On the other hand, our scientific enlightenment was jump-started by: -Stealing technology from England and other industrial powers (who were more advanced than the U.S. at the time) -The use of slavery -Physical isolation from two world wars that decimated most other industrial powers -And don't forget all the advances that came out of the wars that wouldn't have been possible (at least in that time frame) without them
Germany, for example, made fantastic technological progress during world war two, from hydrocarbon dyes to explosives to rocketry to nuclear science. Had the war turned out differently for the germans, they could easily have been on par with the U.S., at least in terms of technology. And not only did we take most of their scientists and technology after the war, germany was in ruins and hardly able to leverage their newfound abilities.
So I guess what I'm saying is that, while the U.S. may have been a technological center, it was as a result of foreign policy, warmaking, and serendipity. And I suppose that's what everyone else relied on, too...
Have you lost your mind? A common language will HELP our intellectual progress. Look at the researchers making the most exciting progress these days- do you have 30 researchers in 12 countries all learning 12 languages in order to communicate? No, they all learn one common language in addition to their native tongue. How does isolation increase our intellectual future? How does keeping non-english speakers from reading classic english works improve our world culture?
The barrier to entry on the global network (cultural, intellectual, etc) should be as low as possible in order to include the most people. All of these people learning english as a second language must have SOMETHING to talk about, or they wouldn't learn the language, right? "Oh I thought I'd learn english, but now I realize that I have nothing to talk about. I guess I'll go do something 'ethnic' for a while..."
"I am sure, though, if this was Microsoft, you'd be lambasting them for it."
Maybe. The thing is, we're not talking about MS right now. When is the last time we talked about the Zune? I haven't seen any Zune stories on the news unlike Apple's products. People wouldn't talk about apple if there wasn't something special there.
So yeah, we would lambaste MS, but first we need to find something about MS worth talking about.
Can I ask how you installed beryl in Ubuntu without using the command line or editing config files? My system uses a radeon 9800 pro, which is recognized but requires unsupported drivers to get beryl to run. The process required several commands run under sudo, and for a while I was booting into the command line (messed up the video config file). I'm not a *nix expert or even a power user, but I knew my way around the command line and a text editor just well enough to get things running again. I can't imagine that most people would know what to do if they tried to install beryl and were dropped into a text shell. "Look it up online" you say? What if they only have one computer?
I like ubuntu, but the eye candy stuff isn't ready for the mainstream, IMO.
Someone else might have already mentioned this, but why do you need to upgrade to a newer OS?
You already admit that your older computers are too slow to run the newest games, so what makes you think that they'd run the newest features in the new OSes? Support for Tiger will continue after leopard comes out. People are acting like their computers will vanish in a puff of smoke the minute leopard comes out if they don't upgrade.
I've known about the 'gyp' controversy for quite a while, and after reading about it more and more, I'd have to say that it is not a racial slur in and of itself.
I can't cite more source, because they came from dead-tree books on word origins.
IMO, this word is akin to other words such as 'niggardly,' a word with a very distinct etymology and meaning from the offensive word that it resembles. I would never use 'niggardly' in normal conversation, since most people don't know what it means and would react to the perceived meaning of it, but to declare it off-limits just because of some racial nonsense would be disingenuous.
If ever 'gyp' was used with racial connotations, that is no longer the case, especially here in the U.S. The only people who even think to associate 'gyp' with 'gypsy' are the self-righteous ones who make a huge deal out of it.
I feel for you, I really do. My dream house meets basically the same specs that you have. And I'm sure that we share similar reasons for wanting to live away from burgeoning cities.
The catch, of course, is that being isolated from civilization means, well- it means that you're isolated from civilization, internet included. We can't have our cake and eat it, too.
There are many suitable solutions posted in this discussion, so I won't try to elaborate on them. All I'm trying to say is this: You live in peaceful isolation for a reason, right? Take a fearless inventory of your needs/desires, and decide for yourself if the money is really worth it- I mean both the costs and the benefits.
