Congratulations, you've made (at least) the second "fixed that for ya" post attached to this story which took a true statement and and "fixed" it into a false one. FTFY is one of those memes that's long overdue for a painful death.
No, you didn't. You took a statement that was demonstrably true, and changed it to one that is false.
You know, here on/. we spend a fairly enormous amount of time parsing the difference between various pieces of software that perform similar functions. DBMSs, word processors, web browsers, graphics programs... pretty much everyone understands that different software behaves differently, and that some programs are clearly better than others in certain respects. Yet when it comes to OSs and security, a lot/.ers (and lots of other people, to be sure) seem to have this enormous blind spot; they simply cannot understand (or bring themselves to acknowledge, as the case may be) that there is, indeed, a difference in how well designed different OSs are to repel attacks. Why is this?
Whoever modded the parent post "Troll," please pay attention to reality.
Yes, yes, in many ways the major parties are depressingly similar; Democrats and Republicans alike take enormous bribes from corporate interests and the little guy is pretty much guaranteed to get screwed no matter who's in power. But on a few key issues, there is a difference between them, and this happens to be one of those issues. Pointing this out does not constitute trolling.
What you said, specifically, was "so many violent criminals manage to dodge convictions here based on legal technicalities." That makes it sound like we have some plague of people who are actually guilty of violent crimes using legal trickery to avoid paying the penalties for their actions. While such cases do happen, the vast majority of the time when a "technicality" gets someone off, it's because it's not at all clear whether or not they actually committed the crime, and/or it is quite clear that the evidence against them is invalid. In short, it's the system working exactly the way it's supposed to.
Those "technicalities" are the only thing standing between us and a police state. Decades of cop show writers have used "off on a technicality" as a convenient plot device to explain why an obvious bad guy is still running around on the street -- which is why people think of them as "technicalities" instead of what they are, which is Constitutional protections of fundamental liberties. This is a serious threat to our freedom.
The mutual need for survival would probably cause the astronauts/cosmonauts to cooperate long enough to get back to Earth alive. Where they'd land would be an interesting question, of course.
Considering we've had wars and genocides throughout human history and we're still here, did it ever occur to you that they might serve some biological function you're not aware of? The 20th century set a record for bloodbaths. We still started it with a world population of 1.6 billion, and ended it with a population of over 6.5 billion.
If the "biological function" you're thinking of is population control, then you're contradicting yourself: clearly, the unparalleled bloodbaths of the 20th c. didn't do much to keep the numbers down.
Anyway, it's silly to talk about "biological functions" at all in a large population. There is no biological imperative for any species to do anything except keep itself going, which humans can do pretty well with or without war. There is no abstract standard of fitness, no goal to evolution, etc. As long as H. sapiens is still here, it is by definition performing its biological function just fine.
And finally, your.sig:
Social Justice: Seeing a liberal getting slugged in the teeth.
So you don't have the guts to go out picking fights with liberals, but you want to see someone else do it? That's an unusually honest bit of conservative chickenhawk macho bullshit. Speaking as a liberal, all I can say is, you're welcome to try; afterwards, the hospital personnel will be happy to tell you more about your own personal biological functions than you ever wanted to know.
Which explains why so many violent criminals manage to dodge convictions here based on legal technicalities.
Oh yeah, those goddamn technicalities like the Bill of Rights. Why are we still worried about such archaic ideas anyway? We've got to get the criminals off the streets, damn it! The police have to beat confessions out of people to KEEP US SAFE! WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?
In other words: fuck you, and fuck everyone else who is willing to give away the basic freedoms that generations fought and died for because of something you saw on a TV cop show. You want to live in a place without those pesky "technicalities?" There are lots of countries all over the world that fit that requirement. Give them a try sometime... you may have a different view afterwards. If you survive the experience.
You know, I don't have any pirated material on my computer. Every song, every video, every piece of software, every file of any kind is something I either bought, downloaded legally for free, or wrote myself.
And yet I support TPB, and oppose the MAFIAA and their toadies in the US and (increasingly) around the world.
You can believe me or not, I don't care. Just be aware that there are a substantial number of people who strongly dislike the current insane state of copyright law and the Draconian enforcement thereof, not because it's personally inconvenient for them, but simply and solely because it is wrong.
Oh, I understand it just fine. I'm guessing that you're intelligent enough to do so as well. The only point I'm not clear on is why you deliberately choose otherwise.
