I find it amusing that some people think that a nation's defense research organisation, which helps build ICBMs, supersonic aircraft, tactical software and so on, needs advice from someone who reading slashdot on how to write an operating system.
Well, in the US -- I don't know about the Indian military -- the same defense establishment that operates those ICBMs etc. also mostly runs Windows. Which is a pretty clear indication that they do need help, and the Slashdot crowd would probably be a good place to get it.
This is at least partly personal experience talking. When I was a medic in the USAF, one of my secondary duties was "computer systems security NCO" for the ER where I worked. Which mainly meant light sysadmin duties, trying to keep machines patched and virus-free with absolutely zero support from the actual hospital IT staff, and debunking "I LOVE YOU virus" warnings and similar bouts of hysteria that Col. So-and-so forwarded to everyone's e-mail ("it must be true, the Colonel said it!") Actual security was a joke.
The idea that an OS is equivalent to a weapons system is absurd, and thinking of it that way (which means it should be kept secret from potential enemies) is pretty much a guarantee of failure. "Everybody wins" is very definitely an option in the network security realm.
Given how puritanical Communist governments tend to be, that seems unlikely. You can bet that every.kp domain will be very, very carefully vetted by legions of low-level officials... and if they screw up (so to speak) and let any porn site through, whether it's child porn or not, the penalties will be a lot worse than just getting fired.
I also seriously doubt that the people in charge of the.kp domain care much about the average North Korean. Every country on earth, no matter how poor, has its rich and powerful class, who these days are pretty much guaranteed to have a computer and the infrastructure for an internet connection.
And historically, totalitarian governments have been obsessed with compiling, storing, and organizing information. The internet, you may have noticed, is very good for this.
Wow, you're displaying a Kim-Il-Sung-ian level of logic with that line. Have you thought of applying for a job with the North Korean government?
Seriously, of course the.kp domain will be used solely as a conduit for NK government propaganda. Everyone gets that. But to claim that the act of a country using its TLD is propaganda in and of itself is just mindless bashing. You remind of me of the guy who claimed that Libya should lose the.ly TLD because the current assignment is inconvenient for people who run URL redirect services.
Anyhow, I could see Riverworld being made into a TV series (with the necessary-for-US-audiences change of everybody being resurrected with clothes).
Wrong Philip (Farmer, not Dick.) But yeah, it could be a great series. I understand there was a terrible miniseries "adaptation" that took nothing from the books but the name and the central conceit; it would be nice to see it done right.
i am merely destroying the idea that the problems with religion and state in the muslim world are the same as the problems with religion and state in the christian world.
Since neither I nor anyone else in this thread ever said they were, this idea you're "destroying" apparently exists only in your own head. Have fun with your mission of self-destruction.
the problem exists in both worlds, but you are a fool or a liar if you don't understand that the problem in the muslim world is orders of magnitude worse
I don't live in Iraq, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran; I live in the US, and therefore have much more of an interest in the problem here than I do elsewhere. "Well, at least we're better than the Taliban!" is not exactly an acceptable standard.
The simple fact is that right now, Americans are fighting and killing and dying, at least in part because the previous President thought that God told him to send them off for that purpose, and the current President is too spineless to stand up against other politicians who think that way. This is a bad thing, and it is bad regardless of the level of religious influence on politics in any other country.
Libya has shown that they do not deserve to be in charge of a tld that happens to be a common English suffix. They have no inherent right to it, so this is just an issue of expedience and user experience for English speakers.
Okay, Libya has no inherent right to the TLD that most closely denotes the name of their country... but "we" (the US? the English-speaking world? the United Nations?) have the inherent right to take it away from them... because it "happens to be a common English suffix"?
you'd be laughed at just as hard as if you told a muslim that saddam hussein's actions were because of islam.
Saddam Hussein is a red herring in this, because Iraq was for quite some time the most secular state in the entire Muslim Middle East, with the possible exception of Turkey. But Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan... not so much. You cannot be claiming with a straight face that the governments of these countries are not dominated by Islam.
state!=religion
if you can't keep that straight, you're just a ridiculous fool
Indeed. Unfortunately, the ridiculous fools who can't keep it straight keep ending up in power, all over the world, and Hell follows with them.