Forgive me if I sound cranky or isolationist, it's been a long week... -b
I thought that I should clear up the Japan issue. I'll give you a timeline of 1945:
July 26: Japan rejects the Potsdam ultimatum, which outlined terms for surrender
August 6: first bomb dropped on Hiroshima
August 7-8: Truman warns of more attacks; leaflets are dropped on Japanese cities. Japan rejects Potsdam again
August 9: Second bomb dropped on Nagasaki, soviet union declares war on Japan
August 15: Japan finally surrenders, but not until the terms of the surrender were changed to allow the existing oligarchy to stay in power.
As you can see, we did try to prevent the war from escalating. At the time (which, you need to remember, came after years of war and hundreds of thousands of deaths) the best option seemed to be the A-bomb. It worked, but just barely: we were prepared to drop more bombs after the 17th. And, frankly, the Japanese committed some of the worst atrocities of the war (some would say some of the worst the world had ever seen). They were a small island nation with designs on taking over as much of the world as they could. What would you have done? Before you answer, you should probably learn more about the japanese kokutai and just how much the emperor and japanese militants were willing to sacrifice. They would have fought until almost every last one of them was killed. This is not simply opinion; research the situation from objective sources and draw your own conclusions.
I don't deny the real intentions of Bush. I just really don't think that the war was about snatching oil. Even an infant would realize that the potential savings of 'owning' Iraq's oil would be outweighed by even a modest war. Bush/Cheney have many, many connections with the military-industrial complex, and they knew damn well that their contractor buddies would profit whether the war was successful or not. Going in for oil would be a risk, but going in for contractor money was a sure bet. And I can tell you right now that the war contractors are making an obscene amount of money. Or maybe he's just senile or insane and actually thought that Iraq was harboring al queda. Who knows. The guy is bonkers. And your ideas about boot camp notwithstanding, I do retain my own personality and intellectual independence. I do what needs to be done, yes, but so does everyone else who wants to keep their job. Funny thing is- my friends who know me well, and know that I am very independent and stubborn, still retain their personal stereotypes of what the military is all about. Talk about cognitive dissonance...
Ah, a veteran. Let me ask you, seriously (not being a libertarian commie prick or whatever you want to call me): do you agree with all the wars the US has fought? Iraq, the gulf, vietnam... wars that weren't yours to fight, but that the US jumped in because of other motives (oil, usually).
Oh and do you feel sorry for all the japanese civilians killed in hiroshima and nagasaki, in WWII?
A job in the military, like a job in many large organizations, does require a fair amount of rationalization/cognitive dissonance. For example, say you were an accountant at a huge firm and did the math that resulted in hundreds of techs being laid off. Would this bother you? Is profit a more noble pursuit than sovereignty/defense/stability (not that I'm claiming that our wars are those things)?
Some would reply that killing someone is very different from firing someone, and of course they're right. I'm just trying to illustrate an example in the civilian world where emotional distancing is also necessary. I processed insurance claims for a while in a past job, and I felt like shi* knowing that a lot of the claims that I worked with would be denied. Many of those claims would really improve our clients' quality of life. I know I'm not the only person at that place who felt that way.
Do I agree with U.S. wars/foreign policy? That would be like asking, "Do you agree with religion?" There are so many aspects to the subject. And to be honest, I'm not sure that I can say exactly how I feel, at least not in words. I kept a blog of my first deployment, so if you want to know how I felt about actually being in a war zone, you can read it: http://hylic.blogspot.com/
You probably want a pithy, candid answer to your questions, and I understand. However, I'm not going to pass judgment on events that happened outside of my lifetime. I can comment on the lessons that history has taught us, but those lessons are available to anyone; I can't say anything new. In addition, there is just so much that history doesn't tell us, or that we have just come around to discovering/admitting to ourselves, that I would be talking about a made-up, abstract idea.
