> Honestly we have went backwards in firepower because the > ships at sea right now are very easy to sink compared to > what we had during WW-II in the world.
I suppose you think we also need to bring back the B-17 and B-24 bombers, so that we can REALLY terrify someone with a 1000 plane raid?
Or maybe we should bring back Maximillian-style plate armor for officers, since kevlar does so poorly against arrows and crossbow bolts?
Modern ships gave up armor for the same reason as 17th and 18th century infantry did. You cannot carry enough armor to make a difference against modern guidance systems on weapons, so it is better to be able to move.
Really, there was a good reason for battleships in a post WWII environment. They were so big that every missile would target them, leaving the smaller but higher value targets alone.
It's better than the previous "jump to the left" body armor. Keep an eye out for the upcoming "put your hands on your hips" version, though; I hear it's gonna be fabulous.
Yeah, with the required pelvic motion, it's going to drive you insaaaane.
> And they retain that ownership indefinitely. So even if it turns into > a pile of rust, that pile of rust still belongs to the government.
Or at least, so they will claim. And they normally have more lawyers, guns, and money than anyone disputing that. OTOH, I knew someone who spent time around WWII salvaging a German battleship, so they can be flexible about that (at least for other people's navies). Also, if true, no one could salvage wrecked Spanish gold ships in the Caribbean.
The satellite will now be re-purposed to study carbon
and methane emissions that need to be observed to
determine the current threat level regarding activity
in R'lyeh.
No, that is in Polynesia, somewhere. You are thinking of "Beyond The Mountains Of Madness" and the race (the Great Race, I believe) that made the shuggoths. Since the Great Race left, that satellite will be observing the shuggoths, the whales, or the penguins.
> our statement assumes that there is meaning to simultaneity, which is incorrect.
There IS meaning for simultaneity, but only for each individual observer (observer here includes each sub-atomic particle, no ETs needed). There is also a meaning for observers sharing the same frame, i.e., at rest relative to each other.
Thus, it is accurate to say that the supernova that formed the Crab Nebula occurred 6500 years earlier. In terms of the event that matters (the wave front ionizing atmospheric gasses), however, it is unimportant.
Therefore, both sides of this should shut up and live with it. Actually, they will now turn on me, moderating all my posts as redundant trolls, but them's the breaks.
If you order from a company that does business in your state, they are required to collect sales tax.
Otherwise, you are required to pay a "Use" tax that usually matches the sales tax. The trick is, most people do not bother to do so, and most states do not bother to check, so you can get out of paying until caught.
If you just wanted to say you're the Supreme Dictator for Life of a small island nation, then go for it. But it's kind of pointless to make and sell passports that no one else recognizes. Pretty useless, really.
It isn't pointless to sell them, anymore than it is pointless to sell diplomas from Miskatonic University; it may be pointless to buy them, of course, unless as a souvenier or novelty item.
And of course, you never know when it might work. Several American Indian tribes have issued passports that were treated as valid (usually by countries that were ticked of at the US at the time).
Besides, multiples of twelve are much easier to divide into meaningful, whole number fractions than multiples of ten, which is why the Arabians chose 12 and 60 as the basis for measuring time.
Sumerians or Babylonians, not Arabs, and certainly not Arabians (the people on the peninsula of that name).
And the meter was originally based on the circumference of the earth, before it was realized that the Earth-based value would never have the precision of the meter rod that was the next basis.
And finally, the 0 (freezing) to 100 (boiling) system is Centigrade; the scale that Celsius devised had boiling at zero and freezing at 0, and so he should have been consigned to historical oblivion.
> Check the history about the US war of independence.
Check the history about the Treaty Of Paris which settled it. The French were screwed out of any gains that they might have warranted, and everyone in the US delegation was pleased about it. They may not have been English subjects, anymore, but they still had English attitudes on a lot of things.
Furthermore, any "alliance" certainly died with the XYZ Affair, after the French Revolution.
> However, the way the northern states went about > getting rid of it was completely wrong.
