another words companies like example Boeing and Airbus doesn't just build airlines, they are involved in much more activity. Boeing is the second largest defense contractor to US army. Airbus is subsidiary of EADS (European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company) which is a large defence and armaments company supplying many European armies. Also both Boeing and Airbus get government subsidies in a form or another. Boeing gets big contracts from US army and works very tightly with NASA. Airbus also gets subsidies in form of a "launch aids" and other government involvement.
It should also be noted that South Korea and Japan in economic terms are quite small compared to United States or European Union, they just don't have muscle enough to set up a support systems to make building airliners economically feasible. Also it should be noted that both South Korea and Japan are allied with US, so it would be politically risky to start building a competitive industry to a industry that US sees as a strategic as. Airline, space and armaments industries are heavily strategic industries in the eyes of world powers. In that perspective both India and China will one day build up their own airliner industries to compete with Europeans and Americans.
From a stand point of citizen of highly developed European country, Africa looks like, as you said it, a some dust bowl or rain forests full of poisonous monkeys. That is not meant as an offence, but just as an fact.
If you want to make some comparisons, look on Europe, the largest industrial and urban area in the world. There is huge transport infrastructure that connects cities and metropolises together with motorways, railways, air- and sea routes. Most of the population live in large cities and other urban areas. There are large industries from steel and petrochemicals to high tech manufacturing. What there isn't in Europe is wild nature, most of the land in western Europe is in farming use and in north Europe where there are more forest, they are mainly meant for the pulp and paper industries.
The thing in Europe is that geographically it is a very small place with highly packed population and infrastructure. The thing in Africa is that it's just huge continent, with not highly packed population and with almost no infrastructure. That's a fact. And that fact won't change any time soon. Even if the whole continent would get it's things together and make what China did, it would still take from 50 - 100 years before Africa would have gained the developed countries. And just to remember it, the infrastructure that has been build, the governing culture and etc.. have been in works for hundreds of years, and generations after another have build on works of previous generations. That can't be just replicated in a matter of years or decades.
I also can understand that it may seem unethical of west to hold on patents of medicine and not sell them cheaply in undeveloped countries, but there is a reason for it. If the pharmaceutical companies would sell medicines to undeveloped countries with lowered prices, it would A) cause uproar in population of developed countries that have to buy the same medication with higher prices and B) it would certainly cause illegal trafficking of cheap medicine from undeveloped countries to developed countries. Even in the B scenario is happening, in example pharmaceutical companies sell their drugs little bit cheaper to Greece which has a lower standard of living, and from there some buyers from other EU countries buy them and transport them to their countries selling them with a bit lower price. If this same would happen in a global scale, with bigger price differences, the pharmaceutical would have a very big problem and development of new medicines would come to a halt. The current situation may seem unfair, but at least new drugs are developed actively and every year patents of many drugs expire, that undeveloped countries can use freely.
I also do think that information and having access to it is important in undeveloped countries. I thought do feel that it won't solve the basic problems there is, which basically are lack of transportation and production infrastructure. You do not have any value with information if you can't use it. So yes, shipping computers to African children and government employees is good, but even better would be if in the developed countries would open our markets to African agricultural products, and many undeveloped nations would understand that having import taxes to high tech and production utilities is not a good thing, then we really could get some results.
Sorry too for ranting, but I just wanted to remind of the facts.
I have never understood why people are so opposed to Prussian style schools?
When you start using severe discipline from early on, the children will get to used to few basic ideas: 1) to shut up and 2) to concentrate. Having a silent class room where students are concentrating on what teacher says to them is the key foundation for learning. After that you just have to keep up the pace, divide people to different difficulty levels based on their success, and voila you have real results, pupils with that have learned something.
On a note, severe discipline doesn't mean expelling from school, but different forms of punishment from basic shame punishments to extra work, like cleaning toilets after school.
I would like to ask what is wrong with us as an society when a job is felt as important as parents and spouse?
