There does seem to be some promising research in extracting aluminum from aluminum-oxide efficiently. A breakthrough there would be big news, but I wouldn't count on it. For now, extracting aluminum from aluminum-oxide is about 32% efficient. If that could be more than doubled, it might get interesting. Do we know how much gallium this alloy uses? Gallium was more expensive than silver last time I checked (in the 90's), and I doubt the entire world supply is very large.
Microsoft trying to enforce copyrights in countries like India and China is not new, not even worth a/. article. However, India allowing Microsoft to impose sanctions is new. The interesting untold part of this story is India's unstoppable trajectory from being a technically backwards nation that encouraged rampant copyright violations, to being a technical powerhouse that enforces intellectual property rights. Without any sort of intellectual property protection, you can't have many indigenous companies that write software or design electronics, since there would be no local market for their products. As India's high-tech industry grows, it will convince the Indian government to protect their products. This isn't about Microsoft... it's much more about India. Microsoft will simply benefit along with the local Indian high-tech companies, once intellectual property rights are enforced.
That was a truly insightful post, indicating you have some depth of knowledge of what it is like for the ground forces in Iraq. Maybe the random sample of soldiers I've talked to just happen to fall into a specific group, but everyone I've talked to thinks we should get the heck out of Iraq, and that Bush screwed up big-time. How is it you understand what it's like for the troops, yet don't hold opinions at all like those I've heard from them?
The first time around, I blamed the Supreme Court, Congress for allowing such a system to happen, etc. The second time around, Bush may have conned his way into the office through some dubious and probably illegal actions, but he won the popular vote fair-and-square. I have no quarrel with an election that won the popular vote. We Americans elected him twice. Now the world has cause to ridicule us.
6. George Washington was more religious than George Bush. If anything, others pander to the godless left, not the other way around.
Bull. The founding fathers from George to Jefferson were wise men, religious, but not born-again Christians. Jefferson was Unitarian, like me. He had serious doubts about the literal truth of the King James translation of the Bible, so he wrote is own (a great translation). On his gravestone, he states only three accomplishments, of which he is most proud. One was crafting America's separation of Church and State.
Everyone who is willing to look past their hatred of bush knows that the Katrina mess was because of the breakdown in local governments and the lack of planning or follow through with the plans.
Obviously you don't know people who lived through the mess. Those of us who know even a tiny bit of what really happened know that Bush's incompetence screwed up the Katrina aftermath big-time (though other incompetence compounded the problem). For example, my father-in-law is a skilled and well respected doctor. The day after the hurricane, he flew to a medical ship, and waited for about a week while the US government (specifically NOT local government) refused to let it enter New Orleans to help. Eventually, the doctors all gave up and went home. None were allowed to help in any way. In contrast, Al Gore chartered a jet and evacuated a hospital personally, because a doctor there called him, begging for help.
I don't mind if you support Bush, but please don't reject what really happened after Katrina. People died because of Bush.
I honestly hope you're right. I'm not so confident in my own beliefs as to think that there is exactly zero chance of pulling off a political reform in Iraq. I just think that getting a Middle Eastern population like that in Iraq to come around and be good world citizens is highly optimistic. I like making long-term predictions. For example, in 1996, I predicted that Israel would build a fence around the Palestinians and unilaterally withdraw from both the West Bank and Gaza, while taking over much land that they had not occupied before the '67 war. Simple reasoning made this a fairly obvious result. There are random events that are hard to predict, like a nuke going off somewhere, but assuming linear progression in events, it's easy to predict.
