At some level, Bill Gates is right - OSS is killing jobs - not jobs in general, but programming jobs.
True -- and Windows is guilty of the same sin. Remember back in the DOS days, when every app that wanted to print documents had to include its own set of proprietary printer drivers? This constant reinventing of the wheel kept thousands of programmers gainfully employed! Then mean old Mr. Gates added a standardized printing API to Windows and started including printer drivers with the OS -- quickly putting every other company's proprietary-app-specific-printer-driver coders out of a job. The proprietary-app-specific-printer-driver industry never recovered from that blow...
All I ask is that, when trying to quantify the risks of nuclear power, you compare them to the well quantified risks of the source they would be replacing, namely coal.
I do prefer nuclear to coal, and it's obvious that we will need to switch away from fossil fuels sooner or later (and hopefully sooner), but if we are going to go through all the trouble of switching, is nuclear the technology we should switch to? Or should we put the bulk of our effort into developing large-scale renewable energy technologies (e.g. wind, solar, tidal, biomass, hydro, geothermal, etc)? These technologies require no fuel resources, create no radioactive waste or pollution, spread no radioactivity if they are blown up, and (very importantly, I think) can be deployed anywhere in the world without us having to worry (AFAIK!) about the technology being covertly abused or stolen to make WMDs.
I understand that renewable technologies have significant obstacles to overcome before they can provide most or all of the world's energy, but then so does nuclear. In the long run, for both security, environmental, political, and sustainability reasons, renewables are IMHO preferable. (and either is preferable to coal!)
I'm pretty sure that a 747 flying into a reactor containment vessel would result in a broken 747 and a scrammed (ie. inert) reactor. Is that the kind of damage you're talking about?
No, I'm more worried about radioactivity being spread around the area, rendering it unhealthful and/or uninhabitable. (Yes, I know, the nuclear industry claims it's all perfectly fail-safe... but then, they would claim that, wouldn't they?)
Of course, if we could build a modern reactor, it would be even safer, but I suppose you're one of those people against building newer, safer nuclear reactors.
I'm not against building reactors per se, but before they are built I think all the inherent problems need to be dealt with -- including the inherent risks of mining, transporting, using, and storing radioactive materials. Once all the problems are factored in, it may be that nuclear power is worth the risk -- or it may be that we're better off in the long run developing other energy sources.
My point was that nuclear power plants can not be called "magnets" for terrorism since they don't actually attract terrorists.
You misspelled "haven't previously" there... but the problem isn't really the number of attacks, the problem is the amount of damage even a single successful attack could inflict.
spam does not evolve like an organism. Organisms slowly evolve while Spam content makes the occassional wild shift in both how and what is used to throw filters off the scent
of course, we could be turning corn into gasoline and diesel right now too, but aren't because we seem to have this foreign dependance fetish
Actually, we aren't, because it takes large amounts of fossil fuels to produce corn -- so we just cut out the middle man and use less oil that way.
Face, you can't get something from nothing. Growing corn to make oil is just a very baroque and inefficient method of gathering solar energy, by using plants as your solar collectors. Therefore, the net amount of energy you get out of your corn can't be more than the amount of energy contained in the sunlight that fell on the corn while it was growing, and in practice will be much less -- certainly less than the amount of energy you spent planting, fertilizing, watering, and harvesting the corn. IMHO, biodiesel is a clever method for subsidising farmers while maintaining the appearance of environmental correctness, nothing more.
Has there ever, in nuclear energy history been any kind of direct attack on a nuclear power plant, or any attempted or successful sabotage? None spring immediatly to mind for me.
And therefore.... what? I bet you had some really good arguments about the safety of airlines before 9/11/2001...
Having the computer make clever guesses about what you probably want it to do (instead of just doing what you tell it to do) usually comes out as "really annoying". Remember Clippy?
For example: People named "Smith" may well not be in my family, since Smith is a common last name. Furthermore, so what if they are? Maybe I don't want to have a "My Family" category, and a non-annoying program wouldn't assume that I do.
Humbug. Give each Starbucks a reasonably fast Internet connection to the central data warehouse, a reasonably large local storage system for cache (you can buy 200GB drives pretty cheap these days, so 1TB of cache isn't unreasonable), a good lossless audio compression codec, and an LRU algorithm for when the local cache gets full. That would give you 99% of the benefit of storing the entire audio library locally, without the overhead of actually having to download any audio file until the first time a customer requests it.
Really, it's not that hard of a problem to solve. Especially if the system implementers have access to 24/7 free coffee during the development period...