They DIDN'T do anything to get rid of it, until after South Carolina had started a shooting war. Furthermore, with the Southern lock on the Supreme Court (why do you suppose the Dredd Scott decision went the way that it did, denying Congress or any state, except maybe the original 13, the right to restrict slavery in any way?), they could have done nothing about it, without a Constitutional Amendment or two.
Remember, SC and six other states seceded before Lincoln's Inauguration. The Republican platform only had restricting slavery from the territories, which STILL would never have passed the Taney Supreme Court, assuming that it could have passed a Congress with the states that seceded, in our world, still in it.
> The key point though is that because the north dealt with it poorly, False. See above. The closest that they came to dealing with it was that Buchanan gave the Southerners whatever they wanted, in the vain hope that they would be satisfied.
> they forced the southern states into a position where they could see > no solution other than secession
What? By electing someone who wasn't on the ballot in any Deep South state, demonstrating that demographics would doom Southern power, in a generation or longer, maybe. Otherwise, the only acts taken were taken by Southern states, who consistently treated anything, even the fact of publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, as proof that the North was just a vast conspiracy to reduce Southern whites to no better than slaves, if not worse. Those idiots in South Carolina and the rest of the South screwed their OWN pooch.
> Slavery was the hot-button issue that catalyzed it.
Only in the South (if you didn't own slaves, you at least didn't want them to be your equals) was it a hot-button issue. The North disliked it, and wanted it to disappear some day and not be visible until then, and didn't want to be FORCED to obey the Fugitive Slave Laws passed after Dredd Scott, requiring the state and local governments to actively aid Southern slave-catchers. That was it, by and large.
> Or in other words, the war could probably have been avoided Not likely, except by welcoming Secession as a way to get rid of the problem (assuming that it would have -- would the South have let the USA keep all those lovely territories in the West?).
> by dealing with slavery in a good way, Let's hear it, remembering that Congress could not even restrict slavery, constitutionally (at least until the South launched an active Rebellion).
> and we probably would not still be dealing with racism issues now. Right. Because Southerners, especially the "white trash" who were only better than the best-treated slaves by legal fiat, would naturally respect the ex-slaves if they had only been purchased and manumitted (oh, BTW, several states didn't allow that under any circumstances) from someone else, and were now looking to take jobs from "honest workingmen" who no longer were better than the ex-slaves, and willing to work more cheaply since getting anything seems better than the nothing that they HAD been paid.
That is why Indian Reservations are such delightful places, and why the Western states lobbied for the Chinese Inclusion Acts to be passed. And why, after the Japanese attack at the start of WWII, California governor Earl Warren fought so hard to avert Internment (with the chance to buy Japanese property at fire-sale prices).
Regardless of my own feelings on the matter, why do you care so much about it, that to achieve your goals, you are willing to torture the entire Cuban population? And what makes your wishes more important than ours?
Torture? We prevent Britney Spears from inflicting herself on you, and this is the thanks we get?:-)
More seriously, the USA was embargoed by the British Empire after of Revolution (more precisely, we could only trade in certain English ports, rather than any other closer or richer possession like e.g., Jamaica when it still had a GNP almost equal to the entire USA, or any of India where they had control), and it was the best thing that happened to US trade. Cuba can trade with the rest of the world (Mexico and Canada, as well as France via Martinique, and all South America, are within easy shipping distance) without our let, since no one else but Liberia pays any attention to the US embargo. If that is torture, so is Ferrari not making a car in my price range, forcing me to settle for Hondas.
That you haven't used the embargo to widen your trade beyond places willing to subsidize you for cheap sugar (mostly countries not much better than you, economically) is not our fault nor our problem.
let's not forget about the medium of machinima, where films (a medium often seen as high-art) are being made with video games (a medium often seen as vulgar and low-art)
That is as much art as anything that Ray Harryhausen ever produced.
BTW, films are only seen as high art when they lose money, or the director and/or stars is/are dead. Roger Corman would still be derided as Schlock-meister One-Shot Corman is he was still making films with Vincent Price and Boris Karloff.
> With hindsight getting the civilian market was the bigger prize.