Iraq has been easy to predict for years. The Sunni will never agree to be ruled by the Shiites, no more than we white Americans would agree to give up our citizenship and be slaves to African Americans. That's how the Sunni see sharing power with the Shiites, except that they feel God wants them to oppress the Shiites (oh, wait.. that's not so different than we were). Therefore, all our efforts to build a unified Iraqi government representative of all Iraqis is doomed. At best, we will not piss off the Shiites, and support them well enough to not be defeated by the Sunnis. If we succeed, even the Shiites will hate us for screwing up their country, but at least they will have normal relations with the US. The Sunnis hate us now passionately, and we can expect that to continue. We will leave Iraq one day, the only question is when. On that day, the Sunni resistance (a bunch of murdering psychopaths) will take over control of the Sunni areas, bringing the worst possible elements into power there. If we fail the Shiites, then the psychopathic Sunni leaders will conquer them, and God help them when that day comes. Alternatively, Iran might invade the Shiite areas to prevent it's falling to Sunni advances. Either way, we lose any sort of ally in Iraq. Iraq is seriously screwed. Too bad Bush didn't listen to any of the guys who know 100X what I think I know about the Middle East before invading. What a dumb-ass.
You pretty much said it all... I only reply to acknowledge how well your message is received.
people are dumb panicky animals who are much happier when they don't have to know what is really happening.
Our current leadership is wise enough to have understood this truth far better than any administration in my lifetime. Dumb as Bush may be, his administration knows how to pull the strings.
Sorry to have caused any infuriation. I don't easily get upset over posts on/. Please don't consider my following comments as an attack or meant to upset you:
- "Concerns over global warming are frequently overblown" - To me, the scary part about global warming is the massive and highly successful campaign by Bush and friends to convince us that it's a) not happening, and b) we're not causing it. For example, his efforts to corrupt and/or bury the results of his own scientific inquiry scare the heck out of me. Humans making the Earth warmer is just one of the truly scary hurdles in front of us. The Middle East building nukes is another one, as is controlling the world's population before we strip it of all it's resources. From that point of view, I agree, it is sometimes overblown. If that's you're position, it's reasonable. If you think we're not causing it, you should become better informed.
- Almost nobody at this point that I run across thinks that things are rosy over in Iraq. Anyone who thinks we've handled Iraq well should become better informed. If you hold out hope that the world will be a better place than if we'd not invaded Iraq, then I'd say your an optimist, though not unreasonable. If you feel we should stay and try to complete the mission, even if Iraq is a mess, then you agree with many other reasonable people, just not most.
- All the government has to do to keep the Internet neutral is nothing. Even better would be a law enforcing no change. If it meddles with what has been working for over 10 years, the value of the Internet could drastically fall. In particular, we need to insure that ISPs do not discriminate against packets based on their origin. That's all. They can still do traffic shaping, charge more for higher levels of service, etc. But, if they want to block all the Democrat web sites, and only allow through the Republican ones, that's a problem. That's exactly what will happen if Murdoch gets control, and packet origin discrimination is allowed. I find that a compelling argument for keeping the status quo, which has been working so well.
- Are you also upset that the Supreme Court ended segregation? It's the court's job to fill in context when laws are unclear. In Rowe v Wade, they tackled the toughest issue: defining when human life begins. It's a slippery area to rule in, and highly contentious, since many of us believe God gives us a soul at conception, while others of us believe that we gain our humanity as our brain develops and we become conscious of our environment. Jews traditionally believed that God gives us a soul at the quickening. I believe life begins when my kids go to college:-) I bet we would agree that having the Supreme Court rule correctly about when human life begins would be a good thing. We just may not agree about what that correct answer is. Unfortunately, it's not an easy area to find agreement, and it's probably more productive to collaborate on reducing unwanted pregnancies, which is probably common ground.
Very true... I sometimes quote Iraqi dead, but estimates vary all over the map. I hope that estimates of > 100,000 are wrong. I'd like to say I'm sorry to the Iraqi people, but I think that the worst is yet to come - after we pull out.
Heck, that's the short list. You didn't even mention stealing two elections in a row, his oh-so-qualified appointments, or his role as puppet for truely scary neo-cons. You missed pandering to Big Oil, the Katrina fiasco, and 3,000 dead soldiers in Iraq. I guess it's hard to get all the really horrible stuff in only one short paragraph...
His approval rating is down to the hardcore loyalists that would eat glass before they spoke ill of any Republican from Texas.