As another poster pointed out, Christianists are indeed trying to make the US military into a Christian organization -- by which they mean their type of Christian, of course -- but that's not really what I meant. Whether the military itself is Christian is irrelevant; what matters is whether the people controlling it consider themselves to be guided by the Christian God. GW Bush was pretty clear that he saw the war in Iraq as a holy war, and there has for decades been a strong fundamentalist presence in US politics which pushes for US miltary involvement in the Middle East on the basis that it is the Holy Land. This isn't solely an American problem, of course (the phrases "holy war" and "Holy Land" far, far predate the existence of the US as a country) but we're pretty clearly the inheritors of it. If you pretend that there is no connections between the actions of governments and the religious beliefs of the people running those governments, then you are the one who is "merely demonstrating that you don't understand the subject matter."
Time to centralize control of DNS in a locale with better (nobody's perfect) free speech and neutrality laws.
You really think that getting rid of the TLD system as it currently stands (every country gets its own TLD) and centralizing control of DNS in any one country would be more conducive to free speech and neutrality? Really?
I thought it had to do with tracking-down and killing dictators like Nero, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Saddam, and so on - in order to restore liberty.
So of the dictators you listed, how many were tracked down and killed by their own armed populace?
I was exaggerating, of course. But take away the science-fictional aspects, and there are people who believe the rest of it implicitly. Some of them used to be friends of mine; not any more.
I like having friends who have different political and religious beliefs from mine. It keeps my on my toes, makes me examine my own beliefs, and can provide hours of entertaining conversation. But I do not enjoy being shouted at by crazy people. A big part of having an online life is learning when things have gone over that line.
Oh, I'll try to have a reasonable debate, if the opinion is being expressed by someone I like and respect. But all too often it just turns into a pointless shouting match.
Slashdotters love to complain about the low quality of debate here, but honestly, in comparison to most of the rest of the internet, the tone here looks like a model of formal rhetoric. Facebook... not so much.
Wait! Is the Sarah Connor Chronicles coming back for a third season?!?
I just wish.
I've been watching on DVD recently, which is probably why that particular idea occurred to me... but honestly, I'll bet you could post what I wrote on Free Republic and there are thousands of people who would believe it and repeat it far and wide, and it would be on Fox News within a week.
There are people I've known for years IRL who hold bizarre beliefs I'd never suspected they held, because they don't talk about them in person, but who will happily spout off about these beliefs on FB, LJ, etc. All that religious bigotry, racism, authoritarianism, etc. that people keep buttoned up in personal conversation comes out at the keyboard, even when the people making the posts know that their friends are going to be reading what they write. And yeah, that's been enough to end a few friendships for me, IRL as well as online. You want to post a hundred times about your favorite band? Okay, no problem, I'll just skip past it. You want to talk about how all Muslims are terrorists and all black people are criminals and Barack Hussein Obama is an al-Qaeda robot sent back from the future to terminate American liberties and ensure the rise of the Kenyan cyber-hegemony? Bye now, and don't let the virtual door hit you in the virtual ass on the way out.
Um. The Mexican-American war was also a case where we "went batshit insane and started attacking for little to no reason" -- or rather, the reason was clear, but it certainly wasn't self-defense. And of course there was the entire period of the Indian Wars. We may not have had a military-industrial complex to push us into fighting, but plain old imperial ambition of the "we want this land and we're going to take it" variety did the trick.
Maybe the outsized excitement I notice is for military hardware and its trappings. I doubt there would be much appetite for fighting here.
To be fair, there are a fair number of veterans here. As a medic, I got an up-close view of what military hardware does on the receiving end, and I have to admit I still think the hardware itself is pretty cool. I also think we're far too enthusiastic about using it.
That's quite an impressive straw man you've built there. And I'm in awe of the ferocity you display in tearing it down. You must be very proud of yourself.
The idea of the president of a company called "The Management Group, Inc." whining to "business executives" about how parasitic lawyers and accountants are... strikes me as sadly hilarious. Pot, kettle. Mote, beam. Etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh my. So what you're saying is you actually had to cope with colonel panics?
To be fair, the Colonel wasn't really to blame. He was just following his orders from General P. Fault.
I find it amusing that some people think that a nation's defense research organisation, which helps build ICBMs, supersonic aircraft, tactical software and so on, needs advice from someone who reading slashdot on how to write an operating system.