Both Lockheed and Boeing expected to convert their candidates for the military contract into civilian aircraft, just as has been done since the Heinkel (read "Airport" and ignore the soap-opera; the characters speak of needing to expand the airfield to accommodate the civilian version of the C-5). Boeing did it, while Lockheed skipped that, producing the L-1011 as their wide-body, instead. It was never *quite* as good as the 747, and sort of disappeared after the airline deregulation, because the then-new Airbus was cheaper to buy and operate than old L-1011s.
> Honestly, if the human race has to end, that is exactly how I want us to go out.
Yes, as a winning (or losing) entry in the Pan-Galactic Darwin Awards Competition. Something towards which all the intergalactic equivalent of white trash can aspire.
> I loose three channels (including my only ABC and CBS options)
How do you expect to lose KDKA (the CBS "affiliate", for a short time the flagship station, when Westinghouse bought CBS then became CBS, before selling itself) or WTAE (the ABC affiliate)? Do you mean that you will lose the second CBS affiliate, channel 10 (forget its call-letters), and the second and third NBC affiliates, channel 6 and 7?
When the stations shift to all digital, they will turn up their antenna power to about what the analog signal now has, and the digital signal will be much easier to receive (than digital is now). After all, the TV stations do not want to lose their non-cable customers, how ever much the cable companies would like that. Advertisers PAY MONEY for those people, after all.
BTW, did you connect the converter box to a rooftop antenna, or just shift your old rabbit ears or dipole antenna to it?
> Hobbes had his "nasty, brutish, and short" predictions for mankind in Leviathan.
That was a description of the past, in contrast to the usual Golden Age beliefs that have been popular since man stopped lolling about except for a brief hunting expedition twice a week (or at least thought that he did, when he used this new "talking" thing to brag or complain to his kids).
Of course, the other big problem with models is that they seldom track how big the error in the prediction can get. There is no fun in a model that predicts X, except that the error is so great that temperatures from 0-100 centigrade are equally supported due to the accumulated round-off errors.
> So.. how many people were bought new cars because the government screwed over everyone who had horses?
No one, because the government didn't. Ask anyone who lives near the Amish; horses are still perfectly legal on the roads. They are banned from limited access highways by not being able to meet the minimum speed (40 MPH), but that is it. The most that they mandated was turn signals and maybe brake lights.
Plus, now I've got to deal with four more months of commercials regarding this switch....ON MY CABLE FUCKING TV!!!! yeah, thanks comcast, thank you for reminding me every 29 seconds that the DTV switch is coming.
Not every TV in a house is on cable, even if people add drops that they don't tell the company about. My mother watches (well, listens) to the news while gardening, in the late spring to mid-fall, on a small set that definitely isn't DTV-compatible (although it COULD get FM, if she wanted). So also for sets in garages, laundry rooms, etc., including our entire third story (actually, we tried it, but the runs all became antennas that ruined reception for the rest of the house).
And since it is not limited to just Comcast, you should probably be thanking some FCC functionary who threw that into the regulations controlling the switch-over process.
> Remember folks, TV is a luxury item that you don't need. It shouldn't be subsidized.
And it shouldn't be dictated. Does the government specify the brand of caviar that I buy? Does it tell me that my yacht can no longer be made of wood but must be fiberglass, because fiberglass is better, or specify that sails cannot be dacron but must henceforth be mylar-kevlar composites?
Is it REALLY that important to see all the pores on Donald Sutherland's face (since Dirty Sexy Money is clearly made on HDTV)? Or do you just want the logo in the lower left of the screen to really POP out at you?
> Unfortunately, there are not enough Russian hackers breaking into > our systems that we can all become crime drama writers. (:-)
Fortunately, there were no Russian hackers involved. Just German hackers paid by the Russians.
Nowadays, it would have to be Chinese hackers selling to the PRC, and there would be no enforcement arm to arrest them. Perhaps, Stoll would just have to run his honeypot net for longer, while the US government filled it with bad plans and data that it wanted the Chinese to believe because they paid so much to get it, and it was multiply sourced (by other such honeypots).