Funny! But I think most of the remaining Bush supporters like him because of their religious beliefs. According to that oh-so-unbiased news station, Fox News, 78 percent of evangelical voters, who made up 23 percent of the electorate, voted for Bush. Assuming they haven't changed their minds, that would account for about 18% of his support (more than half). That leaves only around 15% of the population who I would call glass eaters:-)
It's interesting to guess what Bush could possibly do to become yet less popular. For example, his Supreme Court could over-turn Rowe v Wade. He could institute a draft for the Iraq war. We could catch him in felony voter fraud (like forcing US attorneys to turn a blind eye while he drops minority voters from the voter registration). He could shoot someone during a hunting accident. I doubt all of those combined would erode his remaining base of support much. True glass eaters and true believers are all who remain.
The really scary ones aren't the idiots who support Bush... it's the genuinely intelligent ones. My extended family contains an inter-racial (Jewish, Asian) couple, both with advanced college degrees from great schools, and neither is religious. The absolutely love Bush, and are convinced that every Bush backed idea is the gospel truth (no global warming, the Iraq war is good, AT&T should be able to charge Google a toll to reach it's customers, etc). They also are convinced that Bush's Supreme Court will not reverse Rowe vs. Wade (oddly, my Republican friends who are very religious feel otherwise). They absolutely believe that all those terrible appointments, from Brown of Hurricane Katrina fame, to Wolfowitz, were great appointments, and that Democrats are to blame for their failures. They think Colin Powell was fired for his own incompetence.
In other words, they believe whatever Bush tells them, even though they are super-smart. It's a crazy world. A few such guys even seem to hang out here on/.
I always wonder why people post as AC. Since you can create any sort of fake-id on/. you want, with no public e-mail, etc, what are the benefits of being AC? The down-side of having to start at score 0 seems like a good reason to set up a dummy ID.
I just bought two laptops for a couple of our programmers at work, and let them spec them out. They will configure their own machines however they want, but 100% of our software will be developed under Linux. Both machines were spec-ed with maxed out video cards... hmmm...
I'm glad people can't be banned from/. Of course, you always have that 'foe' option to quell a pesky poster, but so far, I haven't had to use it... the moderation system works quite well. Could such a system be applied to the Web, through a 3rd party service like/.?
Excellent advice! While this is hard (not impossible) to do without a spare Linux machine in the house, you can secure the TightVNC port through ssh port forwarding. The problem with VNC is that everything is transmitted in the clear, even your password.
My dad is a 70 year old x86 assembler hack, and contributes regularly to the open software community (see http://jdmcox.com/). I write place-and-route algorithms for a living, founded one company, was the key technical lead at one other, and basically feel like a fairly smart SOB. When I come home to dad's house, he humors me when I talk about my programming exploits. I know he feels there is little chance I will ever be a very advanced programmer compared to him. He was a Delta pilot for his entire career, and only started playing with computers when he saw me playing with them in college. Go figure.
Go easy on him, guys... it's not easy for guys practically in retirement to learn about these new fangled computers. I recently had to teach my father-in-law how to read e-mail. Apparently, he'd already gone through all of his immediate family, who had given up in disgust. Here's literally how the phone-call went:
me: Open up your e-mail program and tell me what you see. him: How do I do that? me: Click on the start menu, and select the program that has 'mail' in the name. him: I don't have a start menu. me: It's on the lower left corner of your screen. him: Ok, I see it! Now what? me: Click on it. him: With what? me: Your mouse him: I don't have a mouse me: It's that white thing on the right with two buttons. Push it around. See the cursor move? him: I see the mouse, but I don't have a cursor. me: Yes, you do. him: No, I don't me: Yes, you do. him: Oh! I see it! me: Now click on the Start button. Do this by dragging the cursor over it, and pressing the left button on the mouse...
It took pretty much a whole Saturday afternoon to talk him through it. It was one of the most tiring experiences of my life. The Judge is probably just like him. BTW, my father-in-law is a darned smart dude and well respected doctor. He just hates computers (or at least he did until he learned to use e-mail).
Oddly enough, I never heard of "gold" support until reading an earlier post on/. today. I even posted "Bring Back the Super Geeks" at ideastorm.com http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/66653 a few weeks ago, and no one mentioned gold. Thanks for the info! I just bought my first ever gold support, to test it out.
