My mother in law is from South America and down there a whole bunch of people believe Osama Bin Ladin and George Bush staged the whole 9/11 thing and are friends. [...] But even I don't believe that, I don't think he's smart enough.
Intersting. Do you think Karl Rove or Dick Cheney are smart enough for that kind of strategy?
How about evil and cold hearted enough?
Personally I'm going to have to say "yes" on both parts.
In communism the people own everything and everyone works for the good of everyone.
That's socialism. Communism is a derivative of socialism, and I'm yet to see it done in a non-authoritarian style.
My point is - you need to swap communism and socialism in your post.
Example: Scandinavian countries. Highly socialist countries. Mix in the high amount of political parties in parliament, you'll find it very difficult to retain power on your own. They tend to favour minority governments, needing support from other parties to push through any kind of legislation.
There is no actual dark side of the moon. There is a part of the moon that is always facing away from the Earth, but that is still bathed in sunlight from time to time.
No, encase it in a huge container... something obviously not naturally occuring. Maybe a huge slab of obsidian. Make it really stand out... say 4 times as wide as deep and 9 times as high as it is deep.
Then you bury that at the bottom of a large crater on the moon. Deep down so it doesn't just end up surfacing on its own.
I wonder what kind of trouble you'd get in if you made a similarly detailed map of all military installations (secret or otherwise) in the US or the UK.
Considering the oproar over showing where schools, churches and Cheney's residence are, I wouldn't be surprised if it was more difficult to get it done for the US than for North Korea...
Pretty much every US based company have to follow the embargoes, and this means that their subsidiaries in other countries usually follow those lists.
I ended up causing quite a ruccus when I received a tech support call from the Iraqi embassy in Denmark. That's Iraqi territory and the embargo list I had included Iraq. Just logged the issue and contact info and told the guy that I'd call him back, hung up and checked with my manager.
Ended up getting the embargo list updated from our US overlords, as Iraq had been taken off the official US and UN embargo list a few months earlier. Was surprisingly quick though - took a few hours in all.
Source code == Blueprint Compiled code == working model
Then what the hell do you call all the documentation that goes into creating that source code?
I realise that a lot of people tend to think you can just recreate and understand anything if you have the source code, but just isn't the case.
I can make a blueprint of a skyscraper in about 10 minutes, but getting that built... requires a lot more than just the blueprint. Since I know absolutely fuck all about load bearing stresses, building materials and all the other "magic" bits that goes into building anything, you'd need a pretty big dose of ACTUAL magic to transform my blueprint into a working model let alone a functioning building.
Your basic idea is good, but it fails right after that.
On the other hand, it might teach the pesky Americum and the Americum based chemistry to obey the laws. That'd push civilization forward a thousand and one years.
A much simpler explaination is a nice hot oven. Not a problem sticking your arm in there, even if it's 200 C (392F) as long as you don't touch the sides. Not really recomended doing that with water that's not quite boiling (say 93 C, 200F).
I think the idea behind a gas milage requirement for the "Hybrid" thing is to avoid people putting a rechargable 9v battery and rc engine into an H2 Hummer and claiming it's a fuel efficiancy measure.
I realise that people in the US are a bit strange, but on what highways are you liable to encounter a car going the other way in your lane of traffic?
That only leaves you getting rear ended, and from what I've heard about US highways, that'll involve a 6 mph fender bender.
As for what happens to your car - if you are involved in a high energy crash, you're much better off if your car is the one that absorbs as much of the energy as possible. Personally I'd rather be able to walk away from a car that can't drive away, than be driven away in a car that I can't walk away from.
Besides - if you are THAT keen on being in the biggest vehicle in a crash, may I introduce you to Mr. Big Rig? Plenty of space for the kids in the cab. No worries about hooking up a trailer if you need it. Best view over traffic you can possibly get. And you can probably crash into an H1 Hummer and tell your friends "I crashed into one of those tiny suburban soccer mom trolleys... I'm still picking bits out of my grill."
cop pulls in behind me and and accuses me of illegal hunting, of all things. (Do I have any hunting gear whatsoever? No, a notepad, pencil and some D&D books.)
