I think Star Wars is overrated, trivial nonsense, but even I would know better than to make that a story item in Slashdot. That's just asking for trouble.
Not as far as Salon is concerned. They're asking for page hits (and the corresponding ad hits). A little carefully-presented faux controversy is profitable.
Has anyone ever noticed that national sovereignty and international law are mutually exclusive?
Only if you take them both as absolutes, and believe that countries can't sign onto any international law treaties without giving up all of their sovereignty.
Does agreeing to abide by state and federal law mean that individuals give up all their individual rights and freedoms? No, of course not.
Doesnt it sadden any of you that the sole purpose of this is to find out how to more effectivly kill more innocent civilian lives?
But nuclear weapons are only to be feared when they're in the hands of rogue nations. And the US is obviously not a rogue nation, because we respect international law.
We don't? Oh, then we're not a rogue nation because we respect other nations' sovereignty.
We don't? Oh, then we're not a rogue nation because we don't train people to destabilize other counties by terrorizing their citizens.
We do? Well, at least we respect human rights, the democratic process, and justice for all.
We don't? Oh. Um. Well... we're not a rogue nation because we love freedom and wave flags and stuff! Yeah, that's it. So don't worry about us having weapons of mass destruction. I mean, it's not like we'd ever really use them.
Um. Not more than we already have. Well, we probably wouldn't. Unless we decided that we really really needed to.
You'd think a company the size of SEGA could afford to keep a couple native english speakers around to translate things. Aparently not though:
[cough] Apparently, being an english speaker would not be sufficient. I love how many of the posts ragging on the "engrish" have spelling and/or grammar errors. [grin]
Yup, it's evolution, but not like you think. We've accidentally created a new life form -- the corporation. Corporations need humans to live, but that doesn't make us important to them, any more than you or I think much about our intestinal flora.
It used to be possible to kill a corporation, but that's harder and harder to do these days, as their pet lobbyists gut the laws that allowed that.
Humans aren't (quite) irrelevant, but the idea that we're the dominant specie on the planet is becoming an illusion. Or maybe it's just becoming more of an illusion.
Re:check your facts please....
on
Carnivore Update
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The government isn't out to get me and unless you're either a terrorist or paranoid, they're not out to get you either.
Important correction: unless they think you or I might be a terrorist... or unless it's in their benefit to portray you or me as one. I don't see it as paranoid to expect that people in the government may well do what some of their predecessors have done in the past.
Ashcroft and other members of the administration have pretty much said that anyone that opposes their supposedly anti-terrorist policies is actively aiding terrorists, which means that if I do that loudly enough, I'm fair game.
People I know who've actually been in fights thought the fight scenes were handled pretty well. I haven't personally been in any real fights, but I've had some martial arts training (and no, that don't mean watching "The Matrix" a zillion times). I was impressed, particularly by how the individual characters all had distinctive and appropriate fighting styles.
Legolas fought like an elf, Gimli fought like a dwarf, the hobbits fought like barely-trained hobbits, Boromir fought like a human, and Aragorn fought like a human who trained with elves.
And the character development so far roughly matches what's in the first book. Which pretty much amounts to characters realizing how deep the shit is.
Those that feel justifed in meeting social problems with expedient political solutions that are far removed from the root causes of the situation should be drove to the sea and forced to crawl back in till they evolve a suitably advanced brain for deductive logic.
That's a great idea, but the Secret Service might object.
The problem with these kinds of people is that
they're a cross between cargo-cultists and priests
trying to read the future in entrails. They're
randomly recombining ideas and making vague
statements, and occasionally this turns up
something useful, but usually it's just offal.
You said it!
Oh wait... are you talking about Doctorow and Sterling, or Slashdot?
So, under FOIA the content of the tapes of all these cameras is public property right? That' will be very useful to future in-the-beltway memoirs-writers.
Nice thought, but I doubt most memoirs-writers will have the resources necessary to successfully follow through on a FOIA request. And the policy of the current administration is to make using FOIA even harder. The FOIA was a nice idea, but it's becoming essentially worthless for anything really important.
I've done nothing wrong and I have nothing to hide.
Correction: So far nobody has decided that any of the things that you do are wrong. Lucky you. Do you really want to assume that's always going to be true?
