Finally, if he's continuing his "lie...to this very day," then why has Colin Powell come out and admitted...
Colin Powell is not George W. Bush. It's nice of Powell to come clean, but it hasn't stopped Dubya and Cheney from continuing their "Saddam was the cause of 9/11, that's why we attacked Iraq" propoganda every chance they get. It seems they are still hoping to fool at least some of the people some of the time.
What bugs me most about the Clinton thing is that he could have ducked all of the controversy really easily. [...] What did he have to lose?
One article I've read (and I can't remember for the life of me where it was) argued that if someone accuses a politician of something and the politician denies it, people will assume the accusation is true. If the politician readily admits it, on the other hand, people will assume that the accusation is true, and that the politician is admitting to it only because there is something far worse in his closet that he is hoping to avoid the discovery of. Under this theory, admitting guilt would have only put "blood in the water", and intensified the witch-hunt...
(I'm not sure I agree with the theory, but it is something to think about)
I am saying that they war is bad crowd is supporting a person who goes against everything they say the stand for.
Kerry served as a soldier, and did what he was told -- that is what soldiers do. Then when he came back to the states, he was instrumental in allowing the American public to see the truth about the horrible mess we were in, which was a necessary step towards getting us out of that mess. I don't think the anti-war crowd has any problems with that, despite your transparent attempts to twist his words against him.
He should not have done what he says he did.
And what, pray tell, would you have done if you were in Kerry's place? Would you have refused to fight and been sent to jail? Would you have avoided service in Vietnam so that the issue never came up? Or perhaps you would have served, but kept your mouth shut about the atrocities you knew had been committed, on the grounds that they were "somebody else's problem"?
It's really easy to criticize someone else's actions from the comfort of your armchair. What takes real character is to stick your neck out and do the right thing, even when you know it is going to bring mountains of criticism down on your head.
Are you suggesting that any of those statements are untrue, or are you just enjoying some fun "gotcha" politics by persecuting someone for having the cojones to tell the American people the truth?
I have serious hope that a group of revolutionary technocrats will simply develop omnescient, benevolent AI, controlling hoards of robots which will set this world in order once and for all
I think the Democrats ran one of those in the 2000 election... unfortunately the majority voted against him, 5 to 4.
We can't design an 'autopilot' system that interacts with human drivers.
I'm not entirely sure that is true -- we have successfully designed robots that maneuver autonomously around hospitals, etc, interacting with human walkers... presumably interacting with human drivers is just a more difficult version of the same problem.
That's why they want to have the cars be largely computer controlled, so that it is difficult or impossible for an inexperienced driver/pilot to make fatal mistakes.
Whether that is a realistic goal is open to debate... given the current state of software in general, I'm a bit skeptical.
But park the car in a sunny place for a few days, and an explosion seems like a distinct possibility
I think the concept of an overpressure release valve is well understood by automotive engineers... so the worst case would be that you come back to find your tank empty.
No, I don't. If it saves the life of one American then it's worth it.
Interesting... so just how many Iraqis lives IS an American life worth to you, then? 5,000? 50,000? Would you kill every single Iraqi in the world if it would save one American life?
Just keep telling yourself "they are sub-human, their lives don't count", and you can probably justify any number of deaths. That sort of thinking is how genocides happen.
I saw it last night as well, and was bored out of my mind. The problem is that you can tell at the beginning of every scene exactly what is going to happen for the next 10 minutes -- it's all cut and pasted from previous sci-fi/action movies.
The aircraft carriers and the rocket ship were pretty cool to look at, but two cool 3D models aren't enough to entertain for 90 minutes.
The very first link on the download page says this: "Software development kit required to develop applications with the Irrlicht engine. Included is the documentation and the source code of the engine, 12 tutorials, a cool technology demo wich shows the capabilities of the engine, and a lot more."
So it would appear that source is in fact available.
The previous poster never claimed that people are being tracked and locked up, only that he is uncomfortable posting under his real name. There are other ways to suppress political discourse than locking people up.
What WILL happen is that eventually oil because more expensive to pull out of the ground as the reserves get lower. At that point, other sources of energy get more economical, and we inevitably switch over.
That is what they mean when they say "run out of ouil". Oil that is too expensive to obtain might as well not exist. As for "switching over", look around you and notice how many of the goods you own are made out of plastic. When oil becomes very expensive, you will have to either pay a lot of money for those items, or find a way to make them out of some other material. Given that there is no obvious substitute for oil as a manufacturing ingredient, it would be best if we stopped burning it for electricity and saved it for uses where there is no substitute.
First off, you don't want power output to rely too heavily on weather conditions. I want my electricity to be stable. Not that what we have now is stable either...
Also, there are definite weather and atmospheric side effects of absorbing all that wind power into giant fans.
All I've heard is unsubstantiated claims on Slashdot. Care to back that up?
There are definite weather and atmospheric side effects to burning fossil fuel and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The more renewable power we get going, the less fossil fuel we need to burn.
I'm willing to be that the effect is negligible, or at the very least much less disruptive than the global warming caused by the fossil fuel burning that the wind power replaces...
the problem has always been that people open attachments.
I'd say the problem is that bad things can happen when people open attachments. A properly secure computer system would make sure that opening attachments was a non-risky thing to do.
