Well then why don't you start your own internet radio station?
Do you complain about every story that is about the U.S.? Start your own tech news website.
Most of us ARE from the U.S., and although we don't think that makes us better than you, we like to hear news that sometimes only involves us. Like stories about our elections (and there are stories about other elections), stories about our laws (there are *many* stories about the laws of other countries), etc.
We just had a story about a billboard in new zealand. Did you complain because you don't have bleeding billboards where you live?
There really exists a certain point where a more powerful weapon won't do a proportionally greater amount of damage. A 100 megaton bomb will not do ten times as much damage as ten 10-megaton bombs. This is basically geometry at play here (spheres and circles and inverse square laws and stuff). Diminishing returns, that's the phrase I was looking for.
Lots of good info out there about why our nukes are as powerful as they are and not more powerful, if you can believe that.
The nukes aren't being dismantled, merely deactivated. Make no mistake, they will be kept in a convenient spot where they can be dusted off periodically.
I really don't think the F-16 should be considered a strategic launch vehicle. If the F-16 is a launch vehicle, then so is an 18-wheeler or a blimp. Yes, F-16's can drop nukes- the nuclear auth switch is on the right console in the cockpit, right of the joystick. However, as a strategic bomb platform, the F-16 is laughably inadequate. Any target short of southern canada or northen mexico will require tanker support, and neither our tankers nor our f-16s are stealthy. Countries overseas, were they to become targets, would be targeted by subs or our strategic bombers that we keep... you know... 'around'...
The cold war is over, and although first and second generation f-16s were built to be a hail mary nuke platform (hardened systems, special canopy materials, etc.) our current fleet is not equipped, trained, or ready to be part of our strategic forces. And if Nevada starts bombing california, our problems extend way beyond what START or SALT were designed for.
>>the method God used to preserve the text was to have it copied quickly and widely before any single organization could control the process
I guess this is something I didn't know about. Are you saying that an all-powerful, all-knowing god had to scurry about in secret to get his word out? That although he could rain frogs from the sky and heal the blind, His Word was at the mercy of corrupt demagogues?
When I was growing up around christians, God was always about might and power and omniscience (and using those powers, often, right up until about say 100 A.D.). The older I get, the more I notice arguments rationalizing God's actions by making him sound like the underdog, the poor trampled deity just asking for a chance to make the world (that he created?) a little better, but everyone is too mean and too busy to pay him any attention. Aww. Yet people pray to this god that their football team will make the finals?
"God" created a universe where everything makes sense, where everything is ruled by the same basic order. Where effect follows a cause, where time moves always forward, where a broken teacup does not reassemble itself. Why is everything written about god in the christian canon so freaking illogical and arbitrary?
Mythbusters covered your question a while back. It turns out that the startup energy for fluorescent bulbs was equal to about 23 seconds of runtime. So if you're going to be leaving the room for more than 23 seconds, turn off the bulb.
Most of those steps also technically apply for many things in the home whose hazards we simply take for granted. I work with a lot of hazmat stuff, and we need to have MSDS's for substances that, although commonly found in the home, need documentation in an industrial setting.
So what I end up reading can be an MSDS for technical grade isopropyl alcohol that sounds like cleanup procedures and symptoms for VX gas.
Same applies to anything with lead, cadmium, beryllium, etc in the metals dept.
CFL might be a pain to clean up (if you even go to the trouble) but a CFL will never melt your face. I'd rather have a broken CFL than a burst can of oven cleaner.
So, what, Home Depot delivers them to your door when you need them or something? Save up a few of them and then in 5 years when you need more drop them off at the same place you buy them.
Prostitution is a misdemeanor and will not get one a lot of time in jail.
IANAP, nor a customer, but I do know some people. Let's just say that the state you get caught in has a lot do with your punishment. And misdemeanor doesn't always mean a slap on the wrist.
That is some serious jail time and fines for what is often an already economically disadvantaged group. If you are self-employed and unmarried, getting caught can mean losing your car and choosing to either pay $3,000 or spend a month in prison.
But if you do it for free or sell photographs of yourself doing it, or pay other people to do it in front of a camera, it's legal.
>>It might scare you to find out that you too had your individuality most likly beaten out of you one way or another.