Officer: "You're under arrest for driving with only three wheels." Driver: "But... this is a Carver. It's only supposed to have three wheels." Officer: "Alright smart-ass, out of the car."
But while the Classmate is more powerfull and thus more flexible, it does weigh more than 3 times as much as a Kindle 2. Kindle 2 is 0.64 lbs, Classmate is listed at $352 at Amazon ($499 list price) Kindle: $359 at Amazon iRex DRS: $933 at iRex's shop
While I'm no expert on astronomy or the like, Space.com reported that the universe was 156 billion light years wide. For a universe that is less than 14 billion years old, this means that space itself has expanded more than 11 light years per year.
And that's where my understanding of things sort of fall apart, but I imagine that it's a bit like walking on a moving sidewalk. Relatively to space (the side walk) I'm only traveling at x, but space drags me along at a higher speed than that.
You seem to be under the impression that ebook-readers are all a subset of netbooks. They're not.
The thing that attracts people to ebook-readers is that you can read them just about anywhere. Find me a reasonably priced lcd/oled screen that you can read outside with the sun beating down on it.
Second is portability. An ebook-reader the size of a paper back is fine. A portable computer that size isn't really unless we're talking cellphone or pda. Netbooks indicates a keyboard, and I'm yet to find a keyboard in the netbook range that I am able to touch type on - my fingers are quite simply too big (comes with being 194 cm/6'4"). And if I'm getting something with a useless keyboard, why even bother with the keyboard?
Now, if my netbook is stolen somewhere, I now have to worry about my banking information, budget, private information etc being in someone elses hands. If my ebook-reader is stolen, I now have to download the books to a different reader.
Also, if you add in a touch screen interface like in the iRex DR 1000S you get an easy way to annotate the books/documents you're reading. While it's entirely possible to get that into a netbook, I'm yet to see anyone market a netbook tablet.
Will the two converge at one point? Perhaps. But for now I would rather have a good ebook-reader than a great netbook.
Frankie Boyle said it best on an episode of Mock the Week. In the segment Scenes We'd Like To See with the subject being Things A News Reporter Would Never Say his brilliant line was:
"As I watch these people, I cannnot help but think, that if my country was gripped by famine, I'd just move."
Never heard of that one before. Though you do sort of defeat your own point, in that they weren't stopped by killings, they were stopped by being jailed aparently.
Also note that the article you link to sets a starting date for that inter-family feud at January 7, 1863 with major fighting stopping in 1891. "The trial of Johnse Hatfield was the last of the feud trials. It took place in 1901."
That's 28 years at a minimum - again, for two families feuding.
"On June 14, 2003, on the initiative of Reo Hatfield, an actual peace treaty was drawn up and signed in Pikeville by representatives of the two families, even though the feud had ended over a century before."
And then an extra 100 years before the signing of a symbolic treaty.
Sure, the feud would have been over sooner, if the government had just stepped in and shot everyone (headshot).
And again - that was two fairly small famlily feud with what? 300 family members? Now up that conflict by a factor of 10,000 and you're still way smaller than the Israel/Palestine conflict. PLUS that family feud already took place in a culture that frowned upon bloodfeuds (namely the USA).
And I'm not taking sides in the I/P conflict. I think it's an idiotic conflict that is only holding both parties back. I'd suggest building a 200 foot tall, 200 foot wide concrete wall around the entire area and slowly fill it with water. Make the world's biggest swimming pool. Might teach them to cooporate. If not, we're lost a huge conflict and gained a huge swimming pool.
The US Army's goal is to discourage violent alternatives to peaceful cohabitation and negotiation. That often requires the civility of a headshot.
I'm not going to argue that you are incorrect on the army's goal. But the means to get there (headshot) probably works a lot better in our culture (western) than in one where blood feudes are a cultural norm.
See, A kills B. Now B's family has to go a kill either A or someone from A's family. So now someone from A's family has to go kill someone from B's family. Repeat ad nauseum.
