I think he has a point, but he's thinking about what computers *could* be from the standpoint of being in an ideal world.
In the real world, we have limits on hardware performance, some subsystems are far more limited than others, then price comes into the equation, for various subsystems; Video, RAM Storage, Disk Storage, Network IO, etc.
Right now, Network IO is prohibitively expensive, and the state of the technology is way behind that of Disk Storage; it's currently cheaper, and more convenient (offers better price/performance ratio). This is the ultimate factor in why.NET will fail. Net access is too expensive and too flaky for consumers to rely on it for their primary means of accessing apps.
For what this guy is talking about, today's computers can't possibly do these things. For one thing, we still need disk storage. If RAM Storage was cheaper, and didn't have the volotility issues, then we wouldn't need Disk Storage, and all apps could be in RAM all the time, and we could do things like, sleep a machine, and press a button to be instantly-on in the Word Processor, or instantly-on in the Web Browser. But RAM is still WAY too costly, compared to Disk, so it ain't gonna happen.
Computers and their OSes have been the way they are from day one, because the balances in cost and performance on the hardware side have always been pretty much what they are now. In the early days, of course, Disk Storage was highly cost prohibitive, so those machines were diskless (I'm talking TRS-80). Network connections were unheard of in your standard consumer machines until about 7-15 years ago, this came on gradually, then full-force as the technology evolved into something people could afford. We're experiencing another shift in network availability, speed, and cost, with DSL/Cable, and that's what Microsoft is betting on with.NET. But most people don't have DSL or Cable yet, and won't for some time. And even ME, on a corporate 100-base-T network, t1 connected to the internet, I'm not willing to bet my productivity on the notion that Microsoft's.NET server serving Word will always be up, and fully responsive when I need it (and that the service bills won't get me down).
So, the kinds of paradigm shifts that this guy's talking about require the hardware to change, either in performance or cost. If that happened, you can bet the software guys would jump on that damn fast - lots of money to be made during those kinds of periods.
Flatscreen monitors don't appreciably change things. We all thought that super-duper 3D cards would change our user experience into a 3D one (but just because the video could display lots of 3D information quickly, doesn't mean that the rest of the computer can get at that information as quickly, so the 3D interfaces we've seen have been slow, jerkey, useless eye-candy).
My guess is that the next paradigm shift will be a result from an increas in bus speeds. CPU speeds may continue to ramp, or they may stall, network speed will increase per dollar, but I doubt we're going to see an increase in user-trust and reliability. So internal bus speeds are going to change things, and we're going to see computers doing things that they can't currently do, because bus and memory speeds are way too slow. Of course, the technology for this is not even on the horizon yet, so this is all pulled straight out of my ass - but the only other possibility is if RAM gets really cheap. I mean really, really cheap. Cheap enough to make disks look as unattractive as tape currently does. Either of those would surely change the model by which we compute, and OSes run.
damn, I am so sick of hearing about this STUPID topic, why wont it die? why wont the idiots shut up?
Yes! I agree that Apple is in a bind with Motorola as far as getting enough high quality PPC chips, and moving the technology forward at a pace commesurate with competitors. But there's fuck-all anybody can do about it.
Yes, Darwin runs on x86. But Darwin!=OSX. Apple is YEARS behind their original plan to have a "modern" OS. When they finally made plans, they were years behind the rest of the industry. Now they're SO close to actually realizing that goal, and you want them to shove it all off, and have Apple sit on their asses for another 2-5 years to port Aqua/Quartz - and bunches of other technolgies to x86? What will we end up with? Another fucking Be? No software. Do you think for one second that Adobe would waste time porting photoshop to OS X x86? Fuck no. Apple would be dead in the water. Game over.
Not to mention the fact that Apple is bigger than Microsoft. Do you know why? Because Apple makes hardware. Microsoft does not (with the exception of keyboards and mice). Apple makes money off of hardware. The number if iMacs sold in the past 3 years proves that there is a market for Apple hardware. If Apple got out of the hardware business, they'd quickly be out of the software business as well.