The current actions in the middle east are an area that I can comment on, and I will. The entire situation is fu**ed, SNAFU, FUBAR, unrecoverable, wasteful, horrific, etc, etc. Remember that emotional distancing that I mentioned? Well, after being deployed a couple of times and growing up a fair amount, the only emotion I feel about Iraq is anger. Not at the Iraqis, but at the whole situation. I'm angry that our president drove us into this (for whatever reason, well-intentioned or not). I'm angry that our congress wasn't able to separate the lies from the truth, that people in power treated this 'war' the same way that they'd treat a highway bill or a re-election campaign, complete with lying and posturing. I'm angry that my job, which used to be about national defense and community stewardship, has turned me into a mercenary. I'm angry that KBR and Halliburton are making so fu*king much money on this affair. I'm angry that good men and women have to tell themselves that their missions are good and worthwhile just to keep themselves from collapsing in the face of the horrible things they have to see every day. I'm angry that the lives of our sacrificed soldiers are treated like a fu*king cancer awareness ribbon or some shi* that you can just wear on your lapel in order to be patriotic.
I could go on for days. I am very angry.
Most of all, I'm angry that I got shot at, that I had to see terrible things, that I am a fundamentally different person now, that I am kind of messed up, that I lost that time in my life... all so that the Mary Disney Puffpaint Sweatshirt McDonalds of the U.S. can sit on their fat asses and cheer for 'their team' or whatever the fu*k makes people support this war. It's so fu*ked up that people would want us to continu
A president of yours said even said "The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself".
Franklin D. Roosevelt said that in reference to a bank panic that happened in 1933.
And if you thought that he was talking about foreign enemies, it still wouldn't make sense. I'm sure that those words would be cold consolation to the 450,000-odd Americans who died in WWII alone.
I'm a veteran, and those words mean jack sh** in the face of real fear.
-b
It's not entirely true to say that the F-16 is made of CF. The aircraft is basically a straightforward aluminum design with a few structures made of composite.
-The two ventral stabs (below the engine) are fiberglass/resin with aluminum honeycomb core.
-The two horizontal stabs are CF/resin skins with aluminum W-ribs between the CF skins. The skins range in thickness from 3/8" at the attach point to less than 1/8" at the edges.
-The vertical stab is designed in the same fashion as the horizontal stabs. The leading edge and rudder are made of different materials (Fiberglass/aluminum honeycomb core IIRC), so really just the center third of the stab is actually CF.
-The nose radome is monolithic filament-wound fiberglass/resin, about 3/8" thick.
All of these parts are VERY strong. I'm a structures guy in the USAF (I have a F-16c in the room right next to me while I'm typing this). I just repaired a horizontal stab today, but it was an auxilliary aluminum structure (one of the static eliminator bases).
In my experience, the CF parts require the least amount of attention. The only problems that I've seen that could be attributed to the CF material itself would be fastener hole elongation caused by minor fluttering (which would be caused by CF's flexibility). This problem manifests itself as loose fasteners along the thin outer edges of the stab, as flexion of the part causes internal shear forces on the three structural members (two skins and the W-stiffeners). The fix is simple and takes about 90 seconds per fastener.
I've never had to condemn a part due to delamination or outright catastrophic failure. Aluminum parts? I've tossed dozens due to corrosion, cracking, dents, scratches, deformation, etc. On the F-16, pretty much every aluminum part is fixed on a 'remove and replace' basis. Almost every part used complex milling and chem-milling processes that are impossible to replicate in the field. And no, cannot just weld up the cracks, for a variety of reasons. CF, on the other hand- one hot bonder and some supplies, and you can fix almost anything.
I knew that someday/. would post a story about my area of expertise. 'Bout damned time.