Isn't that an oxymoron? How can there be more than one "main" branch?
Show me a Starbucks where they play Mineral, Freakwater, or Belle and Sebastian
Ah, yes. Everybody thinks their own favorite bands are edgy, eclectic well-kept secrets, and everything else is corporate mass media pablum. News flash: "underground cachet" is just another marketing technique.
Civil liberties are just that: civil. They don't apply outside of civil society.
... and yet the majority of the war on terrorism will be fought within the context of civil societies (precisely because Al-Quaeda realizes that the military will be least effective there).
Yes, they are criminals--but they are also a national security threat, and they are not amenable to the criminal justice system.
What is it about our criminal justice system that makes it inadequate to try these people? The fact that it might let them go free if there is not enough evidence to convict them? If that is the line of argument, then I'm afraid we may have reached the stage where we decide we can no longer "afford" civil liberties -- a very sad day, indeed. Consider the possibility that if we don't have enough evidence to convict someone, it may be because they are in fact innocent.
but which are absurd when facing an organised foe (can you see soldiers arresting the enemy and trying him before executing him?).
Why is that absurd? Our soldiers arrest people all the time, and they don't execute them because summary execution without trial is a war crime. If you are talking about shooting people during combat, that is a different situation -- but keep in mind that policemen are legally allowed to shoot people during "combat" as well. In any case, the whole point was that soldiers are probably not the best people to deal with this problem in the first place, since they are not the trained for it. Soldiers are trained for wholesale destruction of "the enemy" by any means necessary, not for the more delicate task of capturing criminals who are hiding amongst a civilian population.
It's a new paradigm, but one which I feel is better met with a military approach than a police one.
In light of what we've seen over the last year in Iraq, can you support your argument that a military approach is more effective? I'll concede that it worked fairly well in Afghanistan (except that they let Osama get away), but that was because the Al-Quaeda bases there were physically isolated and distinct from the rest of the population, and thus reasonably easy to find and destroy without killing too many bystanders. In most countries (including Iraq) I think we will get much better results by co-operating with the local law enforcement authorities, who speak the local language, are (somewhat) more trusted by the people, are familiar with how things are done locally, and (most importantly) don't produce so many more anti-American terrorists as a side effect of their efforts.
Meanwhile, there's a war on, and this is a man who would send the Boston PD out to capture Bin Laden
At the risk of being labelled a heretic or worse, may I suggest that police and intelligence forces are in fact a more effective method of fighting terrorists than sending in the Marines? Our armed forces are great at destroying enemy armies, toppling dictators, etc, but it seems they are much less effective at rooting out underground insurgencies like Al-Quaeda. For every terrorist they kill, they kill several innocent civilians, inspiring their relatives to take up arms against us. Furthermore, our military actions have made the US so unpopular abroad that it is very difficult even for "friendly" politicians to help us track down terrorists -- cooperating with the US is now seen as a major political liability in many parts of the world. So instead of rooting out terrorism, we've given the terrorists valuable recruiting propaganda AND places to hide while they plan their next attack. You may have noticed that according to the US government, terrorism has increased since 9/11, not decreased... I think that is evidence that our current strategies are not working well.
Sooner or later we'll have to face the fact: we are not re-fighting World War II, and what worked against Hitler won't necessarily work against Al-Quaeda. Terrorists ARE criminals (albeit very nasty ones), not armies. Therefore, trying to fight them as if they were something they are not is simply ineffective.
Well, you have to consider the alternative to Bush. Can you imagine the U.S. reaction to terrorism under Kerry?
I sure can -- Kerry would go after the terrorists, instead of using the terrorist attacks as a convenient excuse to invade some other irrelevant country which he really wanted to invade all along.
Kerry is completely anti-military (look at his voting record, if nothing else).
I suspect he's more against abuse of the military, than against the military itself. And as someone who has actually been in the military (rather than using his family's political connections to get a safe, cushy stateside sinecure), he would recognize both the strengths and limitations of military action, and therefore be much less likely to use the military in inappropriate and counterproductive ways. In short, he would be a competent commander in chief, not an overgrown boy acting out his GI Joe fantasies with our soldiers' lives.
He would have the country just lie back and try to enjoy it. Bush may not be good, Kerry would be far, far worse.
Been drinking the Kool-Aid for a while, haven't we?
Actually, the charge most levied against them here is that they make great software but they make really overpriced hardware, and they should port the software to x86.
