Precisely this, a hundred times over. The current political establishment in DE gets a lot of good press, but mainly because the press loves them regardless of what they do. In reality, the current German government makes Mr. Trump seem sane and connected to reality, if you look closely how well their actions match their rhetoric.
In particular with regard to their stance on immigration, and with regard to Islamic fundamentalism in their own country. Are all Muslim immigrants radicals? No, of course not. But if a minority of immigrant Muslims routinely get away with anti-semitic rhetoric that would land a "native" German in jail, what the hell do they expect the outcome to be?
You know, what with their long and illustrious history of totalitarianism and censorship. Which always worked out so perfectly, right?
I guess the correct reply to this whole censorship thing would be "Jawohl, mein Führer!" (spoken to their "Minister of Justice" who came up with this insanity). And I wish this was funny, instead of tragic.
Give these things time. Once they have the whole "continuous medical data recording" thing sorted out (heart rate, blood sugar, if we are talking luxury, even blood pressure, perhaps?), people will wear them constantly. They are not that good at these things yet, though, so adoption is naturally a bit slower than you might expect.
Your smartphone is for connectivity, but your smartwatch is for your health. And it can of course give you weather reports, too, and tell you if someone texted you - but these are side effects. Keeping tabs on your metabolic parameters is the #1 reason to wear something close to your body like that.
As a german speaker from a neighbouring country, I can only express my amazement at the attitude of you guys, over and over again. You Germans are probably the most smug bunch on the planet: one can bend horseshoes around your egos. Right now, you are so extremely convinced that you are right, and that everyone else is just making mistakes. And that the only danger is from the "rise of right wing tendencies".
Oh boy.
The thing is, your precious "democratic" "leaders" you have right now are travesties of what true statesmen should be. And have been for two decades at least. Helmut Schmidt and the like still had character, but how long is it since he was in office?
Point in case: that chap de Maiziere. Or, even worse, Mr. Maas. These people are utter scum: totally unsuited for public office, both intellectually, and with regard to their character. And they both show strong totalitarian tendencies - sorry about that.
And if you don't see that, you deserve everything you get. Unfortunately.
Well, the thing for you to do would then be to cherry-pick some studies that support your viewpoint (based on what you say, this should be really easy, right?). And *not* to flame your opponent by saying "your opinions are worthless, I can't be bothered to refute them". Contrary to what a generation of crybabies and special snowflakes seems to have been taught in liberal arts colleges in the last decade or two, this is not how having an actual argument works. You dislike what someone else is saying? Come up with a counter-argument, not a whine.
Personally, I do not even have a particularly solid opinion on the matter that he was discussing in that memo. But I find it quite telling that one side (Mr. Damore) cites studies and such (as biased and wrong as they might be), while all the other side does is whine and say "it can't be true". Well, if the latter is the case, go right ahead and cite some studies that clearly show Mr. Damore is wrong. Or shut the fuck up.
In all fairness, when I'm skiing, I also have to take off my gloves right now, to unlock my current iPhone 7. And any other phone out there, actually, as interacting with a phone does not work too well with skiing gloves on.
However, I am also quite skeptical about that FaceID feature. Especially the aspect that at least potentially, someone else can hold the phone in front of your face, to unlock it against your will. Not cool.
I would disagree with that. Nothing is going to change unless the crooks who are running that company are made examples out of. In person. In public. The only thing sociopaths like these vermin are actually afraid of is public humiliation, and loss of the hoard they are trying to amass. Nothing else works. These fuckers take pride in outsmarting a reasonable system. Time to up the stakes a bit.
You would be surprised how fast people start to care a lot more about the performance and character of the CxOs of the companies they have in their 401k accounts once a total, sudden loss due to criminal activity on part of said CxOs becomes a reality.
Fair enough - except that I was not talking about stand-alone houses, but all sorts of real estate. I'm talking about flats in larger buildings becoming unaffordable. And along with that, rent is skyrocketing. At least in Europe: where populations are, by and large, fairly static, actually. So even though demand should be more or less level, prices are going ballistic. What is your take on this?
Except that it's not as easy as you make it to be. "A country's finances are different from a household's" is of course true - but also such a convenient excuse for lazy and inefficient governments and societies to mask their ineptitude by printing money.