-B
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, our scientific enlightenment was jump-started by:
-Stealing technology from England and other industrial powers (who were more advanced than the U.S. at the time)
-The use of slavery
-Physical isolation from two world wars that decimated most other industrial powers
-And don't forget all the advances that came out of the wars that wouldn't have been possible (at least in that time frame) without them
Germany, for example, made fantastic technological progress during world war two, from hydrocarbon dyes to explosives to rocketry to nuclear science. Had the war turned out differently for the germans, they could easily have been on par with the U.S., at least in terms of technology. And not only did we take most of their scientists and technology after the war, germany was in ruins and hardly able to leverage their newfound abilities.
So I guess what I'm saying is that, while the U.S. may have been a technological center, it was as a result of foreign policy, warmaking, and serendipity. And I suppose that's what everyone else relied on, too...
-ben
Just in time for Slashdot's birthday party: Rip the tail off the comet!
I do not think that word means what you think it means...
Have you lost your mind? A common language will HELP our intellectual progress. Look at the researchers making the most exciting progress these days- do you have 30 researchers in 12 countries all learning 12 languages in order to communicate? No, they all learn one common language in addition to their native tongue. How does isolation increase our intellectual future? How does keeping non-english speakers from reading classic english works improve our world culture?
The barrier to entry on the global network (cultural, intellectual, etc) should be as low as possible in order to include the most people. All of these people learning english as a second language must have SOMETHING to talk about, or they wouldn't learn the language, right? "Oh I thought I'd learn english, but now I realize that I have nothing to talk about. I guess I'll go do something 'ethnic' for a while..."
bah.
"I am sure, though, if this was Microsoft, you'd be lambasting them for it."
Maybe. The thing is, we're not talking about MS right now. When is the last time we talked about the Zune? I haven't seen any Zune stories on the news unlike Apple's products. People wouldn't talk about apple if there wasn't something special there.
So yeah, we would lambaste MS, but first we need to find something about MS worth talking about.
-b
Ah, so the new iteration of Ubuntu has already been named, huh?
You mean "It transrates to Engrish"
Can I ask how you installed beryl in Ubuntu without using the command line or editing config files? My system uses a radeon 9800 pro, which is recognized but requires unsupported drivers to get beryl to run. The process required several commands run under sudo, and for a while I was booting into the command line (messed up the video config file). I'm not a *nix expert or even a power user, but I knew my way around the command line and a text editor just well enough to get things running again. I can't imagine that most people would know what to do if they tried to install beryl and were dropped into a text shell. "Look it up online" you say? What if they only have one computer?
I like ubuntu, but the eye candy stuff isn't ready for the mainstream, IMO.
-ben
Someone else might have already mentioned this, but why do you need to upgrade to a newer OS?
You already admit that your older computers are too slow to run the newest games, so what makes you think that they'd run the newest features in the new OSes? Support for Tiger will continue after leopard comes out. People are acting like their computers will vanish in a puff of smoke the minute leopard comes out if they don't upgrade.
-b
Fallout 3?
I've known about the 'gyp' controversy for quite a while, and after reading about it more and more, I'd have to say that it is not a racial slur in and of itself.
here is one source that tries to show multiple (and distinct) etymologies: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-gyp1.htm
I can't cite more source, because they came from dead-tree books on word origins.
IMO, this word is akin to other words such as 'niggardly,' a word with a very distinct etymology and meaning from the offensive word that it resembles.
I would never use 'niggardly' in normal conversation, since most people don't know what it means and would react to the perceived meaning of it, but to declare it off-limits just because of some racial nonsense would be disingenuous.
If ever 'gyp' was used with racial connotations, that is no longer the case, especially here in the U.S. The only people who even think to associate 'gyp' with 'gypsy' are the self-righteous ones who make a huge deal out of it.
my two cents.
-b
I feel for you, I really do. My dream house meets basically the same specs that you have. And I'm sure that we share similar reasons for wanting to live away from burgeoning cities.
The catch, of course, is that being isolated from civilization means, well- it means that you're isolated from civilization, internet included. We can't have our cake and eat it, too.