Plus, x86 sucks. that's it. Do you want there to be only one viable CPU choice in the world? 0wned by Intel? Fuck that. I know Motorola isnt giving Intel much competition lately, but PPC is still a better platform, technically. The world is better off that it exists, rather than not.
This makes perfect sense as a business proposition! It could be hugely profitable - do you have any idea how long the waiting lists for organs are? High-demand=high margins, = high profits.
The clones could be made using the transplant recipient's DNA, or possibly with the proper technological advances, the DNA could be altered ahead of time to produce tissue that's a close match. Whether this is legally considered murder (compared to shanghaiing someone in an alley and cutting out their kidney), depends on the laws of our theoretical impoverished third-world country. If we're talking about a freaked out religious fundamentalist government, they may be pretty easy to convince that a clone is not a human (the Taliban are already convinced that women aren't human).
1. On requiring government approval and study of every new frontier of science prior to proceeding with commercial exploitation.
- Like I said, in an ideal world, we could do this, but we have lots of wackos in office, so things could be fought, fillibustered, and pork-barrelled to death. But it's still a good idea, rather than proceeding outside of the rule of law.
2. Women giving birth "the old fashioned way".
- not necessarily; for instance, something that could get a LOT of people's dander up, two gay men approach a woman to be a surrogate mother to twin clones of the gay men. . . I know that surrogate motherhood can be very complicated wrt emotional entanglements and such, but scenarios can arise where the birthing mother's role is trivial, and roughly equivalent to the "brewing vats" we know and love from Sci Fi B movies.
3. On corporations "owning" clones.
- you tell me to not be ridiculous; tell Amazon.com to not be ridiculous about 1-click shopping. I'm totally serious because they're totally ridiculous. This is why I firmly believe that we need a rock-solid legal foundation to build on before we go start cloning people willy-nilly.
4. On the past success of animal trials.
- the way I understand it, the animal trials do NOT indicate that there are no problems with this. 2% success rate isn't very convincing. Surely we'll overcome many of these problems, but as problems are overcome, new ones will arise (as it is with programming, once you get the GUI running, you can test the functionality of the engine, and as you fix GUI bugs, you discover previously hidden engine bugs), and who will be the guinea pigs when some fat pharmaceutical company bribes their way into government acceptance? The poor clonees. And when a clone gets sick, how will they be able to tell if they just acquired a "normal" illness, or if it is one caused by their unique origin - and who knows if the company that invented the process will have that information but keep it secret because it's proprietary? (and would expose them to legal action).
I'm not saying it should never be attempted, never be done. I'm just saying that maybe we have to think about this a WHOLE lot more than we have. Stupid Arnold Schwartzenegger movies don't help much.
I think I finally figured out the Catholic church's REAL problem with cloning;
A person who is cloned, when they find out their origin, how easily will they buy-into the thought that God made them? Right now, scientifically-minded religious people can rationalize it by saying, "Nature made me, nature is God's tool." But not if they were cloned. God made the original. But the clone is different.
How will clones think of themselves? Will they have a harder time accepting spiritual notions? Could they develop a psychological complex over the issue? What if the genetic donor was a terrible person? Will the clone feel predisposed towards that? What if the genetic donor has pictures posted of themself on the internet doing it with a goat? Can they sue the donor for posting what are for all intents and purposes, pictures of THEM?
There are just a lot of issues we "natural born" humans seem to be taking for granted here, that might just cause some emotional distress for the clone.
it remains to be seen whether the existence of nuclear weapons has been a "good thing".
After the nuclear strike on the dawn of world war three, remind me to clear the rubble off of my broken, burned arm, and smack your charred, fleshless skull upside the head.
What's to stop some company from hiring a staff of surrogate mothers to birth clones in some impoverished third world country to mass-produce kidneys and hearts for transplant?
Prior to that, it was genetic donors, mothers and fathers wouldn't be too happy with that. With cloning, you can get your genetic material from an anonymous third party, who may not know his or her genes are being used in that way.
The only thing standing in the way of this particular horrible scenario is the fact that oxytocin would make the mothers too attached to their babies, genetically theirs or not. Unless there are drug treatments that can supress that. I know that money can be a strong motivator.
Be much, much more frightened of when they can generate an infant OUTSIDE the womb. (or across species). Then it becomes a far simpler process, capable of industrialization.