We keep trying to push our cultural norms onto other cultures. And I'm not talking about US Cultural Imperialism (movies, music, McD etc) but just very basic things. We want democracy in big countries. Their country is made up of hundreds of tribes who've never really gotten along in the first place (see most African nations in civil wars, Iraq with Sunni, Shi'a and Kurds etc). Try something similiar in our culture and things break down as well (see Catholic vs Protestants in Northern Ireland, Basques in Spain).
In Iraq and Afghanistan violence begets violence. It doesn't stop it until one party is completely dead. If you don't believe that, then look at the Israeli conflict. Democratic nation whose answer to violence against it has been to level entire housing blocks. Obviously that worked out extremely well - not like we've seen any kind of retaliation from the Palestinians since Israel started doing that.
Hell, look at the US during the civil rights movement and before then. What happened if an African-American family moved into a white neighbourhood in say... Mississippi? I'm sure they were greeted with flowers and bunt cakes, right? And while I'm no expert on the matter, I'm fairly certain you'd be able to find areas in the US where you're on the brink of civil war as it is. If gangs are big enough, couldn't you classify gang wars as civil wars? They do seem to be very preoccupied with territory.
In fact, the US is one of the very few (if not the only) Western cultures that still practices "An Eye For An Eye"... i.e. the death penalty. Yet the same USA expects these "less civilised" nations' citizens to just roll over and play dead when US soldiers kills their family members? And if you think they care why they were killed, look up blood feud again. I linked to it higher up.
If these issues were present in the US less than 100 years ago, what makes you think that a culture that was dragged from essentially the middle ages into the 21st century won't have those problems?
When honor matters more than life, killing doesn't help.
I've had quite a few bad teachers in my time (as in disliked), just as I've had some bad (incompetent) teachers. There's an intersection there of course, but in my experience the disliked teachers were actually very competent.
However the only ones people complained about were the disliked teachers. Like the ones who didn't care who your daddy/mommy were and would treat you like you treated them.
Slashdot Mirror
Intersting. Do you think Karl Rove or Dick Cheney are smart enough for that kind of strategy?
How about evil and cold hearted enough?
Personally I'm going to have to say "yes" on both parts.
That's socialism. Communism is a derivative of socialism, and I'm yet to see it done in a non-authoritarian style.
My point is - you need to swap communism and socialism in your post.
Example: Scandinavian countries. Highly socialist countries. Mix in the high amount of political parties in parliament, you'll find it very difficult to retain power on your own. They tend to favour minority governments, needing support from other parties to push through any kind of legislation.
They also tend to be the lest corrupt countries in the world.
There is no actual dark side of the moon. There is a part of the moon that is always facing away from the Earth, but that is still bathed in sunlight from time to time.
Would degrade in sunlight.
No, encase it in a huge container ... something obviously not naturally occuring. Maybe a huge slab of obsidian. Make it really stand out ... say 4 times as wide as deep and 9 times as high as it is deep.
Then you bury that at the bottom of a large crater on the moon. Deep down so it doesn't just end up surfacing on its own.
Granted, but it's not like we've never heard or seen Bangor naval base before. Or Area 51. Or any of the other major military installations.
But what exactly is being hidden here?
A ~25 x 3 mile black strip in Canada and Alaska ...
I wonder what kind of trouble you'd get in if you made a similarly detailed map of all military installations (secret or otherwise) in the US or the UK.
Considering the oproar over showing where schools, churches and Cheney's residence are, I wouldn't be surprised if it was more difficult to get it done for the US than for North Korea ...
Pretty much every US based company have to follow the embargoes, and this means that their subsidiaries in other countries usually follow those lists.
I ended up causing quite a ruccus when I received a tech support call from the Iraqi embassy in Denmark. That's Iraqi territory and the embargo list I had included Iraq. Just logged the issue and contact info and told the guy that I'd call him back, hung up and checked with my manager.
Ended up getting the embargo list updated from our US overlords, as Iraq had been taken off the official US and UN embargo list a few months earlier. Was surprisingly quick though - took a few hours in all.
Frankie Boyle had it right before the election. "He might as well be called Muslim O'Gun-Bomb"
Then what the hell do you call all the documentation that goes into creating that source code?
