War is not cool. Killing people is not cool. Wake up.
No, you wake up.
War is bad but there are plenty of things that are worse. Ask any survivor of the concentration camps who was liberated by the Allied Expeditionary Force whether they think war is 'cool.'
Pacifism can be more evil than killing people in some circumstances.
The hysterical eco-freaks and grant-grubbing politicized scientists pushing global warming down our throats are the same eco-freaks and grant-grubbing scientists who scared us all with tales of the coming ice age thirty years ago.
About the only thing science has reliably proven is that global temperatures fluctuate dramatically and did so long before mankind crawled out of the swamps.
Whether you blame volcanos, perturbations in the earth's axis of rotation, or volcanoes, it is clear that all anthropogenic climate disturbances since man discovered fire are mere blips of statistical noise compared to natural background variations.
I think all the fuss is driven by the same old crowd of leftist busybodies who live their lives for the chance to tell other people what to do. Go to hell, all of you.
Were 19 people to board 19 different jumbo jets, each with approximately 300-500 people on board, and were to shoot out the windows, or at the fuel tanks, etc, the death toll would be more than double that seen on 9/11.
You are quite wrong. A jet can fly perfectly well with one or all of its windows shot out. For that matter, recall the Aloha Airlines jet that made a safe landing after thirty feet of its fuselage peeled off in flight.
Jets are constantly leaking like sieves anyways. The overall cross sectional area of all the little holes and cracks through which pressurized air leaks out of a plane is orders of magnitude greater than the area of a bullet hole. The pilot has control of a valve that bleeds air pressure off the turbines and can adjust for a bullet hole without the passengers even noticing the difference.
And even if the terrorists succeed in blowing out a window, the oxygen masks fall down and everyone is fine other than their ears hurting for a while. Of course, terrorists could knock a window out today, with a fire extinguisher or sturdy metal briefcase, if they were so inclined.
As for shooting out fuel tanks or control wires, it is to laugh. Passenger planes have highly redundant control systems. A terrorist would have to get off a dozen perfect shots to even have a prayer of bringing down a plane. A bullet through a fuel tank would likely just cause a slow leak.
You keep watching James Bond movies all you want, but don't rely on them for support when important public policy questions are resolved. Obviously the government and aeronautical industry know better than you, or we wouldn't have armed sky marshals and pilots.
3) Government represents the will of the people (one man, one vote). Microsoft represents the will of its shareholders (one share, one vote). That is why I feel safer about government-imposed standards than standards imposed by a near-monopoly corporation, and why you should too.
You're a fool. Microsoft has to please its customers or go out of business. Government can and does imprison or torture or kill its "customers" if they object to its policies.
Government-worshiping idiots like you are responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths over the last hundred years. Collectivists and socialists and statists are the most evil people in the world.
I'm teaching my children to hate and undermine big government and collectivism. Yes, raw naked hatred and proud of it.
A family doc, a psychiatrist, an internist, a surgeon and a pathologist go duck hunting.
First to go is the family practitioner. A duck comes in low, and the doc says "Hey! That looks like a duck!" But before he can get off a shot, he turns to each of the other doctors in turn and asks them if they think it really is a duck. By the time he has a consensus the duck is long gone.
Next is the psychiatrist. The duck flies in, and he says "Say! That looks like a duck. But I wonder if it sees itself as a duck?... And does 'duckness' actually have any neurobiological basis or is it just a theoretical construct of reality?..." By the time he has finished stroking his beard and philosophizing, the duck is past and he has missed his chance.
Next up is the internist. As his target approaches, he says , "Aha! Here comes something that is most likely a duck. However, the differential diagnosis also includes a goose, a coot, a swan, or an unusual presentation of an eagle. Of course, when I was a resident, I shot an albatross that looked just like that. There are also case reports of pterodactyls with those features in the literature, but I have never seen one in person." By the time his exhaustive differential is completed, the duck is in the next county.
Next is the surgeon. A distant speck appears on the horizon. He shouts "DUCK!" and blazes away until his gun is empty. He picks up the next doctor's gun, and the next, and blasts away until on his last shot the bird is hit and falls dead on the other side of the field.
Then the surgeon turns to the pathologist and says, "Now run out there and tell me if it really was a duck!"
A mathematician has shown that if you stacked all new technical journals side by side on a shelf, the velocity of the wave front would exceed the speed of light.
