Redhat is allowed to do exactly what they are doing. Nothing in the GPL requires them to make their changes available upstream (although they usually do), it requires them to make any changes available to their customers. They still release their changes to the kernel source code, but they changed the way those changes are distributed to their customers.
They used to make these changes available as a patch set that could be applied to the vanilla source from kernel.org. "Enhancers" like Oracle and others would take the vanilla source, cherry pick the patches that they wanted to apply out of Redhat's patch set, and compile the kernel, possibly adding in their own patches. Now Redhat is making the changes available in a single large pre-patched tarball, which means that if Oracle doesn't want to apply all of the patches, then they have to hunt down the changes themselves which is more time consuming and error-prone.
Say Redhat comes up with a patch that tweaks the filesystem code in a way that in some cases makes an Oracle DB 10% slower. In the past, Oracle would just apply all RH patches except that one. Now they have to take the vanilla source, diff it against Redhat's patched source, hunt down all the changes related to that filesystem patch, back those changes out manually, and hope that they got it right.
(FYI, I posted this earlier, but I forgot to login so it fell below the threshold)
Actually, the Japanese plan almost worked. They're intent was not to overpower the US quickly and prevent us from joining the war effort, it was to cripple the US fleet in the Pacific in order to delay our entry long enough so that by the time we did join in (it was inevitable anyway) they would have a strong enough foothold on the South Pacific to withstand any attack we could muster. They also destroyed several British ships and outposts later that day.
The carriers in the Pacific weren't at Pearl like the Japanese expected (the Enterprise was due in Pearl on the 6th but was delayed due to bad weather, the Saratoga had just left San Diego, and the Lexington was delivering planes to Midway). There were also several capital ships in drydock in California that were hurriedly return to service right after the attack. If the Japanese had knocked out a few more capital ships and at least one carrier, then it would have been several months more until the US would have had enough of a fleet in the Pacific to start the counter attack and join the British.
The Japanese might have been able to dig in deeper and establish better air superiority and supply routes if that had happened. As it was, it was a touchy thing at first and we had to learn a lot of lessons quickly (i.e. a lot of sailors, pilots, Soldiers, and Marines died) in order to set up the conditions for the island-hopping campaign.
Re:Tron 1.0
on
Tron: Legacy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Yes, the hyper-cuts in most movies are distracting and jarring and you lose sense of who is fighting whom, especially in the Transformers movies. I can't wait for them to go away, along with the "shake the $200,000 camera attached to the $50,000 SteadiCam rig to simulate a handheld camcorder" effect used in almost every movie since Blair Witch. Or the "fiddle with the zoom as the actors are talking", a la BSG.
Directors, these things don't lend "immediacy" to the shot, they distract us and take us *out* of the moment, and it makes some of us slightly nauseated after a while! Probably not the intended effect.
To a grenade launcher, all targets are area targets.:)
This is a squad or fire team support weapon, not everyone will be issued these. Think of the guy carrying this as the M79 gunner in Viet Nam or the M16/M203 grenadier now.
The laser rangefinder estimates the distance, then as you fire it, it calculates the number of times the round should spin before it airbursts, and tells the round to airburst after it revolves X number of times. The projectile is relatively simple device. The gun is where all the smarts are, not the round, and there is no communication with the round after it leaves the launcher.
This is actually an evolution of the same technology that's been around as long as the M79 and its 40MM grenades (i.e. since VietNam). There is a safety built into each 40MM grenade that requires the round to travel at least 30M from the launcher before it actually arms the explosive, so that a round fired "short" or fired accidentally into a wall near the firer will not injure the firer. The round should impact but it should stay inert. This new round simply has another set of counters that cause it to burst when it hits its limit of revolutions.
At that moment, in that time, he did the exact right thing. War isn't a game of Call of Duty or Starcraft. You don't get a health pack or another life if you hesitate and make the wrong decision. The soldier next to you certainly doesn't get another life if your hesitation causes his death, either.
If someone shoots at me or mine, I will react to contact, return fire, assess the situation, maneuver myself or my fire team onto the enemy, and kill him. It's that simple. All other actions in that moment are irrelevant. The poster states that this was during the original invasion, and that they were ambushed. The enemy could have run out of ammo, or they could have had a weapons cache behind that house. Either way, I wouldn't take that risk and I don't know of many Infantryman who would.