Well right there you took one issue and turned it into another. Determinism vs free will is not an argument that will be solved on slashdot. You can say that I have no free will because I use words and sentence structures *other people* made up, but I say I'm choosing the most efficient way of communicating with people.
If you call language and customs/courtesies an infringement of freedom, well, you might as well consider not being able to grow a rocket out of your ass an infringement of your freedom.
You need to define "free" and "individual" before you start telling me that I am neither.
I'm a lot more tired of the filthy roundeyes trashing the place.
Oh, go fu... Never mind. Not even worth arguing with whatever fetish you have w/ japanese culture. I had a friend like that growing up. It's so incredibly racist- but it sounds like you found the place you were looking for.
How can you live your life knowing that everyone around you looks down on you just for the color of your skin? Or do you just ignore that?
Sorry for ranting but this isn't the first holier-than-thou post I've seen from you arguing about how rosy things are in japan. One look at their crammed trains makes me want to crawl out of my skin, I don't care how 'polite' their culture is.
Please don't take this personally, but I counted 10 "if"s in your post. Please find a way to relate your ideas to the real world of 'oftens' and 'always'.
I'm just saying. Give me ten "if"s and I'll have us all walking around on stilts and riding giraffes in clown wigs. Your post is ten levels removed from reality as afar as I'm concerned.
There is no such thing as de-evolution. What I think you're trying to say, that 'undesirable'* DNA is being preserved in our species, will cause quite the opposite of your conclusion. If humans' selective pressure was so strong that individuals were almost identical, then we'd fare little better than corn monocultures or rabbits in our resistance to unforeseen stimuli.
Our long term prospects are best served by a very diverse mix of DNA. Globalization, vaccines, and soap have been key in accelerating our movement as a species into one very diverse gene pool instead of increasingly isolated and different individual gene pools.
We do not live on the savannah any more (well, most of us don't). We have tools and information that make us more than our cells, our genes. A short-sighted person, or a person with severe neuromuscular disorders, can have the positive effect on our species that more primitive species would miss out on.
If you have signed an agreement telling you not to disclose such things, yes. If you are not associated with the DoD in any way, then typically no. ITAR covers basic physical goods, as in, sending your buddy in China the newest U.S. body armor.
If you are not associated with the DoD, then their stance is basically, 'no one can prove that what he said has anything to do with what we're working on'.
As an uninformed (just technically, no offense) civilian, you are not a threat to national security.
They are used *by* the U.S. in *other* countries. No other country uses UAVs as much as we do. And the countries we use them is have, shall we say, rather high crime rates.
Not sure what you're getting at. Your posts are usually much more clear.
The cost of a security clearance for one person is at least $40K.
citation needed? My security clearance consisted of 20 pages of a computer-generated/printed questionnaire and a few phone calls. Please extrapolate this into $40K.
Give those projects to standard military-industrial contractors
Um. Once you accept the contract (and the $$$) you *are* a standard military-industrial contractor. You can't take the heat? Get out of the kitchen.
If the professors and students that you speak so highly of embrace and love openness to much, they wouldn't accept gov't contracts in the first place. End of story.
The DoD doesn't foist 'homework' on hapless professors. The DoD is not some brilliant but lazy bureaucrat sitting in a stuffy office dreaming of ways to buck his responsibility. The DoD says, "Hey, we need to know more about plasma and wings and stuff," and then the DoD says, "Hey, I know these guys at XXU who are working on that, should I contact them?" And then the people at XXU can either agree or disagree to accept funding and a research goal. You make it sound like some sort of draft. It isn't.
In essence what you exported there was your expertise in leading the foreign national to that source of information.
I'd like to add to this, because many people here on/. who don't have experience in these areas often ask, "Why is it illegal for a member of the military/Boeing employee/Raytheon employee/etc to say publicly what can already be found easily on wikipedia or other sources?"
The answer is: Because it verifies facts. An article by AP about the air force's new musical ice-cream truck UAV could only be written based on publicly-available facts or deduction. Once a member of the Air Force confirms to the press or anyone else that yes, we have a new ice-cream UAV and it is delicious, the subject is confirmed. Every member of the DoD, DoD contractors, and DoD researchers is like a walking snopes.com in that everything they say is scrutinized and accepted as the acting ultimate authority on the subject.
