There are things that can happen to wipe us out that are totally independent of our own actions. Asteroid, comet, and rogue planetoid impacts are obvious, but a nova would totally irradiate everything within five or six hundred light years. Solar flares occasionally reach out far enough and in just the right direction to cause massive disruptions. And those are just the things we can think of!
Disasters powerful enough to wipe out civilization on this rock, manmade or natural, are not a maybe. It is simply a matter of time before it happens. We cannot risk the species on the hopes that we'll be lucky for a few million years. As has been said before, the dinosaurs died out because they didn't have space travel. We humans, for all our inventiveness, are currently in exactly the same position.
What can a human do that no autonomous robot in existence can do? Hmmm, dig a hole for subsurface samples? Replace a tire if it goes flat or a circuitboard if it breaks or clear smudge off a camera lense and dirt off a solar cell? Explore a cave (not likely on Mars, but elsewhere, sure)? Build anything at all?
There is nothing a robot can do except sit wherever it was put and take pretty pictures. Everything else requires people.
Which is exactly the problem. _Rocket_ designers are limited because rocket-based launch costs preclude anything so simple as a steel wall. If launch costs were not so much an issue, we'd have no problems packing steel and lunar regolith to the outside of a station.
Space isn't exactly simple, but it's nowhere near as difficult to live in as most people think. What makes it difficult is the nonexistent margin for error, the absolute minimalist approach we have to take to any equipment we bring (space is harsh! why else would we use sheet aluminum to build anything?), which is of course caused by having any payloads costing their weight in gold to ship up to LEO, a trip which is still far from a sure thing.
With cheap earth-to-orbit launch costs, most of the arguments againsnt manned space travel dry up. This is what NASA should have been working on for the past 40 years, opening up space to everyone. Instead they pissed it away on impressive but ultimately pointless endeavors like Apollo and the station and simply keeping the godawful Shuttles running.
With a robot you can send 10x the number of tools to get work done than you can with a human
Only if you're taking a minimalist approach. If your goal is to spend the absolute minimum just to get anything done whatsoever, then yes, a robot is cheaper. But try reversing the question: For the amount of resources you'd have to spend to get a real live person there, what sort of robots could you get? Would they be any better than what we're sending now? Would we get anything else out of them? I doubt it. But people could accomplish ever so much more.
Unmanned spaceflight has a lower minimum expense, sure, but it has a correspondingly lower 'maximum amount of stuff you can do', as well.
Moot point, anyways. There's one overriding reason for manned spaceflight: Survival. As long as the human race is stuck on this rock, our civilization and likely our species are, in the long run, doomed to extinction. 99.99999...% of all species that ever lived are gone, many of them wiped out by things we ourselves could not prevent today. The only way to ensure our survival is to spread as far and wide as we can.
If you bear this in mind, then the conversation between Vader and Palpatine about turning Luke instead of killing him takes on new meaning. During the entire exchange, both was planning on turning Luke and then using him to help supplant the other, and both of them knew it. Palpatine originally wanted Vader to kill Luke and Vader couldn't _not_ do it, so he had to risk letting Palpatine get his hands on him in order to keep him alive long enough for Vader to turn him instead. Makes me wonder what Vader had in mind if he'd actually gotten Luke into the carbonite...
It _also_ suggests that during the 20 years or so between Episodes 3 and 4, Vader probably had to fend off an assassination attempt by Palpatine and another would-be apprentice. Or one of his own attempts had gone awry and he was stuck being low man on the totem pole until he could train up another one? Might explain why he was in such a bad mood at the start of Ep4?
It also totally explains why Republic Jedi (both New and Old) recruited like Scientologists, but even after decades in power, the Empire still only had the two Sith.
no one can say for sure what the primordial earth was like
It was very hot and the air composition and water content was similar to what you'd find around active volcanoes. I can't say what kind of variations the "life in a test tube" experiment environment has been performed in, but I doubt there's a precise recipe for it.
these amino acids were created by an intelligent being in a strictly controlled environment
Uh, no, they weren't. Any more than I 'created' kittens by keeping two cats in my house, or 'created' mold by leaving the leftover pizza in my fridge too long.
hmmm, intelligent being created... sounds kinda like Genesis 1
Really? Genesis says, "And the Lord said, 'Let there be an environment in which ', and it was good"? Is there a detailed description of how the seas formed? Is it explained why the fossil record says there were plants and animals eons before humans, when the bible says otherwise? Sounds to me like you're just peddling your thoroughly debunked mythology.
these created amino acids lacked chirality.
