The problem that the US military is running into is one that is inherent in urban warfare. When you're fighting in forests or open land, there are fewer places for people to hide. Sure, they can hide behind a tree, or in a hole, or whatever. But compared to urban warfare, it's nothing. This is the first real conflict that America has fought in the urban warfare environment, and we're getting our asses handed to us because of principles of asymmetric warfare: One asshole sitting in a window can take out two or three guys before they even figure out where the hell the fire is coming from. And then, if you have a mission with rules of engagement to protect civilians at all costs, you AREN'T going to go throw a HEAT round from a tank into that window.
It's fascinating that you, and Mr. Blair, make a big deal of this - without mentioning that the UK's strategic deterrent is already in the hands of another country. The U.K. is utterly dependent on the U.S. for software and spares for the Trident-II submarines.
In other words, the UK has learned from their previous mistake. Though probably by this point they've reverse-engineered it all; they just don't want anyone to know.
Some suggestions from someone who is going to be dealing with a similar situation in the near future and has had to think about it a bit.
First, go outside and turn your water OFF. You aren't going to be there, so you don't need anything that the water is going to provide anyway. This protects you from a broken pipe flooding the place or anything like that. Turn off the hot water heater as well.
Second, turn off your gas for the same reason. Not that the gas line is going to freeze and rupture, but it's a good idea nevertheless.
Third, if you have a heater that is electric instead of gas (yeah, like how many of those are around?) or if you don't find it necessary to turn off the gas, leave the thing on and set to some obscenely low temperature that will keep your electronic equipment from freezing over. (Hey, this is Slashdot!) You probably don't want ice crystals forming on your equipment so it's wet when you return and heat it back up. Just a thought.
Since you're keeping your broadband connection, you can spend some time coding up a little something that runs off the parallel port or whatever. Basically, the idea I'm getting at is that you could always stick a few webcams up if you want, a few temperature sensors, etc., and wire those into a Linux box. You don't even really need creative software for it. A simple script that polls the sensors and pages/calls/emails/whatever you if one of them breaks some threshold would work fine. And with the webcams, at least you'd be able to look and get some peace of mind if you're paranoid. You could code up a script that captures images at one minute intervals and stores them, and inserts temperature readings and such into a PostgreSQL database. You don't need fancy viewing software: Just use one of those web gallery viewers for the pictures, and just read the temperature/whatever data out of the database raw.
What? You honestly expect us to believe that ads don't work or that they're annoying? Come on. Just look at "Head-On," the worthless chap-stick-like material that has no real medication in it. Apply directly to the forehead. Apply directly to the forehead. Apply directly to the forehead...
I'm just waiting for them to come out with a hemorrhoid cream so they can tell me to "apply directly to the asshole" multiple times.
For this to happen as described, garage door openers must be responding to the mere presence of a signal. Are they really that simplistic? I would have thought that they would respond only to a particular pulse sequence or code of some sort. Not only would that prevent this kind of interference, but it would prevent one person's garage door opener from interfering with the neighbor's.
Damn, I sure hope that the GDO (garage door openers) that the Stargate teams use to open the iris are more secure than that! We're all doomed!
Of course, most of those keypads are merely battery-operated radio transmitters that transmit the signal to the garage door in response to entry of the appropriate (i.e., programmed into the keypad) code, so "getting their fat asses out of their car and do[ing] the keypad instead" won't help.
Agreed on that count. X-Plane is undeniably the best PC flight sim out there. Enough time with it and you could probably be somewhat comfortable getting a 737 down safely, albeit with a little damace owing to the fact that you aren't used to the 'feel' of the plane. Definately a good skill, and you can mod it all to hell by doing things like designing your own aircraft. For extra points, scale model them down and build actual models.;)
I've always been a big fan of strategy style games anyway. No, not the RTS type which I abhor, but games like Space Empires V, Galactic Civilizations, Master of Orion, or hell, Chess. Honestly, I'd invest in Space Empires V and Chessmaster, though I know that my likes don't parallel that of most gamers.
I'll chime in with an anecdotal report. I warn you that it's scary on a few different levels.
We routinely have our doctors run for thirty hours or more without sleep. Now with the new work hours restrictions it's somewhat better, but still bad. Medical schools, however, still routinely abuse medical students, just as mine did as recently as last year. This effectively means that people are up for 30 hours, then are expected to go to some lecture or some other inanity, then get to go home, only to do it again the next day. The end result is that they're up for close to 40 hours at a stretch, then have to drive home in rush hour traffic.