Here's a real world example based on my own experiences. There are maps online of a certain base in Iraq that give very detailed, very accurate information. You can find it, but I won't tell you which one it is. OK. But when we do our predeployment briefing to that base, and which uses *that map*, and which is given by Intel and is secret/noforn- ALL cell phones go away, all the doors are closed, and all the window blinds are closed. The fact that we are using that map as a fact... Makes that map a *Fact*. Capital "F".
See?
I realize that's at odds with much of what slashdottery stands for, but when lives are on the line secrecy matters. It may seem silly but it matters enough to people in the loop (like me...) to keep certain things under wraps.
Another real-world example: My base public relations officer called me in Iraq (from the U.S.) to talk to me about my blog (which was about my deployment). He cautioned me, in no uncertain terms, to be "very, very careful what I include in my essays." And this was after I took pains to change names, places, times, patterns, etc so that my account could easily be from any shitty place* in the world if you didn't personally know where I was.
-b
*No offense Iraq, it was just the weather. No really.
I think he meant, "Inside Deep Throat." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Deep_Throat). I've seen it as well; it's not pornographic in and of itself and the subject (since it was a little before my time) cast light onto a secretive aspect of our culture. Porn has a long history in the U.S. and with Deep Throat, porn almost became mainstream (as in, your local theater would play shrek, batman, and "Journey to the center of the Bertha" or something). This documentary covers the rise and fall of the 'actors', the government scandal, and the changes it wrough on the industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you played eve online? I can't of a better example that would fit your description.
-b
Well then why don't you start your own internet radio station?
Do you complain about every story that is about the U.S.? Start your own tech news website.
Most of us ARE from the U.S., and although we don't think that makes us better than you, we like to hear news that sometimes only involves us. Like stories about our elections (and there are stories about other elections), stories about our laws (there are *many* stories about the laws of other countries), etc.
We just had a story about a billboard in new zealand. Did you complain because you don't have bleeding billboards where you live?
-b
After a dozen or so generations in the wild trying to please teenage boys, the game will either evolve into:
-Shutting itself up in its room, burning incense, and listening to further down the spiral over and over again
-lolcats
-This: http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e291/bubbatwo420/1203_joust_charge_1280.jpg
But, you know, best of luck to the developers. Quick question: If the game evolves disruptive or offensive content, are the developers liable for it?
-b
Yeah, they tested that too. Here's a good experiment description:
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/sustainvu/mythbusters.php
I hate quadratic equations so I'll leave it to you to figure out the exact sweet spot of bulb life vs energy.
-b
START and SALT and every other acronym are different things. This new agreement won't lead to cheap nuclear fuel.
-b
There really exists a certain point where a more powerful weapon won't do a proportionally greater amount of damage. A 100 megaton bomb will not do ten times as much damage as ten 10-megaton bombs. This is basically geometry at play here (spheres and circles and inverse square laws and stuff). Diminishing returns, that's the phrase I was looking for.
Lots of good info out there about why our nukes are as powerful as they are and not more powerful, if you can believe that.
-b
The nukes aren't being dismantled, merely deactivated. Make no mistake, they will be kept in a convenient spot where they can be dusted off periodically.
-b
I really don't think the F-16 should be considered a strategic launch vehicle. If the F-16 is a launch vehicle, then so is an 18-wheeler or a blimp. Yes, F-16's can drop nukes- the nuclear auth switch is on the right console in the cockpit, right of the joystick. However, as a strategic bomb platform, the F-16 is laughably inadequate. Any target short of southern canada or northen mexico will require tanker support, and neither our tankers nor our f-16s are stealthy. Countries overseas, were they to become targets, would be targeted by subs or our strategic bombers that we keep... you know... 'around'...
The cold war is over, and although first and second generation f-16s were built to be a hail mary nuke platform (hardened systems, special canopy materials, etc.) our current fleet is not equipped, trained, or ready to be part of our strategic forces. And if Nevada starts bombing california, our problems extend way beyond what START or SALT were designed for.
-b
>>the method God used to preserve the text was to have it copied quickly and widely before any single organization could control the process
I guess this is something I didn't know about. Are you saying that an all-powerful, all-knowing god had to scurry about in secret to get his word out? That although he could rain frogs from the sky and heal the blind, His Word was at the mercy of corrupt demagogues?
