There is a pretty clear definition of Open Source, and it does not mean software that your government (or anybody else) locks you into using.
The definition of open source is orthogonal to being required to use the software. If your government (or anyone else, such as your employer) says "you will use Linux," you're locked in; it has no effect on the open-source-ness of Linux itself. OSS has the advantage of being less prone to vendor lock-in than proprietary software does, but that's a separate issue.
Simpler solution would be to have a ship or a platform offshore, just on the international waters as close to the port as possible to act as an armory.
I don't claim to be an expert, but it's my understanding that most merchant shipping runs on pretty thin margins, and port fees are already a major expense. Who would pay for this undoubtedly expensive setup?
That would be Somaliland, which is a de facto independent state. It has a functioning government complete with law enforcement, a stable currency, etc. and has repeatedly petitioned the international community for recognition. So far, no one's given it, and I really don't understand why; it should be obvious to everyone by now that Somalia as a country is just gone.
When you post a graphic with people's names and gunsight logos... and you know that a fair number of the people looking at the graphic are vocal loons... and then one of those people gets shot... it's a reasonable speculation.
That's what we hear, anyway, whenever anyone proposes that maybe ever-higher-speed trading isn't such a great idea.
It's a load of crap, of course. Yes, liquidity is good. No, restricting trades to, say, one per second -- which is still faster than any trading ever took place during the centuries of stock trading before computer trading became common -- would not bring our economy to a screeching halt. In fact, it would probably encourage economic growth by encouraging actual investing instead of the giant casino that the stock market has become.
Of course, in a casino, the house always wins, and since in the case the house also owns the House and the Senate too, this is never going to happen. Sigh.
The most famous example was the original version of the F-4 that was deployed to Vietnam with no gun, just missiles; early 1960s air combat doctrine was the dogfighting was obsolete and enemy aircraft would be shot down well beyond visual range. It didn't work out so well, and the problem wasn't decisively solved until the introduction of the F-4E with an internal cannon.
But I would contend the opposite. Our knowledge of our nasty history hasn't stopped us from repeating ourselves again and again, after all.
Actually, in one important way that I can think of, it has. Anti-Semitism has become unacceptable in European and American society largely for one reason: the Holocaust. It's still around, of course, but I think most people don't understand just how pervasive and socially acceptable (encouraged, in fact) it was on both sides of the Atlantic before WW2. It took showing what happens when it's taken to its ultimate extreme to change this attitude.
Unfortunately, we don't seem to be able to apply this lesson elsewhere.
... don't have one. It's really that simple. If you do have a forum on your site -- any site -- then users have a reasonable expectation that you'll read it and, if not cater to their every whim, at least take their opinions into account. Failing to do this send the message "we don't care about our users," and that's not exactly a formula for success.
BTW, this shouldn't be taken as a slam against Spiderweb Software, which has produced some really excellent games over the years. More a general note, I guess.
It has been at least 50 years since heat-seeking missiles were invented. They can hunt down a fighter with far more accuracy than a human pilot can, they can withstand much higher accelerations, they are much cheaper than a manned fighter plane.
Why do they insist on manned fighter aircraft?
Because to date, every attempt to replace manned, and in fact gun-armed and dogfight-capable, fighters with missiles or "missile truck" aircraft has failed miserably. At some point a combination of SAMs and UCAVs may replace fighters, and manned combat planes generally, but we're not there yet -- or more precisely, we have no evidence that we're there yet. There's only one way to really put it to the test, of course, and nobody wants to go there.
I would say it is a fighter with stealth features - but it is NOT a stealth aircraft - the B2 and the F-117 are stealth aircraft - the F-22 is multi-role aircraft with stealth features as well
How do you define the difference between "stealth aircraft" and "aircraft with stealth features"? The F-22 was designed with stealth as a primary goal, and AFAIK actually has a smaller radar signature than either the B-2 or F-117.
That should read: "To date no one else has been confirmed to be able to match the US's stealth capabilities". The whole point of having stealth aircraft is to be able to be stealthy, if you come right out and say "HAI GUISE LOOK AT THIS COOL THING WE HAVE, IT'S SEKRIT" the whole point sort of falls flat.
It always boggled my mind that the US just came right out and said they had developed all these cool stealth craft soon as they were operational. If I were a military commander in charge of a fleet of stealth capable aircraft I'd be doing my utmost to make sure people did not find out I had them, that way I could use them to attack my target and not be readily identifiable as the originator of those attacks.
Um... security through obscurity? Because that always works so well.