The truth is that a job is just a job, it's a way to pay bills and at best it's a way to fulfil ones dreams and desires. If one looses a job, one can search another job and another way to make relevance to his/her life if the job one loosed even offered that. It should be also noted that a job doesn't raise or lower ones worth as an human being: being a jobless, or a multimillionaire CEO or garbage man doesn't change ones worth even a little bit.
What I argue is that most people are just afraid of change, they are fearful of the unknown and don't want to answer such questions like 'Who am I', 'Why am I important', 'What do I want from my life' and 'Why I want something'. What people don't realize that life itself is in constant change and the future and the present day have full of unknowns. When one let's go and starts to empraise the change and sees the unknown as an possibility, then ones life will be much more joy able than it otherwise would be.
On a note, I'm an entrepreneur with a little software start-up going on. I have never been fired, but I have had my share of bad news in many forms: working in projects that went dead, leading successful projects that backfired to me an an person, working hard in another start-up that went belly up, changing locations many times and having to say goodbye to friends and look for new ones. There has been lot of change in my life, but at the end of the day it has been always for the best of myself. So next time something bad happens, ie. you loose your job, don't be too saddened because there is a change of new beginning.
I as an European and as an Finn have never understood why we don't have GE foods in Europe too. In my view and opinion common people are not against nor supporting GE-food, they just don't care. The real reason why we don't have GE-foods in stores is more todo with alarmist greens and politicians afraid of changing anything, which can be easily be translated into anti-technology and anti-change...
I think we should allow GE-food, of course it should be labeled to it, and let the markets, that is consumers , to decide... atleast the markets usually get end in to a rational conclusion versus the politicians. If I remember correctly, a few years ago there was an African country which had hunger-epidemic going on and the US offered to help them, the help was refused because american help was GE-food. I just can't understand their rational, is it really better to let people die in hunger, than to accept GE-food that most likely would not cause no health problems? Or if it would, if it would cause few or hundres to die, it still would have been better than not to accept it...
Oh well... people are stupid... can't help it, can't fight it, just have to accept it.
Slashdot Mirror
Others have already posted to your comment so I will keep it short. First of all, no civilization was wiped out when Moors where removed from Spain, what happened was the removal of governing Muslim elite and replacing it with a christian king and nobles. What stayed the same were the peoples, their language and their habits and culture which in any case were there before Moor conquers. It should be noted that civilization, religion, nation, language i.e. don't mean the same thing. Civilization can be mix of many religions, nations, languages i.e. that are bond together. In Spain, the majority of people where Christians, they spoke the same language and had similar habits, which in later terms made them a nation that can be counted to western civilization.
Also on a note Europe and western powers made a rise because of their highly organized states and armies, more evolved banking and finance sectors, appraisal for knowledge and education and on a later date ability harness finance&scientific knowledge to serve industrialization. This was which raised western civilization from the drain. You also note that christian societies have attempted to control and dominate Islamic societies, but you forget that in 19th and 20th century the focus of European imperial powers was to control and dominate the whole world, not just Muslims. And before that if you make a note about crusades, you should understand that crusades were an attempt to take back old christian lands from Muslim conquers. In the view of these, there isn't any grand christian plot to suppress Muslims as you try to suggest.
Also on a note when you say that the socially mobile tend to follow the ways of a dominant power, you should also understand than in previous times there were no immigration. When Europe and west started to raise, that didn't succumb able part of other cultures to Europe because there still was religion, language and ethnic barriers. What we have seen in Islamic societies in middle east, in last 1000 years are the effects on what it does when the leading elite doesn't embrace trade, banking, formal organization of government, formalization of armies, science, knowledge and education of masses. What happened to Islamic civilization was not that it failed in absolute terms, it just didn't keep up with the rest and thus in 18th and 19th centuries was very much behind western world.
