"What, you want me to provide a exhaustive list of the bad things about the second iraq war? That would take days at least."
No, I just want you to realize the difference between "I wish that baddie wasn't in power." and "We're king of the world by divine providence so we'll invade whatever countries we don't like."
One is a shared sentiment, the other is our new international policy and a sign of our downfall as we break apart some of the ideas that have allowed us to progress towards a world government.
"Like I said, we should have taken out Saddam at the end of the first war."
That would have been nice. I don't disagree.
"If we had done that, there would have nothing good about the second war"
Just wanted to point out that taking Saddam wasn't a victory for us. It was a victory for martyrdom in the minds of anti-zionists (see the rise in insurgency in the past few years) and for the Iraqi people that were oppressed under his rule.
Anywho, we can continue this discussion if you want. I'm not trying to be hostile, just trying to point out the subtle differences that separate the global view of this incident from the national view.
"Was it right to remove Saddam from power, try him and execute him for his crimes? Abso-F@#$%ing-lutely."
Was it our responsibility or duty to do so? No.
Iraq was a sovereign state, just like we were. Violating its sovereignty with false justifications is a real international tragedy.
Just to put this into perspective, our recognized sovereignty is one of the main reasons that keeps China from invading the U.S.A. on the same premises. The other is that China is a strong believer in sovereignty so that it doesn't have to recognize Tibet/Taiwan as separate states, but that's a different discussion.
Point is, we basically said, "Fuck their sovereignty, we're the best, we can do whatever the hell we want as long as the U.K. and some of our euro butt-buddies in the U.N. agree.", and took over.
You can be sure that action, along with the rest of the adopted foreign policy that Clinton mostly started with the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1999, helped change the course of world politics and state recognition in ways that we don't realize yet and probably won't for another couple of decades.
"You tend to encounter this from follower-type personalities. The type that lives in a beige mcmansion and finds nothing humorous at all in sayings like "eat (something disgusting), because ten trillion houseflies can't all be wrong""
Self-righteousness is practically spewing from the seams in that post.
The worst part, in my opinion, is that this isn't even a good movie to pirate. I mean, it was okay to watch on Netflix, but there's no excuse for pirating such a mediocre film. Yea, it won an Oscar, but it was basically just a re-packaged Jarhead.
If this had been over Inception or another really great film, I could understand better. This? Please.
"Creationists claim that everything needs a cause, including the universe, then posit a god as the necessary cause and immediately proclaim that that god is immune to the "everything needs a cause" claim."
Citation needed. I've never heard that proclamation. There are many theories out there to why a god exists and why we exist in relation to them. You just dismissed them in favor of an illogical one.
An example, off the top of my head, is that God is a benevolent being that evolved outside of our dimension/universe timeline (remember, there are a potentially infinite number of them) and took control of this one as a sandbox. You might think that it'd take an incredible amount of energy and intelligence to do such a thing, but that's relative to the size of the originating universe and our species.
MIB had a clever way of portraying such a scenario, with a whole galaxy inside of a necklace.
This is all philosophical of course. You can see evidence for or against in the matrixing of the chaos of the world.
"Also, "God" has no explanatory value. He can do anything, and what he decides to do is completely unpredictable. If a scientist predicted a particle or force that can do anything and is utterly unpredictable, he'd be either ignored or laughed at."
Your analogy is fallacious. If a scientist predicted a particle that could read a book, he'd be ignored or laughed at as well, but that doesn't mean that there aren't beings that can read books.
Also, there is no evidence that "God" can do anything, in fact, there are contradictions that prove that he is not omnipotent (god create a rock that even he can't lift, god create an object that even he can't destroy, etc, etc). The unpredictable clause is also a fallacy. The fact that in many religions, there is a prophecy (might be perpetually unfulfilled) demonstrates that there is predictability to behavior. There's also a whole book full of laws and regulations that describe how God will respond to your actions.
Something else in another dimension unrelated to ours. If you go off some other theories, there are many Gods, only one of our Universe. They were created formed somewhere or somehow else and either create or control a universe of their own using their extreme power and intelligence.
But that's all philosophy after all. No evidence, just an outlet for that logical trap.
ITT: A handful of above average, many average, and a handful of below average programmers giving advice, all thinking they're above average and qualified to do so.
"Who here knows about Czech law that can enlighten us on the likelihood of this becoming real/passed/enforced?"
Depends on who ponies up the cash to pay off the right people. The Czech Republic has some of the highest rates of corruption in the OECD according to wikipedia. Take it with a grain of salt.
Yea, this could be said of people moving from rural to urban areas, or from hands-on/manual labor work to desk jobs/paperwork.
Plowing fields by hand or riveting buildings could be seen as brain downtime, and have largely been lost activities since the trend in technology towards requiring us to use constant thinking and processing in normal activities.