There are many suitable solutions posted in this discussion, so I won't try to elaborate on them. All I'm trying to say is this:
You live in peaceful isolation for a reason, right? Take a fearless inventory of your needs/desires, and decide for yourself if the money is really worth it- I mean both the costs and the benefits.
Forgive me if I sound cranky or isolationist, it's been a long week...
-b
Asteroids are not celestial bodies anymore?
I thought that I should clear up the Japan issue. I'll give you a timeline of 1945:
July 26: Japan rejects the Potsdam ultimatum, which outlined terms for surrender
August 6: first bomb dropped on Hiroshima
August 7-8: Truman warns of more attacks; leaflets are dropped on Japanese cities. Japan rejects Potsdam again
August 9: Second bomb dropped on Nagasaki, soviet union declares war on Japan
August 15: Japan finally surrenders, but not until the terms of the surrender were changed to allow the existing oligarchy to stay in power.
As you can see, we did try to prevent the war from escalating. At the time (which, you need to remember, came after years of war and hundreds of thousands of deaths) the best option seemed to be the A-bomb. It worked, but just barely: we were prepared to drop more bombs after the 17th. And, frankly, the Japanese committed some of the worst atrocities of the war (some would say some of the worst the world had ever seen). They were a small island nation with designs on taking over as much of the world as they could. What would you have done? Before you answer, you should probably learn more about the japanese kokutai and just how much the emperor and japanese militants were willing to sacrifice. They would have fought until almost every last one of them was killed. This is not simply opinion; research the situation from objective sources and draw your own conclusions.
I don't deny the real intentions of Bush. I just really don't think that the war was about snatching oil. Even an infant would realize that the potential savings of 'owning' Iraq's oil would be outweighed by even a modest war. Bush/Cheney have many, many connections with the military-industrial complex, and they knew damn well that their contractor buddies would profit whether the war was successful or not. Going in for oil would be a risk, but going in for contractor money was a sure bet. And I can tell you right now that the war contractors are making an obscene amount of money. Or maybe he's just senile or insane and actually thought that Iraq was harboring al queda. Who knows. The guy is bonkers. And your ideas about boot camp notwithstanding, I do retain my own personality and intellectual independence. I do what needs to be done, yes, but so does everyone else who wants to keep their job. Funny thing is- my friends who know me well, and know that I am very independent and stubborn, still retain their personal stereotypes of what the military is all about. Talk about cognitive dissonance...
Ah, a veteran. Let me ask you, seriously (not being a libertarian commie prick or whatever you want to call me): do you agree with all the wars the US has fought? Iraq, the gulf, vietnam... wars that weren't yours to fight, but that the US jumped in because of other motives (oil, usually). Oh and do you feel sorry for all the japanese civilians killed in hiroshima and nagasaki, in WWII?
A job in the military, like a job in many large organizations, does require a fair amount of rationalization/cognitive dissonance. For example, say you were an accountant at a huge firm and did the math that resulted in hundreds of techs being laid off. Would this bother you? Is profit a more noble pursuit than sovereignty/defense/stability (not that I'm claiming that our wars are those things)?
Some would reply that killing someone is very different from firing someone, and of course they're right. I'm just trying to illustrate an example in the civilian world where emotional distancing is also necessary. I processed insurance claims for a while in a past job, and I felt like shi* knowing that a lot of the claims that I worked with would be denied. Many of those claims would really improve our clients' quality of life. I know I'm not the only person at that place who felt that way.
Do I agree with U.S. wars/foreign policy? That would be like asking, "Do you agree with religion?" There are so many aspects to the subject. And to be honest, I'm not sure that I can say exactly how I feel, at least not in words. I kept a blog of my first deployment, so if you want to know how I felt about actually being in a war zone, you can read it: http://hylic.blogspot.com/
You probably want a pithy, candid answer to your questions, and I understand. However, I'm not going to pass judgment on events that happened outside of my lifetime. I can comment on the lessons that history has taught us, but those lessons are available to anyone; I can't say anything new. In addition, there is just so much that history doesn't tell us, or that we have just come around to discovering/admitting to ourselves, that I would be talking about a made-up, abstract idea.