Just to give you example on what I am discussing in practical terms. In example in Finland Mikael Agricola, a priest, formed the Finnish written language in 16th century which teaching was started even to the simple masses. Of course the literature rate didn't rise quickly, but in time of several centuries it made quite big part of Finnish able to read and write, which in turn made possible to further educate more and more people. Also in western Europe kings and nobles started to understand the practically of stable banking and finance sectors and in time became more tolerant and took more responsibilities to pay their debts and not just wipe out debts to bankers. The fact that western civilization got first to industrial revolution and later on became first modern and birth cradle for global civilization is nothing to do with suppressing or exploiting other civilizations, it's everything to do on using own strengths and continues building and evolution of everything in societies.
I'm sorry to say but costs and competition are poor excuses for having no broadband available or having it cost much. You state that in other countries where broadband adoption is higher the government through state owned telco has made it priority to have broadband adoption high, its not true either. Just to give you an example...
Finland is a country of 5 million peoples. The population density is 16/km. There is only one metropolitan area, Helsinki, with little over 1 million inhabitants. The other few major towns are barely over 200 thousand inhabitants. Broadband is available almost in all corners of Finland, except some northern and eastern rural areas. Even in these rural communities, usually broadband is at least available in the centre of the community. If you live in a town you can get 8mb dsl-connection with 39 and 24mb with 49. I myself have 1mb connection which costs 24.90. Even if you live in a rural area, like my parents: 5km to community centre (community total population little over 6000) and 20km to nearest town (36000) you can get broadband connection with acceptable price. You may think that government has lend a hand in here, but that isn't the case like I said. In Finland before 90s telecoms sector consisted from independent local phone companies and state owned Tele. After deregulation in the beginning 90s markets because free to competition and local phone companies loosed their monopoly to their wires. In example you can start virtual operator in broadband or in mobile business very easily by renting other operators wires and equipment as needed. And to say it again, Finnish government didn't put any pennies to build up the infrastructure, the playing field was totally left open to companies.
When you compare Finland to US states, in population density Finland is in the same bar as Colorado or Maine.
And on a note on competition. Competition really does work. Here in Finland local telecom operators have had to update their networks and try as hard as possible to get people take broadband because otherwise soon they wouldn't have no customers at all. In here mobile operators have been very aggressive and almost everybody have mobile phone and more and more people use it as their only phone. Also by introduction of GPRS and later EDGE and UTMS networks, there is pressure from mobile operators to get customers adopt mobile broadband from them. So competition and costs of operation are not real reasons for not having or having costly broadband access.
I don't think that nobody with a rational mind can really hate America or Americans. Yes it's true that American government does from time to time very fucked up things. Yes it's true that most Americans seem more or less ignorant or straight stupid from the eyes of the rest of the world. Even so, that really doesn't make justifiable to hate America or Americans. When you look at other nations and previous superpowers, they have done and do same things and at times have seemed to the rest of the world as bunch of morons. Then again, many nations and peoples have hated English, Germans, French, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and so on. So what sets America and Americans a part from the previous group? Well at least that you guys laugh actively to yourself and you always have some people arguing against the majority that does stupid things. Actually this is just what an episode of Southpark was about, where Cartman dreamed to the times of making the independence declaration.
So nobody hates you guys, but if you keep on your current track, the real danger is that you become indifferent to the rest of the world. Indifferent meaning that the rest of the world doesn't anymore look up to you and say "oh my god, we must do exactly like the Americans" and instead say "America? What ever, I don't care". But hey, it's not too late to repair the damage, just execute your lawyers and think-of-the-children people and I say your again ahead of the world.
I just have wonder what is wrong in Exxon-Mobile. Every other major oil company in the world has admitted that global warming is for real and it's probably caused by man. In example Jorma Ollila who is the chairman of Shell has said it an interview that global warming is real and the only way to tackel it is to reduce carbon emissions. He continued and said that when he came to work in Shell, he was amazed by the concern that Shell employees had about global warming. So the question is what is wrong in Exxon-Mobile? Are their executives so locked into an equation (oil = money) that they have forgotten that it's really (oil = energy = money) and that a company can have other forms of energy sources than just oil?