There are a number of reasons to announce the existence of stealth aircraft. The most obvious is deterrence: if your enemy knows you have planes he's not going to be able to see, he's less likely to start a war in the first place. Another -- in the US, anyway -- is the oft-disregarded principle that We, the People have the right to know how our money is being spent; the F-22 and F-35 are very, very expensive aircraft. Yet another is that given the number of enthusiastic and often very knowledgeable amateur plane-spotters, it's simply impossible to keep people from finding out about any widely deployed aircraft, so it would be kind of dumb to try.
And "not be[ing] readily identifiable as the originator of those attacks" is a bizarre red herring. If we're at war with China, and a Chinese fighter gets shot down by a fighter that doesn't show up on radar, do you think the Chinese are going to assume the attack came from, oh, say, Poland? Misdirection in warfare is a powerful tool, but there's a limit to how far it can be taken.
Except the Chinese and American economies are too interlocked to repeat something like the that. Its hard to say what Sino-American relations will look like in the future, but I don't think the Cold War is a particularly good model.
How about a hot war? In the early 20th c., it was widely and loudly proclaimed that the economies of the great European powers were far too dependent on each other for any serious conflict to take place. They might play ego games with each other by building lots of battleships, sure, but anything worse than the occasional naval skirmish, or brief land war in some far-away colony, was unthinkable And, um, we know how that worked out.
There are plenty of stupid people who lack wisdom, humility, and social skills; and smart people can learn these things at least as well as stupid people can.
The point is that "Apple's current model" isn't just Apple's; it's most of the publishing industry's current model, even if you're not aware of it.
On the whole I am shocked that people don't seem to care about freedom of speech anymore. Witness that my post has not been modded up but your response has been.
Right, the only possible reason is that we're all a bunch of censorship-loving sheeple! [rolls eyes]
Slashdot has managed to get by fine for more than a decade without a similar deletion policy.
Slashdot covers lots of issues without any particular focus ("news for nerds" is about as vague as you can get, since people can be nerdy about nearly any subject) so it doesn't make enemies the way Groklaw does. There are anti-Slashdot cranks, of course, but there's no reason for major industry players to fund them.
To be fair, as traditional media has become more and more consolidated, the companies that own the magazines, newspapers, and networks exert this kind of control too. I'm not saying I approve of this situation, you understand, just pointing out that singling out e-publication as uniquely vulnerable doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
True, and I can't help but think that people reading print-like content online would find ads a lot less objectionable if they behaved more like ads in print publications, simply by not breaking your concentration while you're trying to read the story. This is one of the secrets of Google's success, of course, but it's a lesson that no one else seems to want to learn.
Wikipedia can make the ad section blatantly obvious, so to distinguish between ads and content.
I think you missed eldavojohn's point. The fear is that the ads will inevitably leak into the content -- that is, not only will you have the "blatantly obvious" ads on some separate section of the page, you'll also have content rewritten to push products. And this fear is quite justified. Any time you take money from someone, you have aligned your interests with theirs. We/.ers love to complain, with good reason, about the "Senator from Disney" and the blatant corporate spin in the mass media, and it's easy enough to see why this happens: campaign contributions and advertising money set the agenda. There's no particular reason to assume Wikipedia would be immune to this sort of corruption.
Ah, I knew someone would make that mistake. What you're talking about is bringing science into political debate, which is entirely reasonable (and something we need to do a lot more of.) What I was talking about was bringing politics into scientific debate, which is what OP (and many others) were doing by making dumb jokes about Al Gore, and which is, as I said, almost invariably the refuge of people who are too ignorant to contribute anything meaningful to the discussion. Science should always, when possible, inform politics, but not the other way around.
Bringing politics into a scientific debate is very nearly a sure sign that you don't know enough about the subject at hand to have a meaningful opinion.
The whole globe doesn't matter -> what matters are local conditions and specific distributions. Nobody has ever been killed because the average cyclonic activity for a year was up by 2%. Plenty of people get killed by specific storms, even when average cyclonic activity for a year was down.
The whole murder rate doesn't matter -> what matters are local conditions and specific distributions. Nobody has ever been killed because the average number of murders for a year was up by 2%. Plenty of people get killed by specific murderers, even when average murder for a year was down.
Please learn the fact that "the climate" is as far outside of your ability to predict and thoroughly understand as is your apparent grasp on a sense of humor.
I'd say "please learn that jokes based on stupid ideas are only funny to stupid people," but stupid people are by definition not capable of learning much, so it would be a wasted effort.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a pretty clear definition of Open Source, and it does not mean software that your government (or anybody else) locks you into using.