Really, there is no problem with it, in a perfect world.
However, the clonee, is a human being, yet while they're perfecting this technique on humans, human lives will be created with little knowledge of what health, or legal (or spiritual) consequences there will be.
Of course, there's nothing anyone can do about spiritual consequences, since nobody has proven the existence of a soul anyway. But will governments accept this person as a real person, with subsequent individual rights and freedoms? Will the clonee be a legal heir to the "parent"? Will the "parent" be the legal guardian? Presumably, the answer is yes. Unless the government is overridden with psychotic luddites, which is not beyond the realm of reality. Does the corporation that cloned this person "own" the results? What if a person is cloned without the genetic donor's consent? If Dow chemical clones Brad Pitt, and raises him to be an actor, can the real Brad Pitt sue them for using his likeness? But still, genetically, we'll be pretty certain how this person will turn out, congenital diseases and all, who's going to insure that person? Who's going to protect that person's genetic privacy? Then there are the health implications, will this clone spontanously melt down at age 10? That's a ridiculous example to be sure, but we really won't know what's going to happen until we do it. Animal trials are fun and games, until someone is born with one eye.
A lot of religious folks in my country (US) aren't too happy with IVF and what happens to "surplus" embryos. Let me tell you that.
Come on, the first fucking man made object in space was a weapon. Sputik was propaganda, an international psychological weapon, boosted into orbit by an ICBM.
This is a game of survival of the fittest, on a cultural and ideological level. Perhaps it seems that the US cultural meme is paranoid, agressive, etc. But look how far Microsoft has come with that same mind-set. Peace is a nice idea - but as long as humans rely on resources for survival, we'll be playing that Darwinian game, because basically, we're all still animals, whether we accept it or not.
I think Lockheed is also under investigation for fudging early test results. This was intended to be nothing more than a huge defense contractor pork barrel boondoggle. How convenient for Lockheed that the bad guys have nuclear missiles. Let's just make some campaign contributions here, have the politicians get nervous there. . . etc. repeat as necessary.
Oh, at the root of it all, it's still an ethnic and territorial squabble - but the most powerful economic player in the world today, (that's US), has seen that it's a lot more convenient to fight an economic war of global domination, than one of guns. It could WIN the war of guns, but there'd be no world left to dominante. So it fights little teacup wars like Desert Storm - to keep Oil interests dilute, keep OPEC divided, keep Oil prices down, because cheap oil means a strong US economy, which means that the US can continue to dominate the world economy, dictate economic terms, and basically, rule all.
Yes, you're right, war has changed from shooting to economic, but economic warfare is simply another means to the same end; cultural imperialism. And don't go blaming religion or religious preferences. God is, and always has been, a convenient excuse for people to go to war against someone who doesn't worship that God, or maybe disagrees on the exact rituals and rules of how you should worship that God.
I guarantee - that when (not IF) the entire world is united (by force, economic force, most likely) under a single religion, language, cell-phone-standard, etc. people will try to find other reasons to fight.
In my line of work, in my company, Linux is not really a workable alternative. That's not to say that MS Office is THE standard in my company, things ARE changing, but in MY division, with the people I generally communicate with, Win/MS Office is a LONG standing tradition, and shaking them of it has been very difficult. And getting IT support when things are broke with non standard apps is impossible. So, I have to read LOTS of MS documents, and when I save my email, I used to use rtf a lot, and I don't remember it being this slow back when I was using Office97 on NT 4.0, on a P 166.
It's just fucked.
That's the thing. The HD is not being hit very hard, nor is the CPU pegged (I cancelled the process in Task Manager, WINWORD.EXE was at 0% most of the time, but if I waited, the process would complete - eventually).
It's as if Microsoft coded the translation app with a lot of WaitAndPunishUserForUsingNonWordDocumentFormat() loops.
The Word window is just sitting there, hourglassing away. Fuckitall.
Sending the inexperienced underequipped troops as a first wave is also an excellent tactic against landmines. So Iran proved in it's war vs. Iraq. It's why Iraq resorted to chemical warfare, to stop Iran from sending waves of children across the battlefield to sweep mines out for the real troops to follow.