Can a 25mm projectile contain enough explosives to produce the desired effect when it air-bursts?
Most definitely. A Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle uses basically the same 25mm High Explosive projectile without the ariburst electronics, but it just uses a *lot* more powder behind it to throw it a lot farther (equivalent to a 1/4 stick of dynamite, IIRC). One of these landing within a few meters of you will ruin your whole day. Actually, it will pretty much end your day. I was a Gunner on a Bradley and now that I think about it, adding an airburst mode to the Bradley HE round would be pretty freaking cool. I can't imagine having that capability from a shoulder-fired weapon.
Think of it like a much better replacement for the old M79 thumper and you won't go wrong.
Well, you sound like you know what you are talking about, until you say "That's basically why the Marines exist at all. That's their sole purpose - and why they don't have M1's (tanks)." Marines most definitely have tanks. They have their own Air Force, their own specops, light/medium/heavy brigades, etc...
But you are right, conventional warfare against a standing army like North Korea or Iran is what the US Military is good at. This low-level "global war on terror" is not.
BTW, and the M1 Carbine has an amazing knockdown punch. At CQB ranges (50M) it actually imparts a lot more kinetic energy (i.e. turns more guts into goo) than the higher velocity 30-06 M1 Garand round.
Hear, hear! I was also an Infantryman in Iraq in 2004-2005 (central Baghdad and the re-invasion of Fallujah) and my weapon fired every time I pulled the trigger because I took care of it.
Also, everyone that I saw who was hit in the torso or head with a 5.56 went down, period. Varmint gun my ass.
Weapons are actually produced a little differently from other equipment purchased by the military. For most items, a very highly detailed specification is created (mil-spec) and the military puts out requests for bids for manufacturers who can produce the goods. As long as they meet spec, the military will buy it. Weapons and certain vehicles, on the other hand (pistols, rifles, machine guns, humvees, etc...) are contracted out to a manufacturer, but the equipment used in making them is actually owned by the government. The government pays the manufacturer for labor, materials, shipping, etc.., but the the huge cost of creating a fab to produce the weapon is borne by the government. As a side effect of this, *every* weapon produced on this equipment is already "owned" by the government, and is *only* allowed to be used by (or sold by) the government. This lowers the cost per unit to something not unreasonable (something like $1000 for an M16).
For example, Beretta makes the M9 pistol for the US Goverment, but they also have a parallel assembly line with the exact same equipment (they they paid for) for making the 92FS pistol for the civilian market. At no time are any parts from the M9 assembly line ever allowed onto the 92FS assembly line and vice versa, even though they are the same parts made from identical pieces of equipment. Once the M9 contract is up, Beretta is contractually responsible for destroying all of the equipment used for making the M9, unless the government wants to reclaim it and let another manufacturer use it to make more M9's.
Why don't you read the article yourself, instead of relying on/.'s sensationalist headline. Ubuntu is not "dropping" X, Shuttleworth basically says that they are going to look into using Wayland at some point in the future, and even says that it may be years before Wayland is ready for that.
BTW, I like PulseAudio, now that the kinks have been worked out. Did those kinks take a release or two to get worked out? Yep. Did PulseAudio suck at first and was it a bad decision to jump on it so soon? Yep. Is it a better system now than it would have been without all that attention (read: Shuttleworth-funded developer time) put into it? Most definitely.
Well, I *am* a veteran, and I have watched that Wikileaks video several times. It is very sad to me that those reporters and their bodyguards died, but to characterize that shooting as anything other than a tragic accident is totally baseless.
Listening to the radio traffic, they were informed of an ongoing firefight between a Bradley platoon and armed insurgents. They saw a group of men moving *toward* the battle area with what appeared to be weapons, described what they saw to their higher command, and received permission to fire. From my perspective, they performed a textbook engagement, just like they were trained.
Like these pilots, I have been in situations where I was sitting in the turret of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle with weapons armed, looking through my gun sight, having to decide if the person that I was looking at was a hostile or not, and sometimes having to pull the trigger. I don't know the pilots in that video but if they are anything like me then they never forgot **for even one second** that pulling the trigger would end a human life in violence and pain.
You who have never known that you have just actively taken a life will never understand these men. Yes, there is a bit of gallows humor in the cockpit after they fired. That is a well-documented and common response to the situation. They were not "trigger happy" and did not "gleefully murder civilians". Read the book "On Killing" by retired Colonel Dave Grossman if you want some *real* insight into what these pilots were thinking.