Why 21 is better drinking age than 18? As it is, at least here in Finland, almost everybody have drank alcohol long ago before turning to 18. In other parts of Europe young people also drink alcohol very young, and this haven't flushed the continent under the table. What I have heard, both from European exchange students visiting US and from Americans, is that young people instead of drinking alcohol, because it's so hard to get, blow pot. So one 'bad habit' is traded to another one.
On a note, when one turns to 18, he is adult, he usually moves to own his/her place, he can vote, he can be elected and he can/has to go to a army. So why not give all the rights to 18 year old at the same time when he/she comes fully liable on his/her own life?
Could you enlighten little more about the connection between Nokia and Estonia? It's true that many Nokias partners and contractors moved their manufacturing businesses to Estonia and even R&D units, but if I recall correctly, Nokia itself didn't build any manufacturing or R&D units to the country.
To this day, the only place where Nokia has had very deep impact on whole society has been Finland and in here the impact has been concentrated primarily to Helsinki, Tampere and Oulu.
You've got mail got computers quite right. They used normal everyday computers, they used the Internet and they used e-mail as they were back then. I actually liked the film lot because it had a very positive theme and it showed two people fall in love who would maybe never in daily life done the same - which was kind a good message for me, because back then I was nerd, still am but at least now I get ladies ;)
We haven't reached Kyoto levels of pollution in Europe, so we really can't beat our chest loudly. Further more the levels of pollution are that of 1990, which still means quite heavy pollution: remember the biggest industrial base in the world is in Europe and although European factories and plants do clean emissions, they aren't 100% clean. Actually what is happening in Europe largely is that by trying to achieve Kyoto levels we only have been able to decrease the increase of pollution.
Just to make my point more clear, here are some excerpts from Wikipedia article about Kyoto Protocol.
On June 28, 2006, the German government announced it would exempt its coal industry from requirements under the Kyoto agreement. Claudia Kemfert, an energy professor at the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin said, "For all its support for a clean environment and the Kyoto Protocol, the cabinet decision is very disappointing. The energy lobbies have played a big role in this decision."
To date (October 2006), there is no legislative framework in place within the UK to guarantee year-on-year reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases.
The position of the EU is not without controversy in Protocol negotiations, however. One criticism is that, rather than reducing 8%, all the EU member countries should cut 15% as the EU insisted a uniform target of 15% for other developed countries during the negotiation while allowing itself to share a big reduction in the former East Germany to meet the 15% goal for the entire EU. Also, emission levels of former Warsaw Pact countries who now are members of the EU have already been reduced as a result of their economic restructuring. This may mean that the region's 1990 baseline level is inflated compared to that of other developed countries, thus giving European economies a potential competitive advantage over the U.S.
The good thing is that we are really doing something to make a difference, but we aren't making real progress in the issue. Further more many countries in the European Union have really unrealistic energy politics going i.e. Germany and Sweden who both made political decision to stop using nuclear power and who now buy more and more gas from Russia and electricity from other member countries. Today only Finland is building more nuclear power and France is the next country to do the same. If not all member countries don't educate their citizens and start to have rational energy policy which includes nuclear power, we as Europeans don't really have a position to shout to the US or rest of the world "Fuck you, you irresponsible pollution loving lunatics" when we are just as bad.
I have a small software company and we use Gmail for domains. We get Gmail with out domain and calendar services. They are more than sufficient for a small company. Of course as we grow our needs are going to grow also, but at that time we think that Google will either offer an extended version of their service or even sell Gmail boxes for companies.
In China the rich families, at least if they were traders or bankers, became poor because actions of government and emperor who nationalized their fortunes. When looking at Europe same was partly true in the middle ages were loans from bankers and traders were from time to time nullified. Thought after enlightenment European bankers and traders were quite safe from the actions of government. While China wasn't so feudal, it was very backwards towards trading classes. Same in Japan.