Apple has time to make the great software because they don't have to spend all their effort dealing with x86 hardware brain damage, like Microsoft does... so people should be careful what they wish for:^)
Actually, the other factor is that OS/X is built on a solid foundation (NextStep+BSD), not a festering pile of fetid backwards compatibility crap. It's amazing how much nicer you can make the penthouse when the foundation isn't constantly threatening to collapse into the mire...
It seems to be really popular amongst the liberal-minded folk to try and always blame someone or something else for anything.
That's a common tendency amongst all humans, actually. The only thing that changes is the choice of scapegoats. Certainly Bush and friends had no qualms about blaming Saddam for the actions of those 19 hijackers when it suited their purpose.
Whatever happened to the notion of personal responsibility? It's not always someone else's fault, quit trying to blame someone else, and maybe try looking in at yourself for a moment.
You're absolutely right. Each person is responsible for his own actions. The problem with many conservatives, however, is that is as far as their analysis goes. They find the person to blame, throw him in jail, and declare the problem solved. But the problem is NOT solved -- now we have a person in jail, tying up taxpayer money and learning more criminal behaviour from his fellow inmates, instead of living a responsible, productive life and contributing to society. Just because liberals are willing to think about all aspects of the problem and how to solve it (and you can't deny that there are socioeconomic factors involved -- how many millionaires get arrested for stealing a loaf of bread?), doesn't mean that they are denying the notion of personal responsibility. To the contrary, in fact -- they are accepting their own responsibility as citizens to try and understand the problems their society faces and address/reduce/repair them as well as they know how. That's a much tougher, long term task than just labelling someone as evil and throwing him in jail to rot, but in the long run it will give us a happy, functional society instead of what we have now -- the world's largest and most expensive prison-industrial complex.
How about we take a look at the crying mothers of *REAL* babies who were decimated or cut open by "our babies" firing weapons at them for basically no reason
Um, did you miss the extended scene with the Iraqi woman crying to Allah because we had destroyed her Uncle's house and family? How about the Iraqi man throwing his baby's corpse onto the back of a pickup truck and asking the camera why the US troops had killed him? I'd say the movie covered that angle too.
Conservatives seem absolutely apoplectic about this movie, but I don't understand why.
Ah c'mon, you know exactly why. "Dear Leader" has been convincingly exposed to the public as the manipulative, dishonest, dangerous incompetent he is. They've been discredited and are squealing like stuck pigs.
No need to bring Hitler into it... if bashing the commander in chief means you don't support the troops, does that mean the conservatives abandoned our soldiers in Serbia during the Clinton adminstration? Interesting how all these little rules only get applied to the "other side"...
I've had to endure people convulsing with Mooregasms (a phrase I just coined, so Paypal me a buck if you want to use it..haha) over how powerful the whole movie is, how evil my country's leaders are, how worthy of the world's hate my country is, and how stupid we are as Americans.
Heh, nicely coined word... I guess it all goes to show how powerful visual media is as a way to alter people's thinking. I'd argue that these "Mooregasms" (check's in the mail;^)) are a healthy counterreaction to the earlier "You Ess Aye! You Ess Aye! You Ess Aye!" nuke-the-Middle-East jingoist hysteria that allowed the Iraq war to happen in the first place. If we're going to have propaganda, it's better to have propaganda that forces people to confront the consequences of their (country's) own actions, than propaganda that assures them that war and killing are okay. This movie will ultimately lead to more thoughtful, responsible, accountable government in the future.
Yes, that is correct -- the cable needs to extend past the level of geostationary orbit. It can either extend a long way past that level, or it can extend a shorter distance and have a counterweight tied to the end. Geostationary orbit is still a useful place on the cable to put a space station though.
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True -- and Windows is guilty of the same sin. Remember back in the DOS days, when every app that wanted to print documents had to include its own set of proprietary printer drivers? This constant reinventing of the wheel kept thousands of programmers gainfully employed! Then mean old Mr. Gates added a standardized printing API to Windows and started including printer drivers with the OS -- quickly putting every other company's proprietary-app-specific-printer-driver coders out of a job. The proprietary-app-specific-printer-driver industry never recovered from that blow...
CODE REUSE: JUST SAY NO!
I do prefer nuclear to coal, and it's obvious that we will need to switch away from fossil fuels sooner or later (and hopefully sooner), but if we are going to go through all the trouble of switching, is nuclear the technology we should switch to? Or should we put the bulk of our effort into developing large-scale renewable energy technologies (e.g. wind, solar, tidal, biomass, hydro, geothermal, etc)? These technologies require no fuel resources, create no radioactive waste or pollution, spread no radioactivity if they are blown up, and (very importantly, I think) can be deployed anywhere in the world without us having to worry (AFAIK!) about the technology being covertly abused or stolen to make WMDs.