I'll admit that there are a few sick fucks who have done some bad shit in Iraq, but that is a VERY small percentage of the military. A blanket statement like "nine years later our military and contractors are slaughtering, raping, and murdering innocents for amusement" is highly offensive to me and to those that I served with. Not once did I nor anyone I knew rape ANYONE. Not once did I nor anyone I knew EVER knowingly injure a civilian. Sometimes we put our own lives at risk by not firing when authorized, in order to make sure that we weren't harming civilians. I went to Iraq, did my job, and I am proud of my service. The politicians got us into that mess and yet we were the ones doing the bleeding and dying. If you want to talk politics, that's one thing, but please quit spreading lies about whatever slaughter/rape fantasies you got from watching Full Metal Jacket or Casualties of War.
If you want to blame someone, don't blame the mythical "We". "We" didn't lie, the Bush administration did. The only reason that "We" are there now is because of those lies. The problem is that "We" have our hand in the hornet's nest and we can pull it out without causing a whole shitstorm of problems. Bottom line is, we're damned if we do and damned if we don't.
WWII != "war on terror" (I hate that term, but that's all we have now)
WWII was a conventional war. Hitler was a head of state and Germany was a sovereign nation. The carpet bombs didn't kill Hitler, his own gun did. Hitler's bunker was pretty easy to find once we advanced into Germany because the demoralizing effect of carpet bombing and the death of their leader caused the nation to give up. The German citizen was proud of their country but by the end they were beaten people.
WOT is an unconventional war where we are fighting a loose confederation of Islamist groups spread across many countries. Taking out Bin Laden won't really do anything in the grand scheme of things, except make whoever the President is at the time look good on TV (Bush could only dream about that). There is no single country that we are fighting. We are fighting in Afghanistan, but we aren't fighting the Afghans per se, but a small subset of them that may not even be the real force behind all of this. It's actually murkier than the situation in Viet Nam.
Yes, we have improved since WWII. Civilian casualties in the tens or even hundreds of thousands may look bad, but that is nowhere near as bad as the millions or tens of millions in England, Japan, and Europe in WWII. Gotta keep some perspective. The important distinction that the average American doesn't realize is that in an unconventional war, there is no goal line to cross, to football to spike, and no stupid "Mission Accomplished" banner to signal that the war is over and all the troops can come home.
That's funny, during my time in Iraq I distinctly remember GUARDING hospitals, key bridges, police stations, ING outposts, sewage treatment plants, and water treatment facilities for days or weeks at a time, in order to prevent insurgents from attacking them and destroying infrastructure. i also remember escorting US civilian contractors to water treatment facilities. These contractors were there to inspect, repair, and upgrade the facilities.
Yes, we targeted infrastructure during the initial bombing campaign. That's Invasion 101, people. Then we spent tens of billions of dollars over the last few years on repairing and upgrading these facilities. That's what has happened in every conventional war for the last 100 years. The only difference is that instead of firebombing an entire city we can do it be hitting just the buildings directly (most of the time).
But they *do* see it as validation and *will* use this as precedent in the future. Just as they don't understand or care about the science refuting their claims, they don't understand or care about the distinction between aggravating an incredibly rare genetic condition and directly causing that condition in the first place.
Driving a herd of cows up a road might be OK for clearing "dumb" land mines (although I would still think twice before walking there!), a herd of cattle is not so great for ensuring a lane is clear of command-detonated mines.
You're not understanding how this works. The military has has mine-clearing systems like this for 100 years (first bangalores, then the MCLC "micklick"), but they required combat engineers to get up to the suspected minefield and deploy these while exposing themselves to enemy fire (or the possibility that the edge of the minefield is closer than expected!). This robot drives up, launches the micklick, and then charges on the line are detonated remotely, while the engineers are safely under cover. Then everyone drives through the lane and is happy, except the guys who planted those mines in the first place...
Think VM (VmWare/Xen/Solaris Zones) instead of parallel applications...Multi-core CPUs are great for server consolidation. We went from a row of 10 full racks of Sun gear down to 10 T2+ blades + a SAN over the last 18 months. Database / webserver / Java app server, you name it, the T2+ handles it all!