Re:What have they been doing until now?
on
NASA May Outsource
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· Score: 5, Insightful
NASA is not a business. Therefore, absolutely none of the buzzword bingo applies here.
Actually, the current state of the US economy indicates that buzzword bingo doesn't apply in any useful way to running a business, either, but that's a whole 'nother argument.
So in other words, you didn't want an answer to your question, even though there's one available based on easily understandable physics; you just wanted an excuse to post more wilfully ignorant ranting. Got it. Once again, you live down to your username in spectacular fashion.
"A service like this for religious people" would be a private clinic offering big-bucks treatment to cure "religion addiction." Nobody (AFAIK) is getting forced into the treatment being discussed in TFA, so by extension, they wouldn't be forced into the religion treatment either. Whether such a service would be of any use is arguable, of course, but it wouldn't constitute a government infringement on individual rights.
Hey Limbaugh, please explain how helping people recover from a dangerous psychological disorder is either "an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
Photosynthesis is still wasteful; the entropy of the system (plants + sunlight + soil + water + air) is still higher after a photosynthetic event than before. The only reason it keeps going is because of the constant supply of free energy from the second item on the list.
How is percentage of GDP the relevant measure here? The US is richer than most other countries; we already knew that. No matter how much money we have, the question to ask is "how much should we spend on X to get what we need" (whether X is defense or something else) not "what percentage of our wealth should we spend on X?" If you make ten times as much money as someone else, it does not follow that you have to spend ten times as much money on your house, your car, and everything else.
Indeed it is, but not as jet fuel; as a couple of other posters have pointed out, almost certainly what the Navy has in mind for this is a plant that could be put on board an aircraft carrier, and used to make fuel while at sea. Methane is waste in this scenario.
GPP called for the military to be "pared down by 50% for the next 3 years running," by which I assume he means 1/2 of current spending next year, 1/4 of current spending the following year, and 1/8 of current spending the year after that. While I think this is pretty unrealistic (the drawdown costs would be enormous, and wipe out much of the savings) I have to note that we could spend 1/8 of our current defense budget and still have a pretty damn "serious military." This list for worldwide defense budgets for the mid-2000's makes the argument pretty compelling; we spend more than the rest of the world combined, and almost ten times as much as our nearest rival, China. Cutting out 7/8 of it isn't going to happen, nor should it... but cutting it by, say, half over five years would be entirely reasonable, and would still leave us a large and well-equipped enough military to deal with any credible threat.
How a liberal, who generally is in favor of bigger government, can rail against the waste that is endemic in a big government and yet cannot recognize the dissonance between those two desires and grow up is beyond me, but that's an aside for now.
[sigh] Liberals, like conservatives and libertarians and people of just about every other political philosophy, want government to do certain things and not do certain other things. Nobody is in favor of "big government" generally, and people who tell you they're in favor of "small government" are generally lying -- they always want to shrink some parts of government and expand others. Libertarians are kinda-sorta the exception, but libertarians who align themselves with conservatives are fools, because conservatives are guaranteed to produce just as big a government as liberals, only they'll try to do it without paying.
Another big one is comfort. Talking on a cell phone, even the best high-end models, for very long is just uncomfortable for me. Cell phones are fine for quick "Hi, honey, I'm at the grocery and I can't remember if we're out of butter" calls, but with friends and family scattered all over the country, I spend a lot of time on one- or two-hour calls and I've never used a cell phone that I can tolerate for that long. I can't believe I'm the only person who finds this to be so.
Re:Wake me when they have something in production.
on
New Nano-Laser Created
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· Score: 1
Thank you! That was a very nice thing to do, and I hope you don't get modded down for it.
Re:Wake me when they have something in production.
on
New Nano-Laser Created
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Except here we have researchers at Purdue, a university with a history of a particularly strong and fruitful connection between science and engineering, doing solid scientific research which may well (or may not, of course) lead to useful commercial development. Believe me, I agree with you entirely about the "bean counters," and I would very much like to see more money directed toward pure research. (Part of this is pure self-interest, since I'm an academic scientist, but I felt this way back when I was doing corporate DBA work too.) The point is that while it may not happen enough, it does happen... and "who cares" attitudes, like the one displayed in the OP which I replied to, are a major obstacle to it happening more.
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations, you've made (at least) the second "fixed that for ya" post attached to this story which took a true statement and and "fixed" it into a false one. FTFY is one of those memes that's long overdue for a painful death.