This hack constantly claims that without chirality, DNA couldn't do it's job, nor the proteins and enzymes that modern organisms depend on. I've no idea if this is true, but who exactly was it that made the claim that it was DNA that formed by chance in these primordeal seas? Were you under the impression that every single protein that exists _today_ was formed in these vats of un-chiral amino acids? Are you implying that proteins of any kind, not necessarily the ones that exist today, could not form in such an environment? This article constantly works off the assumption that DNA has not itself done any evolving, and was formed entirely complete, right down to the self-repair mechanisms, all the way back at the beginning. The only people making that claim are guys like you.
The point is, when referring to how amino acids first became life forms, referring to DNA and modern proteins tells me only that you are making the usual bogus creationist argument that complex systems like eyeballs cannot occur naturally. You look at the finished product and say, "Could never happen by chance", without looking at all the useful interim steps that could have led to it.
Interestingly enough, however, scientists have the same problem with the Big Bang theory. According to theory, when energy condenses down to matter, it should do so into equal parts matter and antimatter. In fact, when we make antimatter, that's exactly what we get. This sort of process would not yield the universe of stuff we see today. And yet nobody thinks that this is proof positive that god exists and wants you to be christian. Real scientists go back and try to figure out what they missed. They don't just play the "Omnipotent Deity" wildcard to explain away all the unknowns like creationists do.
Because there's nothing spectacularly odd about this planet. It's an average star, there's billions just like it in our galaxy alone. There's _three_ planets and a number of gas giant moons reasonably close to Earth's size, just within this one star system. The range within which liquid water can exist is pretty large, several dozen million miles across. So with all that, the odds of not one single earth-sized planet within 80-120 millions miles of a G3 star forming anywhere, ever, is vanishingly, stupidly small. To say nothing of other combinations which can produce the same result; larger stars with the planet further away, smaller stars with rocky planets closer in.
At this point, we're reduced to problems of biology. We have easily produced amino acids in recreations of primordial Earth, so clearly organic compounds in general are not difficult. Similarly, life on Earth has proved to be ridiculously tenacious, reproducing and thriving in even the most disgusting conditions. Bridging the gap between amino acids barely capable of forming proteins and self-reproducing molecules is the only real unlikelihood here. But there are a number of plausible theories that don't involve seeding by extraterrestrials, merely time and chance.
If we assume that life can easily form on planets that can support it (which would definitely be backed up by the discovery of ancient life on Mars), it is highly reasonable to conclude that among the stars, life is as commonplace as dirt.
The development of sapience is probably the most unlikely item on the list. There's nothing about primates that tends towards intelligence that hasn't happened before, it just took a combination of the right evolutionary and environmental coincidences. On Earth, the inner workings of DNA and RNA biochemistry got about as good as it ever will eons ago. But it still took a billion years of recombination for sentience to develop. Whether or not it occurs elsewhere is something we'll just have to go and see for ourselves, but with (potentially) trillions of planets and eons upon eons of history to work with, the odds are pretty good.
Because, of course, I implicitly signed just such a license when I paid for my PS2 and games with cash and walked out the door?
Click-through agreements within the software are not worth the phosphers they're printed on. Every so often I come across a program in which the license text is stored in a plaintext file. I could modify it to read "By clicking 'I agree', the User agrees to accept one meeeeeelion dollars from the Company". The software accepted the changes in the renegotiated license, so it must be valid and binding, right?
Reminds me of the comment from an ABC exec awhile back. He claimed that simply by turning on the TV and looking at it, you are implicitly agreeing to watch the ads, and using a Tivo to skip them put you in breach of contract.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
Many Christians understand that this country was founded... on legal traditions that find their roots in the Bible.