If the attitudes towards bankers and traders would have been more friendlier and them be treated as an integral element of society, industrialization would have started either from China or Japan. Because Europe was fragmented and people could move away from oppression, advanced banking system developed itself in Europe and as times showed its' advances it spread over the continent and in the end destroyed last remaining bits of aristocracy in the French revolution as bourgou took the power from the king and land lords.
I know I'm little bit of the chain, but when speaking about feudal times, one key factor which is not usually discussed is the treatment of trading classes.
I think that we could easily up the 15% to 25% or 30% just by telling our moms, dads, brothers, sisters and friends that we won't support computers whos user uses Internet Explorer. I myself have got everybody from my family to use Firefox by installing and deleting Internet Explorer icons and warning them about the perils of using Internet Explorer. The only thing todo now is to convert them to Linux. Next time when my familys home computer is updated I will give my ultimatum "I do not support any other systems than Linux", this is great because then I will not be bothered with help desk issues and if they indeed fold, then I can lock the machine so deep that they can't screw it. Ha!
On a different note, I like Firefox 2.0, thought it's not so visible upgrade to 1.5, but it still rocks. Actually I really don't care what browser people are using as long as it supports standards and don't open huge security holes to the system.
I too think that this Microsoft orchestrated TCO evaluation is complete FUD. In my own experience as an web application & virtual appliance developer, deploying and running a Linux solution is much easier than a Windows solution. First of all, with Linux you can easily make a bare bone installation and then add specifics that you need. With Windows, you can't really make a bare bone installation, thus you have to spend time closing unneeded services. In second there is the big fact that open source software doesn't cost and I'm not just talking about Linux and Apache, but software as Tripwire, Netfilter/Iptables etc.. In Windows world, there isn't so much free software to use.
All in all, I can't really see even a point in this TCO comparison. I myself believe that in the future all web serving and applications are run from virtual servers that are provided by the application developers themselves. You just plug in an virtual appliance to another and you are go. In virtual appliance markets, cost of Windows is too high, unless they change their licensing dramatically. Oh well, I will still happily continue using Linux, Apache, Tomcat, JBoss and MySQL as my preferred environment in web serving.
On a different note, the study said that labor costs are lower in Windows, in another words Windows administrators are cheaper, but did they account costs that those cheap Windows administrators bring? My friend is working in subsidiary of a Finnish multinational company, they had for an almost a week no web and email in their office. The server, Windows Server 2003, in their office had rebooted because of power-outage in night. The next morning people couldn't connect to web and read their mails. Only application that worked was Skype which my friend and others used to communicate back to Finland. The miserable administrators first argued that it was telecoms fault that web and mail didn't work. After few days they gave up on blaming telecom operator and developed a theory that there was something wrong with the server. After a third day they suggested a complete re-installation to fix it, but web and email were still cut out in fourth day. After the weekend had gone, the system was working. In their case they probably had something wrong either with proxy or dns-settings, because Skype was working fine, but this they didn't realize. Complete four days wasted because incompetent administrators, makes could TCO!
If we think that natural selection just means survival of the strongest or fittest, then the humankind should have died a long a go. For almost its entire history humankind has been dinner in dishes of predators. If you put a human and a lion one against another, the lion wins. The key in success of man has been group work, working together to achieve common goals: hunting, defending against predators etc.. In this backdrop having a bad eyesight or asthma doesn't matter so much, individuals with these negative attributes could still specialise on some other talent form. And keeping in mind that there has always been more individuals wanting to join a successful group than there has been inner need in that group, has kept the competition going on and 'natural' selection has taken it's care.