A physicist has confirmed his calculations, and noted that this did not violate relativity since no information was actually being transmitted.
Supposedly the Mecca of bagpipes is the Edinburgh Military Tatoo. That would probably get me sufficient bagpipe music to last ten years, but I sure would like to see it someday.
Of course I know where it comes from, jackass. Since I was talking about bagpipes, I thought it would be clever to title my comment with a few words about pipes that everyone remembers. Are you aware of any others?
I also know the difference between Scottish pipes and Irish Uilleann bagpipes, and I have ancestors from both countries.
I mean, come on, who the hell listens to bagpipe music for pleasure...???
In the appropriate context (usually military related) it is quite inspring. I don't listen to it on my car CD, but there was a Scottish band at a war-graves ceremony I went to last Memorial Day, and it brought tears to your eyes.
My grandfather fought in the First World War, in some of the worst of the blood and muck (Passchendaele). The way he told it, his regiment's trench was next to a Scots Highlander regiment. The Scottish lads fought for the right to be first over the top, in full kilt, skirling the pipes. Then they would march forward until they either overran the Germans' trench, or were killed. Them Scots are tough customers.
According to him the sound of the pipes scared the scheiss out of old Fritz. Sure gives me shivers when I hear it with a 21 gun salute and a jet flyover.
I'll cheer the day the Chinese march on Washinton DC. It is coming.
How comical. The Chinese can't possibly even invade Taiwan, and their technical prowess falls further behind ours every year (like everybody else.) The only advantage they have are their "human wave" hordes, and I know we could kill them faster than they can breed.
I expect that in ten or fifteen years, we will be in a position to force the Chinese and Russians to turn over all their nukes to us, without fear of reprisal thanks to our missile defenses. We'll do likewise to the Pakis and the North Koreans and every other unstable dictatorship. Any refusal of our ultimatum will be met with surgical strikes that will utterly destroy the infrastructure of the country, with very little collateral damage to life and private property.
We will remove the specter of nuclear war from the world. We will do more for world peace than a million filthy hippies singing Kumbaya and waving signs for a nuclear freeze.
Now listen up, you clod, this is the last ballistics lesson you will get from me.
Artillery shells follow a parabolic path. Elementary calculus shows that the maximal range of a shell is achieved by firing it at an angle of 45 degrees from horizontal (or marginally higher when air friction is taken into account.)
The maximal height of a shell fired at 45 degrees is about half its maximal range. So for a shell fired a mile high, its maximal range is about two miles.
For distances that are a small fraction of the circumference of the earth, the curvature of the earth measures about 8 inches in a mile. A laser at ground level twenty miles from the front lines could intersect an artillery shell flying a hundred feet off the ground, not to mention one flying a mile high, assuming the terrain is flat.
Since the maximal range of such a shell is only two miles, this means that a ground-based laser could theoretically shoot down shells from a distance that is orders of magnitude greater than the range of the gun.
Why understand when you can just force things unto others?
Sorry, I don't waste time trying to understand inferior savage cultures anymore. Cultural relativism and wooly-minded 'diversity' worship died on a sunny September morning last year. It's might-makes-right from here on out.
We are great! We are Americans!
Yes we are. The best there has ever been, by practically any measure.
Tremble before our might!
Yes. Please do, and learn to live with Pax Americana. And thank your lucky stars it's us and not the Nazis or the Chinese that will be calling the shots from here on out.
Are you really saying that it costs $3.33 per year to feed each person?
$3.33 worth of seed corn ought to feed someone for a year. Unless you are suggesting that giving them the seed corn isn't enough, that we have to feed them all year while they sit on their asses.
Sorry, I am not interested in keeping shiftless layabouts alive. Work or starve.
Punch a small hole in a man's torso with FMJ ammo, and you take him out of action, as well as his two stretcher bearers.
Blow his heart out of the back of his chest with a hollow-point, and he is equally hors de combat, but the would-be stretcher bearers just cross themselves and keep fighting.
If I were the ARTY commander, and I figured out I was fighting one of these things, I'd call in multiple volleys from different Fire Units to wipe it out -- it can't be omnidirectional! Unless the target acquisition time is insanely low...
Remember, this is a coherent beam of laser photons. Lasers lose little of their energy and gain only slightly in cross-sectional area with increasing distance. It is likely that any deployed system will have a range vastly greater than artillery. These things can be miles behind the front or even in the air. Plus, the accuracy is such that we will soon be able to vaporize selected individuals in a crowd.