Really. Which traditions would those be? I don't believe the whole 'innocent until proven guilty' thing is in the Bible anywhere. And I'm pretty sure the Inquisition didn't invent trial by jury. There is that bit about "Thou shalt worship me and only me", which of course is totally countermanded by the 1st Ammendment. In fact, only 2 (and in some cases 3) of the 10 commandments have any real analog in the US code of law.
So what if freedom of religion is enshrined in Christian dogma (it certainly didn't originate there)? Every single time they are in power, Christians try to renege on it. How many states are atheists legally barred from holding office in? How many Christian judges publicly proclaim their intent to dispense Biblical justice?
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
What causes a brutal dictatorship to be overthrown by the people? When enough of them realize they are getting screwed over by The Man and getting nothing in return for their toils. Sound about right?
Now, how does this happen in a secular government like, say, the Soviet Union? Well, all the poor slobs tired of never being able to buy shoes or toilet paper, tired of living in the 19th century while their government declares their enemy to be the people who can actually afford to buy stuff. When push came to shove, there were just too many unhappy people. Soviet economics was clearly bunk to anyone not way the hell up on the food chain.
How does this happen in a theocracy where the populace actually buys into the mumbo-jumbo? When the clerics spout their nonsense about how getting to the afterlife is dependent on being oppressed by and dying at the hands of the government for being divinely naughty, what examples can the people look at that even an idiot could tell disproved the party line? They generally rig things so that only the dead can talk about what a load of crap it all is. Isn't it wierd how Christianity, which has historically been _monstrously_ oppressive and cruel when in power, to this day maintains the mantra of "The meek shall inherit the earth"? They tell you to bend over, to take everything you're given and like it, because that's the only that way will you get to heaven. And they can do it because there's too many suckers willing to buy into it for the 'sight unseen' rewards. Secular Western nations are way the hell better off than _any_ theocracy that ever existed, but there's no way to show that we are better off 'spiritually' (whatever that means) and that's all that fundies care about. So they try to wreck it with bombs from without and religious legislation from within.
My problem isn't religions, per se, it's people stupid enough to take things on faith in general; after all, the former wouldn't exist without the latter. They'll believe anything and then be willing to do anything, to kill anyone, for that belief. This is not to say that people wouldn't hurt each other anyways, but it's so much _easier_ to justify the pogroms, the genocides, the centuries-long crusades and jihads, the purges and the 'cleansings', the sheer brutality of it all when you can just make up any old bullshit and have people willing to believe it.
This is exactly the sort of thing that worries me. The developed nations are having the most terrifically difficult time coming to grips with infinitely reproducible information today. How bad will it be in 50 or 100 years when we develop exactly the tech you described; being able to infinitely reproduce stuff in the Real World? Can you imagine the kind of pressure all the various manufacturing industries would exert to make such devices illegal? If our Beloved Leaders aren't capable of seeing the net benefits of being able to efficient move large quantities of data around, how are they going to react when farmers, manufacturers, cooks, artists, damned near anyone who depends on maintaining scarcity of physical objects comes to them and tells them that this new tech is bad?
I would agree, except it does it on both my work machine (1.0 celeron w/ 192MB) and my home machine (2.4 P4 w/ 512 DDR), both Win2k & Opera 7.23, both can browse like a dream otherwise. But if you tell me it's not totally ubiquitous, I will see what I can see.
On that note, it seems like every IE patch will reset the homepage to msn.com. Trying to cancel this in mid-render will make IE just totally halt. I've seen it sit there for 30 seconds on a 1.8GHz machine, just trying to stop rendering Microsoft's own webpage.
I concur. Opera caches every page, so even for ones that are dynamically rendered, there's no reconnecting to the server. The _only_ site I've ever seen that took longer to load in Opera is here. Some sort of script runs which totally halts Opera for about 5 seconds. Drives me nuts, but at least it's only the first time per session.
Actually, Netscape did this ages ago (at least as early as 95 or 96). It was one of the main reasons why I switched to IE only when Navigator had totally de-evolved into a puddle of unusable goo. I ditched it for Opera ASAP.