;)
If we look at our current society where almost every baby is been saved and poor people have more children than rich, it could look like there is no natural selection going on, and thus one could think that degeneration of human genetic code is going on. I don't think that this is the case. It could be the case if there would be strong social barriers between different classes of society, but now there isn't, and people can mix and match on their own basis, selecting the most suitable partner for them. Also one variable to consider is that humans have developed very much information regarding how to live life and how groups should work, and thus the race is also going on in a cultural front. If we look a child, he/she gets very much cultural information from the beginning that influence ones later success in life. All in all I think that we are running in the right direction.
On a different note, I also applaud genetic screening for defects, but only on clear cases like the mentioned Down syndrome. Screening something like the 'criminal' or 'gay' gene, would not yield success and if used in a large scale would lead to a shift in society: there has to be enough aggressive people and people liking to dress pink
His parents are Iranian and born in Iran, he is American and born in United States. His own country is USA.
What I can tell from the video is that there was definitely police brutality going on. Actually I can't even understand why they had to touch him in the first place? He was leaving. And I completely don't understand why they had to use tasers. From my experience and from lessons I got in the Finnish army in peace keeping is that when you out number your opponent with 3 to 1, you need only a little force to subdue your opponent. In this case the cops had him in hand cuffs, in that situation one can control easily hand cuffed person and two can move him/her without difficulty. What hear is going is just police brutality and usage of extreme force.
What this video has done, has got me rethinking again of coming to study to US: if this is what is happening, I definitely don't want to step in to american soil. In Europe, especially in Nordic countries, that kind of police work would have led automatically to firing of polices in question and warning notices to all other polices who led the situation happen.
I remember back from the beginning of 90's, around the time when Windows NT 3.11 came to markets, that vision behind NT was that it would be as modular as possible and allow swapping of lots of components beginning from the kernel to file-system. This was actually reported in lots of computer news papers, but it seems from now that it was just hype and hopeful wishes. Now it seems that the code base of NT and it's successors is so mingled that trying to swap components from it would make the system die in a split second.
This article is no news. Since after the half of the 90's there has been a constant complaining about phones getting new features and them becoming harder to use. This is just one complaint more.
What I don't understand why the article writer wants to paint so grim image of where Nokia is going. Nokia is a very big firm with biggest selection of mobile phones. They have more advanced models that are the cutting in the edge and then they have simple basic models. They also have a very short product life cycle. What this means is that Nokia can try new things with their cutting edge models and if they succeed, trasfer the innovations down the line to other phone models, and if they fail, they just try again and again until they succeed. This is what the article author should have remembered. Nokia is not like other mobile phone companies, they don't play with just one card, they have massive collection of phones and if few phones flop, that doesn't matter because they still have a big collection of phones that work.
It should also be noted that this isn't the first time when a mobile phone is not a mobile phone but something else. I can remember the end of the 90's and my Ericsson R380e which was by the words of Ericsson not a mobile phone but a terminal. Actually that phone has been the best phone that I have ever owned. It's just sad that Ericsson didn't follow with the design but moved to a more bulky design, the P-series.
On a different note, Nokia's management doesn't have any other direction to go than make mobile phone more than a mobile phone. If they would just stop and say that these features are all that users will ever want, eventually chinese no name manufactures and computer companies would get them. There is only one path to Nokia and that is to make mobile phone more than a phone.
I'm very happy that Sun is going to bring Java -platform to Open Source and under GPL license.
I believe that this move by Sun will increase development speed of Java and more importantly it will make Java more common. By having Java as a GPL, there is no reason left why Linux distributions wouldn't include Java in default installation. By becoming a standard part of Linux installations, it will gather more mind share from developers, both open source and commercial, and make developing of Java based applications more lucrative. It's interesting to see if this move will bring Java over a tipping point in desktop environments and lead to a situation where more and more applications are based on Java, leading to a total commodization of desktop.
When Java will become more standard part of a desktop, I believe that it will change deeply on how we build our applications. I think that the future is for applications that have desktop application component that is integrated to a server application. Already it's quite easy with Java to develop server software that works via multiple interfaces, ie. web and desktop. The only question for now has been, do all clients have Java, maybe in the future there is no need to ask this question.