Before long we will have the ability to render even sophisticated armies totally obsolete. I think this is a good thing. We'll turn opposing officers and armor into cinders in the first fifteen minutes of any engagement, sparing not only civilian bystanders but the great majority of the troops.
Thirty years from now, the greatest challenge to our armed forces will be how to deal with the POWs. No power on Earth will be able to oppose us when we decide to bend other nations to our will.
You may like this situation (I certainly do) or not, but be prepared to face the reality. Our obligation to the rest of the world, as American citizens, is to work to keep our Constitutional checks and balances in place so that our mighty power is used for worthy ends.
Since you don't like government interference in your business, I hope that your health care firm will give up access to funding in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, NIH research funds, etc. It would be terrible if you were to behave hypocritically by taking lots of government money and then turn around and complain about government regulations.
It's attitudes like this that ensure that physicians will continue to flee from Medicare. Their reimbursements become more paltry every year, and with the unfunded mandates of HIPAA compliance piled on top, it will soon be impossible for many physicians to see Medicare patients and still remain in business. And that's without even considering the effect of the spiraling cost of malpractice insurance.
From 2001 to 2004, payments will fall by 17%. That doesn't sound too awful until you realize that a lot of doctors' offices run on a 25% or 30% profit margin. Depending on how many Medicare/Medicaid patients your doctor sees (and for some it is virtually 100%), a 17% Medicare cut can trim your doctor's take-home pay by more than 50%.
There are already a lot of doctors who have decided to go cash-only. You pay 100% of the bill at the receptionist's desk, and you take your own bill to your insurance company and fight them for reimbursement. They refuse Medicare patients altogether and thereby stay free of Federal regulation. This is a worrisome development in my opinion, and further unfunded mandates like HIPAA will only worsen the trend.
I make my living with my eyes so obviously I am very leery of this surgery. On the other hand, I once got a rip-roaring keratitis from leaving my contacts in too long. There are risks with everything but glasses.
I find that daily disposable contacts worn on an as-needed basis work best for me. I wear good quality glasses to work, then put the contacts in if I'm going out with my wife or doing active sports. Then before I go to bed I throw them in the trash. Costs about 3-4 dollars per pair.
Probably 2-3 days a week (or partial days) I'm wearing contacts, the rest just glasses. I never re-use the contacts and never leave them in too long, so the irritation I used to have from contacts is now gone.
Slashdot Mirror
Fine by me. Putains de merde.
-ccm
-ccm
You do realize she's only 15, you old pervert?
-ccm
I bought them my first year in college about twenty years ago when I was doing a lot of skiing. I replaced the wool liners about five years ago.
They have remained perfectly waterproof, and my feet have never, not once, ever been cold while wearing them.
Not very high tech but worthy of mention in this thread.
-ccm
No, you wake up.
War is bad but there are plenty of things that are worse. Ask any survivor of the concentration camps who was liberated by the Allied Expeditionary Force whether they think war is 'cool.'
Pacifism can be more evil than killing people in some circumstances.
-ccm
-ccm
About the only thing science has reliably proven is that global temperatures fluctuate dramatically and did so long before mankind crawled out of the swamps.
Whether you blame volcanos, perturbations in the earth's axis of rotation, or volcanoes, it is clear that all anthropogenic climate disturbances since man discovered fire are mere blips of statistical noise compared to natural background variations.
I think all the fuss is driven by the same old crowd of leftist busybodies who live their lives for the chance to tell other people what to do. Go to hell, all of you.
-ccm
You are quite wrong. A jet can fly perfectly well with one or all of its windows shot out. For that matter, recall the Aloha Airlines jet that made a safe landing after thirty feet of its fuselage peeled off in flight.
Jets are constantly leaking like sieves anyways. The overall cross sectional area of all the little holes and cracks through which pressurized air leaks out of a plane is orders of magnitude greater than the area of a bullet hole. The pilot has control of a valve that bleeds air pressure off the turbines and can adjust for a bullet hole without the passengers even noticing the difference.
And even if the terrorists succeed in blowing out a window, the oxygen masks fall down and everyone is fine other than their ears hurting for a while. Of course, terrorists could knock a window out today, with a fire extinguisher or sturdy metal briefcase, if they were so inclined.