In the Old Testament of the Bible, there is a story about how the Israelites went into Palestine, and God commanded them to go attack a certain village, and kill every last man, take the women as slaves, etc.
This is a lesson - because it sounds just horrible, expecially when you take into account that a few years earlier, the 10 commandments (Thou shalt not kill) were given. But if you think about it, it's a lesson. Really, that's the only way to defeat an opponent. Thorough genocide. If you let ONE of them live, chances are, they'll breed, and tell their kids about what happened, and generations later, you have an enemy that really hates you - and another war. Or nowadays, even if you kill them all, chances are, there's members of that ethnic group in another country you can't get to, so in order to do a thorough job, you basically have to take over the world.
This is the lesson of WWI->WWII, which was really one extended long war, if you think about it. We (US/Allies) tried to apply that lesson to Iraq, and have met with limited success. But when it comes down to it, the only other alternative is genocide. And who wants that? Um, the bad guys? You wanna be a bad guy? Or maybe it would be best to just live in peace.
What that means for the Jews, and whether they *belong* in Palestine/Israel, I have no idea, I don't want to get into that here - but to me, when I read that Bible story, that is what I learned: Violent conflict, is ultimately futile, unless you're willing to walk down the genocide path. And the genocide path is no good either. So maybe it's best to just try to learn alternative methods of conflict resolution.
My wife's best friend's daughter is a big fan of aol (I get lots of good tease material out of her - why aol-er's love aol. ..)
I'm trying to convince that family that there is more to the net than aol. I started by introducing them to Yahoo. By far, the lesser of the two evils; from there, Google, memepool, slashdot, and everything else.
Slashdot Mirror
um - little known fact:
(would YOU publicise this?)
Fighter pilots on long (8hr+) missions have been known to wear adult diapers.
I think he has a point, but he's thinking about what computers *could* be from the standpoint of being in an ideal world.
.NET will fail. Net access is too expensive and too flaky for consumers to rely on it for their primary means of accessing apps.
.NET. But most people don't have DSL or Cable yet, and won't for some time. And even ME, on a corporate 100-base-T network, t1 connected to the internet, I'm not willing to bet my productivity on the notion that Microsoft's .NET server serving Word will always be up, and fully responsive when I need it (and that the service bills won't get me down).
In the real world, we have limits on hardware performance, some subsystems are far more limited than others, then price comes into the equation, for various subsystems; Video, RAM Storage, Disk Storage, Network IO, etc.
Right now, Network IO is prohibitively expensive, and the state of the technology is way behind that of Disk Storage; it's currently cheaper, and more convenient (offers better price/performance ratio). This is the ultimate factor in why
For what this guy is talking about, today's computers can't possibly do these things. For one thing, we still need disk storage. If RAM Storage was cheaper, and didn't have the volotility issues, then we wouldn't need Disk Storage, and all apps could be in RAM all the time, and we could do things like, sleep a machine, and press a button to be instantly-on in the Word Processor, or instantly-on in the Web Browser. But RAM is still WAY too costly, compared to Disk, so it ain't gonna happen.
Computers and their OSes have been the way they are from day one, because the balances in cost and performance on the hardware side have always been pretty much what they are now. In the early days, of course, Disk Storage was highly cost prohibitive, so those machines were diskless (I'm talking TRS-80). Network connections were unheard of in your standard consumer machines until about 7-15 years ago, this came on gradually, then full-force as the technology evolved into something people could afford. We're experiencing another shift in network availability, speed, and cost, with DSL/Cable, and that's what Microsoft is betting on with
So, the kinds of paradigm shifts that this guy's talking about require the hardware to change, either in performance or cost. If that happened, you can bet the software guys would jump on that damn fast - lots of money to be made during those kinds of periods.
Flatscreen monitors don't appreciably change things. We all thought that super-duper 3D cards would change our user experience into a 3D one (but just because the video could display lots of 3D information quickly, doesn't mean that the rest of the computer can get at that information as quickly, so the 3D interfaces we've seen have been slow, jerkey, useless eye-candy).