I think that what Ballmer and Microsoft are up to is to take over the distribution chain. What Microsoft wants to do is to became a one stop house for all software customers. If a customer needs/wants a commercial linux with support he/she can go to Microsoft and buy it. A customer benefits because he has only a one channel to work with, one vendor how quarantines and provides all the he wants. Microsoft benefits because it can at the same sell try to persuade customer to go for Microsoft products. Also by being the first contact to the customer, Microsoft guarantees that Novell/other companies making the same deal won't try to persuade customers away from Microsoft products.
You might ask why is Microsoft changing it tactics to semi-embrace Linux? One answer is that Linux is not going away and the second is that today's and tomorrows computing environments will be multi-os and multi-vendor, because of advancements in virtualization and deeper standardization of communication between different enterprise application. In this environment for Microsoft to succeed, they need to be more closer to customers and be able to satisfy all customers need, of course at this position they have more power to bring customers to their software offerings.
From the CIA world fact book
Rank Order - GDP (purchasing power parity)
United States $ 12,310,000,000,000
European Union $ 12,180,000,000,000
China $ 8,883,000,000,000
Japan $ 4,025,000,000,000
India $ 3,666,000,000,000
European Union is a real thing and it has real power. Europeans are uniting, both in govermental and in commercial sectors.
And yes, Japan is three times smaller than Europea Union or United States. So they are small.
Developing, building and selling airliners is linked heavily to other activities, in another words companies like example Boeing and Airbus doesn't just build airlines, they are involved in much more activity. Boeing is the second largest defense contractor to US army. Airbus is subsidiary of EADS (European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company) which is a large defence and armaments company supplying many European armies. Also both Boeing and Airbus get government subsidies in a form or another. Boeing gets big contracts from US army and works very tightly with NASA. Airbus also gets subsidies in form of a "launch aids" and other government involvement.
It should also be noted that South Korea and Japan in economic terms are quite small compared to United States or European Union, they just don't have muscle enough to set up a support systems to make building airliners economically feasible. Also it should be noted that both South Korea and Japan are allied with US, so it would be politically risky to start building a competitive industry to a industry that US sees as a strategic as. Airline, space and armaments industries are heavily strategic industries in the eyes of world powers. In that perspective both India and China will one day build up their own airliner industries to compete with Europeans and Americans.
From a stand point of citizen of highly developed European country, Africa looks like, as you said it, a some dust bowl or rain forests full of poisonous monkeys. That is not meant as an offence, but just as an fact.
If you want to make some comparisons, look on Europe, the largest industrial and urban area in the world. There is huge transport infrastructure that connects cities and metropolises together with motorways, railways, air- and sea routes. Most of the population live in large cities and other urban areas. There are large industries from steel and petrochemicals to high tech manufacturing. What there isn't in Europe is wild nature, most of the land in western Europe is in farming use and in north Europe where there are more forest, they are mainly meant for the pulp and paper industries.
The thing in Europe is that geographically it is a very small place with highly packed population and infrastructure. The thing in Africa is that it's just huge continent, with not highly packed population and with almost no infrastructure. That's a fact. And that fact won't change any time soon. Even if the whole continent would get it's things together and make what China did, it would still take from 50 - 100 years before Africa would have gained the developed countries. And just to remember it, the infrastructure that has been build, the governing culture and etc.. have been in works for hundreds of years, and generations after another have build on works of previous generations. That can't be just replicated in a matter of years or decades.
