Saddam Hussein is a homicidal maniac, but he was bending over backwards to avoid war - doing all he could to comply with UN demands.
Playing shell games with inspectors and flagrantly violating UN resolutions for ten years is "bending over backwards"?
The trouble was, the US and Britain were not prepared to consider any outcome other than war. A war which killed tens of thousands while doing damage which Paul Bremer indicated a couple of days ago, was almost impossible to overestimate.
I'll overestimate it for you: the world was destroyed, and everyone died. There that wasn't so hard, you see?
I just got back from China two weeks ago and I never found a site that was blocked. Maybe they just monitor and pay you a visit if you visit too many subversive sites? But I had no trouble getting to google, slashdot, CNN, what have you. Perhaps there are more obscure sites that are blocked, I don't know.
Pundits have claimed that the parallel launch configuration of the orbiter and external tank are a design flaw. Hog wash. The size of the orbiter precludes an inline configuration.
Then maybe the size of the orbiter is part of the design flaw. Separate the engines from the plane and you get a smaller, more reliable, more capable craft. Hell, the entire orbiter assembly is one giant design flaw.
If you want to fly "spam in a can" on top of a larger rockets then welcome back to 1960!
Refresh my memory. Is this the same 1960 where we went from no manned spaceflight to walking on the fucking moon in nine years? The same 1960 which started a period of American manned spaceflight in which there was not a single death off the ground despite a lightning strike (!) on a running rocket filled with five million pounds of explosive fuel (Apollo 12), an explosion onboard a ship 200,000 miles out from Earth (Apollo 13), a potentially disastrous "pogo" resonance problem in the second stage of an entire series of rockets (all Saturn V missions up to Apollo 13), a heat shield that nearly fell off (Mercury 13), and a host of other problems that occur when newbies explore a hostile environment for the first time? From your commentary, I think your 1960 and my 1960 are not the same one.
The vehicles before the shuttle could take punishment and survive. The shuttle cannot. Both shuttle accidents would have either been impossible or resulted in a big zero fatalities with a 1960s-design space craft. The escape tower would have pulled everyone to safety with a Challenger-type rocket-explodes-during-launch accident, and the ablative heat shields used on those craft are much more durable than the fragile tiles on the shuttle, even if they could have been hit with debris which they can't.
The sad thing about the shuttle is that safety was sacrificed in the name of reusability. This reusability was supposed to give us more capabilities for less money. Yet the shuttle is both less capable and more expensive than the equivalent vehicle it replaced. In the end, we have gained nothing from it but a series of expensive, mostly useless programs and fourteen dead.
I don't understand. Are you saying that a large, democratic government that consists of hundreds of different people with different opinions, different worldviews, and different agendas might not always agree with itself or be self-consistent?! Say it ain't so!
The solution to your Two Armies problem is not difficult in the real world. You know your communications medium, how much loss it has, how much latency it has. You don't send "Go", you send "Go at time X" where time X is a point in the future with a comfortable margin to allow for the latency and packet loss in your medium. If you don't get an ACK within a certain amount of time (about twice the latency of the channel), send it again. Repeat until you get an ACK.
If the packet loss and latency of your channel are known (or at least a maximum for both are known), then you can make the probability that the other guy doesn't get the message, or that he gets it but you never got the ACK, as low as you wish.
Note that duplicate messages do not imply the system is unreliable.
Actually, asteroids are a total zero threat since there aren't any around here, and radiation is also a zero threat unless you're going to the Moon or farther for a long time.
Oddly enough, the threats are something like this:
Sealed container for the astronauts makes survival in the event of a disaster harder. (Apollo 1)
Sitting on top of a few million pounds of highly explosive fuel can have certain obvious effects. (Challenger)
Hitting a planetary atmosphere at several miles a second and temperatures higher than the surface of the sun is hard to protect against. (Columbia)
So in sum, the people who have died in our space program have died for exactly the reasons you'd expect.
If Windows is so secure, why does it ship with stuff like this RPC thing turned on by default? If nothing was accessable from the outside in a default install, then nothing could be compromised in a default install.
I have a way for you to be ready by the end of the week instead of by the end of the year. Just install a bittorrent tracker on your download site, and have people grab the mods with bittorrent. The download site doesn't get swamped, people get their mods, and everybody goes home happy. But, of course, that's not cool enough.
No, you don't get it. This isn't somebody who, in the interview, says, "I was convicted for XXX and YYY, but I'm a changed man now, and I won't do it again."
In this interview, the guy says "I killed four people just because they looked at me funny. And I'll whack anybody who gives me shit. Are you looking at me funny?" All the while carrying a shotgun and a twitchy eye.
Here's a hint that you may not have picked up on yet in your movie-watching career.