That's funny, because I was thinking the same thing. It seems to me that most reading habits with RSS feed readers, Google News, Yahoo News, and newspapers are about the same. Most people probably skim the headlines and/or the first paragraph of each article, and only read the ones that they are actually interested in.
Google News doesn't really care about the click-through as much as Yahoo does, so it's a pretty bare bones site that lends itself to this sort of thing. Yahoo has always been all about the click-through, so it has the "New! Shiny!" headlines to try to grab the reader's attention (although they have toned down their sites recently, too).
The online news sites that all rehash the same Reuters and AP feeds like Fox are prime examples of business people trying to change the customer's behavior instead of responding to how the customer actually uses their *product*.
1) release the footage and look like heroes to the 500 people who would watch 45 year old unreleased Jack Benny shows
2) permanently lock them down, **just in case** we can make a minimal profit off of this footage at some point in the future.
A sane person would say "this isn't the 'lost alternate ending' of Avatar, we'll never make a dime off of this, give it to the fans" and choose #1. A corporate executive will choose #2 and look like an ass every time.
That's exactly what happened. MS tossed a ton of $$ at Netflix for the exclusive right to install a Netflix player on the Xbox360. Netflix took their cash, made a big announcement about it, and then this conversation happened:
Netflix CEO: "There's a lot of bad press from the Playstation and Wii crowd, what can we do to get around this exclusivity thing?" NF Legal: "Well, the contract specifies 'embedded player', can we have people get the content another way without installing anything on the game console??" NF Programmers: "Sure, put the app on a Blu-Ray disk and have it look like BD-Live content" Legal: "Yeah, and we can put the player in the PS Store and WiiWare after the deal is up in 12 months" CEO: "So we get paid for exclusivity *and* we still get to claim that customers can watch movies on other game consoles?? Yay!! Free money!!!"
Our office just switched away from Verizon to T-Mobile for our office phones. I actually gave up my office cell phone 2 years ago because of the poor coverage in our area (we would actually have to step outside of our data center to use our verizon phones, but my personal AT&T and later T-Mobile phones had 3 or 4 bars all the time in there). I've been a happy G1 user since the first week they came out and I'm not looking back.
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Redhat is allowed to do exactly what they are doing. Nothing in the GPL requires them to make their changes available upstream (although they usually do), it requires them to make any changes available to their customers. They still release their changes to the kernel source code, but they changed the way those changes are distributed to their customers.
They used to make these changes available as a patch set that could be applied to the vanilla source from kernel.org. "Enhancers" like Oracle and others would take the vanilla source, cherry pick the patches that they wanted to apply out of Redhat's patch set, and compile the kernel, possibly adding in their own patches. Now Redhat is making the changes available in a single large pre-patched tarball, which means that if Oracle doesn't want to apply all of the patches, then they have to hunt down the changes themselves which is more time consuming and error-prone.
Say Redhat comes up with a patch that tweaks the filesystem code in a way that in some cases makes an Oracle DB 10% slower. In the past, Oracle would just apply all RH patches except that one. Now they have to take the vanilla source, diff it against Redhat's patched source, hunt down all the changes related to that filesystem patch, back those changes out manually, and hope that they got it right.
(FYI, I posted this earlier, but I forgot to login so it fell below the threshold)
Actually, the Japanese plan almost worked. They're intent was not to overpower the US quickly and prevent us from joining the war effort, it was to cripple the US fleet in the Pacific in order to delay our entry long enough so that by the time we did join in (it was inevitable anyway) they would have a strong enough foothold on the South Pacific to withstand any attack we could muster. They also destroyed several British ships and outposts later that day.
The carriers in the Pacific weren't at Pearl like the Japanese expected (the Enterprise was due in Pearl on the 6th but was delayed due to bad weather, the Saratoga had just left San Diego, and the Lexington was delivering planes to Midway). There were also several capital ships in drydock in California that were hurriedly return to service right after the attack. If the Japanese had knocked out a few more capital ships and at least one carrier, then it would have been several months more until the US would have had enough of a fleet in the Pacific to start the counter attack and join the British.
The Japanese might have been able to dig in deeper and establish better air superiority and supply routes if that had happened. As it was, it was a touchy thing at first and we had to learn a lot of lessons quickly (i.e. a lot of sailors, pilots, Soldiers, and Marines died) in order to set up the conditions for the island-hopping campaign.