IMs used to, but I've stopped responding to most emails/IMs long ago.
Instead, I get distracted by youtube/short videogames.
On the other hand, once I get ramped up and there's some amount of white noise (music, tv, etc) in the background, it's hard to get distracted by anything until whatever I'm working on is done.
"3) We had to send people + Avatars from Earth to Pandora."
My understanding was that they had sent a large armed party after an initial scout, and the Avatar technology/DNA sequencing/unobtanium discovery was made on or in orbit just above Pandora.
That would mean that there is a 20-30 year backstory that isn't told since it's largely irrelevant to the plot We already know there is some backstory with the Avatar project and the scientists that were well acquainted with the natives.
"Moreover, if you can do.5c ships, you are able to manipulate energies much higher than we can now, so again, no chemical projectile weapons."
Not necessarily true. Ion drives are well within our current technology if we ever decided to make a long-distance trip, and they can theoretically push us up to.9+c given enough time and fuel.
"Again, tell me why they used massed rockets rather than a small rock?"
Maybe dropping an asteroid on the tree would ruin the mining prospects of the unobtanium under the tree. Remember, they weren't going to just piss off the Na'vi, they were going to the tree to mine.
"(it also seems likely we would be able to synthesize a room-temp superconductor, but I digress)."
From the Avatar Wiki:
"Furthermore, unlike the fragile crystals of human-created superconducting compounds, the substance found on Pandora was a stable quasi-crystal with its atoms arranged in a never-repeating but orderly pattern with fivefold symmetry. This structure was not only structurally rugged but also has microscopic voids in the quasicrystalline structure that contain the magnetic flux lines (see [1])."
So we were able to synthesize something, but it just wasn't useful.
A 3 GHz P4 is slower on single-threaded applications than most 2.2GHz single/dual core processors (AMD Athalon/Core2) simply because P4's had high clocks but a poorly designed and underperforming architecture that made instructions take more cycles and memory accesses more frequent than on the Athalon/Core2's.
What you see as "faster" is probably a combination of perception, dependencies on networked software, and background software overhead (anti-virus, outlook, etc) that tends to bog down business computers.
I say this, because a company I work for bought a set of Dell XPS computers a year ago (small project was required to spend around 6k/computer for the amount to be high enough to justify procurement), each with Core2Quads, 8gb+ of ram, bunch of other toys with massive screens, blah blah...
Anyhow, the XPS's run about like a 3 GHz P4 desktop-replacement-laptop my mother bought back in 2005.
*Both* feel like they have a small fraction of the power of an AMD 64 X2 4400+ (2.2ghz) based desktop that I built back in 2007.
What I'm trying to say is that your claim doesn't make any sense from an architectural standpoint if you're familiar with the P4 architectures, and for good reason, since what you perceive as speed has to do with many other factors than the processor and thread handling behavior.
"Sorry to rant a bit but why the hell would a civilization sent out a radio signal from their planet? Look at us, all we do is "listen" but we don't build any transmitters capable of transmitting a signal across a thousand light years. Transmit first, listen second."
Welcome to 80 years ago. Our civilization has been spamming decipherable signals at the speed of light since it's been able to. And so far, that's the best we can do, unless you have some secret method of transmitting data across dozens of light-years faster than the universal speed limit of light speed with any technology that is practically obtainable in the next few decades.
Science education is worthless in that regard. Unless you are naturally gifted with an inquisitive or critical mind, that sort of thinking isn't taught or expected in any science courses up until, maybe, the latter years of college. It's not the citizen's fault or failure, as they are not told their duty is to think in a rational way and it's not encoded in their genetics.
Critical thinking, rationality, logic, and skepticism are topics of philosophy, and as many here on Slashdot have agreed in the past, should be taught in the philosophical context as part of the core curriculum, not the scientific context. Preferably, the philosophy classes would be precursors to more advanced science classes where the scientific method could then be applied as recitation.
Yes, but that's because I'm also a libertarian. I have no right to tell someone else that they cannot do something just because my religion disagrees with it.
Slashdot Mirror
"What, you want me to provide a exhaustive list of the bad things about the second iraq war? That would take days at least."
No, I just want you to realize the difference between "I wish that baddie wasn't in power." and "We're king of the world by divine providence so we'll invade whatever countries we don't like."
One is a shared sentiment, the other is our new international policy and a sign of our downfall as we break apart some of the ideas that have allowed us to progress towards a world government.
"Like I said, we should have taken out Saddam at the end of the first war."
That would have been nice. I don't disagree.
"If we had done that, there would have nothing good about the second war"
Just wanted to point out that taking Saddam wasn't a victory for us. It was a victory for martyrdom in the minds of anti-zionists (see the rise in insurgency in the past few years) and for the Iraqi people that were oppressed under his rule.