Three very serious things happened to me (and many others I worked with). First, we became almost narcoleptic, falling asleep while standing up, waking just quickly enough to avoid face-planting ourselves into the floor, the wall, or a body cavity. Second, we started seeing things, most of the time ridiculous things, like thinking that Bugs Bunny was actually in someone's chest cavity (the diaphragmatic cura look like rabbit ears if you have an imagination), which led to us doing things like blurting out answers to questions that weren't even asked, and that kind of thing. Third, our personalities changed dramatically. A year later, most of us have actually recovered from that three month hell, but we all have a much shorter fuse too, and a far lower tolerance for bullshit.
Sleep is necessary. If nothing else, it allows one to consolidate memories into long term, which would explain why I literally don't remember half or more of that three months of my life. I wish I had Provigil during that time, because it would have smoothed over the effects a great deal. But I didn't. And I can only imagine what would happen if someone tried to use modanifil for days and days without a break.
Others have asked how students can learn "proper" English with these newly loosened regulations. I'd like to point out that one of the main objectives of English class is to teach the use of standard English! The students' mastery of English can be tested with their English exams; doing so with those of any other subject would be ridiculous.
The obvious problem here, however, is that these students can use proper English. If they can't spell "you" as "y-o-u" instead of "u," then they're idiots. I don't care how bad your language skills are, they aren't that bad unless you're mentally disabled or are just barely learning English. I fully agree with not grading a student down if he spells something incorrectly or uses less than perfect grammar on a chemistry test, but if he isn't even trying to communicate, I'd fail him.
Not only that, but these kids are in for a world of hurt if they run across someone like me who doesn't understand half the idiotic abbreviations that are used. I get "lol," smilies, and words with a verb removed. I don't like it, but I get it. On the other hand, start throwing in crap like "ftw" and other stuff I haven't figured out (and don't desire to), and I'd fail your ass.
I'll admit that I don't fully understand this. I'm far from one of those ridiculously fast texters on the cell phone. I do send a fair number of text messages. Only very rarely will I let bad text prediction through without taking a second to correct it, and I have never sent a text message in "text speak." It would probably take me just as long to use "text speak" as it would to do it correctly.
In many cases, it's futile. I'm a medical doctor, cellular and molecular biologist, and have training in genetics. Nevertheless, I have ABSOLUTELY NO assurance that any contribution that I might make to Wikipedia isn't edited to hell and back by someone who doesn't have those qualifications. In other words, that means that most of the people most qualified to edit many of the articles won't bother (and no, I don't mean articles on "Britney Spears" or "Aerosmith").
I don't know how Wikipedia can address this. But until it does, Wikipedia is a pop-culture reference, not anything that can be used as a legitimate scientific or literary reference.
Oh, so you know of a service where I can get an assortment of music I want, playable on whatever software I want, in MP3 or OGG format, and which I can transfer between devices that I legitimately use? All I've seen is DRM-laden crap which requires some proprietary software, a list of "blessed" operating systems, and which use proprietary formats. Add to that the fact that I can legally make a recording off the radio, make an MP3 out of it for my own use, and put it on my devices, and the entire point becomes moot to anyone but the RIAA apologists.
Or they could have some kind of "prime directive." Or they could consider us too primitive to bother with, the same way we might not bother with a colony of ants. Or they might have been here a long time ago, done whatever research they wanted, considered the planet uninteresting, and taken it off their list of tourist destinations. Or their thought processes might be so completely different from ours that they don't even recognize us as alive, or us recognize them as alive. Or they might not feel compelled to explore as humans do, and therefore simply expand out from their homeworld in a sphere; depending on how far away that homeworld is, they might not be here yet even if they've been doing it for millions of years. Or they might do some combination of the above, but also have decided not to reproduce uncontrolled like humans do.
Almost a 50/50 chance of getting a doc who cheated his/her way through college.. scary.
On the bright side if your doc is ever stuck with a diagnosis he can always look it up on wikipedia.
Agreed completely. Unfortunately, nobody ever looks at how monkeying with this environment ultimately screws over the honest people. For example, I knew people in undergrad who had 3.9s because they cheated, compared to someone else's 3.4 who did it honestly. They then took a standardized test, got outperformed by their honest counterparts, and applied to medical school. They got preference because of their GPA.