Slashdot Mirror
There does seem to be some promising research in extracting aluminum from aluminum-oxide efficiently. A breakthrough there would be big news, but I wouldn't count on it. For now, extracting aluminum from aluminum-oxide is about 32% efficient. If that could be more than doubled, it might get interesting. Do we know how much gallium this alloy uses? Gallium was more expensive than silver last time I checked (in the 90's), and I doubt the entire world supply is very large.
Microsoft trying to enforce copyrights in countries like India and China is not new, not even worth a /. article. However, India allowing Microsoft to impose sanctions is new. The interesting untold part of this story is India's unstoppable trajectory from being a technically backwards nation that encouraged rampant copyright violations, to being a technical powerhouse that enforces intellectual property rights. Without any sort of intellectual property protection, you can't have many indigenous companies that write software or design electronics, since there would be no local market for their products. As India's high-tech industry grows, it will convince the Indian government to protect their products. This isn't about Microsoft... it's much more about India. Microsoft will simply benefit along with the local Indian high-tech companies, once intellectual property rights are enforced.
That was a truly insightful post, indicating you have some depth of knowledge of what it is like for the ground forces in Iraq. Maybe the random sample of soldiers I've talked to just happen to fall into a specific group, but everyone I've talked to thinks we should get the heck out of Iraq, and that Bush screwed up big-time. How is it you understand what it's like for the troops, yet don't hold opinions at all like those I've heard from them?
The first time around, I blamed the Supreme Court, Congress for allowing such a system to happen, etc. The second time around, Bush may have conned his way into the office through some dubious and probably illegal actions, but he won the popular vote fair-and-square. I have no quarrel with an election that won the popular vote. We Americans elected him twice. Now the world has cause to ridicule us.
Bull. The founding fathers from George to Jefferson were wise men, religious, but not born-again Christians. Jefferson was Unitarian, like me. He had serious doubts about the literal truth of the King James translation of the Bible, so he wrote is own (a great translation). On his gravestone, he states only three accomplishments, of which he is most proud. One was crafting America's separation of Church and State.
Obviously you don't know people who lived through the mess. Those of us who know even a tiny bit of what really happened know that Bush's incompetence screwed up the Katrina aftermath big-time (though other incompetence compounded the problem). For example, my father-in-law is a skilled and well respected doctor. The day after the hurricane, he flew to a medical ship, and waited for about a week while the US government (specifically NOT local government) refused to let it enter New Orleans to help. Eventually, the doctors all gave up and went home. None were allowed to help in any way. In contrast, Al Gore chartered a jet and evacuated a hospital personally, because a doctor there called him, begging for help.
I don't mind if you support Bush, but please don't reject what really happened after Katrina. People died because of Bush.
I honestly hope you're right. I'm not so confident in my own beliefs as to think that there is exactly zero chance of pulling off a political reform in Iraq. I just think that getting a Middle Eastern population like that in Iraq to come around and be good world citizens is highly optimistic. I like making long-term predictions. For example, in 1996, I predicted that Israel would build a fence around the Palestinians and unilaterally withdraw from both the West Bank and Gaza, while taking over much land that they had not occupied before the '67 war. Simple reasoning made this a fairly obvious result. There are random events that are hard to predict, like a nuke going off somewhere, but assuming linear progression in events, it's easy to predict.
Iraq has been easy to predict for years. The Sunni will never agree to be ruled by the Shiites, no more than we white Americans would agree to give up our citizenship and be slaves to African Americans. That's how the Sunni see sharing power with the Shiites, except that they feel God wants them to oppress the Shiites (oh, wait.. that's not so different than we were). Therefore, all our efforts to build a unified Iraqi government representative of all Iraqis is doomed. At best, we will not piss off the Shiites, and support them well enough to not be defeated by the Sunnis. If we succeed, even the Shiites will hate us for screwing up their country, but at least they will have normal relations with the US. The Sunnis hate us now passionately, and we can expect that to continue. We will leave Iraq one day, the only question is when. On that day, the Sunni resistance (a bunch of murdering psychopaths) will take over control of the Sunni areas, bringing the worst possible elements into power there. If we fail the Shiites, then the psychopathic Sunni leaders will conquer them, and God help them when that day comes. Alternatively, Iran might invade the Shiite areas to prevent it's falling to Sunni advances. Either way, we lose any sort of ally in Iraq. Iraq is seriously screwed. Too bad Bush didn't listen to any of the guys who know 100X what I think I know about the Middle East before invading. What a dumb-ass.