Yes, the hyper-cuts in most movies are distracting and jarring and you lose sense of who is fighting whom, especially in the Transformers movies. I can't wait for them to go away, along with the "shake the $200,000 camera attached to the $50,000 SteadiCam rig to simulate a handheld camcorder" effect used in almost every movie since Blair Witch. Or the "fiddle with the zoom as the actors are talking", a la BSG.
Directors, these things don't lend "immediacy" to the shot, they distract us and take us *out* of the moment, and it makes some of us slightly nauseated after a while! Probably not the intended effect.
Yeah, it felt like a bit of the Dude crept into his character. "This is messing with my Zen, man". Priceless.
To a grenade launcher, all targets are area targets. :)
This is a squad or fire team support weapon, not everyone will be issued these. Think of the guy carrying this as the M79 gunner in Viet Nam or the M16/M203 grenadier now.
The laser rangefinder estimates the distance, then as you fire it, it calculates the number of times the round should spin before it airbursts, and tells the round to airburst after it revolves X number of times. The projectile is relatively simple device. The gun is where all the smarts are, not the round, and there is no communication with the round after it leaves the launcher.
This is actually an evolution of the same technology that's been around as long as the M79 and its 40MM grenades (i.e. since VietNam). There is a safety built into each 40MM grenade that requires the round to travel at least 30M from the launcher before it actually arms the explosive, so that a round fired "short" or fired accidentally into a wall near the firer will not injure the firer. The round should impact but it should stay inert. This new round simply has another set of counters that cause it to burst when it hits its limit of revolutions.
At that moment, in that time, he did the exact right thing. War isn't a game of Call of Duty or Starcraft. You don't get a health pack or another life if you hesitate and make the wrong decision. The soldier next to you certainly doesn't get another life if your hesitation causes his death, either.
If someone shoots at me or mine, I will react to contact, return fire, assess the situation, maneuver myself or my fire team onto the enemy, and kill him. It's that simple. All other actions in that moment are irrelevant. The poster states that this was during the original invasion, and that they were ambushed. The enemy could have run out of ammo, or they could have had a weapons cache behind that house. Either way, I wouldn't take that risk and I don't know of many Infantryman who would.
Can a 25mm projectile contain enough explosives to produce the desired effect when it air-bursts?
Most definitely. A Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle uses basically the same 25mm High Explosive projectile without the ariburst electronics, but it just uses a *lot* more powder behind it to throw it a lot farther (equivalent to a 1/4 stick of dynamite, IIRC). One of these landing within a few meters of you will ruin your whole day. Actually, it will pretty much end your day. I was a Gunner on a Bradley and now that I think about it, adding an airburst mode to the Bradley HE round would be pretty freaking cool. I can't imagine having that capability from a shoulder-fired weapon.
Think of it like a much better replacement for the old M79 thumper and you won't go wrong.
Well, you sound like you know what you are talking about, until you say "That's basically why the Marines exist at all. That's their sole purpose - and why they don't have M1's (tanks)." Marines most definitely have tanks. They have their own Air Force, their own specops, light/medium/heavy brigades, etc...
But you are right, conventional warfare against a standing army like North Korea or Iran is what the US Military is good at. This low-level "global war on terror" is not.
BTW, and the M1 Carbine has an amazing knockdown punch. At CQB ranges (50M) it actually imparts a lot more kinetic energy (i.e. turns more guts into goo) than the higher velocity 30-06 M1 Garand round.
Hear, hear! I was also an Infantryman in Iraq in 2004-2005 (central Baghdad and the re-invasion of Fallujah) and my weapon fired every time I pulled the trigger because I took care of it.
Also, everyone that I saw who was hit in the torso or head with a 5.56 went down, period. Varmint gun my ass.
Weapons are actually produced a little differently from other equipment purchased by the military. For most items, a very highly detailed specification is created (mil-spec) and the military puts out requests for bids for manufacturers who can produce the goods. As long as they meet spec, the military will buy it. Weapons and certain vehicles, on the other hand (pistols, rifles, machine guns, humvees, etc...) are contracted out to a manufacturer, but the equipment used in making them is actually owned by the government. The government pays the manufacturer for labor, materials, shipping, etc.., but the the huge cost of creating a fab to produce the weapon is borne by the government. As a side effect of this, *every* weapon produced on this equipment is already "owned" by the government, and is *only* allowed to be used by (or sold by) the government. This lowers the cost per unit to something not unreasonable (something like $1000 for an M16).