Anywho, we can continue this discussion if you want. I'm not trying to be hostile, just trying to point out the subtle differences that separate the global view of this incident from the national view.
"Was it right to remove Saddam from power, try him and execute him for his crimes? Abso-F@#$%ing-lutely."
Was it our responsibility or duty to do so? No.
Iraq was a sovereign state, just like we were. Violating its sovereignty with false justifications is a real international tragedy.
Just to put this into perspective, our recognized sovereignty is one of the main reasons that keeps China from invading the U.S.A. on the same premises. The other is that China is a strong believer in sovereignty so that it doesn't have to recognize Tibet/Taiwan as separate states, but that's a different discussion.
Point is, we basically said, "Fuck their sovereignty, we're the best, we can do whatever the hell we want as long as the U.K. and some of our euro butt-buddies in the U.N. agree.", and took over.
You can be sure that action, along with the rest of the adopted foreign policy that Clinton mostly started with the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1999, helped change the course of world politics and state recognition in ways that we don't realize yet and probably won't for another couple of decades.
"You tend to encounter this from follower-type personalities. The type that lives in a beige mcmansion and finds nothing humorous at all in sayings like "eat (something disgusting), because ten trillion houseflies can't all be wrong""
Self-righteousness is practically spewing from the seams in that post.
Slashdot hires Norwegian radio journalist as story aggregator.
"In essence, it's a type of razor wire that kills off all the guys no woman wants to talk to."
You're just doing a bunch of bullshit stereotyping. In reality, most guys find girls, no matter what their interests, activities, or income.
The worst part, in my opinion, is that this isn't even a good movie to pirate. I mean, it was okay to watch on Netflix, but there's no excuse for pirating such a mediocre film. Yea, it won an Oscar, but it was basically just a re-packaged Jarhead.
If this had been over Inception or another really great film, I could understand better. This? Please.
"Creationists claim that everything needs a cause, including the universe, then posit a god as the necessary cause and immediately proclaim that that god is immune to the "everything needs a cause" claim."
Citation needed. I've never heard that proclamation. There are many theories out there to why a god exists and why we exist in relation to them. You just dismissed them in favor of an illogical one.
An example, off the top of my head, is that God is a benevolent being that evolved outside of our dimension/universe timeline (remember, there are a potentially infinite number of them) and took control of this one as a sandbox. You might think that it'd take an incredible amount of energy and intelligence to do such a thing, but that's relative to the size of the originating universe and our species.
MIB had a clever way of portraying such a scenario, with a whole galaxy inside of a necklace.
This is all philosophical of course. You can see evidence for or against in the matrixing of the chaos of the world.
"Also, "God" has no explanatory value. He can do anything, and what he decides to do is completely unpredictable. If a scientist predicted a particle or force that can do anything and is utterly unpredictable, he'd be either ignored or laughed at."
Your analogy is fallacious. If a scientist predicted a particle that could read a book, he'd be ignored or laughed at as well, but that doesn't mean that there aren't beings that can read books.
Also, there is no evidence that "God" can do anything, in fact, there are contradictions that prove that he is not omnipotent (god create a rock that even he can't lift, god create an object that even he can't destroy, etc, etc). The unpredictable clause is also a fallacy. The fact that in many religions, there is a prophecy (might be perpetually unfulfilled) demonstrates that there is predictability to behavior. There's also a whole book full of laws and regulations that describe how God will respond to your actions.
That problem isn't exactly a triumph of any logic to arrive at. It's been thought over and attempted to be solved for hundreds of years now.
Don't dismiss it as laziness, when you are too lazy to provide an answer of your own.
Something else in another dimension unrelated to ours. If you go off some other theories, there are many Gods, only one of our Universe. They were created formed somewhere or somehow else and either create or control a universe of their own using their extreme power and intelligence.
But that's all philosophy after all. No evidence, just an outlet for that logical trap.
ITT: A handful of above average, many average, and a handful of below average programmers giving advice, all thinking they're above average and qualified to do so.
I disagree. I definitely caught that point he thought he made.
"Who here knows about Czech law that can enlighten us on the likelihood of this becoming real/passed/enforced?"
Depends on who ponies up the cash to pay off the right people. The Czech Republic has some of the highest rates of corruption in the OECD according to wikipedia. Take it with a grain of salt.
Yea, this could be said of people moving from rural to urban areas, or from hands-on/manual labor work to desk jobs/paperwork.
Plowing fields by hand or riveting buildings could be seen as brain downtime, and have largely been lost activities since the trend in technology towards requiring us to use constant thinking and processing in normal activities.
IMs used to, but I've stopped responding to most emails/IMs long ago.