When I was growing up around christians, God was always about might and power and omniscience (and using those powers, often, right up until about say 100 A.D.). The older I get, the more I notice arguments rationalizing God's actions by making him sound like the underdog, the poor trampled deity just asking for a chance to make the world (that he created?) a little better, but everyone is too mean and too busy to pay him any attention. Aww. Yet people pray to this god that their football team will make the finals?
"God" created a universe where everything makes sense, where everything is ruled by the same basic order. Where effect follows a cause, where time moves always forward, where a broken teacup does not reassemble itself. Why is everything written about god in the christian canon so freaking illogical and arbitrary?
Gosh it looks like I ranted a little bit. Sorry.
-b
Mythbusters covered your question a while back. It turns out that the startup energy for fluorescent bulbs was equal to about 23 seconds of runtime. So if you're going to be leaving the room for more than 23 seconds, turn off the bulb.
-b
Most of those steps also technically apply for many things in the home whose hazards we simply take for granted. I work with a lot of hazmat stuff, and we need to have MSDS's for substances that, although commonly found in the home, need documentation in an industrial setting.
So what I end up reading can be an MSDS for technical grade isopropyl alcohol that sounds like cleanup procedures and symptoms for VX gas.
Same applies to anything with lead, cadmium, beryllium, etc in the metals dept.
CFL might be a pain to clean up (if you even go to the trouble) but a CFL will never melt your face. I'd rather have a broken CFL than a burst can of oven cleaner.
-b
>>Way out of my way.
So, what, Home Depot delivers them to your door when you need them or something? Save up a few of them and then in 5 years when you need more drop them off at the same place you buy them.
-b
Prostitution is a misdemeanor and will not get one a lot of time in jail.
IANAP, nor a customer, but I do know some people. Let's just say that the state you get caught in has a lot do with your punishment. And misdemeanor doesn't always mean a slap on the wrist.
http://prostitution.procon.org/viewresource.asp?resourceID=000119
That is some serious jail time and fines for what is often an already economically disadvantaged group. If you are self-employed and unmarried, getting caught can mean losing your car and choosing to either pay $3,000 or spend a month in prison.
But if you do it for free or sell photographs of yourself doing it, or pay other people to do it in front of a camera, it's legal.
-b
>>It might scare you to find out that you too had your individuality most likly beaten out of you one way or another.
Well right there you took one issue and turned it into another. Determinism vs free will is not an argument that will be solved on slashdot. You can say that I have no free will because I use words and sentence structures *other people* made up, but I say I'm choosing the most efficient way of communicating with people.
If you call language and customs/courtesies an infringement of freedom, well, you might as well consider not being able to grow a rocket out of your ass an infringement of your freedom.
You need to define "free" and "individual" before you start telling me that I am neither.
-b
Only English speakers would be so arrogant as to need to be told this.
ORLY?
http://feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=EnEspanol.Home
I'm a lot more tired of the filthy roundeyes trashing the place.
Oh, go fu... Never mind. Not even worth arguing with whatever fetish you have w/ japanese culture. I had a friend like that growing up. It's so incredibly racist- but it sounds like you found the place you were looking for.
How can you live your life knowing that everyone around you looks down on you just for the color of your skin? Or do you just ignore that?
Sorry for ranting but this isn't the first holier-than-thou post I've seen from you arguing about how rosy things are in japan. One look at their crammed trains makes me want to crawl out of my skin, I don't care how 'polite' their culture is.
-b
Please don't take this personally, but I counted 10 "if"s in your post. Please find a way to relate your ideas to the real world of 'oftens' and 'always'.
I'm just saying. Give me ten "if"s and I'll have us all walking around on stilts and riding giraffes in clown wigs. Your post is ten levels removed from reality as afar as I'm concerned.
-b
There is no such thing as de-evolution. What I think you're trying to say, that 'undesirable'* DNA is being preserved in our species, will cause quite the opposite of your conclusion. If humans' selective pressure was so strong that individuals were almost identical, then we'd fare little better than corn monocultures or rabbits in our resistance to unforeseen stimuli.
Our long term prospects are best served by a very diverse mix of DNA. Globalization, vaccines, and soap have been key in accelerating our movement as a species into one very diverse gene pool instead of increasingly isolated and different individual gene pools.