As for shooting out fuel tanks or control wires, it is to laugh. Passenger planes have highly redundant control systems. A terrorist would have to get off a dozen perfect shots to even have a prayer of bringing down a plane. A bullet through a fuel tank would likely just cause a slow leak.
You keep watching James Bond movies all you want, but don't rely on them for support when important public policy questions are resolved. Obviously the government and aeronautical industry know better than you, or we wouldn't have armed sky marshals and pilots.
-ccm
----
You're a fool. Microsoft has to please its customers or go out of business. Government can and does imprison or torture or kill its "customers" if they object to its policies.
Government-worshiping idiots like you are responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths over the last hundred years. Collectivists and socialists and statists are the most evil people in the world.
I'm teaching my children to hate and undermine big government and collectivism. Yes, raw naked hatred and proud of it.
-ccm
A family doc, a psychiatrist, an internist, a surgeon and a pathologist go duck hunting.
First to go is the family practitioner. A duck comes in low, and the doc says "Hey! That looks like a duck!" But before he can get off a shot, he turns to each of the other doctors in turn and asks them if they think it really is a duck. By the time he has a consensus the duck is long gone.
Next is the psychiatrist. The duck flies in, and he says "Say! That looks like a duck. But I wonder if it sees itself as a duck?... And does 'duckness' actually have any neurobiological basis or is it just a theoretical construct of reality?..." By the time he has finished stroking his beard and philosophizing, the duck is past and he has missed his chance.
Next up is the internist. As his target approaches, he says , "Aha! Here comes something that is most likely a duck. However, the differential diagnosis also includes a goose, a coot, a swan, or an unusual presentation of an eagle. Of course, when I was a resident, I shot an albatross that looked just like that. There are also case reports of pterodactyls with those features in the literature, but I have never seen one in person." By the time his exhaustive differential is completed, the duck is in the next county.
Next is the surgeon. A distant speck appears on the horizon. He shouts "DUCK!" and blazes away until his gun is empty. He picks up the next doctor's gun, and the next, and blasts away until on his last shot the bird is hit and falls dead on the other side of the field.
Then the surgeon turns to the pathologist and says, "Now run out there and tell me if it really was a duck!"
-ccm
A physicist has confirmed his calculations, and noted that this did not violate relativity since no information was actually being transmitted.
-ccm
I also know the difference between Scottish pipes and Irish Uilleann bagpipes, and I have ancestors from both countries.
So pòg mo thòin, mate.
-ccm
In the appropriate context (usually military related) it is quite inspring. I don't listen to it on my car CD, but there was a Scottish band at a war-graves ceremony I went to last Memorial Day, and it brought tears to your eyes.
My grandfather fought in the First World War, in some of the worst of the blood and muck (Passchendaele). The way he told it, his regiment's trench was next to a Scots Highlander regiment. The Scottish lads fought for the right to be first over the top, in full kilt, skirling the pipes. Then they would march forward until they either overran the Germans' trench, or were killed. Them Scots are tough customers.
According to him the sound of the pipes scared the scheiss out of old Fritz. Sure gives me shivers when I hear it with a 21 gun salute and a jet flyover.
-ccm
Nor does the original article, remember? It dealt with artillery shells.
Missiles fly even higher, anything with decent range is going to be in space or close to it. Hittable from hundreds if not thousands of miles away.
I sure don't know what your point is but it's obvious you didn't read the article. Hard to believe you're a math and physics student.
-ccm
How comical. The Chinese can't possibly even invade Taiwan, and their technical prowess falls further behind ours every year (like everybody else.) The only advantage they have are their "human wave" hordes, and I know we could kill them faster than they can breed.
I expect that in ten or fifteen years, we will be in a position to force the Chinese and Russians to turn over all their nukes to us, without fear of reprisal thanks to our missile defenses. We'll do likewise to the Pakis and the North Koreans and every other unstable dictatorship. Any refusal of our ultimatum will be met with surgical strikes that will utterly destroy the infrastructure of the country, with very little collateral damage to life and private property.
We will remove the specter of nuclear war from the world. We will do more for world peace than a million filthy hippies singing Kumbaya and waving signs for a nuclear freeze.
-ccm
Artillery shells follow a parabolic path. Elementary calculus shows that the maximal range of a shell is achieved by firing it at an angle of 45 degrees from horizontal (or marginally higher when air friction is taken into account.)