Well, in the US -- I don't know about the Indian military -- the same defense establishment that operates those ICBMs etc. also mostly runs Windows. Which is a pretty clear indication that they do need help, and the Slashdot crowd would probably be a good place to get it.
This is at least partly personal experience talking. When I was a medic in the USAF, one of my secondary duties was "computer systems security NCO" for the ER where I worked. Which mainly meant light sysadmin duties, trying to keep machines patched and virus-free with absolutely zero support from the actual hospital IT staff, and debunking "I LOVE YOU virus" warnings and similar bouts of hysteria that Col. So-and-so forwarded to everyone's e-mail ("it must be true, the Colonel said it!") Actual security was a joke.
The idea that an OS is equivalent to a weapons system is absurd, and thinking of it that way (which means it should be kept secret from potential enemies) is pretty much a guarantee of failure. "Everybody wins" is very definitely an option in the network security realm.
Given how puritanical Communist governments tend to be, that seems unlikely. You can bet that every .kp domain will be very, very carefully vetted by legions of low-level officials ... and if they screw up (so to speak) and let any porn site through, whether it's child porn or not, the penalties will be a lot worse than just getting fired.
I also seriously doubt that the people in charge of the .kp domain care much about the average North Korean. Every country on earth, no matter how poor, has its rich and powerful class, who these days are pretty much guaranteed to have a computer and the infrastructure for an internet connection.
And historically, totalitarian governments have been obsessed with compiling, storing, and organizing information. The internet, you may have noticed, is very good for this.
The very act of using this domain IS propaganda.
Wow, you're displaying a Kim-Il-Sung-ian level of logic with that line. Have you thought of applying for a job with the North Korean government?
Seriously, of course the .kp domain will be used solely as a conduit for NK government propaganda. Everyone gets that. But to claim that the act of a country using its TLD is propaganda in and of itself is just mindless bashing. You remind of me of the guy who claimed that Libya should lose the .ly TLD because the current assignment is inconvenient for people who run URL redirect services.
Anyhow, I could see Riverworld being made into a TV series (with the necessary-for-US-audiences change of everybody being resurrected with clothes).
Wrong Philip (Farmer, not Dick.) But yeah, it could be a great series. I understand there was a terrible miniseries "adaptation" that took nothing from the books but the name and the central conceit; it would be nice to see it done right.
i stopped reading here.
How convenient for you.
you just said they were in the comment i was responding to.
No, I didn't. If you're too ideologically blinded to read what I actually wrote instead of what you think I wrote, that's your problem.
do you have some sort of short term memory defect?
My memory is just fine. You might want to work on your reading comprehension, though.
i am merely destroying the idea that the problems with religion and state in the muslim world are the same as the problems with religion and state in the christian world.
Since neither I nor anyone else in this thread ever said they were, this idea you're "destroying" apparently exists only in your own head. Have fun with your mission of self-destruction.
the problem exists in both worlds, but you are a fool or a liar if you don't understand that the problem in the muslim world is orders of magnitude worse
I don't live in Iraq, or Saudi Arabia, or Iran; I live in the US, and therefore have much more of an interest in the problem here than I do elsewhere. "Well, at least we're better than the Taliban!" is not exactly an acceptable standard.
The simple fact is that right now, Americans are fighting and killing and dying, at least in part because the previous President thought that God told him to send them off for that purpose, and the current President is too spineless to stand up against other politicians who think that way. This is a bad thing, and it is bad regardless of the level of religious influence on politics in any other country.
Libya has shown that they do not deserve to be in charge of a tld that happens to be a common English suffix. They have no inherent right to it, so this is just an issue of expedience and user experience for English speakers.
Okay, Libya has no inherent right to the TLD that most closely denotes the name of their country ... but "we" (the US? the English-speaking world? the United Nations?) have the inherent right to take it away from them ... because it "happens to be a common English suffix"?
Are you actually listening to yourself?
you'd be laughed at just as hard as if you told a muslim that saddam hussein's actions were because of islam.
Saddam Hussein is a red herring in this, because Iraq was for quite some time the most secular state in the entire Muslim Middle East, with the possible exception of Turkey. But Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan ... not so much. You cannot be claiming with a straight face that the governments of these countries are not dominated by Islam.
state!=religion
if you can't keep that straight, you're just a ridiculous fool
Indeed. Unfortunately, the ridiculous fools who can't keep it straight keep ending up in power, all over the world, and Hell follows with them.