Neo is the movie's hero. That means that, unless this is one of those rare films with an unhappy ending, he is immortal and invincible. Sometimes the hero dies at the end, but never in the middle. Since the entire movie qualifies as "middle", you can know without even needing to watch a trailer or a movie that Neo doesn't lose to Smith.
It's not that you're more discerning, it's just that you have a selective memory.
I'm not criticizing, it happens to all of us.
Sure, Star Wars was really great. All three of them, and they came out over, what, six years? How many other great films from those six years do you remember? Horrible, horrible movies are the norm and always have been. The gems are what stick in our minds, and so the past seems littered with great movies simply because the past is so long. The present seems littered with horrible movies because we haven't forgotten about them yet, they're shoved in our faces.
I hacked my DVD player's firmware to play discs from any region. Please explain how that is not a legitimate use. It's my DVD player, and I'm not using it to play pirated discs or anything. Region controls are an artificial limitation imposed by manufacturers, and I have a perfect right to get around those limitations if I wish, and can.
and mostly just affect appearances and your standing with certain factions
Obviously the reviewer knows of the negative social effects of race, that's what "standing with certain factions" refers to.
By gameplay, he means the game mechanics; how the game works excluding social interactions. And race has little bearing on those. Differences are there, but most of the time they aren't very noticeable.
Does not require the agent to demonstrate "probable cause," the existence of specific facts to support the belief that a crime has been committed or that the items sought are evidence of a crime. Instead, the agent only needs to claim that he believes that the records he wants may be related to an ongoing investigation related to terrorism or intelligence activities, a very low legal standard.
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on the wiretaps thing. But please note that Patriot allows very wide-reaching court orders; a wiretap order can be used on anyone, named in the order or not, for nearly any reason. The agency serving the order is required to provide nearly no accountability for its use.
Padilla: the fact that he has not been charged at all is in fact the most disturbing part of the entire case. Holding people without charging them with crimes is the kind of thing that repressive dictatorships do. Although he has not been charged as an enemy combatant, he has been declared as one, which is how they are able to hold him without charging him or (I may be wrong on this part) giving him access to a lawyer.
My impression of Padilla is that he is an enormous incompetent. He could no more build a dirty bomb than I could build a fusion weapon. But, assume for the moment that he is competent. He may well be, for all we know about him. Assume that he has done all of what you claimed, and that we have all this evidence against him. Drag him into court and convict him! How hard can that be? If he is such an evil person, we ought to be able to convict him in a court of law like everybody else.
I've been to France, and worked for the French government. I've been to China. I sometimes discuss on publicly-available spaces weapons with high destructive potential and how one might go about constructing them. If the US government one day decides that they permanently dislike the countries above, are they going to declare me as an enemy combatant and locked up without a lawyer?
This is admittely paranoid. (But, but! I'm not paranoid! They really are all out to get me!) And out good friend Jose is most likely best where he is, in prison. But if there are such good reasons to lock him up, why don't they tell us what they are? What you've listed is potentially bad, but very, very circumstantial.
Yes, the library thing is a big deal. You see, they can get at your records without a warrant. It also prevents the library or bookseller involved from telling you about the investigation. As far as updating "outdated" wiretap laws, well, I don't see what was so bad about them before. Requiring warrants is a good thing.
As far as the enemy combatant thing goes, I'll keep worrying about it. There is no real restriction, as far as I can tell, on who may be declared an "enemy combatant". All you need is the President deciding you're Evil. Or maybe he just decided he doesn't like you. And then you're locked up without a trial, without access to a lawyer, without any of the normal recourses to justice that one has when accused of a crime in this country. If Jose Padilla (an American citizen!) can be declared an enemy combatant and whisked away, what assurance do I have?
I shouldn't even have to mention the privacy stuff, that's basically what the whole Act is about. One brief example: allowing law enforcement to get records of books borrowed or bought from libraries and booksellers. If you want more examples, have a look here.
The speedy trial thing I am apparently mistaken about. I must have mixed it up with the whole "enemy combatant" thing and Guantanamo Bay. Although the original context was what Bush had done in these areas, so I believe they're still appropriate to the overall discussion.
So in conclusion, the forces in effect in orbit are, um, nothing. Well, nothing other than drag from the interplanetary medium, gravitational radiation drag, and photon pressure.
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If you'd be so kind as to point out exactly where I said he had WMDs, and therefore show me how your post is relevant to my post, I would be obliged.
Saddam Hussein is a homicidal maniac, but he was bending over backwards to avoid war - doing all he could to comply with UN demands.
Playing shell games with inspectors and flagrantly violating UN resolutions for ten years is "bending over backwards"?