There is actually skyrocketing inflation going on: the big difference is that it is not evenly spread across all markets. Remember when a person with a normal income had a chance of actually buying real estate for their own use? Say, the flat you live in? This has become fairly utopic for a sizeable part of the demographic pie: anyone except the top of the income pyramid are driven out of this market, as this is where the big players are trying to park their increasingly dubious freshly printed money. Same goes for a number of other "hard assets".
But I grant you, the economy has managed to avoid old-school social upheavals (read: hunger riots etc.) so far, as stuff you need for everyday survival have stayed decently priced, with only very moderate increases in price over the past few years. Real estate and living, though... ouch.
He managed to lose the air war which he needed to win if he expected to produce enough for the domestic markets and the war.
Yet he did come very very close to win the battle of Britain. So close, yet so far. So it goes.
Actually, if you look at how the actual Battle of Britain played out, it took quite substantial military genius on the part of the Reich to wrest spectacular defeat from the jaws of victory in that particular case. If the German side had kept their cool and done what was logical, the RAF would have been history. Instead, they whittled their resources on petty destruction of civilian targets, and lost focus. Which was of course in character for the bunch of mindless fascists they were, but still, military genius this ain't.
Mind you, that particular clusterfuck was more Göring's work than Hitler's - but still. Dunkirk and BoB were prime examples of amateurs losing sight of what they originally set out to accomplish. Basically, the invasion of France earlier had worked only because it was led by professionals, and was over before Hitler could intervene. And also because the French military leadership made it rather easy for them, of course. Which the Brits did not.
I remember that crap. Basically, this was the brainchild of a bunch of second-rate CS professors, who tried to do better than TCP/IP by adding several layers of obtuse complications on top of the network layer. One of these professors was a teacher at the uni I studied, many years ago. He forced everyone to buy his book on the topic. After the course was done, I never heard of the thing again, of course, until now. Not so happy memories (the course was lethally boring), but at least memories. Of 25 years ago.:)
Look up youtube videos of real aerial combat manoeuvres. In other word, dogfight training in a modern jet fighter, filmed from the cockpit.
Then say again that being good at this sort of things does not need considerable physical strength. Not to mention the cardio health you mention. But you also have to be quite strong in the really old fashioned physical way, to hack it at dogfighting.
To be fair, if something the size of a spy satellite hit squarely ISS head on while on a retrograde orbit, the outcome would be a short-lived, and very faint, ring of tiny debris particles around earth. With very little else remaining. So being concerned about a fairly close pass is not that unreasonable - at least if no other information is available.
That having been said, I do agree with you that this was likely an intentional "close pass" while on fairly similar orbit, so the relative velocities were likely not that dangerous.
Right. But since when was "we could not get approval to do it our way" a valid reason to do away with international law?
Mind you, this is not to say that under certain circumstances, it isn't permissible to say "fuck it", and just do what you have to do. But to me, it would not seem that all possible options had been exhausted before the use of deadly force.
Also, if the images that are emerging from the airbase are anything to go by, the airstrikes seem to have fallen well short of the alleged goal of totally disabling the base. Which, interestingly, might or might not have been the purpose all along, Trump-style. Do something to be able to say you tried, and intentionally fuck up so you don't hurt your friends too much.
The devil is in the details, though. For instance, their point about all the Sarin stockpile of the Syrian government being in the form of binary weapons. Which would not yield active Sarin when accidentally hit during an airstrike.
Sure, that makes sense. Iff it was Sarin that was originally from Syrian government stocks that was hit. Could be, could perfectly well be.
But what if someone was storing non-binary Sarin (from whatever source) in a building there. Properly made non-binary Sarin has a shelf life of around 5 years, or so they say. Now anyone reasonably sane would prefer binary C-weapons for safety reasons - but they are harder to make than plain Sarin. Would it be inconceivable for rebels (who do have chemical engineers in their ranks) to make some, to provoke precisely the reaction we are seeing now?
Not sure - maybe the whole thing was a Syrian govt. airstrike after all. But there is a reason that military action normally requires international agreement. Say, a UN resolution, or something. Unilaterally striking under such unclear circumstances hardly helps pacifying the region.
I am talking about chemical weapons attacks in the civil war only - and attacks that could be pinned to Assad's troops beyond any reasonable level of doubt.