As another poster pointed out, Christianists are indeed trying to make the US military into a Christian organization -- by which they mean their type of Christian, of course -- but that's not really what I meant. Whether the military itself is Christian is irrelevant; what matters is whether the people controlling it consider themselves to be guided by the Christian God. GW Bush was pretty clear that he saw the war in Iraq as a holy war, and there has for decades been a strong fundamentalist presence in US politics which pushes for US miltary involvement in the Middle East on the basis that it is the Holy Land. This isn't solely an American problem, of course (the phrases "holy war" and "Holy Land" far, far predate the existence of the US as a country) but we're pretty clearly the inheritors of it. If you pretend that there is no connections between the actions of governments and the religious beliefs of the people running those governments, then you are the one who is "merely demonstrating that you don't understand the subject matter."
Time to centralize control of DNS in a locale with better (nobody's perfect) free speech and neutrality laws.
You really think that getting rid of the TLD system as it currently stands (every country gets its own TLD) and centralizing control of DNS in any one country would be more conducive to free speech and neutrality? Really?
I thought it had to do with tracking-down and killing dictators like Nero, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Saddam, and so on - in order to restore liberty.
So of the dictators you listed, how many were tracked down and killed by their own armed populace?
i am not familiar with christian suicide bombers regularly killing hundreds (of mostly other christians)
Christians don't have to blow themselves up to kill hundreds of people at one go. They have the US military to do it for them.
I was exaggerating, of course. But take away the science-fictional aspects, and there are people who believe the rest of it implicitly. Some of them used to be friends of mine; not any more.
I like having friends who have different political and religious beliefs from mine. It keeps my on my toes, makes me examine my own beliefs, and can provide hours of entertaining conversation. But I do not enjoy being shouted at by crazy people. A big part of having an online life is learning when things have gone over that line.
Oh, I'll try to have a reasonable debate, if the opinion is being expressed by someone I like and respect. But all too often it just turns into a pointless shouting match.
Slashdotters love to complain about the low quality of debate here, but honestly, in comparison to most of the rest of the internet, the tone here looks like a model of formal rhetoric. Facebook ... not so much.
Wait! Is the Sarah Connor Chronicles coming back for a third season?!?
I just wish.
I've been watching on DVD recently, which is probably why that particular idea occurred to me ... but honestly, I'll bet you could post what I wrote on Free Republic and there are thousands of people who would believe it and repeat it far and wide, and it would be on Fox News within a week.
There are people I've known for years IRL who hold bizarre beliefs I'd never suspected they held, because they don't talk about them in person, but who will happily spout off about these beliefs on FB, LJ, etc. All that religious bigotry, racism, authoritarianism, etc. that people keep buttoned up in personal conversation comes out at the keyboard, even when the people making the posts know that their friends are going to be reading what they write. And yeah, that's been enough to end a few friendships for me, IRL as well as online. You want to post a hundred times about your favorite band? Okay, no problem, I'll just skip past it. You want to talk about how all Muslims are terrorists and all black people are criminals and Barack Hussein Obama is an al-Qaeda robot sent back from the future to terminate American liberties and ensure the rise of the Kenyan cyber-hegemony? Bye now, and don't let the virtual door hit you in the virtual ass on the way out.
Um. The Mexican-American war was also a case where we "went batshit insane and started attacking for little to no reason" -- or rather, the reason was clear, but it certainly wasn't self-defense. And of course there was the entire period of the Indian Wars. We may not have had a military-industrial complex to push us into fighting, but plain old imperial ambition of the "we want this land and we're going to take it" variety did the trick.
Maybe the outsized excitement I notice is for military hardware and its trappings. I doubt there would be much appetite for fighting here.
To be fair, there are a fair number of veterans here. As a medic, I got an up-close view of what military hardware does on the receiving end, and I have to admit I still think the hardware itself is pretty cool. I also think we're far too enthusiastic about using it.
That's quite an impressive straw man you've built there. And I'm in awe of the ferocity you display in tearing it down. You must be very proud of yourself.
It's a pun on "ignoble."
The idea of the president of a company called "The Management Group, Inc." whining to "business executives" about how parasitic lawyers and accountants are ... strikes me as sadly hilarious. Pot, kettle. Mote, beam. Etc.