Then once in medical school, those who cheated (obviously) got better grades. Those who did it honestly might have come out with a 2.25-2.75. (They grade on curves, so obviously most people are going to fall in the C category.) Unfortunately, the reality is that because you have some jackasses cheating out there, they then shift the curve such that people who are doing it honestly either get a C or fail. Now if you're like me, you don't cheat even in the end, but you get screwed when you go to apply to residency which, yet again, looks at your GPA.
It's when these people get into residency that the GPA doesn't matter so much. Unfortunately, that's also when they KILL PEOPLE.
Now wait a second. I thought we had a color-blind, gender-blind, racially and gender neutral society where everyone is supposed to be equal, at least in the ideas of the liberal quacks in the media. So who gives a rat's ass that she's the first FEMALE space tourist? I guess "eqwalit-ee" only applies if it's against men or whites. Or the Jews. Can't forget those Jews.
Region encoding is absolutely worthless. Think about it: Someone buys a CD in Asia, and pirates it. Now if they do a direct copy of the CD, it can't be played in players in America. But if they rip it and reencode it, [b]which they are going to do anyway[/b], then it doesn't matter. All it does is piss of legitimate customers.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem that the US military is running into is one that is inherent in urban warfare. When you're fighting in forests or open land, there are fewer places for people to hide. Sure, they can hide behind a tree, or in a hole, or whatever. But compared to urban warfare, it's nothing. This is the first real conflict that America has fought in the urban warfare environment, and we're getting our asses handed to us because of principles of asymmetric warfare: One asshole sitting in a window can take out two or three guys before they even figure out where the hell the fire is coming from. And then, if you have a mission with rules of engagement to protect civilians at all costs, you AREN'T going to go throw a HEAT round from a tank into that window.
First, go outside and turn your water OFF. You aren't going to be there, so you don't need anything that the water is going to provide anyway. This protects you from a broken pipe flooding the place or anything like that. Turn off the hot water heater as well.
Second, turn off your gas for the same reason. Not that the gas line is going to freeze and rupture, but it's a good idea nevertheless.
Third, if you have a heater that is electric instead of gas (yeah, like how many of those are around?) or if you don't find it necessary to turn off the gas, leave the thing on and set to some obscenely low temperature that will keep your electronic equipment from freezing over. (Hey, this is Slashdot!) You probably don't want ice crystals forming on your equipment so it's wet when you return and heat it back up. Just a thought.
Since you're keeping your broadband connection, you can spend some time coding up a little something that runs off the parallel port or whatever. Basically, the idea I'm getting at is that you could always stick a few webcams up if you want, a few temperature sensors, etc., and wire those into a Linux box. You don't even really need creative software for it. A simple script that polls the sensors and pages/calls/emails/whatever you if one of them breaks some threshold would work fine. And with the webcams, at least you'd be able to look and get some peace of mind if you're paranoid. You could code up a script that captures images at one minute intervals and stores them, and inserts temperature readings and such into a PostgreSQL database. You don't need fancy viewing software: Just use one of those web gallery viewers for the pictures, and just read the temperature/whatever data out of the database raw.
I'm just waiting for them to come out with a hemorrhoid cream so they can tell me to "apply directly to the asshole" multiple times.
Of course, most of those keypads are merely battery-operated radio transmitters that transmit the signal to the garage door in response to entry of the appropriate (i.e., programmed into the keypad) code, so "getting their fat asses out of their car and do[ing] the keypad instead" won't help.
Agreed on that count. X-Plane is undeniably the best PC flight sim out there. Enough time with it and you could probably be somewhat comfortable getting a 737 down safely, albeit with a little damace owing to the fact that you aren't used to the 'feel' of the plane. Definately a good skill, and you can mod it all to hell by doing things like designing your own aircraft. For extra points, scale model them down and build actual models. ;)
I've always been a big fan of strategy style games anyway. No, not the RTS type which I abhor, but games like Space Empires V, Galactic Civilizations, Master of Orion, or hell, Chess. Honestly, I'd invest in Space Empires V and Chessmaster, though I know that my likes don't parallel that of most gamers.
We routinely have our doctors run for thirty hours or more without sleep. Now with the new work hours restrictions it's somewhat better, but still bad. Medical schools, however, still routinely abuse medical students, just as mine did as recently as last year. This effectively means that people are up for 30 hours, then are expected to go to some lecture or some other inanity, then get to go home, only to do it again the next day. The end result is that they're up for close to 40 hours at a stretch, then have to drive home in rush hour traffic.