I realise that a lot of people tend to think you can just recreate and understand anything if you have the source code, but just isn't the case.
I can make a blueprint of a skyscraper in about 10 minutes, but getting that built ... requires a lot more than just the blueprint. Since I know absolutely fuck all about load bearing stresses, building materials and all the other "magic" bits that goes into building anything, you'd need a pretty big dose of ACTUAL magic to transform my blueprint into a working model let alone a functioning building.
Your basic idea is good, but it fails right after that.
On the other hand, it might teach the pesky Americum and the Americum based chemistry to obey the laws. That'd push civilization forward a thousand and one years.
Not everytime. You get accelerated from 0 to 60 km/s in a second, and I'll bet you it's not the comming to a stop that killed you.
A much simpler explaination is a nice hot oven. Not a problem sticking your arm in there, even if it's 200 C (392F) as long as you don't touch the sides. Not really recomended doing that with water that's not quite boiling (say 93 C, 200F).
Somewhat reasonable, but that's still not going to help you much, when you find yourself encountering Mr. Big Rig comming at you unexpectedly.
I think the idea behind a gas milage requirement for the "Hybrid" thing is to avoid people putting a rechargable 9v battery and rc engine into an H2 Hummer and claiming it's a fuel efficiancy measure.
I realise that people in the US are a bit strange, but on what highways are you liable to encounter a car going the other way in your lane of traffic?
That only leaves you getting rear ended, and from what I've heard about US highways, that'll involve a 6 mph fender bender.
As for what happens to your car - if you are involved in a high energy crash, you're much better off if your car is the one that absorbs as much of the energy as possible. Personally I'd rather be able to walk away from a car that can't drive away, than be driven away in a car that I can't walk away from.
Besides - if you are THAT keen on being in the biggest vehicle in a crash, may I introduce you to Mr. Big Rig? Plenty of space for the kids in the cab. No worries about hooking up a trailer if you need it. Best view over traffic you can possibly get. And you can probably crash into an H1 Hummer and tell your friends "I crashed into one of those tiny suburban soccer mom trolleys ... I'm still picking bits out of my grill."
Maybe Goblins were out of season?
Officer: "You're under arrest for driving with only three wheels." ... this is a Carver. It's only supposed to have three wheels."
Driver: "But
Officer: "Alright smart-ass, out of the car."
Cool. I stand corrected.
But while the Classmate is more powerfull and thus more flexible, it does weigh more than 3 times as much as a Kindle 2. Kindle 2 is 0.64 lbs, Classmate is listed at $352 at Amazon ($499 list price)
Kindle: $359 at Amazon
iRex DRS: $933 at iRex's shop
That iRex is insanely expensive ... heh
While I'm no expert on astronomy or the like, Space.com reported that the universe was 156 billion light years wide. For a universe that is less than 14 billion years old, this means that space itself has expanded more than 11 light years per year.
And that's where my understanding of things sort of fall apart, but I imagine that it's a bit like walking on a moving sidewalk. Relatively to space (the side walk) I'm only traveling at x, but space drags me along at a higher speed than that.
You seem to be under the impression that ebook-readers are all a subset of netbooks. They're not.
The thing that attracts people to ebook-readers is that you can read them just about anywhere. Find me a reasonably priced lcd/oled screen that you can read outside with the sun beating down on it.
Second is portability. An ebook-reader the size of a paper back is fine. A portable computer that size isn't really unless we're talking cellphone or pda. Netbooks indicates a keyboard, and I'm yet to find a keyboard in the netbook range that I am able to touch type on - my fingers are quite simply too big (comes with being 194 cm/6'4"). And if I'm getting something with a useless keyboard, why even bother with the keyboard?
Now, if my netbook is stolen somewhere, I now have to worry about my banking information, budget, private information etc being in someone elses hands. If my ebook-reader is stolen, I now have to download the books to a different reader.
Also, if you add in a touch screen interface like in the iRex DR 1000S you get an easy way to annotate the books/documents you're reading. While it's entirely possible to get that into a netbook, I'm yet to see anyone market a netbook tablet.