We do not live on the savannah any more (well, most of us don't). We have tools and information that make us more than our cells, our genes. A short-sighted person, or a person with severe neuromuscular disorders, can have the positive effect on our species that more primitive species would miss out on.
-b
*To you, that is
I've done some reading about that experiment as well; a good start is
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tame_foxes
From there you can follow links to the paper in question as well as some other good information. And they're cute.
-b
If you have signed an agreement telling you not to disclose such things, yes. If you are not associated with the DoD in any way, then typically no. ITAR covers basic physical goods, as in, sending your buddy in China the newest U.S. body armor.
If you are not associated with the DoD, then their stance is basically, 'no one can prove that what he said has anything to do with what we're working on'.
As an uninformed (just technically, no offense) civilian, you are not a threat to national security.
-b
They are used *by* the U.S. in *other* countries. No other country uses UAVs as much as we do. And the countries we use them is have, shall we say, rather high crime rates.
Not sure what you're getting at. Your posts are usually much more clear.
-b
The cost of a security clearance for one person is at least $40K.
citation needed? My security clearance consisted of 20 pages of a computer-generated/printed questionnaire and a few phone calls. Please extrapolate this into $40K.
-b
I really hate to do this but I wrote a response to your very question earlier in this discussion and I feel like you should read it:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1291249&cid=28577863
Long story short: There is a big difference between finding something on the internet and hearing someone in the DoD say it as a fact.
-b
Give those projects to standard military-industrial contractors
Um. Once you accept the contract (and the $$$) you *are* a standard military-industrial contractor. You can't take the heat? Get out of the kitchen.
If the professors and students that you speak so highly of embrace and love openness to much, they wouldn't accept gov't contracts in the first place. End of story.
The DoD doesn't foist 'homework' on hapless professors. The DoD is not some brilliant but lazy bureaucrat sitting in a stuffy office dreaming of ways to buck his responsibility. The DoD says, "Hey, we need to know more about plasma and wings and stuff," and then the DoD says, "Hey, I know these guys at XXU who are working on that, should I contact them?" And then the people at XXU can either agree or disagree to accept funding and a research goal. You make it sound like some sort of draft. It isn't.
-b
In essence what you exported there was your expertise in leading the foreign national to that source of information.
I'd like to add to this, because many people here on /. who don't have experience in these areas often ask, "Why is it illegal for a member of the military/Boeing employee/Raytheon employee/etc to say publicly what can already be found easily on wikipedia or other sources?"
The answer is: Because it verifies facts. An article by AP about the air force's new musical ice-cream truck UAV could only be written based on publicly-available facts or deduction. Once a member of the Air Force confirms to the press or anyone else that yes, we have a new ice-cream UAV and it is delicious, the subject is confirmed. Every member of the DoD, DoD contractors, and DoD researchers is like a walking snopes.com in that everything they say is scrutinized and accepted as the acting ultimate authority on the subject.
Here's a real world example based on my own experiences. There are maps online of a certain base in Iraq that give very detailed, very accurate information. You can find it, but I won't tell you which one it is. OK. But when we do our predeployment briefing to that base, and which uses *that map*, and which is given by Intel and is secret/noforn- ALL cell phones go away, all the doors are closed, and all the window blinds are closed. The fact that we are using that map as a fact... Makes that map a *Fact*. Capital "F".
See?
I realize that's at odds with much of what slashdottery stands for, but when lives are on the line secrecy matters. It may seem silly but it matters enough to people in the loop (like me...) to keep certain things under wraps.
Another real-world example: My base public relations officer called me in Iraq (from the U.S.) to talk to me about my blog (which was about my deployment). He cautioned me, in no uncertain terms, to be "very, very careful what I include in my essays." And this was after I took pains to change names, places, times, patterns, etc so that my account could easily be from any shitty place* in the world if you didn't personally know where I was.
-b
*No offense Iraq, it was just the weather. No really.
I think he meant, "Inside Deep Throat." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Deep_Throat). I've seen it as well; it's not pornographic in and of itself and the subject (since it was a little before my time) cast light onto a secretive aspect of our culture. Porn has a long history in the U.S. and with Deep Throat, porn almost became mainstream (as in, your local theater would play shrek, batman, and "Journey to the center of the Bertha" or something). This documentary covers the rise and fall of the 'actors', the government scandal, and the changes it wrough on the industry.
-b