I have the horrible feeling that it is similar to how the giant electric penguin with tentacles ended up in Scott Of The Sahara, in that one Monty Python episode. Correct?
Or, alternately, how Scott was moved from the Antarctic to the Sahara, so that he could wrestle a lion.
You could pick up Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stroll. It's a real-to-life first-hand account of the Morris Worm. It's well-written and entertaining - one of the few novels I've actually bought after getting out of the library (I now have two copies).
And yet you only remember the Morris Worm, which was just the postscript to the real story?
PS, as it was not fiction, it was not a novel. In this case, that is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
> Honestly we have went backwards in firepower because the
> ships at sea right now are very easy to sink compared to
> what we had during WW-II in the world.
I suppose you think we also need to bring back the B-17 and B-24 bombers, so that we can REALLY terrify someone with a 1000 plane raid?
Or maybe we should bring back Maximillian-style plate armor for officers, since kevlar does so poorly against arrows and crossbow bolts?
Modern ships gave up armor for the same reason as 17th and 18th century infantry did. You cannot carry enough armor to make a difference against modern guidance systems on weapons, so it is better to be able to move.
Really, there was a good reason for battleships in a post WWII environment. They were so big that every missile would target them, leaving the smaller but higher value targets alone.
Yeah, with the required pelvic motion, it's going to drive you insaaaane.
> And they retain that ownership indefinitely. So even if it turns into
> a pile of rust, that pile of rust still belongs to the government.
Or at least, so they will claim. And they normally have more lawyers, guns, and money than anyone disputing that. OTOH, I knew someone who spent time around WWII salvaging a German battleship, so they can be flexible about that (at least for other people's navies). Also, if true, no one could salvage wrecked Spanish gold ships in the Caribbean.
No, that is in Polynesia, somewhere. You are thinking of "Beyond The Mountains Of Madness" and the race (the Great Race, I believe) that made the shuggoths. Since the Great Race left, that satellite will be observing the shuggoths, the whales, or the penguins.
> our statement assumes that there is meaning to simultaneity, which is incorrect.
There IS meaning for simultaneity, but only for each individual observer (observer here includes each sub-atomic particle, no ETs needed). There is also a meaning for observers sharing the same frame, i.e., at rest relative to each other.
Thus, it is accurate to say that the supernova that formed the Crab Nebula occurred 6500 years earlier. In terms of the event that matters (the wave front ionizing atmospheric gasses), however, it is unimportant.
Therefore, both sides of this should shut up and live with it. Actually, they will now turn on me, moderating all my posts as redundant trolls, but them's the breaks.
Otherwise, you are required to pay a "Use" tax that usually matches the sales tax. The trick is, most people do not bother to do so, and most states do not bother to check, so you can get out of paying until caught.
Maybe a Perl script setting a fake Browser string to avoid later complexity?
It isn't pointless to sell them, anymore than it is pointless to sell diplomas from Miskatonic University; it may be pointless to buy them, of course, unless as a souvenier or novelty item.
And of course, you never know when it might work. Several American Indian tribes have issued passports that were treated as valid (usually by countries that were ticked of at the US at the time).
Sumerians or Babylonians, not Arabs, and certainly not Arabians (the people on the peninsula of that name).
And the meter was originally based on the circumference of the earth, before it was realized that the Earth-based value would never have the precision of the meter rod that was the next basis.
And finally, the 0 (freezing) to 100 (boiling) system is Centigrade; the scale that Celsius devised had boiling at zero and freezing at 0, and so he should have been consigned to historical oblivion.
> Check the history about the US war of independence.
Check the history about the Treaty Of Paris which settled it. The French were screwed out of any gains that they might have warranted, and everyone in the US delegation was pleased about it. They may not have been English subjects, anymore, but they still had English attitudes on a lot of things.
Furthermore, any "alliance" certainly died with the XYZ Affair, after the French Revolution.
> However, the way the northern states went about
> getting rid of it was completely wrong.
They DIDN'T do anything to get rid of it, until after South Carolina had started a shooting war. Furthermore, with the Southern lock on the Supreme Court (why do you suppose the Dredd Scott decision went the way that it did, denying Congress or any state, except maybe the original 13, the right to restrict slavery in any way?), they could have done nothing about it, without a Constitutional Amendment or two.