There, fixed that for ya!
No, you didn't. You took a statement that was demonstrably true, and changed it to one that is false.
You know, here on /. we spend a fairly enormous amount of time parsing the difference between various pieces of software that perform similar functions. DBMSs, word processors, web browsers, graphics programs ... pretty much everyone understands that different software behaves differently, and that some programs are clearly better than others in certain respects. Yet when it comes to OSs and security, a lot /.ers (and lots of other people, to be sure) seem to have this enormous blind spot; they simply cannot understand (or bring themselves to acknowledge, as the case may be) that there is, indeed, a difference in how well designed different OSs are to repel attacks. Why is this?
Whoever modded the parent post "Troll," please pay attention to reality.
Yes, yes, in many ways the major parties are depressingly similar; Democrats and Republicans alike take enormous bribes from corporate interests and the little guy is pretty much guaranteed to get screwed no matter who's in power. But on a few key issues, there is a difference between them, and this happens to be one of those issues. Pointing this out does not constitute trolling.
What you said, specifically, was "so many violent criminals manage to dodge convictions here based on legal technicalities." That makes it sound like we have some plague of people who are actually guilty of violent crimes using legal trickery to avoid paying the penalties for their actions. While such cases do happen, the vast majority of the time when a "technicality" gets someone off, it's because it's not at all clear whether or not they actually committed the crime, and/or it is quite clear that the evidence against them is invalid. In short, it's the system working exactly the way it's supposed to.
Those "technicalities" are the only thing standing between us and a police state. Decades of cop show writers have used "off on a technicality" as a convenient plot device to explain why an obvious bad guy is still running around on the street -- which is why people think of them as "technicalities" instead of what they are, which is Constitutional protections of fundamental liberties. This is a serious threat to our freedom.
So that's why the outrage, pretty much.
The mutual need for survival would probably cause the astronauts/cosmonauts to cooperate long enough to get back to Earth alive. Where they'd land would be an interesting question, of course.
Considering we've had wars and genocides throughout human history and we're still here, did it ever occur to you that they might serve some biological function you're not aware of? The 20th century set a record for bloodbaths. We still started it with a world population of 1.6 billion, and ended it with a population of over 6.5 billion.
If the "biological function" you're thinking of is population control, then you're contradicting yourself: clearly, the unparalleled bloodbaths of the 20th c. didn't do much to keep the numbers down.
Anyway, it's silly to talk about "biological functions" at all in a large population. There is no biological imperative for any species to do anything except keep itself going, which humans can do pretty well with or without war. There is no abstract standard of fitness, no goal to evolution, etc. As long as H. sapiens is still here, it is by definition performing its biological function just fine.
And finally, your .sig:
Social Justice: Seeing a liberal getting slugged in the teeth.
So you don't have the guts to go out picking fights with liberals, but you want to see someone else do it? That's an unusually honest bit of conservative chickenhawk macho bullshit. Speaking as a liberal, all I can say is, you're welcome to try; afterwards, the hospital personnel will be happy to tell you more about your own personal biological functions than you ever wanted to know.
Which explains why so many violent criminals manage to dodge convictions here based on legal technicalities.
Oh yeah, those goddamn technicalities like the Bill of Rights. Why are we still worried about such archaic ideas anyway? We've got to get the criminals off the streets, damn it! The police have to beat confessions out of people to KEEP US SAFE! WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?
In other words: fuck you, and fuck everyone else who is willing to give away the basic freedoms that generations fought and died for because of something you saw on a TV cop show. You want to live in a place without those pesky "technicalities?" There are lots of countries all over the world that fit that requirement. Give them a try sometime ... you may have a different view afterwards. If you survive the experience.
:)
"My fellow Americans (and Swedes) we are at this moment locked in a war against a merciless enemy ..."
You know, I don't have any pirated material on my computer. Every song, every video, every piece of software, every file of any kind is something I either bought, downloaded legally for free, or wrote myself.
And yet I support TPB, and oppose the MAFIAA and their toadies in the US and (increasingly) around the world.
You can believe me or not, I don't care. Just be aware that there are a substantial number of people who strongly dislike the current insane state of copyright law and the Draconian enforcement thereof, not because it's personally inconvenient for them, but simply and solely because it is wrong.
Oh, I understand it just fine. I'm guessing that you're intelligent enough to do so as well. The only point I'm not clear on is why you deliberately choose otherwise.