I work in a university library, which is where I learned that, in fact, it is illegal for law enforcement to come in and ask questions like, "Who has "the anarchist's cookbook cheked out?" or "Can you tell me what books Mr. Smith has checked out right now?" Those kinds of questions were asked during the McCarthy-era, when FBI, etc. were looking for Communists under every rock, eventually, the courts held up the librarian's right to answer "I'm sorry, I can't tell you that," to those law enforcement officials. I imagine that bookstore will start answering the same way, using that same precedent to back them up.
That's if the usually underpaid and undertrained person that the cops talk to happens to know that. The cops know damn well that most people don't know when they shouldn't answer questions, and will frame their questions carefully enough that any info they get will be usable -- at least in the investigation, if not in court.
(IANAL, but I don't think it's against the law for them to ask, it's just that they can't officially demand it. That may vary depending on state or local regs, and probably does.)
Though if your usage of other folk's resources is greater than their usage of yours, you will be charged more. (And -- of course -- either way there will be service activation fees, administrative fees, tracking fees, licensing fees, and so on. Oh yeah, and taxes.)
1Gig+ CPU?: Nerds -- Mac nerds, at least -- know that raw gigahertz is not all that useful a number by itself. The slowest new iMac is generally faster than any 1GHz Pentium-based PC.
512M memory?: IMacs come with 256M, upgradable to 1G... and memory is cheap.
Radeon AIW card?: NVIDIA GeoForce2, combined with Velocity Engine in the CPU.
CD-RW, DVD?: The high-end iMac has this built in, including DVD-write ability.
RAID array of 4 hard drives?: That's the kind of thing IEEE 1394 ports are for.
Beside's which, it's a consumer computer. The functionality it's already got is bordering on overkill.
Oops, sorry, forgot the math. 10 megawatts = 10,000 kilowatts. ~8,760 hours per year. Therefore, the test satellite would produce over 87 million kilowatt hours annually. (I think?) That means you'd need ~5,700 similar satellites to meet all of Japan's needs, which is still quite a few.
But the article doesn't say how much power a full-scale satellite would produce, so I dunno.
Um. Each laser is capable of 10 megawatts, and the annual energy needed is 504 billion kilowatt hours. You need to make the units match before comparing them.
Also, the 10 megawatt satellite is a test satellite. Presumably, if it works, later facilities would be more powerful.
oh come on? "ethically bankrupt"? This would happen at just about every business.
Even if it would happen at just about every business -- even if it would happen at every business -- that doesn't mean that it's not ethically bankrupt. What is or is not common behavior is not relevant to what is or is not ethical behavior.
Only geeks need or want to stack computers meant for a desk. And part of the reason for a computer design like this is to make it unnecessary to hide the damn thing under the desk.
Rectangular computers are as "fugly" as a monkey-dancing Steve Ballmer. (Well, ok, not that fugly, but close.)
...to the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field? I guess I have to see one in person, but the new iMac looks plain stupid. I so wish I didn't feel that way. I saw the keynote at the Apple Store, and although we all clapped, many expressed disappointment.
Now maybe I'm just relatively new to the Mac world, but my impression is that the supposed RDF is meant tongue-in-cheek. Whatever Steve announces, many Mac users express disappointment. He could announce the successful test of a warp drive, and some whiner in the back would be going, "Jeez, is that all? Boy, they really over-hyped it."
Slashdot Mirror
Not as far as Salon is concerned. They're asking for page hits (and the corresponding ad hits). A little carefully-presented faux controversy is profitable.
I didn't wait for something better. I'm using something better right now.
Only if you take them both as absolutes, and believe that countries can't sign onto any international law treaties without giving up all of their sovereignty.
Does agreeing to abide by state and federal law mean that individuals give up all their individual rights and freedoms? No, of course not.
Same thing.
But nuclear weapons are only to be feared when they're in the hands of rogue nations. And the US is obviously not a rogue nation, because we respect international law.
We don't? Oh, then we're not a rogue nation because we respect other nations' sovereignty.
We don't? Oh, then we're not a rogue nation because we don't train people to destabilize other counties by terrorizing their citizens.
We do? Well, at least we respect human rights, the democratic process, and justice for all.