My guess is that the next paradigm shift will be a result from an increas in bus speeds. CPU speeds may continue to ramp, or they may stall, network speed will increase per dollar, but I doubt we're going to see an increase in user-trust and reliability. So internal bus speeds are going to change things, and we're going to see computers doing things that they can't currently do, because bus and memory speeds are way too slow. Of course, the technology for this is not even on the horizon yet, so this is all pulled straight out of my ass - but the only other possibility is if RAM gets really cheap. I mean really, really cheap. Cheap enough to make disks look as unattractive as tape currently does. Either of those would surely change the model by which we compute, and OSes run.
And Unix will still be Unix.
is Firefox
"But you must THINK. . . in Russian."
damn, I am so sick of hearing about this STUPID topic, why wont it die? why wont the idiots shut up?
Yes! I agree that Apple is in a bind with Motorola as far as getting enough high quality PPC chips, and moving the technology forward at a pace commesurate with competitors. But there's fuck-all anybody can do about it.
Yes, Darwin runs on x86. But Darwin!=OSX. Apple is YEARS behind their original plan to have a "modern" OS. When they finally made plans, they were years behind the rest of the industry. Now they're SO close to actually realizing that goal, and you want them to shove it all off, and have Apple sit on their asses for another 2-5 years to port Aqua/Quartz - and bunches of other technolgies to x86? What will we end up with? Another fucking Be? No software. Do you think for one second that Adobe would waste time porting photoshop to OS X x86? Fuck no. Apple would be dead in the water. Game over.
Not to mention the fact that Apple is bigger than Microsoft. Do you know why? Because Apple makes hardware. Microsoft does not (with the exception of keyboards and mice). Apple makes money off of hardware. The number if iMacs sold in the past 3 years proves that there is a market for Apple hardware. If Apple got out of the hardware business, they'd quickly be out of the software business as well.
Plus, x86 sucks. that's it. Do you want there to be only one viable CPU choice in the world? 0wned by Intel? Fuck that. I know Motorola isnt giving Intel much competition lately, but PPC is still a better platform, technically. The world is better off that it exists, rather than not.
This makes perfect sense as a business proposition! It could be hugely profitable - do you have any idea how long the waiting lists for organs are? High-demand=high margins, = high profits.
The clones could be made using the transplant recipient's DNA, or possibly with the proper technological advances, the DNA could be altered ahead of time to produce tissue that's a close match. Whether this is legally considered murder (compared to shanghaiing someone in an alley and cutting out their kidney), depends on the laws of our theoretical impoverished third-world country. If we're talking about a freaked out religious fundamentalist government, they may be pretty easy to convince that a clone is not a human (the Taliban are already convinced that women aren't human).
1. On requiring government approval and study of every new frontier of science prior to proceeding with commercial exploitation.
- Like I said, in an ideal world, we could do this, but we have lots of wackos in office, so things could be fought, fillibustered, and pork-barrelled to death. But it's still a good idea, rather than proceeding outside of the rule of law.
2. Women giving birth "the old fashioned way".
- not necessarily; for instance, something that could get a LOT of people's dander up, two gay men approach a woman to be a surrogate mother to twin clones of the gay men. . . I know that surrogate motherhood can be very complicated wrt emotional entanglements and such, but scenarios can arise where the birthing mother's role is trivial, and roughly equivalent to the "brewing vats" we know and love from Sci Fi B movies.
3. On corporations "owning" clones.
- you tell me to not be ridiculous; tell Amazon.com to not be ridiculous about 1-click shopping. I'm totally serious because they're totally ridiculous. This is why I firmly believe that we need a rock-solid legal foundation to build on before we go start cloning people willy-nilly.
4. On the past success of animal trials.
- the way I understand it, the animal trials do NOT indicate that there are no problems with this. 2% success rate isn't very convincing. Surely we'll overcome many of these problems, but as problems are overcome, new ones will arise (as it is with programming, once you get the GUI running, you can test the functionality of the engine, and as you fix GUI bugs, you discover previously hidden engine bugs), and who will be the guinea pigs when some fat pharmaceutical company bribes their way into government acceptance? The poor clonees. And when a clone gets sick, how will they be able to tell if they just acquired a "normal" illness, or if it is one caused by their unique origin - and who knows if the company that invented the process will have that information but keep it secret because it's proprietary? (and would expose them to legal action).