NASA is not a business. Therefore, absolutely none of the buzzword bingo applies here.
Actually, the current state of the US economy indicates that buzzword bingo doesn't apply in any useful way to running a business, either, but that's a whole 'nother argument.
So in other words, you didn't want an answer to your question, even though there's one available based on easily understandable physics; you just wanted an excuse to post more wilfully ignorant ranting. Got it. Once again, you live down to your username in spectacular fashion.
Here's a hint: think about what a greenhouse is -- an actual greenhouse like you'd build in your garden -- and why CO2 is called a "greenhouse gas."
"A service like this for religious people" would be a private clinic offering big-bucks treatment to cure "religion addiction." Nobody (AFAIK) is getting forced into the treatment being discussed in TFA, so by extension, they wouldn't be forced into the religion treatment either. Whether such a service would be of any use is arguable, of course, but it wouldn't constitute a government infringement on individual rights.
Hey Stalin, ever heard of the first amendment?
Hey Limbaugh, please explain how helping people recover from a dangerous psychological disorder is either "an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."
That "Dead Mule Test" essay is OMFG brilliant. Thanks for the laugh.
Photosynthesis is still wasteful; the entropy of the system (plants + sunlight + soil + water + air) is still higher after a photosynthetic event than before. The only reason it keeps going is because of the constant supply of free energy from the second item on the list.
Everything that every living thing does is thermodynamically a huge waste.
How is percentage of GDP the relevant measure here? The US is richer than most other countries; we already knew that. No matter how much money we have, the question to ask is "how much should we spend on X to get what we need" (whether X is defense or something else) not "what percentage of our wealth should we spend on X?" If you make ten times as much money as someone else, it does not follow that you have to spend ten times as much money on your house, your car, and everything else.
Indeed it is, but not as jet fuel; as a couple of other posters have pointed out, almost certainly what the Navy has in mind for this is a plant that could be put on board an aircraft carrier, and used to make fuel while at sea. Methane is waste in this scenario.
GPP called for the military to be "pared down by 50% for the next 3 years running," by which I assume he means 1/2 of current spending next year, 1/4 of current spending the following year, and 1/8 of current spending the year after that. While I think this is pretty unrealistic (the drawdown costs would be enormous, and wipe out much of the savings) I have to note that we could spend 1/8 of our current defense budget and still have a pretty damn "serious military." This list for worldwide defense budgets for the mid-2000's makes the argument pretty compelling; we spend more than the rest of the world combined, and almost ten times as much as our nearest rival, China. Cutting out 7/8 of it isn't going to happen, nor should it ... but cutting it by, say, half over five years would be entirely reasonable, and would still leave us a large and well-equipped enough military to deal with any credible threat.
How a liberal, who generally is in favor of bigger government, can rail against the waste that is endemic in a big government and yet cannot recognize the dissonance between those two desires and grow up is beyond me, but that's an aside for now.
[sigh] Liberals, like conservatives and libertarians and people of just about every other political philosophy, want government to do certain things and not do certain other things. Nobody is in favor of "big government" generally, and people who tell you they're in favor of "small government" are generally lying -- they always want to shrink some parts of government and expand others. Libertarians are kinda-sorta the exception, but libertarians who align themselves with conservatives are fools, because conservatives are guaranteed to produce just as big a government as liberals, only they'll try to do it without paying.
Yes, to all of the above.
Another big one is comfort. Talking on a cell phone, even the best high-end models, for very long is just uncomfortable for me. Cell phones are fine for quick "Hi, honey, I'm at the grocery and I can't remember if we're out of butter" calls, but with friends and family scattered all over the country, I spend a lot of time on one- or two-hour calls and I've never used a cell phone that I can tolerate for that long. I can't believe I'm the only person who finds this to be so.
Thank you! That was a very nice thing to do, and I hope you don't get modded down for it.
Except here we have researchers at Purdue, a university with a history of a particularly strong and fruitful connection between science and engineering, doing solid scientific research which may well (or may not, of course) lead to useful commercial development. Believe me, I agree with you entirely about the "bean counters," and I would very much like to see more money directed toward pure research. (Part of this is pure self-interest, since I'm an academic scientist, but I felt this way back when I was doing corporate DBA work too.) The point is that while it may not happen enough, it does happen ... and "who cares" attitudes, like the one displayed in the OP which I replied to, are a major obstacle to it happening more.