The definition of open source is orthogonal to being required to use the software. If your government (or anyone else, such as your employer) says "you will use Linux," you're locked in; it has no effect on the open-source-ness of Linux itself. OSS has the advantage of being less prone to vendor lock-in than proprietary software does, but that's a separate issue.
Simpler solution would be to have a ship or a platform offshore, just on the international waters as close to the port as possible to act as an armory.
I don't claim to be an expert, but it's my understanding that most merchant shipping runs on pretty thin margins, and port fees are already a major expense. Who would pay for this undoubtedly expensive setup?
That would be Somaliland, which is a de facto independent state. It has a functioning government complete with law enforcement, a stable currency, etc. and has repeatedly petitioned the international community for recognition. So far, no one's given it, and I really don't understand why; it should be obvious to everyone by now that Somalia as a country is just gone.
Yes.
Your .sig is uniquely appropriate in light of your post.
When you post a graphic with people's names and gunsight logos ... and you know that a fair number of the people looking at the graphic are vocal loons ... and then one of those people gets shot ... it's a reasonable speculation.
That's what we hear, anyway, whenever anyone proposes that maybe ever-higher-speed trading isn't such a great idea.
It's a load of crap, of course. Yes, liquidity is good. No, restricting trades to, say, one per second -- which is still faster than any trading ever took place during the centuries of stock trading before computer trading became common -- would not bring our economy to a screeching halt. In fact, it would probably encourage economic growth by encouraging actual investing instead of the giant casino that the stock market has become.
Of course, in a casino, the house always wins, and since in the case the house also owns the House and the Senate too, this is never going to happen. Sigh.
The most famous example was the original version of the F-4 that was deployed to Vietnam with no gun, just missiles; early 1960s air combat doctrine was the dogfighting was obsolete and enemy aircraft would be shot down well beyond visual range. It didn't work out so well, and the problem wasn't decisively solved until the introduction of the F-4E with an internal cannon.
But I would contend the opposite. Our knowledge of our nasty history hasn't stopped us from repeating ourselves again and again, after all.
Actually, in one important way that I can think of, it has. Anti-Semitism has become unacceptable in European and American society largely for one reason: the Holocaust. It's still around, of course, but I think most people don't understand just how pervasive and socially acceptable (encouraged, in fact) it was on both sides of the Atlantic before WW2. It took showing what happens when it's taken to its ultimate extreme to change this attitude.
Unfortunately, we don't seem to be able to apply this lesson elsewhere.
... don't have one. It's really that simple. If you do have a forum on your site -- any site -- then users have a reasonable expectation that you'll read it and, if not cater to their every whim, at least take their opinions into account. Failing to do this send the message "we don't care about our users," and that's not exactly a formula for success.
BTW, this shouldn't be taken as a slam against Spiderweb Software, which has produced some really excellent games over the years. More a general note, I guess.
It has been at least 50 years since heat-seeking missiles were invented. They can hunt down a fighter with far more accuracy than a human pilot can, they can withstand much higher accelerations, they are much cheaper than a manned fighter plane.
Why do they insist on manned fighter aircraft?
Because to date, every attempt to replace manned, and in fact gun-armed and dogfight-capable, fighters with missiles or "missile truck" aircraft has failed miserably. At some point a combination of SAMs and UCAVs may replace fighters, and manned combat planes generally, but we're not there yet -- or more precisely, we have no evidence that we're there yet. There's only one way to really put it to the test, of course, and nobody wants to go there.
I would say it is a fighter with stealth features - but it is NOT a stealth aircraft - the B2 and the F-117 are stealth aircraft - the F-22 is multi-role aircraft with stealth features as well
How do you define the difference between "stealth aircraft" and "aircraft with stealth features"? The F-22 was designed with stealth as a primary goal, and AFAIK actually has a smaller radar signature than either the B-2 or F-117.
That should read: "To date no one else has been confirmed to be able to match the US's stealth capabilities". The whole point of having stealth aircraft is to be able to be stealthy, if you come right out and say "HAI GUISE LOOK AT THIS COOL THING WE HAVE, IT'S SEKRIT" the whole point sort of falls flat.
It always boggled my mind that the US just came right out and said they had developed all these cool stealth craft soon as they were operational. If I were a military commander in charge of a fleet of stealth capable aircraft I'd be doing my utmost to make sure people did not find out I had them, that way I could use them to attack my target and not be readily identifiable as the originator of those attacks.
Um ... security through obscurity? Because that always works so well.