For example, Beretta makes the M9 pistol for the US Goverment, but they also have a parallel assembly line with the exact same equipment (they they paid for) for making the 92FS pistol for the civilian market. At no time are any parts from the M9 assembly line ever allowed onto the 92FS assembly line and vice versa, even though they are the same parts made from identical pieces of equipment. Once the M9 contract is up, Beretta is contractually responsible for destroying all of the equipment used for making the M9, unless the government wants to reclaim it and let another manufacturer use it to make more M9's.
This is off topic, but thank you for the proper use of the "eat your cake" figure of speech. I hate when people say it backwards.
Why don't you read the article yourself, instead of relying on /.'s sensationalist headline. Ubuntu is not "dropping" X, Shuttleworth basically says that they are going to look into using Wayland at some point in the future, and even says that it may be years before Wayland is ready for that.
BTW, I like PulseAudio, now that the kinks have been worked out. Did those kinks take a release or two to get worked out? Yep. Did PulseAudio suck at first and was it a bad decision to jump on it so soon? Yep. Is it a better system now than it would have been without all that attention (read: Shuttleworth-funded developer time) put into it? Most definitely.
Well, I *am* a veteran, and I have watched that Wikileaks video several times. It is very sad to me that those reporters and their bodyguards died, but to characterize that shooting as anything other than a tragic accident is totally baseless.
Listening to the radio traffic, they were informed of an ongoing firefight between a Bradley platoon and armed insurgents. They saw a group of men moving *toward* the battle area with what appeared to be weapons, described what they saw to their higher command, and received permission to fire. From my perspective, they performed a textbook engagement, just like they were trained.
Like these pilots, I have been in situations where I was sitting in the turret of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle with weapons armed, looking through my gun sight, having to decide if the person that I was looking at was a hostile or not, and sometimes having to pull the trigger. I don't know the pilots in that video but if they are anything like me then they never forgot **for even one second** that pulling the trigger would end a human life in violence and pain.
You who have never known that you have just actively taken a life will never understand these men. Yes, there is a bit of gallows humor in the cockpit after they fired. That is a well-documented and common response to the situation. They were not "trigger happy" and did not "gleefully murder civilians". Read the book "On Killing" by retired Colonel Dave Grossman if you want some *real* insight into what these pilots were thinking.
I'll admit that there are a few sick fucks who have done some bad shit in Iraq, but that is a VERY small percentage of the military. A blanket statement like "nine years later our military and contractors are slaughtering, raping, and murdering innocents for amusement" is highly offensive to me and to those that I served with. Not once did I nor anyone I knew rape ANYONE. Not once did I nor anyone I knew EVER knowingly injure a civilian. Sometimes we put our own lives at risk by not firing when authorized, in order to make sure that we weren't harming civilians. I went to Iraq, did my job, and I am proud of my service. The politicians got us into that mess and yet we were the ones doing the bleeding and dying. If you want to talk politics, that's one thing, but please quit spreading lies about whatever slaughter/rape fantasies you got from watching Full Metal Jacket or Casualties of War.
If you want to blame someone, don't blame the mythical "We". "We" didn't lie, the Bush administration did. The only reason that "We" are there now is because of those lies. The problem is that "We" have our hand in the hornet's nest and we can pull it out without causing a whole shitstorm of problems. Bottom line is, we're damned if we do and damned if we don't.
WWII != "war on terror" (I hate that term, but that's all we have now)
WWII was a conventional war. Hitler was a head of state and Germany was a sovereign nation. The carpet bombs didn't kill Hitler, his own gun did. Hitler's bunker was pretty easy to find once we advanced into Germany because the demoralizing effect of carpet bombing and the death of their leader caused the nation to give up. The German citizen was proud of their country but by the end they were beaten people.
WOT is an unconventional war where we are fighting a loose confederation of Islamist groups spread across many countries. Taking out Bin Laden won't really do anything in the grand scheme of things, except make whoever the President is at the time look good on TV (Bush could only dream about that). There is no single country that we are fighting. We are fighting in Afghanistan, but we aren't fighting the Afghans per se, but a small subset of them that may not even be the real force behind all of this. It's actually murkier than the situation in Viet Nam.