I also can understand that it may seem unethical of west to hold on patents of medicine and not sell them cheaply in undeveloped countries, but there is a reason for it. If the pharmaceutical companies would sell medicines to undeveloped countries with lowered prices, it would A) cause uproar in population of developed countries that have to buy the same medication with higher prices and B) it would certainly cause illegal trafficking of cheap medicine from undeveloped countries to developed countries. Even in the B scenario is happening, in example pharmaceutical companies sell their drugs little bit cheaper to Greece which has a lower standard of living, and from there some buyers from other EU countries buy them and transport them to their countries selling them with a bit lower price. If this same would happen in a global scale, with bigger price differences, the pharmaceutical would have a very big problem and development of new medicines would come to a halt. The current situation may seem unfair, but at least new drugs are developed actively and every year patents of many drugs expire, that undeveloped countries can use freely.
I also do think that information and having access to it is important in undeveloped countries. I thought do feel that it won't solve the basic problems there is, which basically are lack of transportation and production infrastructure. You do not have any value with information if you can't use it. So yes, shipping computers to African children and government employees is good, but even better would be if in the developed countries would open our markets to African agricultural products, and many undeveloped nations would understand that having import taxes to high tech and production utilities is not a good thing, then we really could get some results. Sorry too for ranting, but I just wanted to remind of the facts.
I have never understood why people are so opposed to Prussian style schools?
When you start using severe discipline from early on, the children will get to used to few basic ideas: 1) to shut up and 2) to concentrate. Having a silent class room where students are concentrating on what teacher says to them is the key foundation for learning. After that you just have to keep up the pace, divide people to different difficulty levels based on their success, and voila you have real results, pupils with that have learned something.
On a note, severe discipline doesn't mean expelling from school, but different forms of punishment from basic shame punishments to extra work, like cleaning toilets after school.
I would like to ask what is wrong with us as an society when a job is felt as important as parents and spouse?
The truth is that a job is just a job, it's a way to pay bills and at best it's a way to fulfil ones dreams and desires. If one looses a job, one can search another job and another way to make relevance to his/her life if the job one loosed even offered that. It should be also noted that a job doesn't raise or lower ones worth as an human being: being a jobless, or a multimillionaire CEO or garbage man doesn't change ones worth even a little bit.
What I argue is that most people are just afraid of change, they are fearful of the unknown and don't want to answer such questions like 'Who am I', 'Why am I important', 'What do I want from my life' and 'Why I want something'. What people don't realize that life itself is in constant change and the future and the present day have full of unknowns. When one let's go and starts to empraise the change and sees the unknown as an possibility, then ones life will be much more joy able than it otherwise would be.
On a note, I'm an entrepreneur with a little software start-up going on. I have never been fired, but I have had my share of bad news in many forms: working in projects that went dead, leading successful projects that backfired to me an an person, working hard in another start-up that went belly up, changing locations many times and having to say goodbye to friends and look for new ones. There has been lot of change in my life, but at the end of the day it has been always for the best of myself. So next time something bad happens, ie. you loose your job, don't be too saddened because there is a change of new beginning.
I as an European and as an Finn have never understood why we don't have GE foods in Europe too. In my view and opinion common people are not against nor supporting GE-food, they just don't care. The real reason why we don't have GE-foods in stores is more todo with alarmist greens and politicians afraid of changing anything, which can be easily be translated into anti-technology and anti-change...
I think we should allow GE-food, of course it should be labeled to it, and let the markets, that is consumers , to decide... atleast the markets usually get end in to a rational conclusion versus the politicians. If I remember correctly, a few years ago there was an African country which had hunger-epidemic going on and the US offered to help them, the help was refused because american help was GE-food. I just can't understand their rational, is it really better to let people die in hunger, than to accept GE-food that most likely would not cause no health problems? Or if it would, if it would cause few or hundres to die, it still would have been better than not to accept it...
Oh well... people are stupid... can't help it, can't fight it, just have to accept it.
1. Make a product
...well I guess I just have to buy their shares when they go to IPO.
2. Open source it and hype it to death in Slashdot
3. ?
4. Profit
Actually if you are clever, you can skip the part one, and just hype it to death and move to profit, also known as IPO.
Why didn't I invent this idea?