I understand that renewable technologies have significant obstacles to overcome before they can provide most or all of the world's energy, but then so does nuclear. In the long run, for both security, environmental, political, and sustainability reasons, renewables are IMHO preferable. (and either is preferable to coal!)
No, I'm more worried about radioactivity being spread around the area, rendering it unhealthful and/or uninhabitable. (Yes, I know, the nuclear industry claims it's all perfectly fail-safe... but then, they would claim that, wouldn't they?)
Of course, if we could build a modern reactor, it would be even safer, but I suppose you're one of those people against building newer, safer nuclear reactors.
I'm not against building reactors per se, but before they are built I think all the inherent problems need to be dealt with -- including the inherent risks of mining, transporting, using, and storing radioactive materials. Once all the problems are factored in, it may be that nuclear power is worth the risk -- or it may be that we're better off in the long run developing other energy sources.
You misspelled "haven't previously" there... but the problem isn't really the number of attacks, the problem is the amount of damage even a single successful attack could inflict.
Actually, "occasional wild shifts" are exactly how organisms evolve.
Actually, we aren't, because it takes large amounts of fossil fuels to produce corn -- so we just cut out the middle man and use less oil that way.
Face, you can't get something from nothing. Growing corn to make oil is just a very baroque and inefficient method of gathering solar energy, by using plants as your solar collectors. Therefore, the net amount of energy you get out of your corn can't be more than the amount of energy contained in the sunlight that fell on the corn while it was growing, and in practice will be much less -- certainly less than the amount of energy you spent planting, fertilizing, watering, and harvesting the corn. IMHO, biodiesel is a clever method for subsidising farmers while maintaining the appearance of environmental correctness, nothing more.
And therefore.... what? I bet you had some really good arguments about the safety of airlines before 9/11/2001...
For example: People named "Smith" may well not be in my family, since Smith is a common last name. Furthermore, so what if they are? Maybe I don't want to have a "My Family" category, and a non-annoying program wouldn't assume that I do.
Really, it's not that hard of a problem to solve. Especially if the system implementers have access to 24/7 free coffee during the development period...
Isn't that an oxymoron? How can there be more than one "main" branch?
Show me a Starbucks where they play Mineral, Freakwater, or Belle and Sebastian
Ah, yes. Everybody thinks their own favorite bands are edgy, eclectic well-kept secrets, and everything else is corporate mass media pablum. News flash: "underground cachet" is just another marketing technique.
What is it about our criminal justice system that makes it inadequate to try these people? The fact that it might let them go free if there is not enough evidence to convict them? If that is the line of argument, then I'm afraid we may have reached the stage where we decide we can no longer "afford" civil liberties -- a very sad day, indeed. Consider the possibility that if we don't have enough evidence to convict someone, it may be because they are in fact innocent.
but which are absurd when facing an organised foe (can you see soldiers arresting the enemy and trying him before executing him?).
Why is that absurd? Our soldiers arrest people all the time, and they don't execute them because summary execution without trial is a war crime. If you are talking about shooting people during combat, that is a different situation -- but keep in mind that policemen are legally allowed to shoot people during "combat" as well. In any case, the whole point was that soldiers are probably not the best people to deal with this problem in the first place, since they are not the trained for it. Soldiers are trained for wholesale destruction of "the enemy" by any means necessary, not for the more delicate task of capturing criminals who are hiding amongst a civilian population.
It's a new paradigm, but one which I feel is better met with a military approach than a police one.
In light of what we've seen over the last year in Iraq, can you support your argument that a military approach is more effective? I'll concede that it worked fairly well in Afghanistan (except that they let Osama get away), but that was because the Al-Quaeda bases there were physically isolated and distinct from the rest of the population, and thus reasonably easy to find and destroy without killing too many bystanders. In most countries (including Iraq) I think we will get much better results by co-operating with the local law enforcement authorities, who speak the local language, are (somewhat) more trusted by the people, are familiar with how things are done locally, and (most importantly) don't produce so many more anti-American terrorists as a side effect of their efforts.