I'm not saying it should never be attempted, never be done. I'm just saying that maybe we have to think about this a WHOLE lot more than we have. Stupid Arnold Schwartzenegger movies don't help much.
I think I finally figured out the Catholic church's REAL problem with cloning;
A person who is cloned, when they find out their origin, how easily will they buy-into the thought that God made them? Right now, scientifically-minded religious people can rationalize it by saying, "Nature made me, nature is God's tool." But not if they were cloned. God made the original. But the clone is different.
How will clones think of themselves? Will they have a harder time accepting spiritual notions? Could they develop a psychological complex over the issue? What if the genetic donor was a terrible person? Will the clone feel predisposed towards that? What if the genetic donor has pictures posted of themself on the internet doing it with a goat? Can they sue the donor for posting what are for all intents and purposes, pictures of THEM?
There are just a lot of issues we "natural born" humans seem to be taking for granted here, that might just cause some emotional distress for the clone.
it remains to be seen whether the existence of nuclear weapons has been a "good thing".
After the nuclear strike on the dawn of world war three, remind me to clear the rubble off of my broken, burned arm, and smack your charred, fleshless skull upside the head.
that, of course, would eliminate the demand in the market for pr0n, and the internet would collapse in on itself.
re: organ harvesting./ . .
What's to stop some company from hiring a staff of surrogate mothers to birth clones in some impoverished third world country to mass-produce kidneys and hearts for transplant?
Prior to that, it was genetic donors, mothers and fathers wouldn't be too happy with that. With cloning, you can get your genetic material from an anonymous third party, who may not know his or her genes are being used in that way.
The only thing standing in the way of this particular horrible scenario is the fact that oxytocin would make the mothers too attached to their babies, genetically theirs or not. Unless there are drug treatments that can supress that. I know that money can be a strong motivator.
Be much, much more frightened of when they can generate an infant OUTSIDE the womb. (or across species). Then it becomes a far simpler process, capable of industrialization.
Really, there is no problem with it, in a perfect world.
However, the clonee, is a human being, yet while they're perfecting this technique on humans, human lives will be created with little knowledge of what health, or legal (or spiritual) consequences there will be.
Of course, there's nothing anyone can do about spiritual consequences, since nobody has proven the existence of a soul anyway. But will governments accept this person as a real person, with subsequent individual rights and freedoms? Will the clonee be a legal heir to the "parent"? Will the "parent" be the legal guardian? Presumably, the answer is yes. Unless the government is overridden with psychotic luddites, which is not beyond the realm of reality. Does the corporation that cloned this person "own" the results? What if a person is cloned without the genetic donor's consent? If Dow chemical clones Brad Pitt, and raises him to be an actor, can the real Brad Pitt sue them for using his likeness? But still, genetically, we'll be pretty certain how this person will turn out, congenital diseases and all, who's going to insure that person? Who's going to protect that person's genetic privacy? Then there are the health implications, will this clone spontanously melt down at age 10? That's a ridiculous example to be sure, but we really won't know what's going to happen until we do it. Animal trials are fun and games, until someone is born with one eye.
A lot of religious folks in my country (US) aren't too happy with IVF and what happens to "surplus" embryos. Let me tell you that.
and Antarctica?
Come on, the first fucking man made object in space was a weapon. Sputik was propaganda, an international psychological weapon, boosted into orbit by an ICBM.
This is a game of survival of the fittest, on a cultural and ideological level. Perhaps it seems that the US cultural meme is paranoid, agressive, etc. But look how far Microsoft has come with that same mind-set. Peace is a nice idea - but as long as humans rely on resources for survival, we'll be playing that Darwinian game, because basically, we're all still animals, whether we accept it or not.
I think Lockheed is also under investigation for fudging early test results. This was intended to be nothing more than a huge defense contractor pork barrel boondoggle. How convenient for Lockheed that the bad guys have nuclear missiles. Let's just make some campaign contributions here, have the politicians get nervous there. . . etc. repeat as necessary.
hm - Waco?
