Having had a long interest in pottery, I've looked at some of the history of pottery in Japan. Interestingly, in the late 1500s, Japan invaded Korea and while they didn't get much territory-wise, they rounded up a lot of potters and forced them give up their knowledge in Japan. Pottery was high technology in those days. Anyway, kidnapping knowledgable workers is a time honored tradition.

The example I reference is usually called the Pottery Wars, rather than "Ceramic Wars" but there's a short synopsis here: The Ceramic Wars: Hideyoshi's Japan Kidnaps Korean Artisans

re-aim the camera at closing time to aim at the door. What's so hard about that?

Again, why would a company that is increasing making a larger percentage of its sales outside the U.S. want to be part of that?

China and India are going to be far larger markets in the long run, do we really want to be pushed aside faster?

I know a lot of Americans think we're the center of the world, but we really aren't.

It will? I didn't read anything about the law requiring US corporations to reinvest in jobs and infrastructure.

In fact, what I read is that Obama thinks that if Apple builds an iPad in China and sells it in Australia, that the U.S. government should get a cut.

Why would Apple which to be a US corporation at that point?

What exactly is their "fair share"?

That term doesn't actually say anything, other than perhaps warm fuzzy feelings...

So if Apple builds iPads in China and sells them in Australia, you think the U.S. Government should get a cut?

If so, why would Apple want to remain a U.S. based company again?

Came here to suggest this. Besides doing a static image, you can also use it as a motion detector so that at night, if there is a break-in, there's a chance of getting a snapshot of the robbers.

Here's a link: http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/...

This looks interesting: https://medium.com/@Cvrsor/how...

My opinion will be unpopular, but I think RRMartin is just milking it at this point. I've listened to all the books published so far as audiobooks, and my experience was that the first two books were very fun, and then it started to drag out -- more and more characters introduced, the same sort of imagery and conversation patterns repeated, and time just stopped moving altogether. By the last book, I was just bored silly and it was all I could do to trudge through it.

RRMartin got famous, got money, and has been milking it, extending it, trying to make sure it never ever ends. I'm interested enough in how the story turns out, should it be finished, that I will read the wikipedia synopsis of it. But I would never deal with the whole repetitive unabridged bullshit ever again.

NOTE: I've only seen the first season of the TV show, and I liked it a lot. The TV show is quite likely way better than the books because there are some natural constraints in that context. I won't pay for the shows though. I don't want to give RRM anything -- he took a promising interesting story, and is just torturing it now for the money. Fucker.

On the one hand I sympathize with everything you say. On the other hand, so what? Why does everyone need to do something that will keep their name around for the ages -- maybe it's enough that they don't cause active harm. Not every person is going to be a Turing, a Vonnegut, or a Michelangelo making works that will endure for the ages. It isn't possible, and besides, on a long enough time scale, even the great works will mean nothing at all. I don't think it is wrong to say that even the Einsteins of the world, are just monkey-button-pushers -- people like that just push them in more mesmerizing patterns than I can, just like I can push them in more mesmerizing patterns than others can, etc. etc. That doesn't make me any less a MBPer than anyone else. I will admit that I sometimes feel condescending toward lower level MBPers, but if I zoom out to a great distance, the destruction of the solar system or the heat death of the universe for example, the difference between any one person's button-pushing and any other's button-pushing become indistinguishable and utterly irrelevant.

The "my days" thing might be valid. Young people have grown up in a world where surveillance is expected, and thus it doesn't rub them wrong so much older people like myself. To put this in another context, racism for example, I would say that for the most part, generational characteristics don't change, they die with their members. Today, most people would be shocked and outraged to see a drinking fountain with a "Whites Only" sign over it, but in 1950, it would be common. The difference between now and then is that most of the people who saw that as right and proper, are dead now. They didn't learn to live a non-racist life through education or the law -- they kept on being racist until death made them irrelevant. That's good of course.

This can work negatively as well however, and the younger generations, if this study and others like it are true, don't really care about the constitutional privacy protections us fogies do care about. What that suggests, is privacy protections will continue to erode over time as people in my generation (and older) start to die off (I'm Gen X for any pop-demographers who care).

The really sad thing is that people will post back and forth about this change and that change that we should make.

Close coal power plants, build more electric cars, install more LED light bulbs...

None of it matters... not a single bit of it...

Why? Because over the next 30 years, the four nations that make up BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) will increase their output by about as much as the US produces today.

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The United States of America could cut our output by 100%, we could all go back into caves... and it wouldn't make any difference, in 30 years our entire output will be replaced by other people.

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The only real possible solutions are those that work worldwide, it doesn't take very many people ignoring them to make the entire effort pointless.

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I'm open to suggestions that actually might lower the global total output by 50% over the next 50 years... Not reduce the increase, but actually lower the global total from today.

Because if you aren't reducing the global total, then you're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

How many PDAs were sold in the 90s? How many iPads did Apple sell last MONTH?

How many Android tablets were sold last WEEK?

The Newton was a nice idea, but the wrong product at the wrong time. 13 years later, it was ready... called the iPad, and a wild success...

And to be clear, the smartphone and the tablet are really the same thing, in different sizes...

:) You have to think bigger... to when computers are smarter and we no longer need to sit in from of them as often...

Like I said, we aren't there, and we won't be in 5-10 years... This is long term stuff...

Consider... The Apple Newton was really just a VERY early iPad... But it flopped because the technology and supporting infrastructure wasn't there yet. 15 years later and it was... It needed Wi-Fi, flash memory, Internet everywhere, touch screens, new batteries, low power CPUs, etc.

That is a common reply that I see...

First, yes... Microsoft Office is indeed important... for people who share documents, spreadsheets, etc. with the outside world, using the standard does matter. OpenOffice doesn't convert them perfectly and small errors creep when you try.

Second, yes... other windows applications do matter, many such as Quickbooks are important for many businesses. It is what their CPA uses, so keeping your accounting files in the same format that allows you to easily upload your data to your CPA, they can do their thing, and send them back, is more important than what OS you run.

Finally, Windows just works. XP was "good enough" and killed off most further interest in Linux on the desktop. Windows 7 took it further and torpedoed the rest of it... Windows 8 got a lot of flack, 8.1 fixed much of that mess... You install Windows 8.1 on almost anything made in the past 6 years and it runs very, very well.

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As a side note, if the reason you want Linux is because it is "not Windows", that will never be enough of a reason. You need a reason beyond that to get the bulk of the people to care.

Apple OS X has three times the Linux marketshare (if not more), and it is one of the most expensive options you can pick. That more than anything else should pour cold water on the Linux Desktop idea...

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For servers? Wonderful, totally wonderful, I get that it does have a bright future there.

http://elsag.com/mobile.htm

1800 license plates per minute, monitor 4 lanes of traffic at once -- yeah, show me the man in a lawnchair who can do that.