Will the two converge at one point? Perhaps. But for now I would rather have a good ebook-reader than a great netbook.
Frankie Boyle said it best on an episode of Mock the Week. In the segment Scenes We'd Like To See with the subject being Things A News Reporter Would Never Say his brilliant line was:
"As I watch these people, I cannnot help but think, that if my country was gripped by famine, I'd just move."
Never heard of that one before. Though you do sort of defeat your own point, in that they weren't stopped by killings, they were stopped by being jailed aparently.
Also note that the article you link to sets a starting date for that inter-family feud at January 7, 1863 with major fighting stopping in 1891. "The trial of Johnse Hatfield was the last of the feud trials. It took place in 1901."
That's 28 years at a minimum - again, for two families feuding.
"On June 14, 2003, on the initiative of Reo Hatfield, an actual peace treaty was drawn up and signed in Pikeville by representatives of the two families, even though the feud had ended over a century before."
And then an extra 100 years before the signing of a symbolic treaty.
Sure, the feud would have been over sooner, if the government had just stepped in and shot everyone (headshot).
And again - that was two fairly small famlily feud with what? 300 family members? Now up that conflict by a factor of 10,000 and you're still way smaller than the Israel/Palestine conflict. PLUS that family feud already took place in a culture that frowned upon bloodfeuds (namely the USA).
And I'm not taking sides in the I/P conflict. I think it's an idiotic conflict that is only holding both parties back. I'd suggest building a 200 foot tall, 200 foot wide concrete wall around the entire area and slowly fill it with water. Make the world's biggest swimming pool. Might teach them to cooporate. If not, we're lost a huge conflict and gained a huge swimming pool.
I'm not going to argue that you are incorrect on the army's goal. But the means to get there (headshot) probably works a lot better in our culture (western) than in one where blood feudes are a cultural norm.
See, A kills B. Now B's family has to go a kill either A or someone from A's family. So now someone from A's family has to go kill someone from B's family. Repeat ad nauseum.
We keep trying to push our cultural norms onto other cultures. And I'm not talking about US Cultural Imperialism (movies, music, McD etc) but just very basic things. We want democracy in big countries. Their country is made up of hundreds of tribes who've never really gotten along in the first place (see most African nations in civil wars, Iraq with Sunni, Shi'a and Kurds etc). Try something similiar in our culture and things break down as well (see Catholic vs Protestants in Northern Ireland, Basques in Spain).
In Iraq and Afghanistan violence begets violence. It doesn't stop it until one party is completely dead. If you don't believe that, then look at the Israeli conflict. Democratic nation whose answer to violence against it has been to level entire housing blocks. Obviously that worked out extremely well - not like we've seen any kind of retaliation from the Palestinians since Israel started doing that.
Hell, look at the US during the civil rights movement and before then. What happened if an African-American family moved into a white neighbourhood in say ... Mississippi? I'm sure they were greeted with flowers and bunt cakes, right? And while I'm no expert on the matter, I'm fairly certain you'd be able to find areas in the US where you're on the brink of civil war as it is. If gangs are big enough, couldn't you classify gang wars as civil wars? They do seem to be very preoccupied with territory.
In fact, the US is one of the very few (if not the only) Western cultures that still practices "An Eye For An Eye" ... i.e. the death penalty. Yet the same USA expects these "less civilised" nations' citizens to just roll over and play dead when US soldiers kills their family members? And if you think they care why they were killed, look up blood feud again. I linked to it higher up.
If these issues were present in the US less than 100 years ago, what makes you think that a culture that was dragged from essentially the middle ages into the 21st century won't have those problems?
When honor matters more than life, killing doesn't help.
I've had quite a few bad teachers in my time (as in disliked), just as I've had some bad (incompetent) teachers. There's an intersection there of course, but in my experience the disliked teachers were actually very competent.
However the only ones people complained about were the disliked teachers. Like the ones who didn't care who your daddy/mommy were and would treat you like you treated them.
Actually, from what I understand of the US, I'd say most of them ARE special. As in the little yellow bus.