We don't? Oh. Um. Well ... we're not a rogue nation because we love freedom and wave flags and stuff! Yeah, that's it. So don't worry about us having weapons of mass destruction. I mean, it's not like we'd ever really use them.
Um. Not more than we already have. Well, we probably wouldn't. Unless we decided that we really really needed to.
(Score: -1, Treasonous)
[cough] Apparently, being an english speaker would not be sufficient. I love how many of the posts ragging on the "engrish" have spelling and/or grammar errors. [grin]
Space Elevator
Built by a joint Russian/Irish shpathe conth- ..., spice conzter- ..., er, group to build high thingth.
No, wait, I got it -- it's the "War on Lame War Metaphors Used for Political Posturing". That's a Forever War.
It used to be possible to kill a corporation, but that's harder and harder to do these days, as their pet lobbyists gut the laws that allowed that.
Humans aren't (quite) irrelevant, but the idea that we're the dominant specie on the planet is becoming an illusion. Or maybe it's just becoming more of an illusion.
Important correction: unless they think you or I might be a terrorist ... or unless it's in their benefit to portray you or me as one. I don't see it as paranoid to expect that people in the government may well do what some of their predecessors have done in the past.
Ashcroft and other members of the administration have pretty much said that anyone that opposes their supposedly anti-terrorist policies is actively aiding terrorists, which means that if I do that loudly enough, I'm fair game.
Still pay more money? [laugh] "Only the little people pay taxes."
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me 3,736,589,132 times, shame on gullible consumers sucked in by manipulative marketing.
Legolas fought like an elf, Gimli fought like a dwarf, the hobbits fought like barely-trained hobbits, Boromir fought like a human, and Aragorn fought like a human who trained with elves.
And the character development so far roughly matches what's in the first book. Which pretty much amounts to characters realizing how deep the shit is.
That's a great idea, but the Secret Service might object.
Yah, and with 2 needles and OS X support for dual-processor PowerMacs. Vroom.
You said it!
Oh wait ... are you talking about Doctorow and Sterling, or Slashdot?
Nice thought, but I doubt most memoirs-writers will have the resources necessary to successfully follow through on a FOIA request. And the policy of the current administration is to make using FOIA even harder. The FOIA was a nice idea, but it's becoming essentially worthless for anything really important.
Correction: So far nobody has decided that any of the things that you do are wrong. Lucky you. Do you really want to assume that's always going to be true?
That's if the usually underpaid and undertrained person that the cops talk to happens to know that. The cops know damn well that most people don't know when they shouldn't answer questions, and will frame their questions carefully enough that any info they get will be usable -- at least in the investigation, if not in court.
(IANAL, but I don't think it's against the law for them to ask, it's just that they can't officially demand it. That may vary depending on state or local regs, and probably does.)
Though if your usage of other folk's resources is greater than their usage of yours, you will be charged more. (And -- of course -- either way there will be service activation fees, administrative fees, tracking fees, licensing fees, and so on. Oh yeah, and taxes.)
512M memory?: IMacs come with 256M, upgradable to 1G ... and memory is cheap.
Radeon AIW card?: NVIDIA GeoForce2, combined with Velocity Engine in the CPU.
CD-RW, DVD?: The high-end iMac has this built in, including DVD-write ability.
RAID array of 4 hard drives?: That's the kind of thing IEEE 1394 ports are for.
Beside's which, it's a consumer computer. The functionality it's already got is bordering on overkill.
But the article doesn't say how much power a full-scale satellite would produce, so I dunno.
Also, the 10 megawatt satellite is a test satellite. Presumably, if it works, later facilities would be more powerful.
Even if it would happen at just about every business -- even if it would happen at every business -- that doesn't mean that it's not ethically bankrupt. What is or is not common behavior is not relevant to what is or is not ethical behavior.
Rectangular computers are as "fugly" as a monkey-dancing Steve Ballmer. (Well, ok, not that fugly, but close.)
Now maybe I'm just relatively new to the Mac world, but my impression is that the supposed RDF is meant tongue-in-cheek. Whatever Steve announces, many Mac users express disappointment. He could announce the successful test of a warp drive, and some whiner in the back would be going, "Jeez, is that all? Boy, they really over-hyped it."