Remember, SC and six other states seceded before Lincoln's Inauguration. The Republican platform only had restricting slavery from the territories, which STILL would never have passed the Taney Supreme Court, assuming that it could have passed a Congress with the states that seceded, in our world, still in it.
> The key point though is that because the north dealt with it poorly,
False. See above. The closest that they came to dealing with it was that Buchanan gave the Southerners whatever they wanted, in the vain hope that they would be satisfied.
> they forced the southern states into a position where they could see
> no solution other than secession
What? By electing someone who wasn't on the ballot in any Deep South state, demonstrating that demographics would doom Southern power, in a generation or longer, maybe. Otherwise, the only acts taken were taken by Southern states, who consistently treated anything, even the fact of publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, as proof that the North was just a vast conspiracy to reduce Southern whites to no better than slaves, if not worse. Those idiots in South Carolina and the rest of the South screwed their OWN pooch.
> Slavery was the hot-button issue that catalyzed it.
Only in the South (if you didn't own slaves, you at least didn't want them to be your equals) was it a hot-button issue. The North disliked it, and wanted it to disappear some day and not be visible until then, and didn't want to be FORCED to obey the Fugitive Slave Laws passed after Dredd Scott, requiring the state and local governments to actively aid Southern slave-catchers. That was it, by and large.
> Or in other words, the war could probably have been avoided
Not likely, except by welcoming Secession as a way to get rid of the problem (assuming that it would have -- would the South have let the USA keep all those lovely territories in the West?).
> by dealing with slavery in a good way,
Let's hear it, remembering that Congress could not even restrict slavery, constitutionally (at least until the South launched an active Rebellion).
> and we probably would not still be dealing with racism issues now.
Right. Because Southerners, especially the "white trash" who were only better than the best-treated slaves by legal fiat, would naturally respect the ex-slaves if they had only been purchased and manumitted (oh, BTW, several states didn't allow that under any circumstances) from someone else, and were now looking to take jobs from "honest workingmen" who no longer were better than the ex-slaves, and willing to work more cheaply since getting anything seems better than the nothing that they HAD been paid.
That is why Indian Reservations are such delightful places, and why the Western states lobbied for the Chinese Inclusion Acts to be passed. And why, after the Japanese attack at the start of WWII, California governor Earl Warren fought so hard to avert Internment (with the chance to buy Japanese property at fire-sale prices).
Torture? We prevent Britney Spears from inflicting herself on you, and this is the thanks we get? :-)
More seriously, the USA was embargoed by the British Empire after of Revolution (more precisely, we could only trade in certain English ports, rather than any other closer or richer possession like e.g., Jamaica when it still had a GNP almost equal to the entire USA, or any of India where they had control), and it was the best thing that happened to US trade. Cuba can trade with the rest of the world (Mexico and Canada, as well as France via Martinique, and all South America, are within easy shipping distance) without our let, since no one else but Liberia pays any attention to the US embargo. If that is torture, so is Ferrari not making a car in my price range, forcing me to settle for Hondas.
That you haven't used the embargo to widen your trade beyond places willing to subsidize you for cheap sugar (mostly countries not much better than you, economically) is not our fault nor our problem.
That is as much art as anything that Ray Harryhausen ever produced.
BTW, films are only seen as high art when they lose money, or the director and/or stars is/are dead. Roger Corman would still be derided as Schlock-meister One-Shot Corman is he was still making films with Vincent Price and Boris Karloff.
> With hindsight getting the civilian market was the bigger prize.
Both Lockheed and Boeing expected to convert their candidates for the military contract into civilian aircraft, just as has been done since the Heinkel (read "Airport" and ignore the soap-opera; the characters speak of needing to expand the airfield to accommodate the civilian version of the C-5). Boeing did it, while Lockheed skipped that, producing the L-1011 as their wide-body, instead. It was never *quite* as good as the 747, and sort of disappeared after the airline deregulation, because the then-new Airbus was cheaper to buy and operate than old L-1011s.