The thing is, if this was a false flag operation (which I'm not saying it was, btw), it would not have been a really complicated one. Release some Sarin in an area that is currently being subjected to Syrian government airstrikes. Done.
All you need for this are one, two operatives who can move in rebel territory. And some Sarin, of course - but obtaining some is hardly an obstacle for any serious state-level actor who would like to influence things in Syria to move in a direction they fancy. Such an operation is hardly worthy of more than one, two paragraphs in a Tom Clancy novel.
Again: not saying this is what happened. Just that it would have been a no-brainer to pull off, for a large number of state-level actors in this war.
...but would it not also have been an option to slingshot Cassini out of the local system of Saturn altogether? (say, via a close fly-by of Titan, or something) To set it on some really long-shot trajectory across the solar system, from which it could conceivably be collected in a few decades once we get the hang of proper space propulsion?
That way, a truly historic artefact could have been preserved, without risking contamination of Saturn's moons?
Does this survey properly factor in things like healthcare and retirement costs?
Because sure, in Western Europe you earn half as much as in the US - but with that salary, you usually already have health insurance, retirement and free education for your kids covered (minus university, which is not free in a number of countries).
These little details could conceivably tilt the balance in favour of the lower salary.
Well, the thing is, if you were either working in the telecom industry back then, or for the military, you already got more than a passing inkling that said pervasive monitoring claims were at least not total bullshit. But corporate and military secrecy made sure that hardly anyone at the time was able to walk out of the building they worked in, and had anything actionable to show to anybody. Besides, in the era before the internet, it was much harder to actually spread information so quickly that the genie could not be put back in the lamp.
Or simply put: even back then, a lot of people had fairly solid indications that these crazy theories were, well, not all that crazy. But without the internet, knowledge about this usually stayed compartmentalised, and no one cared.
For instance, I had spent some time in the military in the late 80ies/early 90ies. And then went on to study computer science. Even back then, I knew that a lot of this was going on. You know who was absolutely and totally apathetic to all this, in spite of me saying more than I probably should have? Everyone at the CS department where I got my master's degree. Literally no one cared. And these were the people who had the technical background to see that what I was saying made some sense, and was not taken from thin air. But no one cared.
Same thing now, actually - except that the internet lets the few who do care gather and connect.
The only bit I don't quite understand is why they don't piece together some completely mammoth DNA, and try to grow that in an artificial uterus? What would the additional complications be, beyond hacking together an elephant-mammoth hybrid like they propose?
For at least some of them: by the magnetisation they have?
Before you moderate this as stupid circular reasoning - consider that you could, at least conceivably, pull a tree-ring like stunt here. For some layers, you might be able to determine the date, via these pottery artefacts. And you might be able to interpolate the others from these data points.
"Might" is of course a very important qualifier here.
Well, sure, no such station currently exists. But there is science fiction of the "we could do it if someone just ponied up enough $$$" variety, and then there is the other sort ("we just need to invent anti-gravity, and we are all set").
And to me, a rotation space station would seem to squarely fall into the first camp - unless there are some fundamental engineering issues I am not aware of. But my assumption is that all that is keeping us from building something like that, and putting it in orbit, is the combination of the staggering price tag, and the questionable utility of a low orbit space habitat. As in: it would cost astronomical sums of money to build - but for what do we need this sort of thing, exactly?
...to confirm that long term space travel will require artificial gravity of some sort. Fair enough, it should hardly come as a surprise that if you send a bunch of premium monkeys evolved for life deep down in a gravity well into long term zero G, Trouble Will Ensue.
But we have at least one seemingly workable idea of how to do this, so this is not a deal breaker to interplanetary travel. Rotating spaceships of some sort (cylinders, wheel-type habitats) don't require much in terms of science fiction to pull off, and should cover this problem nicely.
It does seem, though, that no one has any even medium term plans to pull anything of the sort off. At least I haven't seen any concrete plans to build any rotating space stations - all I ever came across were hypothetical studies of some sort. But my guess is that this is only because the ISS was already gigantically expensive, and is not used all that intensively. So successor space stations are a long way out anyway. And the non-rotating design of the ISS allowed for incremental construction. There do not seem to be any big drawbacks to a rotating station in principle, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Precisely this, a hundred times over. The current political establishment in DE gets a lot of good press, but mainly because the press loves them regardless of what they do. In reality, the current German government makes Mr. Trump seem sane and connected to reality, if you look closely how well their actions match their rhetoric.