Our current leadership is wise enough to have understood this truth far better than any administration in my lifetime. Dumb as Bush may be, his administration knows how to pull the strings.
Sorry to have caused any infuriation. I don't easily get upset over posts on /. Please don't consider my following comments as an attack or meant to upset you:
:-) I bet we would agree that having the Supreme Court rule correctly about when human life begins would be a good thing. We just may not agree about what that correct answer is. Unfortunately, it's not an easy area to find agreement, and it's probably more productive to collaborate on reducing unwanted pregnancies, which is probably common ground.
- "Concerns over global warming are frequently overblown" - To me, the scary part about global warming is the massive and highly successful campaign by Bush and friends to convince us that it's a) not happening, and b) we're not causing it. For example, his efforts to corrupt and/or bury the results of his own scientific inquiry scare the heck out of me. Humans making the Earth warmer is just one of the truly scary hurdles in front of us. The Middle East building nukes is another one, as is controlling the world's population before we strip it of all it's resources. From that point of view, I agree, it is sometimes overblown. If that's you're position, it's reasonable. If you think we're not causing it, you should become better informed.
- Almost nobody at this point that I run across thinks that things are rosy over in Iraq. Anyone who thinks we've handled Iraq well should become better informed. If you hold out hope that the world will be a better place than if we'd not invaded Iraq, then I'd say your an optimist, though not unreasonable. If you feel we should stay and try to complete the mission, even if Iraq is a mess, then you agree with many other reasonable people, just not most.
- All the government has to do to keep the Internet neutral is nothing. Even better would be a law enforcing no change. If it meddles with what has been working for over 10 years, the value of the Internet could drastically fall. In particular, we need to insure that ISPs do not discriminate against packets based on their origin. That's all. They can still do traffic shaping, charge more for higher levels of service, etc. But, if they want to block all the Democrat web sites, and only allow through the Republican ones, that's a problem. That's exactly what will happen if Murdoch gets control, and packet origin discrimination is allowed. I find that a compelling argument for keeping the status quo, which has been working so well.
- Are you also upset that the Supreme Court ended segregation? It's the court's job to fill in context when laws are unclear. In Rowe v Wade, they tackled the toughest issue: defining when human life begins. It's a slippery area to rule in, and highly contentious, since many of us believe God gives us a soul at conception, while others of us believe that we gain our humanity as our brain develops and we become conscious of our environment. Jews traditionally believed that God gives us a soul at the quickening. I believe life begins when my kids go to college
Very true... I sometimes quote Iraqi dead, but estimates vary all over the map. I hope that estimates of > 100,000 are wrong. I'd like to say I'm sorry to the Iraqi people, but I think that the worst is yet to come - after we pull out.
Heck, that's the short list. You didn't even mention stealing two elections in a row, his oh-so-qualified appointments, or his role as puppet for truely scary neo-cons. You missed pandering to Big Oil, the Katrina fiasco, and 3,000 dead soldiers in Iraq. I guess it's hard to get all the really horrible stuff in only one short paragraph...
Funny! But I think most of the remaining Bush supporters like him because of their religious beliefs. According to that oh-so-unbiased news station, Fox News, 78 percent of evangelical voters, who made up 23 percent of the electorate, voted for Bush. Assuming they haven't changed their minds, that would account for about 18% of his support (more than half). That leaves only around 15% of the population who I would call glass eaters
It's interesting to guess what Bush could possibly do to become yet less popular. For example, his Supreme Court could over-turn Rowe v Wade. He could institute a draft for the Iraq war. We could catch him in felony voter fraud (like forcing US attorneys to turn a blind eye while he drops minority voters from the voter registration). He could shoot someone during a hunting accident. I doubt all of those combined would erode his remaining base of support much. True glass eaters and true believers are all who remain.