The trouble was, the US and Britain were not prepared to consider any outcome other than war. A war which killed tens of thousands while doing damage which Paul Bremer indicated a couple of days ago, was almost impossible to overestimate.
I'll overestimate it for you: the world was destroyed, and everyone died. There that wasn't so hard, you see?
I just got back from China two weeks ago and I never found a site that was blocked. Maybe they just monitor and pay you a visit if you visit too many subversive sites? But I had no trouble getting to google, slashdot, CNN, what have you. Perhaps there are more obscure sites that are blocked, I don't know.
Pundits have claimed that the parallel launch configuration of the orbiter and external tank are a design flaw. Hog wash. The size of the orbiter precludes an inline configuration.
Then maybe the size of the orbiter is part of the design flaw. Separate the engines from the plane and you get a smaller, more reliable, more capable craft. Hell, the entire orbiter assembly is one giant design flaw.
If you want to fly "spam in a can" on top of a larger rockets then welcome back to 1960!
Refresh my memory. Is this the same 1960 where we went from no manned spaceflight to walking on the fucking moon in nine years? The same 1960 which started a period of American manned spaceflight in which there was not a single death off the ground despite a lightning strike (!) on a running rocket filled with five million pounds of explosive fuel (Apollo 12), an explosion onboard a ship 200,000 miles out from Earth (Apollo 13), a potentially disastrous "pogo" resonance problem in the second stage of an entire series of rockets (all Saturn V missions up to Apollo 13), a heat shield that nearly fell off (Mercury 13), and a host of other problems that occur when newbies explore a hostile environment for the first time? From your commentary, I think your 1960 and my 1960 are not the same one.
The vehicles before the shuttle could take punishment and survive. The shuttle cannot. Both shuttle accidents would have either been impossible or resulted in a big zero fatalities with a 1960s-design space craft. The escape tower would have pulled everyone to safety with a Challenger-type rocket-explodes-during-launch accident, and the ablative heat shields used on those craft are much more durable than the fragile tiles on the shuttle, even if they could have been hit with debris which they can't.
The sad thing about the shuttle is that safety was sacrificed in the name of reusability. This reusability was supposed to give us more capabilities for less money. Yet the shuttle is both less capable and more expensive than the equivalent vehicle it replaced. In the end, we have gained nothing from it but a series of expensive, mostly useless programs and fourteen dead.
I don't understand. Are you saying that a large, democratic government that consists of hundreds of different people with different opinions, different worldviews, and different agendas might not always agree with itself or be self-consistent?! Say it ain't so!
Movie theaters blocking cell phones is illegal because they're blocking other people from communicating with a third party.
This is perfectly legal. You're only interfering with things you already own.
Death of the internet predicted! Details at 11.
Share and share alike; PBS may follow across the pond.
Look, they're already looking at not giving people in the US access. Don't go and threaten them, it'll only make it worse!
The solution to your Two Armies problem is not difficult in the real world. You know your communications medium, how much loss it has, how much latency it has. You don't send "Go", you send "Go at time X" where time X is a point in the future with a comfortable margin to allow for the latency and packet loss in your medium. If you don't get an ACK within a certain amount of time (about twice the latency of the channel), send it again. Repeat until you get an ACK.
If the packet loss and latency of your channel are known (or at least a maximum for both are known), then you can make the probability that the other guy doesn't get the message, or that he gets it but you never got the ACK, as low as you wish.
Note that duplicate messages do not imply the system is unreliable.
Actually, asteroids are a total zero threat since there aren't any around here, and radiation is also a zero threat unless you're going to the Moon or farther for a long time.
Oddly enough, the threats are something like this:
Sealed container for the astronauts makes survival in the event of a disaster harder. (Apollo 1)
Sitting on top of a few million pounds of highly explosive fuel can have certain obvious effects. (Challenger)
Hitting a planetary atmosphere at several miles a second and temperatures higher than the surface of the sun is hard to protect against. (Columbia)
So in sum, the people who have died in our space program have died for exactly the reasons you'd expect.
If Windows is so secure, why does it ship with stuff like this RPC thing turned on by default? If nothing was accessable from the outside in a default install, then nothing could be compromised in a default install.
While we're at it, let's have a big round of applause for Dennis Ritchie, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein.... oh hell, forget it.
I have a way for you to be ready by the end of the week instead of by the end of the year. Just install a bittorrent tracker on your download site, and have people grab the mods with bittorrent. The download site doesn't get swamped, people get their mods, and everybody goes home happy. But, of course, that's not cool enough.
No, you don't get it. This isn't somebody who, in the interview, says, "I was convicted for XXX and YYY, but I'm a changed man now, and I won't do it again."