Oh, at the root of it all, it's still an ethnic and territorial squabble - but the most powerful economic player in the world today, (that's US), has seen that it's a lot more convenient to fight an economic war of global domination, than one of guns. It could WIN the war of guns, but there'd be no world left to dominante. So it fights little teacup wars like Desert Storm - to keep Oil interests dilute, keep OPEC divided, keep Oil prices down, because cheap oil means a strong US economy, which means that the US can continue to dominate the world economy, dictate economic terms, and basically, rule all.
Yes, you're right, war has changed from shooting to economic, but economic warfare is simply another means to the same end; cultural imperialism. And don't go blaming religion or religious preferences. God is, and always has been, a convenient excuse for people to go to war against someone who doesn't worship that God, or maybe disagrees on the exact rituals and rules of how you should worship that God.
I guarantee - that when (not IF) the entire world is united (by force, economic force, most likely) under a single religion, language, cell-phone-standard, etc. people will try to find other reasons to fight.
High-altitude burst is definately optimal.
but a ground burst sure does something too.
In my line of work, in my company, Linux is not really a workable alternative. That's not to say that MS Office is THE standard in my company, things ARE changing, but in MY division, with the people I generally communicate with, Win/MS Office is a LONG standing tradition, and shaking them of it has been very difficult. And getting IT support when things are broke with non standard apps is impossible. So, I have to read LOTS of MS documents, and when I save my email, I used to use rtf a lot, and I don't remember it being this slow back when I was using Office97 on NT 4.0, on a P 166.
It's just fucked.
That's the thing. The HD is not being hit very hard, nor is the CPU pegged (I cancelled the process in Task Manager, WINWORD.EXE was at 0% most of the time, but if I waited, the process would complete - eventually).
It's as if Microsoft coded the translation app with a lot of WaitAndPunishUserForUsingNonWordDocumentFormat() loops.
The Word window is just sitting there, hourglassing away. Fuckitall.
Sending the inexperienced underequipped troops as a first wave is also an excellent tactic against landmines. So Iran proved in it's war vs. Iraq. It's why Iraq resorted to chemical warfare, to stop Iran from sending waves of children across the battlefield to sweep mines out for the real troops to follow.
naw, increased morale is cheap.
Give them shore-leave in San Francisco, and $100 of GI money. Blowjobs=morale.
maybe they only sell the cheap plastic garbage to us sucker Americans and keep the "good stuff" for themselves?
In the Old Testament of the Bible, there is a story about how the Israelites went into Palestine, and God commanded them to go attack a certain village, and kill every last man, take the women as slaves, etc.
This is a lesson - because it sounds just horrible, expecially when you take into account that a few years earlier, the 10 commandments (Thou shalt not kill) were given. But if you think about it, it's a lesson. Really, that's the only way to defeat an opponent. Thorough genocide. If you let ONE of them live, chances are, they'll breed, and tell their kids about what happened, and generations later, you have an enemy that really hates you - and another war. Or nowadays, even if you kill them all, chances are, there's members of that ethnic group in another country you can't get to, so in order to do a thorough job, you basically have to take over the world.
This is the lesson of WWI->WWII, which was really one extended long war, if you think about it. We (US/Allies) tried to apply that lesson to Iraq, and have met with limited success. But when it comes down to it, the only other alternative is genocide. And who wants that? Um, the bad guys? You wanna be a bad guy? Or maybe it would be best to just live in peace.
What that means for the Jews, and whether they *belong* in Palestine/Israel, I have no idea, I don't want to get into that here - but to me, when I read that Bible story, that is what I learned: Violent conflict, is ultimately futile, unless you're willing to walk down the genocide path. And the genocide path is no good either. So maybe it's best to just try to learn alternative methods of conflict resolution.
It should not scare you.
It should strengthen your resolve.
If the fascists force you underground, then you're really better off anyway.
My wife's best friend's daughter is a big fan of aol (I get lots of good tease material out of her - why aol-er's love aol. . .)
I'm trying to convince that family that there is more to the net than aol. I started by introducing them to Yahoo. By far, the lesser of the two evils; from there, Google, memepool, slashdot, and everything else.