The current actions in the middle east are an area that I can comment on, and I will. The entire situation is fu**ed, SNAFU, FUBAR, unrecoverable, wasteful, horrific, etc, etc. Remember that emotional distancing that I mentioned? Well, after being deployed a couple of times and growing up a fair amount, the only emotion I feel about Iraq is anger. Not at the Iraqis, but at the whole situation. I'm angry that our president drove us into this (for whatever reason, well-intentioned or not). I'm angry that our congress wasn't able to separate the lies from the truth, that people in power treated this 'war' the same way that they'd treat a highway bill or a re-election campaign, complete with lying and posturing. I'm angry that my job, which used to be about national defense and community stewardship, has turned me into a mercenary. I'm angry that KBR and Halliburton are making so fu*king much money on this affair. I'm angry that good men and women have to tell themselves that their missions are good and worthwhile just to keep themselves from collapsing in the face of the horrible things they have to see every day. I'm angry that the lives of our sacrificed soldiers are treated like a fu*king cancer awareness ribbon or some shi* that you can just wear on your lapel in order to be patriotic.
I could go on for days. I am very angry.
Most of all, I'm angry that I got shot at, that I had to see terrible things, that I am a fundamentally different person now, that I am kind of messed up, that I lost that time in my life... all so that the Mary Disney Puffpaint Sweatshirt McDonalds of the U.S. can sit on their fat asses and cheer for 'their team' or whatever the fu*k makes people support this war. It's so fu*ked up that people would want us to continu
Franklin D. Roosevelt said that in reference to a bank panic that happened in 1933.
And if you thought that he was talking about foreign enemies, it still wouldn't make sense. I'm sure that those words would be cold consolation to the 450,000-odd Americans who died in WWII alone.
I'm a veteran, and those words mean jack sh** in the face of real fear.
-b
It's not entirely true to say that the F-16 is made of CF. The aircraft is basically a straightforward aluminum design with a few structures made of composite. -The two ventral stabs (below the engine) are fiberglass/resin with aluminum honeycomb core. -The two horizontal stabs are CF/resin skins with aluminum W-ribs between the CF skins. The skins range in thickness from 3/8" at the attach point to less than 1/8" at the edges. -The vertical stab is designed in the same fashion as the horizontal stabs. The leading edge and rudder are made of different materials (Fiberglass/aluminum honeycomb core IIRC), so really just the center third of the stab is actually CF. -The nose radome is monolithic filament-wound fiberglass/resin, about 3/8" thick. All of these parts are VERY strong. I'm a structures guy in the USAF (I have a F-16c in the room right next to me while I'm typing this). I just repaired a horizontal stab today, but it was an auxilliary aluminum structure (one of the static eliminator bases). In my experience, the CF parts require the least amount of attention. The only problems that I've seen that could be attributed to the CF material itself would be fastener hole elongation caused by minor fluttering (which would be caused by CF's flexibility). This problem manifests itself as loose fasteners along the thin outer edges of the stab, as flexion of the part causes internal shear forces on the three structural members (two skins and the W-stiffeners). The fix is simple and takes about 90 seconds per fastener. I've never had to condemn a part due to delamination or outright catastrophic failure. Aluminum parts? I've tossed dozens due to corrosion, cracking, dents, scratches, deformation, etc. On the F-16, pretty much every aluminum part is fixed on a 'remove and replace' basis. Almost every part used complex milling and chem-milling processes that are impossible to replicate in the field. And no, cannot just weld up the cracks, for a variety of reasons. CF, on the other hand- one hot bonder and some supplies, and you can fix almost anything. I knew that someday /. would post a story about my area of expertise. 'Bout damned time.
-B