In this interview, the guy says "I killed four people just because they looked at me funny. And I'll whack anybody who gives me shit. Are you looking at me funny?" All the while carrying a shotgun and a twitchy eye.
Would you hire that guy?
Here's a hint that you may not have picked up on yet in your movie-watching career.
Neo is the movie's hero. That means that, unless this is one of those rare films with an unhappy ending, he is immortal and invincible. Sometimes the hero dies at the end, but never in the middle. Since the entire movie qualifies as "middle", you can know without even needing to watch a trailer or a movie that Neo doesn't lose to Smith.
It's not that you're more discerning, it's just that you have a selective memory.
I'm not criticizing, it happens to all of us.
Sure, Star Wars was really great. All three of them, and they came out over, what, six years? How many other great films from those six years do you remember? Horrible, horrible movies are the norm and always have been. The gems are what stick in our minds, and so the past seems littered with great movies simply because the past is so long. The present seems littered with horrible movies because we haven't forgotten about them yet, they're shoved in our faces.
I hacked my DVD player's firmware to play discs from any region. Please explain how that is not a legitimate use. It's my DVD player, and I'm not using it to play pirated discs or anything. Region controls are an artificial limitation imposed by manufacturers, and I have a perfect right to get around those limitations if I wish, and can.
There's an easy way to tell the difference.
In X-Plane, you can build your own airplane and see how it flies. Some people actually do this in order to build better real airplanes.
Try that in a sim that uses pre-calculated data.
and mostly just affect appearances and your standing with certain factions
Obviously the reviewer knows of the negative social effects of race, that's what "standing with certain factions" refers to.
By gameplay, he means the game mechanics; how the game works excluding social interactions. And race has little bearing on those. Differences are there, but most of the time they aren't very noticeable.
If you're referring to 2000, need I remind you that neither of them got a majority?
I think we'll have to agree to disagree on the wiretaps thing. But please note that Patriot allows very wide-reaching court orders; a wiretap order can be used on anyone, named in the order or not, for nearly any reason. The agency serving the order is required to provide nearly no accountability for its use.
Padilla: the fact that he has not been charged at all is in fact the most disturbing part of the entire case. Holding people without charging them with crimes is the kind of thing that repressive dictatorships do. Although he has not been charged as an enemy combatant, he has been declared as one, which is how they are able to hold him without charging him or (I may be wrong on this part) giving him access to a lawyer.
My impression of Padilla is that he is an enormous incompetent. He could no more build a dirty bomb than I could build a fusion weapon. But, assume for the moment that he is competent. He may well be, for all we know about him. Assume that he has done all of what you claimed, and that we have all this evidence against him. Drag him into court and convict him! How hard can that be? If he is such an evil person, we ought to be able to convict him in a court of law like everybody else.
I've been to France, and worked for the French government. I've been to China. I sometimes discuss on publicly-available spaces weapons with high destructive potential and how one might go about constructing them. If the US government one day decides that they permanently dislike the countries above, are they going to declare me as an enemy combatant and locked up without a lawyer?
This is admittely paranoid. (But, but! I'm not paranoid! They really are all out to get me!) And out good friend Jose is most likely best where he is, in prison. But if there are such good reasons to lock him up, why don't they tell us what they are? What you've listed is potentially bad, but very, very circumstantial.
Yes, the library thing is a big deal. You see, they can get at your records without a warrant. It also prevents the library or bookseller involved from telling you about the investigation. As far as updating "outdated" wiretap laws, well, I don't see what was so bad about them before. Requiring warrants is a good thing.
As far as the enemy combatant thing goes, I'll keep worrying about it. There is no real restriction, as far as I can tell, on who may be declared an "enemy combatant". All you need is the President deciding you're Evil. Or maybe he just decided he doesn't like you. And then you're locked up without a trial, without access to a lawyer, without any of the normal recourses to justice that one has when accused of a crime in this country. If Jose Padilla (an American citizen!) can be declared an enemy combatant and whisked away, what assurance do I have?
I shouldn't even have to mention the privacy stuff, that's basically what the whole Act is about. One brief example: allowing law enforcement to get records of books borrowed or bought from libraries and booksellers. If you want more examples, have a look here.
The speedy trial thing I am apparently mistaken about. I must have mixed it up with the whole "enemy combatant" thing and Guantanamo Bay. Although the original context was what Bush had done in these areas, so I believe they're still appropriate to the overall discussion.
Yet more pedantry: momentum isn't a force!
So in conclusion, the forces in effect in orbit are, um, nothing. Well, nothing other than drag from the interplanetary medium, gravitational radiation drag, and photon pressure.
Out of curiosity, what of "your basic civil rights" does that Patriot act screw you out of?
Oh, nothing much really. Just useless things like privacy, the right to a speedy jury trial, silly junk like that.