Three very serious things happened to me (and many others I worked with). First, we became almost narcoleptic, falling asleep while standing up, waking just quickly enough to avoid face-planting ourselves into the floor, the wall, or a body cavity. Second, we started seeing things, most of the time ridiculous things, like thinking that Bugs Bunny was actually in someone's chest cavity (the diaphragmatic cura look like rabbit ears if you have an imagination), which led to us doing things like blurting out answers to questions that weren't even asked, and that kind of thing. Third, our personalities changed dramatically. A year later, most of us have actually recovered from that three month hell, but we all have a much shorter fuse too, and a far lower tolerance for bullshit.
Sleep is necessary. If nothing else, it allows one to consolidate memories into long term, which would explain why I literally don't remember half or more of that three months of my life. I wish I had Provigil during that time, because it would have smoothed over the effects a great deal. But I didn't. And I can only imagine what would happen if someone tried to use modanifil for days and days without a break.
Yeah, it would be like the entire planet had eaten too much Taco Bell because, as we know, in the future, all resturaunts are Taco Bell.
Not only that, but these kids are in for a world of hurt if they run across someone like me who doesn't understand half the idiotic abbreviations that are used. I get "lol," smilies, and words with a verb removed. I don't like it, but I get it. On the other hand, start throwing in crap like "ftw" and other stuff I haven't figured out (and don't desire to), and I'd fail your ass.
I'll admit that I don't fully understand this. I'm far from one of those ridiculously fast texters on the cell phone. I do send a fair number of text messages. Only very rarely will I let bad text prediction through without taking a second to correct it, and I have never sent a text message in "text speak." It would probably take me just as long to use "text speak" as it would to do it correctly.
I don't know how Wikipedia can address this. But until it does, Wikipedia is a pop-culture reference, not anything that can be used as a legitimate scientific or literary reference.
Worse, in Firefox on Linux I couldn't even figure out how to play the video. "Check out the video above" -- Huh? There's nothing above.
Oh well. I guess I'll have to keep getting my movies from Torrent sites.
The RIAA and friends don't get profits off of allofmp3.com. Therefore, it's just as illegitimate, but it's more convenient.
Or they could have some kind of "prime directive." Or they could consider us too primitive to bother with, the same way we might not bother with a colony of ants. Or they might have been here a long time ago, done whatever research they wanted, considered the planet uninteresting, and taken it off their list of tourist destinations. Or their thought processes might be so completely different from ours that they don't even recognize us as alive, or us recognize them as alive. Or they might not feel compelled to explore as humans do, and therefore simply expand out from their homeworld in a sphere; depending on how far away that homeworld is, they might not be here yet even if they've been doing it for millions of years. Or they might do some combination of the above, but also have decided not to reproduce uncontrolled like humans do.
Agreed completely. Unfortunately, nobody ever looks at how monkeying with this environment ultimately screws over the honest people. For example, I knew people in undergrad who had 3.9s because they cheated, compared to someone else's 3.4 who did it honestly. They then took a standardized test, got outperformed by their honest counterparts, and applied to medical school. They got preference because of their GPA.
Then once in medical school, those who cheated (obviously) got better grades. Those who did it honestly might have come out with a 2.25-2.75. (They grade on curves, so obviously most people are going to fall in the C category.) Unfortunately, the reality is that because you have some jackasses cheating out there, they then shift the curve such that people who are doing it honestly either get a C or fail. Now if you're like me, you don't cheat even in the end, but you get screwed when you go to apply to residency which, yet again, looks at your GPA.
It's when these people get into residency that the GPA doesn't matter so much. Unfortunately, that's also when they KILL PEOPLE.
Real men key their code in hexidecimal using 8 bit ASCII!
Now wait a second. I thought we had a color-blind, gender-blind, racially and gender neutral society where everyone is supposed to be equal, at least in the ideas of the liberal quacks in the media. So who gives a rat's ass that she's the first FEMALE space tourist? I guess "eqwalit-ee" only applies if it's against men or whites. Or the Jews. Can't forget those Jews.
Region encoding is absolutely worthless. Think about it: Someone buys a CD in Asia, and pirates it. Now if they do a direct copy of the CD, it can't be played in players in America. But if they rip it and reencode it, [b]which they are going to do anyway[/b], then it doesn't matter. All it does is piss of legitimate customers.