At the risk of being labelled a heretic or worse, may I suggest that police and intelligence forces are in fact a more effective method of fighting terrorists than sending in the Marines? Our armed forces are great at destroying enemy armies, toppling dictators, etc, but it seems they are much less effective at rooting out underground insurgencies like Al-Quaeda. For every terrorist they kill, they kill several innocent civilians, inspiring their relatives to take up arms against us. Furthermore, our military actions have made the US so unpopular abroad that it is very difficult even for "friendly" politicians to help us track down terrorists -- cooperating with the US is now seen as a major political liability in many parts of the world. So instead of rooting out terrorism, we've given the terrorists valuable recruiting propaganda AND places to hide while they plan their next attack. You may have noticed that according to the US government, terrorism has increased since 9/11, not decreased... I think that is evidence that our current strategies are not working well.
Sooner or later we'll have to face the fact: we are not re-fighting World War II, and what worked against Hitler won't necessarily work against Al-Quaeda. Terrorists ARE criminals (albeit very nasty ones), not armies. Therefore, trying to fight them as if they were something they are not is simply ineffective.
I sure can -- Kerry would go after the terrorists, instead of using the terrorist attacks as a convenient excuse to invade some other irrelevant country which he really wanted to invade all along.
Kerry is completely anti-military (look at his voting record, if nothing else).
I suspect he's more against abuse of the military, than against the military itself. And as someone who has actually been in the military (rather than using his family's political connections to get a safe, cushy stateside sinecure), he would recognize both the strengths and limitations of military action, and therefore be much less likely to use the military in inappropriate and counterproductive ways. In short, he would be a competent commander in chief, not an overgrown boy acting out his GI Joe fantasies with our soldiers' lives.
He would have the country just lie back and try to enjoy it. Bush may not be good, Kerry would be far, far worse.
Been drinking the Kool-Aid for a while, haven't we?
Apple has time to make the great software because they don't have to spend all their effort dealing with x86 hardware brain damage, like Microsoft does... so people should be careful what they wish for
Actually, the other factor is that OS/X is built on a solid foundation (NextStep+BSD), not a festering pile of fetid backwards compatibility crap. It's amazing how much nicer you can make the penthouse when the foundation isn't constantly threatening to collapse into the mire...
TMBG has been around and "making a living" for literally decades. I doubt you need to worry about Them. They'll be okay.
Nonsense! Memorizing all the digits in Pi is easy. From memory, here they are: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.
That's a common tendency amongst all humans, actually. The only thing that changes is the choice of scapegoats. Certainly Bush and friends had no qualms about blaming Saddam for the actions of those 19 hijackers when it suited their purpose.
Whatever happened to the notion of personal responsibility? It's not always someone else's fault, quit trying to blame someone else, and maybe try looking in at yourself for a moment.
You're absolutely right. Each person is responsible for his own actions. The problem with many conservatives, however, is that is as far as their analysis goes. They find the person to blame, throw him in jail, and declare the problem solved. But the problem is NOT solved -- now we have a person in jail, tying up taxpayer money and learning more criminal behaviour from his fellow inmates, instead of living a responsible, productive life and contributing to society. Just because liberals are willing to think about all aspects of the problem and how to solve it (and you can't deny that there are socioeconomic factors involved -- how many millionaires get arrested for stealing a loaf of bread?), doesn't mean that they are denying the notion of personal responsibility. To the contrary, in fact -- they are accepting their own responsibility as citizens to try and understand the problems their society faces and address/reduce/repair them as well as they know how. That's a much tougher, long term task than just labelling someone as evil and throwing him in jail to rot, but in the long run it will give us a happy, functional society instead of what we have now -- the world's largest and most expensive prison-industrial complex.
Yes, even so. Her son is just as dead, and her grief is just as real. Her son would be alive today if he hadn't been sent to Baghdad.
Um, did you miss the extended scene with the Iraqi woman crying to Allah because we had destroyed her Uncle's house and family? How about the Iraqi man throwing his baby's corpse onto the back of a pickup truck and asking the camera why the US troops had killed him? I'd say the movie covered that angle too.
Ah c'mon, you know exactly why. "Dear Leader" has been convincingly exposed to the public as the manipulative, dishonest, dangerous incompetent he is. They've been discredited and are squealing like stuck pigs.
No need to bring Hitler into it... if bashing the commander in chief means you don't support the troops, does that mean the conservatives abandoned our soldiers in Serbia during the Clinton adminstration? Interesting how all these little rules only get applied to the "other side"...
Heh, nicely coined word... I guess it all goes to show how powerful visual media is as a way to alter people's thinking. I'd argue that these "Mooregasms" (check's in the mail
Yes, that is correct -- the cable needs to extend past the level of geostationary orbit. It can either extend a long way past that level, or it can extend a shorter distance and have a counterweight tied to the end. Geostationary orbit is still a useful place on the cable to put a space station though.
Hm, that's almost impressive.