Instead, I get distracted by youtube/short videogames.
On the other hand, once I get ramped up and there's some amount of white noise (music, tv, etc) in the background, it's hard to get distracted by anything until whatever I'm working on is done.
"3) We had to send people + Avatars from Earth to Pandora."
.5c ships, you are able to manipulate energies much higher than we can now, so again, no chemical projectile weapons."
.9+c given enough time and fuel.
My understanding was that they had sent a large armed party after an initial scout, and the Avatar technology/DNA sequencing/unobtanium discovery was made on or in orbit just above Pandora.
That would mean that there is a 20-30 year backstory that isn't told since it's largely irrelevant to the plot We already know there is some backstory with the Avatar project and the scientists that were well acquainted with the natives.
"Moreover, if you can do
Not necessarily true. Ion drives are well within our current technology if we ever decided to make a long-distance trip, and they can theoretically push us up to
"Again, tell me why they used massed rockets rather than a small rock?"
Maybe dropping an asteroid on the tree would ruin the mining prospects of the unobtanium under the tree. Remember, they weren't going to just piss off the Na'vi, they were going to the tree to mine.
"(it also seems likely we would be able to synthesize a room-temp superconductor, but I digress)."
From the Avatar Wiki:
"Furthermore, unlike the fragile crystals of human-created superconducting compounds, the substance found on Pandora was a stable quasi-crystal with its atoms arranged in a never-repeating but orderly pattern with fivefold symmetry. This structure was not only structurally rugged but also has microscopic voids in the quasicrystalline structure that contain the magnetic flux lines (see [1])."
So we were able to synthesize something, but it just wasn't useful.
"Last time this happened in China" does not mean: "Last time this happened in the world was in China".
"No they won't. You can't be profitable unless people buy your stuff. "
You buy with views/clicks. That's how almost all profitable websites have operated since the 90s.
A 3 GHz P4 is slower on single-threaded applications than most 2.2GHz single/dual core processors (AMD Athalon/Core2) simply because P4's had high clocks but a poorly designed and underperforming architecture that made instructions take more cycles and memory accesses more frequent than on the Athalon/Core2's.
What you see as "faster" is probably a combination of perception, dependencies on networked software, and background software overhead (anti-virus, outlook, etc) that tends to bog down business computers.
I say this, because a company I work for bought a set of Dell XPS computers a year ago (small project was required to spend around 6k/computer for the amount to be high enough to justify procurement), each with Core2Quads, 8gb+ of ram, bunch of other toys with massive screens, blah blah...
Anyhow, the XPS's run about like a 3 GHz P4 desktop-replacement-laptop my mother bought back in 2005.
*Both* feel like they have a small fraction of the power of an AMD 64 X2 4400+ (2.2ghz) based desktop that I built back in 2007.
What I'm trying to say is that your claim doesn't make any sense from an architectural standpoint if you're familiar with the P4 architectures, and for good reason, since what you perceive as speed has to do with many other factors than the processor and thread handling behavior.
Were you only upgrading with Intel processors?
The AMD AM3 processors are backwards compatible with AM2/AM2+ sockets and AM2+ processors are backwards compatible with AM2 sockets.
AM2 came out in May, 2006.
"Sorry to rant a bit but why the hell would a civilization sent out a radio signal from their planet? Look at us, all we do is "listen" but we don't build any transmitters capable of transmitting a signal across a thousand light years. Transmit first, listen second."
I hope you're trolling.
http://thepublicinterest.freedomblogging.com/files/2009/10/tv-in-space.png
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
Welcome to 80 years ago. Our civilization has been spamming decipherable signals at the speed of light since it's been able to. And so far, that's the best we can do, unless you have some secret method of transmitting data across dozens of light-years faster than the universal speed limit of light speed with any technology that is practically obtainable in the next few decades.
Well good thing we have your exceptionally small sampling size of two total drives (one of each) to make generalizations off of.
Science education is worthless in that regard. Unless you are naturally gifted with an inquisitive or critical mind, that sort of thinking isn't taught or expected in any science courses up until, maybe, the latter years of college. It's not the citizen's fault or failure, as they are not told their duty is to think in a rational way and it's not encoded in their genetics.
Critical thinking, rationality, logic, and skepticism are topics of philosophy, and as many here on Slashdot have agreed in the past, should be taught in the philosophical context as part of the core curriculum, not the scientific context. Preferably, the philosophy classes would be precursors to more advanced science classes where the scientific method could then be applied as recitation.
It's just as well. From the commercials, it looked like it did the same thing as my email spam box.
Why are you telling me this?
I have not made any assertions about his religion, and nor do I care. I was merely clarifying his insight.
Yes, but that's because I'm also a libertarian. I have no right to tell someone else that they cannot do something just because my religion disagrees with it.