The really scary ones aren't the idiots who support Bush... it's the genuinely intelligent ones. My extended family contains an inter-racial (Jewish, Asian) couple, both with advanced college degrees from great schools, and neither is religious. The absolutely love Bush, and are convinced that every Bush backed idea is the gospel truth (no global warming, the Iraq war is good, AT&T should be able to charge Google a toll to reach it's customers, etc). They also are convinced that Bush's Supreme Court will not reverse Rowe vs. Wade (oddly, my Republican friends who are very religious feel otherwise). They absolutely believe that all those terrible appointments, from Brown of Hurricane Katrina fame, to Wolfowitz, were great appointments, and that Democrats are to blame for their failures. They think Colin Powell was fired for his own incompetence.
/.
In other words, they believe whatever Bush tells them, even though they are super-smart. It's a crazy world. A few such guys even seem to hang out here on
I always wonder why people post as AC. Since you can create any sort of fake-id on /. you want, with no public e-mail, etc, what are the benefits of being AC? The down-side of having to start at score 0 seems like a good reason to set up a dummy ID.
I just bought two laptops for a couple of our programmers at work, and let them spec them out. They will configure their own machines however they want, but 100% of our software will be developed under Linux. Both machines were spec-ed with maxed out video cards... hmmm...
Ha! I be they get $$ for click throughs! So... where exactly are those "Perfect 10" thumbnails?
I'm glad people can't be banned from /. Of course, you always have that 'foe' option to quell a pesky poster, but so far, I haven't had to use it... the moderation system works quite well. Could such a system be applied to the Web, through a 3rd party service like /.?
I really don't think so, but I'll ask him.
Excellent advice! While this is hard (not impossible) to do without a spare Linux machine in the house, you can secure the TightVNC port through ssh port forwarding. The problem with VNC is that everything is transmitted in the clear, even your password.
My dad is a 70 year old x86 assembler hack, and contributes regularly to the open software community (see http://jdmcox.com/). I write place-and-route algorithms for a living, founded one company, was the key technical lead at one other, and basically feel like a fairly smart SOB. When I come home to dad's house, he humors me when I talk about my programming exploits. I know he feels there is little chance I will ever be a very advanced programmer compared to him. He was a Delta pilot for his entire career, and only started playing with computers when he saw me playing with them in college. Go figure.
That post gave me a better laugh than any 0 score post in a long while... to bad I can't mod it funny!
Go easy on him, guys... it's not easy for guys practically in retirement to learn about these new fangled computers. I recently had to teach my father-in-law how to read e-mail. Apparently, he'd already gone through all of his immediate family, who had given up in disgust. Here's literally how the phone-call went:
...
me: Open up your e-mail program and tell me what you see.
him: How do I do that?
me: Click on the start menu, and select the program that has 'mail' in the name.
him: I don't have a start menu.
me: It's on the lower left corner of your screen.
him: Ok, I see it! Now what?
me: Click on it.
him: With what?
me: Your mouse
him: I don't have a mouse
me: It's that white thing on the right with two buttons. Push it around. See the cursor move?
him: I see the mouse, but I don't have a cursor.
me: Yes, you do.
him: No, I don't
me: Yes, you do.
him: Oh! I see it!
me: Now click on the Start button. Do this by dragging the cursor over it, and pressing the left button on the mouse
It took pretty much a whole Saturday afternoon to talk him through it. It was one of the most tiring experiences of my life. The Judge is probably just like him. BTW, my father-in-law is a darned smart dude and well respected doctor. He just hates computers (or at least he did until he learned to use e-mail).
Oooh... That's really sneaky! I guess crime does pay, at least if you're brilliant.
The SEC just needs to find who shorted the heck out of Apple stock yesterday.
Oddly enough, I never heard of "gold" support until reading an earlier post on /. today. I even posted "Bring Back the Super Geeks" at ideastorm.com http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/66653 a few weeks ago, and no one mentioned gold. Thanks for the info! I just bought my first ever gold support, to test it out.