In particular with regard to their stance on immigration, and with regard to Islamic fundamentalism in their own country. Are all Muslim immigrants radicals? No, of course not. But if a minority of immigrant Muslims routinely get away with anti-semitic rhetoric that would land a "native" German in jail, what the hell do they expect the outcome to be?
You know, what with their long and illustrious history of totalitarianism and censorship. Which always worked out so perfectly, right?
I guess the correct reply to this whole censorship thing would be "Jawohl, mein Führer!" (spoken to their "Minister of Justice" who came up with this insanity). And I wish this was funny, instead of tragic.
Give these things time. Once they have the whole "continuous medical data recording" thing sorted out (heart rate, blood sugar, if we are talking luxury, even blood pressure, perhaps?), people will wear them constantly. They are not that good at these things yet, though, so adoption is naturally a bit slower than you might expect.
Your smartphone is for connectivity, but your smartwatch is for your health. And it can of course give you weather reports, too, and tell you if someone texted you - but these are side effects. Keeping tabs on your metabolic parameters is the #1 reason to wear something close to your body like that.
As a german speaker from a neighbouring country, I can only express my amazement at the attitude of you guys, over and over again. You Germans are probably the most smug bunch on the planet: one can bend horseshoes around your egos. Right now, you are so extremely convinced that you are right, and that everyone else is just making mistakes. And that the only danger is from the "rise of right wing tendencies".
Oh boy.
The thing is, your precious "democratic" "leaders" you have right now are travesties of what true statesmen should be. And have been for two decades at least. Helmut Schmidt and the like still had character, but how long is it since he was in office?
Point in case: that chap de Maiziere. Or, even worse, Mr. Maas. These people are utter scum: totally unsuited for public office, both intellectually, and with regard to their character. And they both show strong totalitarian tendencies - sorry about that.
And if you don't see that, you deserve everything you get. Unfortunately.
Well, the thing for you to do would then be to cherry-pick some studies that support your viewpoint (based on what you say, this should be really easy, right?). And *not* to flame your opponent by saying "your opinions are worthless, I can't be bothered to refute them". Contrary to what a generation of crybabies and special snowflakes seems to have been taught in liberal arts colleges in the last decade or two, this is not how having an actual argument works. You dislike what someone else is saying? Come up with a counter-argument, not a whine.
Personally, I do not even have a particularly solid opinion on the matter that he was discussing in that memo. But I find it quite telling that one side (Mr. Damore) cites studies and such (as biased and wrong as they might be), while all the other side does is whine and say "it can't be true". Well, if the latter is the case, go right ahead and cite some studies that clearly show Mr. Damore is wrong. Or shut the fuck up.
In all fairness, when I'm skiing, I also have to take off my gloves right now, to unlock my current iPhone 7. And any other phone out there, actually, as interacting with a phone does not work too well with skiing gloves on.
However, I am also quite skeptical about that FaceID feature. Especially the aspect that at least potentially, someone else can hold the phone in front of your face, to unlock it against your will. Not cool.
I would disagree with that. Nothing is going to change unless the crooks who are running that company are made examples out of. In person. In public. The only thing sociopaths like these vermin are actually afraid of is public humiliation, and loss of the hoard they are trying to amass. Nothing else works. These fuckers take pride in outsmarting a reasonable system. Time to up the stakes a bit.
You would be surprised how fast people start to care a lot more about the performance and character of the CxOs of the companies they have in their 401k accounts once a total, sudden loss due to criminal activity on part of said CxOs becomes a reality.
Fair enough - except that I was not talking about stand-alone houses, but all sorts of real estate. I'm talking about flats in larger buildings becoming unaffordable. And along with that, rent is skyrocketing. At least in Europe: where populations are, by and large, fairly static, actually. So even though demand should be more or less level, prices are going ballistic. What is your take on this?
Except that it's not as easy as you make it to be. "A country's finances are different from a household's" is of course true - but also such a convenient excuse for lazy and inefficient governments and societies to mask their ineptitude by printing money.