> Honestly, if the human race has to end, that is exactly how I want us to go out.
Yes, as a winning (or losing) entry in the Pan-Galactic Darwin Awards Competition. Something towards which all the intergalactic equivalent of white trash can aspire.
> 3) And because this is the United States of America, a person
> may do neither 1 or 2, but instead spend hundred of dollars
> to file a law suit.
No, they will find some welfare recipients to file as a pauper, in which case the filing fees are waived.
Maybe we should cut internet service, too, and really improve things? You go first.
> I loose three channels (including my only ABC and CBS options)
How do you expect to lose KDKA (the CBS "affiliate", for a short time the flagship station, when Westinghouse bought CBS then became CBS, before selling itself) or WTAE (the ABC affiliate)? Do you mean that you will lose the second CBS affiliate, channel 10 (forget its call-letters), and the second and third NBC affiliates, channel 6 and 7?
When the stations shift to all digital, they will turn up their antenna power to about what the analog signal now has, and the digital signal will be much easier to receive (than digital is now). After all, the TV stations do not want to lose their non-cable customers, how ever much the cable companies would like that. Advertisers PAY MONEY for those people, after all.
BTW, did you connect the converter box to a rooftop antenna, or just shift your old rabbit ears or dipole antenna to it?
> Hobbes had his "nasty, brutish, and short" predictions for mankind in Leviathan.
That was a description of the past, in contrast to the usual Golden Age beliefs that have been popular since man stopped lolling about except for a brief hunting expedition twice a week (or at least thought that he did, when he used this new "talking" thing to brag or complain to his kids).
Of course, the other big problem with models is that they seldom track how big the error in the prediction can get. There is no fun in a model that predicts X, except that the error is so great that temperatures from 0-100 centigrade are equally supported due to the accumulated round-off errors.
> So.. how many people were bought new cars because the government screwed over everyone who had horses?
No one, because the government didn't. Ask anyone who lives near the Amish; horses are still perfectly legal on the roads. They are banned from limited access highways by not being able to meet the minimum speed (40 MPH), but that is it. The most that they mandated was turn signals and maybe brake lights.
Not every TV in a house is on cable, even if people add drops that they don't tell the company about. My mother watches (well, listens) to the news while gardening, in the late spring to mid-fall, on a small set that definitely isn't DTV-compatible (although it COULD get FM, if she wanted). So also for sets in garages, laundry rooms, etc., including our entire third story (actually, we tried it, but the runs all became antennas that ruined reception for the rest of the house).
And since it is not limited to just Comcast, you should probably be thanking some FCC functionary who threw that into the regulations controlling the switch-over process.
> Remember folks, TV is a luxury item that you don't need. It shouldn't be subsidized.
And it shouldn't be dictated. Does the government specify the brand of caviar that I buy? Does it tell me that my yacht can no longer be made of wood but must be fiberglass, because fiberglass is better, or specify that sails cannot be dacron but must henceforth be mylar-kevlar composites?
Is it REALLY that important to see all the pores on Donald Sutherland's face (since Dirty Sexy Money is clearly made on HDTV)? Or do you just want the logo in the lower left of the screen to really POP out at you?
> Unfortunately, there are not enough Russian hackers breaking into
> our systems that we can all become crime drama writers. (:-)
Fortunately, there were no Russian hackers involved. Just German hackers paid by the Russians.
Nowadays, it would have to be Chinese hackers selling to the PRC, and there would be no enforcement arm to arrest them. Perhaps, Stoll would just have to run his honeypot net for longer, while the US government filled it with bad plans and data that it wanted the Chinese to believe because they paid so much to get it, and it was multiply sourced (by other such honeypots).
I have the horrible feeling that it is similar to how the giant electric penguin with tentacles ended up in Scott Of The Sahara, in that one Monty Python episode. Correct?
Or, alternately, how Scott was moved from the Antarctic to the Sahara, so that he could wrestle a lion.
And yet you only remember the Morris Worm, which was just the postscript to the real story?
PS, as it was not fiction, it was not a novel. In this case, that is a good thing.