Yes, we have improved since WWII. Civilian casualties in the tens or even hundreds of thousands may look bad, but that is nowhere near as bad as the millions or tens of millions in England, Japan, and Europe in WWII. Gotta keep some perspective. The important distinction that the average American doesn't realize is that in an unconventional war, there is no goal line to cross, to football to spike, and no stupid "Mission Accomplished" banner to signal that the war is over and all the troops can come home.
That's funny, during my time in Iraq I distinctly remember GUARDING hospitals, key bridges, police stations, ING outposts, sewage treatment plants, and water treatment facilities for days or weeks at a time, in order to prevent insurgents from attacking them and destroying infrastructure. i also remember escorting US civilian contractors to water treatment facilities. These contractors were there to inspect, repair, and upgrade the facilities.
Yes, we targeted infrastructure during the initial bombing campaign. That's Invasion 101, people. Then we spent tens of billions of dollars over the last few years on repairing and upgrading these facilities. That's what has happened in every conventional war for the last 100 years. The only difference is that instead of firebombing an entire city we can do it be hitting just the buildings directly (most of the time).
But they *do* see it as validation and *will* use this as precedent in the future. Just as they don't understand or care about the science refuting their claims, they don't understand or care about the distinction between aggravating an incredibly rare genetic condition and directly causing that condition in the first place.
Driving a herd of cows up a road might be OK for clearing "dumb" land mines (although I would still think twice before walking there!), a herd of cattle is not so great for ensuring a lane is clear of command-detonated mines.
You're not understanding how this works. The military has has mine-clearing systems like this for 100 years (first bangalores, then the MCLC "micklick"), but they required combat engineers to get up to the suspected minefield and deploy these while exposing themselves to enemy fire (or the possibility that the edge of the minefield is closer than expected!). This robot drives up, launches the micklick, and then charges on the line are detonated remotely, while the engineers are safely under cover. Then everyone drives through the lane and is happy, except the guys who planted those mines in the first place...
Think VM (VmWare/Xen/Solaris Zones) instead of parallel applications...Multi-core CPUs are great for server consolidation. We went from a row of 10 full racks of Sun gear down to 10 T2+ blades + a SAN over the last 18 months. Database / webserver / Java app server, you name it, the T2+ handles it all!
Cocks!
That's funny, because I was thinking the same thing. It seems to me that most reading habits with RSS feed readers, Google News, Yahoo News, and newspapers are about the same. Most people probably skim the headlines and/or the first paragraph of each article, and only read the ones that they are actually interested in.
Google News doesn't really care about the click-through as much as Yahoo does, so it's a pretty bare bones site that lends itself to this sort of thing. Yahoo has always been all about the click-through, so it has the "New! Shiny!" headlines to try to grab the reader's attention (although they have toned down their sites recently, too).
The online news sites that all rehash the same Reuters and AP feeds like Fox are prime examples of business people trying to change the customer's behavior instead of responding to how the customer actually uses their *product*.
Lets see:
1) release the footage and look like heroes to the 500 people who would watch 45 year old unreleased Jack Benny shows
2) permanently lock them down, **just in case** we can make a minimal profit off of this footage at some point in the future.
A sane person would say "this isn't the 'lost alternate ending' of Avatar, we'll never make a dime off of this, give it to the fans" and choose #1. A corporate executive will choose #2 and look like an ass every time.
That's exactly what happened. MS tossed a ton of $$ at Netflix for the exclusive right to install a Netflix player on the Xbox360. Netflix took their cash, made a big announcement about it, and then this conversation happened:
Netflix CEO: "There's a lot of bad press from the Playstation and Wii crowd, what can we do to get around this exclusivity thing?"
NF Legal: "Well, the contract specifies 'embedded player', can we have people get the content another way without installing anything on the game console??"
NF Programmers: "Sure, put the app on a Blu-Ray disk and have it look like BD-Live content"
Legal: "Yeah, and we can put the player in the PS Store and WiiWare after the deal is up in 12 months"
CEO: "So we get paid for exclusivity *and* we still get to claim that customers can watch movies on other game consoles?? Yay!! Free money!!!"
Our office just switched away from Verizon to T-Mobile for our office phones. I actually gave up my office cell phone 2 years ago because of the poor coverage in our area (we would actually have to step outside of our data center to use our verizon phones, but my personal AT&T and later T-Mobile phones had 3 or 4 bars all the time in there). I've been a happy G1 user since the first week they came out and I'm not looking back.