There is actually skyrocketing inflation going on: the big difference is that it is not evenly spread across all markets. Remember when a person with a normal income had a chance of actually buying real estate for their own use? Say, the flat you live in? This has become fairly utopic for a sizeable part of the demographic pie: anyone except the top of the income pyramid are driven out of this market, as this is where the big players are trying to park their increasingly dubious freshly printed money. Same goes for a number of other "hard assets".
But I grant you, the economy has managed to avoid old-school social upheavals (read: hunger riots etc.) so far, as stuff you need for everyday survival have stayed decently priced, with only very moderate increases in price over the past few years. Real estate and living, though... ouch.
He managed to lose the air war which he needed to win if he expected to produce enough for the domestic markets and the war.
Yet he did come very very close to win the battle of Britain. So close, yet so far. So it goes.
Actually, if you look at how the actual Battle of Britain played out, it took quite substantial military genius on the part of the Reich to wrest spectacular defeat from the jaws of victory in that particular case. If the German side had kept their cool and done what was logical, the RAF would have been history. Instead, they whittled their resources on petty destruction of civilian targets, and lost focus. Which was of course in character for the bunch of mindless fascists they were, but still, military genius this ain't.
Mind you, that particular clusterfuck was more Göring's work than Hitler's - but still. Dunkirk and BoB were prime examples of amateurs losing sight of what they originally set out to accomplish. Basically, the invasion of France earlier had worked only because it was led by professionals, and was over before Hitler could intervene. And also because the French military leadership made it rather easy for them, of course. Which the Brits did not.
Ahahaha... OSI :)
I remember that crap. Basically, this was the brainchild of a bunch of second-rate CS professors, who tried to do better than TCP/IP by adding several layers of obtuse complications on top of the network layer. One of these professors was a teacher at the uni I studied, many years ago. He forced everyone to buy his book on the topic. After the course was done, I never heard of the thing again, of course, until now. Not so happy memories (the course was lethally boring), but at least memories. Of 25 years ago. :)
Look up youtube videos of real aerial combat manoeuvres. In other word, dogfight training in a modern jet fighter, filmed from the cockpit.
Then say again that being good at this sort of things does not need considerable physical strength. Not to mention the cardio health you mention. But you also have to be quite strong in the really old fashioned physical way, to hack it at dogfighting.
To be fair, if something the size of a spy satellite hit squarely ISS head on while on a retrograde orbit, the outcome would be a short-lived, and very faint, ring of tiny debris particles around earth. With very little else remaining. So being concerned about a fairly close pass is not that unreasonable - at least if no other information is available.
That having been said, I do agree with you that this was likely an intentional "close pass" while on fairly similar orbit, so the relative velocities were likely not that dangerous.
Right. But since when was "we could not get approval to do it our way" a valid reason to do away with international law?
Mind you, this is not to say that under certain circumstances, it isn't permissible to say "fuck it", and just do what you have to do. But to me, it would not seem that all possible options had been exhausted before the use of deadly force.
Also, if the images that are emerging from the airbase are anything to go by, the airstrikes seem to have fallen well short of the alleged goal of totally disabling the base. Which, interestingly, might or might not have been the purpose all along, Trump-style. Do something to be able to say you tried, and intentionally fuck up so you don't hurt your friends too much.
The devil is in the details, though. For instance, their point about all the Sarin stockpile of the Syrian government being in the form of binary weapons. Which would not yield active Sarin when accidentally hit during an airstrike.
Sure, that makes sense. Iff it was Sarin that was originally from Syrian government stocks that was hit. Could be, could perfectly well be.
But what if someone was storing non-binary Sarin (from whatever source) in a building there. Properly made non-binary Sarin has a shelf life of around 5 years, or so they say. Now anyone reasonably sane would prefer binary C-weapons for safety reasons - but they are harder to make than plain Sarin. Would it be inconceivable for rebels (who do have chemical engineers in their ranks) to make some, to provoke precisely the reaction we are seeing now?
Not sure - maybe the whole thing was a Syrian govt. airstrike after all. But there is a reason that military action normally requires international agreement. Say, a UN resolution, or something. Unilaterally striking under such unclear circumstances hardly helps pacifying the region.
Remind me - which ones were those, exactly?
I am talking about chemical weapons attacks in the civil war only - and attacks that could be pinned to Assad's troops beyond any reasonable level of doubt.