Would it be greater or less than the psychological effect that baseless and unjustified fear has done in shutting down the US the last couple of years?
Greater. Not to mention that if that were to happen, then arguably the recent fears would not have been 'baseless and unjustified' after all...
They could have the biggest nukes ever made, and it wouldn't matter to us as long as they don't have an ICBM to reach us with them.
Launching an ICBM at us would only guarantee their own destruction anyway. If they wanted to attack us, they could just ship their nuke over on a boat -- they do have those, you know.
Slashdot Mirror
Colin Powell is not George W. Bush. It's nice of Powell to come clean, but it hasn't stopped Dubya and Cheney from continuing their "Saddam was the cause of 9/11, that's why we attacked Iraq" propoganda every chance they get. It seems they are still hoping to fool at least some of the people some of the time.
One article I've read (and I can't remember for the life of me where it was) argued that if someone accuses a politician of something and the politician denies it, people will assume the accusation is true. If the politician readily admits it, on the other hand, people will assume that the accusation is true, and that the politician is admitting to it only because there is something far worse in his closet that he is hoping to avoid the discovery of. Under this theory, admitting guilt would have only put "blood in the water", and intensified the witch-hunt...
(I'm not sure I agree with the theory, but it is something to think about)
Kerry served as a soldier, and did what he was told -- that is what soldiers do. Then when he came back to the states, he was instrumental in allowing the American public to see the truth about the horrible mess we were in, which was a necessary step towards getting us out of that mess. I don't think the anti-war crowd has any problems with that, despite your transparent attempts to twist his words against him.
He should not have done what he says he did.
And what, pray tell, would you have done if you were in Kerry's place? Would you have refused to fight and been sent to jail? Would you have avoided service in Vietnam so that the issue never came up? Or perhaps you would have served, but kept your mouth shut about the atrocities you knew had been committed, on the grounds that they were "somebody else's problem"?
It's really easy to criticize someone else's actions from the comfort of your armchair. What takes real character is to stick your neck out and do the right thing, even when you know it is going to bring mountains of criticism down on your head.
Are you suggesting that any of those statements are untrue, or are you just enjoying some fun "gotcha" politics by persecuting someone for having the cojones to tell the American people the truth?
I think the Democrats ran one of those in the 2000 election... unfortunately the majority voted against him, 5 to 4.
Man, I feel a sudden urge to play NetHack...
Are you this obnoxious in person as well, or only on Slashdot? Congratulations on arrogantly slapping down an argument I never made.
I'm not entirely sure that is true -- we have successfully designed robots that maneuver autonomously around hospitals, etc, interacting with human walkers... presumably interacting with human drivers is just a more difficult version of the same problem.
Whether that is a realistic goal is open to debate... given the current state of software in general, I'm a bit skeptical.
Yeah, what business does an article about the sequel to the best-selling video game in history have doing on a "News for Nerds" site?
I think the concept of an overpressure release valve is well understood by automotive engineers... so the worst case would be that you come back to find your tank empty.
There's motivation enough to go solar right there!
How about the fact that Lucas decided to name one of his characters "Count Dooku"?
Interesting
Just keep telling yourself "they are sub-human, their lives don't count", and you can probably justify any number of deaths. That sort of thinking is how genocides happen.
The aircraft carriers and the rocket ship were pretty cool to look at, but two cool 3D models aren't enough to entertain for 90 minutes.
So it would appear that source is in fact available.
The previous poster never claimed that people are being tracked and locked up, only that he is uncomfortable posting under his real name. There are other ways to suppress political discourse than locking people up.
It's true that nobody can predict the future 100%, but according to U.S. intelligence the prospects are pretty dim. Even Republicans are very concerned.
What WILL happen is that eventually oil because more expensive to pull out of the ground as the reserves get lower. At that point, other sources of energy get more economical, and we inevitably switch over.
That is what they mean when they say "run out of ouil". Oil that is too expensive to obtain might as well not exist. As for "switching over", look around you and notice how many of the goods you own are made out of plastic. When oil becomes very expensive, you will have to either pay a lot of money for those items, or find a way to make them out of some other material. Given that there is no obvious substitute for oil as a manufacturing ingredient, it would be best if we stopped burning it for electricity and saved it for uses where there is no substitute.
Also, there are definite weather and atmospheric side effects of absorbing all that wind power into giant fans.
All I've heard is unsubstantiated claims on Slashdot. Care to back that up?
There are definite weather and atmospheric side effects to burning fossil fuel and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The more renewable power we get going, the less fossil fuel we need to burn.
I'm willing to be that the effect is negligible, or at the very least much less disruptive than the global warming caused by the fossil fuel burning that the wind power replaces...
I'd say the problem is that bad things can happen when people open attachments. A properly secure computer system would make sure that opening attachments was a non-risky thing to do.
To paraphrase Lucy Lawless (from her Simpson's appearance): "whenever you notice an inconsistency in the details, a wizard did it."
Greater. Not to mention that if that were to happen, then arguably the recent fears would not have been 'baseless and unjustified' after all...
Launching an ICBM at us would only guarantee their own destruction anyway. If they wanted to attack us, they could just ship their nuke over on a boat -- they do have those, you know.