There are a number of reasons to announce the existence of stealth aircraft. The most obvious is deterrence: if your enemy knows you have planes he's not going to be able to see, he's less likely to start a war in the first place. Another -- in the US, anyway -- is the oft-disregarded principle that We, the People have the right to know how our money is being spent; the F-22 and F-35 are very, very expensive aircraft. Yet another is that given the number of enthusiastic and often very knowledgeable amateur plane-spotters, it's simply impossible to keep people from finding out about any widely deployed aircraft, so it would be kind of dumb to try.
And "not be[ing] readily identifiable as the originator of those attacks" is a bizarre red herring. If we're at war with China, and a Chinese fighter gets shot down by a fighter that doesn't show up on radar, do you think the Chinese are going to assume the attack came from, oh, say, Poland? Misdirection in warfare is a powerful tool, but there's a limit to how far it can be taken.
Except the Chinese and American economies are too interlocked to repeat something like the that. Its hard to say what Sino-American relations will look like in the future, but I don't think the Cold War is a particularly good model.
How about a hot war? In the early 20th c., it was widely and loudly proclaimed that the economies of the great European powers were far too dependent on each other for any serious conflict to take place. They might play ego games with each other by building lots of battleships, sure, but anything worse than the occasional naval skirmish, or brief land war in some far-away colony, was unthinkable And, um, we know how that worked out.
There are plenty of stupid people who lack wisdom, humility, and social skills; and smart people can learn these things at least as well as stupid people can.
The point is that "Apple's current model" isn't just Apple's; it's most of the publishing industry's current model, even if you're not aware of it.
On the whole I am shocked that people don't seem to care about freedom of speech anymore. Witness that my post has not been modded up but your response has been.
Right, the only possible reason is that we're all a bunch of censorship-loving sheeple! [rolls eyes]
Slashdot has managed to get by fine for more than a decade without a similar deletion policy.
Slashdot covers lots of issues without any particular focus ("news for nerds" is about as vague as you can get, since people can be nerdy about nearly any subject) so it doesn't make enemies the way Groklaw does. There are anti-Slashdot cranks, of course, but there's no reason for major industry players to fund them.
To be fair, as traditional media has become more and more consolidated, the companies that own the magazines, newspapers, and networks exert this kind of control too. I'm not saying I approve of this situation, you understand, just pointing out that singling out e-publication as uniquely vulnerable doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
True, and I can't help but think that people reading print-like content online would find ads a lot less objectionable if they behaved more like ads in print publications, simply by not breaking your concentration while you're trying to read the story. This is one of the secrets of Google's success, of course, but it's a lesson that no one else seems to want to learn.
Tulip bulbs, I tried to tell them. Tulip bulbs! That's the future of finance, right there!
Wikipedia can make the ad section blatantly obvious, so to distinguish between ads and content.
I think you missed eldavojohn's point. The fear is that the ads will inevitably leak into the content -- that is, not only will you have the "blatantly obvious" ads on some separate section of the page, you'll also have content rewritten to push products. And this fear is quite justified. Any time you take money from someone, you have aligned your interests with theirs. We /.ers love to complain, with good reason, about the "Senator from Disney" and the blatant corporate spin in the mass media, and it's easy enough to see why this happens: campaign contributions and advertising money set the agenda. There's no particular reason to assume Wikipedia would be immune to this sort of corruption.
Actually, it would be interesting to compare military hospitals with civilian and see how they rate on important measures.
Having worked quite a bit in both, I'll say that I think military hospitals are ahead by almost any measure you care to name.
Ah, I knew someone would make that mistake. What you're talking about is bringing science into political debate, which is entirely reasonable (and something we need to do a lot more of.) What I was talking about was bringing politics into scientific debate, which is what OP (and many others) were doing by making dumb jokes about Al Gore, and which is, as I said, almost invariably the refuge of people who are too ignorant to contribute anything meaningful to the discussion. Science should always, when possible, inform politics, but not the other way around.
Bringing politics into a scientific debate is very nearly a sure sign that you don't know enough about the subject at hand to have a meaningful opinion.
The whole globe doesn't matter -> what matters are local conditions and specific distributions. Nobody has ever been killed because the average cyclonic activity for a year was up by 2%. Plenty of people get killed by specific storms, even when average cyclonic activity for a year was down.
The whole murder rate doesn't matter -> what matters are local conditions and specific distributions. Nobody has ever been killed because the average number of murders for a year was up by 2%. Plenty of people get killed by specific murderers, even when average murder for a year was down.
Please learn the fact that "the climate" is as far outside of your ability to predict and thoroughly understand as is your apparent grasp on a sense of humor.
I'd say "please learn that jokes based on stupid ideas are only funny to stupid people," but stupid people are by definition not capable of learning much, so it would be a wasted effort.