The thing is, if this was a false flag operation (which I'm not saying it was, btw), it would not have been a really complicated one. Release some Sarin in an area that is currently being subjected to Syrian government airstrikes. Done.
All you need for this are one, two operatives who can move in rebel territory. And some Sarin, of course - but obtaining some is hardly an obstacle for any serious state-level actor who would like to influence things in Syria to move in a direction they fancy. Such an operation is hardly worthy of more than one, two paragraphs in a Tom Clancy novel.
Again: not saying this is what happened. Just that it would have been a no-brainer to pull off, for a large number of state-level actors in this war.
...but would it not also have been an option to slingshot Cassini out of the local system of Saturn altogether? (say, via a close fly-by of Titan, or something) To set it on some really long-shot trajectory across the solar system, from which it could conceivably be collected in a few decades once we get the hang of proper space propulsion?
That way, a truly historic artefact could have been preserved, without risking contamination of Saturn's moons?
Does this survey properly factor in things like healthcare and retirement costs?
Because sure, in Western Europe you earn half as much as in the US - but with that salary, you usually already have health insurance, retirement and free education for your kids covered (minus university, which is not free in a number of countries).
These little details could conceivably tilt the balance in favour of the lower salary.
Well, the thing is, if you were either working in the telecom industry back then, or for the military, you already got more than a passing inkling that said pervasive monitoring claims were at least not total bullshit. But corporate and military secrecy made sure that hardly anyone at the time was able to walk out of the building they worked in, and had anything actionable to show to anybody. Besides, in the era before the internet, it was much harder to actually spread information so quickly that the genie could not be put back in the lamp.
Or simply put: even back then, a lot of people had fairly solid indications that these crazy theories were, well, not all that crazy. But without the internet, knowledge about this usually stayed compartmentalised, and no one cared.
For instance, I had spent some time in the military in the late 80ies/early 90ies. And then went on to study computer science. Even back then, I knew that a lot of this was going on. You know who was absolutely and totally apathetic to all this, in spite of me saying more than I probably should have? Everyone at the CS department where I got my master's degree. Literally no one cared. And these were the people who had the technical background to see that what I was saying made some sense, and was not taken from thin air. But no one cared.
Same thing now, actually - except that the internet lets the few who do care gather and connect.
The only bit I don't quite understand is why they don't piece together some completely mammoth DNA, and try to grow that in an artificial uterus? What would the additional complications be, beyond hacking together an elephant-mammoth hybrid like they propose?
For at least some of them: by the magnetisation they have?
Before you moderate this as stupid circular reasoning - consider that you could, at least conceivably, pull a tree-ring like stunt here. For some layers, you might be able to determine the date, via these pottery artefacts. And you might be able to interpolate the others from these data points.
"Might" is of course a very important qualifier here.
Well, sure, no such station currently exists. But there is science fiction of the "we could do it if someone just ponied up enough $$$" variety, and then there is the other sort ("we just need to invent anti-gravity, and we are all set").
And to me, a rotation space station would seem to squarely fall into the first camp - unless there are some fundamental engineering issues I am not aware of. But my assumption is that all that is keeping us from building something like that, and putting it in orbit, is the combination of the staggering price tag, and the questionable utility of a low orbit space habitat. As in: it would cost astronomical sums of money to build - but for what do we need this sort of thing, exactly?
...to confirm that long term space travel will require artificial gravity of some sort. Fair enough, it should hardly come as a surprise that if you send a bunch of premium monkeys evolved for life deep down in a gravity well into long term zero G, Trouble Will Ensue.
But we have at least one seemingly workable idea of how to do this, so this is not a deal breaker to interplanetary travel. Rotating spaceships of some sort (cylinders, wheel-type habitats) don't require much in terms of science fiction to pull off, and should cover this problem nicely.
It does seem, though, that no one has any even medium term plans to pull anything of the sort off. At least I haven't seen any concrete plans to build any rotating space stations - all I ever came across were hypothetical studies of some sort. But my guess is that this is only because the ISS was already gigantically expensive, and is not used all that intensively. So successor space stations are a long way out anyway. And the non-rotating design of the ISS allowed for incremental construction. There do not seem to be any big drawbacks to a rotating station in principle, right?