The maximal height of a shell fired at 45 degrees is about half its maximal range. So for a shell fired a mile high, its maximal range is about two miles.
For distances that are a small fraction of the circumference of the earth, the curvature of the earth measures about 8 inches in a mile. A laser at ground level twenty miles from the front lines could intersect an artillery shell flying a hundred feet off the ground, not to mention one flying a mile high, assuming the terrain is flat.
Since the maximal range of such a shell is only two miles, this means that a ground-based laser could theoretically shoot down shells from a distance that is orders of magnitude greater than the range of the gun.
No mirrors needed.
-ccm
Sorry, I don't waste time trying to understand inferior savage cultures anymore. Cultural relativism and wooly-minded 'diversity' worship died on a sunny September morning last year. It's might-makes-right from here on out.
We are great! We are Americans!
Yes we are. The best there has ever been, by practically any measure.
Tremble before our might!
Yes. Please do, and learn to live with Pax Americana. And thank your lucky stars it's us and not the Nazis or the Chinese that will be calling the shots from here on out.
-ccm
$3.33 worth of seed corn ought to feed someone for a year. Unless you are suggesting that giving them the seed corn isn't enough, that we have to feed them all year while they sit on their asses.
Sorry, I am not interested in keeping shiftless layabouts alive. Work or starve.
-ccm
"WARNING! Do not look into laser beam with remaining eye!"
-ccm
These are more lethal than ball ammo, not less.
Punch a small hole in a man's torso with FMJ ammo, and you take him out of action, as well as his two stretcher bearers.
Blow his heart out of the back of his chest with a hollow-point, and he is equally hors de combat, but the would-be stretcher bearers just cross themselves and keep fighting.
-ccm
Here's a little news for you, jackass. Artillery shells and rockets follow a parabolic path that takes them well above the horizon.
-ccm
Remember, this is a coherent beam of laser photons. Lasers lose little of their energy and gain only slightly in cross-sectional area with increasing distance. It is likely that any deployed system will have a range vastly greater than artillery. These things can be miles behind the front or even in the air. Plus, the accuracy is such that we will soon be able to vaporize selected individuals in a crowd.
Before long we will have the ability to render even sophisticated armies totally obsolete. I think this is a good thing. We'll turn opposing officers and armor into cinders in the first fifteen minutes of any engagement, sparing not only civilian bystanders but the great majority of the troops.
Thirty years from now, the greatest challenge to our armed forces will be how to deal with the POWs. No power on Earth will be able to oppose us when we decide to bend other nations to our will.
You may like this situation (I certainly do) or not, but be prepared to face the reality. Our obligation to the rest of the world, as American citizens, is to work to keep our Constitutional checks and balances in place so that our mighty power is used for worthy ends.
-ccm
It's attitudes like this that ensure that physicians will continue to flee from Medicare. Their reimbursements become more paltry every year, and with the unfunded mandates of HIPAA compliance piled on top, it will soon be impossible for many physicians to see Medicare patients and still remain in business. And that's without even considering the effect of the spiraling cost of malpractice insurance.
From 2001 to 2004, payments will fall by 17%. That doesn't sound too awful until you realize that a lot of doctors' offices run on a 25% or 30% profit margin. Depending on how many Medicare/Medicaid patients your doctor sees (and for some it is virtually 100%), a 17% Medicare cut can trim your doctor's take-home pay by more than 50%.
There are already a lot of doctors who have decided to go cash-only. You pay 100% of the bill at the receptionist's desk, and you take your own bill to your insurance company and fight them for reimbursement. They refuse Medicare patients altogether and thereby stay free of Federal regulation. This is a worrisome development in my opinion, and further unfunded mandates like HIPAA will only worsen the trend.
-ccm
I make my living with my eyes so obviously I am very leery of this surgery. On the other hand, I once got a rip-roaring keratitis from leaving my contacts in too long. There are risks with everything but glasses.
I find that daily disposable contacts worn on an as-needed basis work best for me. I wear good quality glasses to work, then put the contacts in if I'm going out with my wife or doing active sports. Then before I go to bed I throw them in the trash. Costs about 3-4 dollars per pair.
Probably 2-3 days a week (or partial days) I'm wearing contacts, the rest just glasses. I never re-use the contacts and never leave them in too long, so the irritation I used to have from contacts is now gone.
-ccm