Opera is also way faster, but largely due to the tremendous memory cache it maintains. At any time on my machine, it's using more memory than any 3 other programs (no kidding! The next highest: Outlook, Trillian, and Explorer combined don't even reach Opera's usage).
I dunno how they do things back home by you, but around here, adding a % to a number automatically reduces the value by a factor of 100. So when you say $1 = 0.003% of a number, I can only assume that the gun in question costs over $33,000. For that kind of money, I'd expect a gun with AI target tracking and 50 rounds per second auto-cannon-fire mode. So it was a great disappointment when I actually RTFL.
Israel is an exception to the rule of "Governments kills more of their own citizens than terrorists". Not an exception to the definition of terrorist. My apologies, I guess that could have been interpreted wrong.
Wha? Did you not actually read anything I wrote, or did you just pick up on the words 'Israel', 'Hitler', and 'exception' and draw some unfathomable conclusion? I said that neither the 3rd Reich nor Israel nor the US nor the USSR were considered terrorists because no matter what they did, they were governments. The Nazi's slaughtered _far_ more civilians than could ever have been killed in terrorist attacks on germans. Hence, they are not an exception; in fact, they epitomized the rule. Israel, on the other hand, while certainly not the most benign of governments, has had a significant chunk of its population zilched out by guys with bombs on their chests. As I said, if Israel is an exception to the rule, it's because of the sheer terrorist animosity held against them.
How on earth did you get anti-semitism from what I wrote? If you'd bothered to read what I wrote, you'd notice that being an exception to the rule is a good thing.
Others have rebuffed your claim about the USA already, so I will merely point out that even if a government smells like roses (comparatively), that state of affairs can change so quickly it'll make your head spin. Weimar Republic Germany wasn't a swell place to live, in fact it sucked ass, but it took all of 10 years to turn into the Nazi 3rd Reich we all know and despise.
I'm not trying to invoke Godwin here by comparing the PATRIOT act or its supporters in particular to counterparts in 1930's Berlin. I'm really not. It is merely an historical example of an otherwise benign government transmuting into something fearsome, terrible, and utterly despicable under the guises of 'necessary', 'security', and 'expediency'. I maintain that "It won't be abused" is not sufficient protection for citizens from their government. Not now, not ever. And it is for that reason that I find the arguments for the PATRIOT act, even moreso than the act itself, to be of greater danger to the US populace than every terrorist who lives today. The moment the people truly believe that "It can't happen here" is usually followed by the moment when they find themselves to be totally screwed.
People put to death for petty or imagined 'crimes against the state'. Government policies that directly result in deaths of civilians. Wars waged against a selected group of the civilian population. So you have the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, the purges and general persecution in Soviet Russia, the Great Leap Forward under Maoist China, and the massacres of Native Americans by the US government, to name but a few. It would include the 'homeless left to starve' only if the government was actively doing something to prevent them from obtaining food (like making giving food away illegal). The death penalty would count if it was for crimes that nobody in their right mind would think warranted execution. An enlisted soldier KIA, no, a conscripted soldier, yes.
And how do you define a terrorist network? Were McVeigh and Nichols a terrorist network? Were the Minutemen terrorists? Was Hitler a terrorist in his own country?
Very good point. People who specifically attack civilians with intent to kill large numbers of them for political, religious, or ideological reasons, but not operating at the behest of the governance. So McVeigh was. Minutemen and guerillas in general are not, insofar as they refrained from explicitly attacking civilians (and no, I don't imagine this is always the case). Hitler was not, because he was the government.
Insanely enough, Israel may be one of the only nations to actually be an exception. Not by virtue of having a nice government, but simply by having so damned many terrorists.
Except that with few exceptions, more people have been killed at the hands of their own governments than have ever died from foreign or even domestic terrorist networks.
Slashdot Mirror
Disasters powerful enough to wipe out civilization on this rock, manmade or natural, are not a maybe. It is simply a matter of time before it happens. We cannot risk the species on the hopes that we'll be lucky for a few million years. As has been said before, the dinosaurs died out because they didn't have space travel. We humans, for all our inventiveness, are currently in exactly the same position.
There is nothing a robot can do except sit wherever it was put and take pretty pictures. Everything else requires people.
Space isn't exactly simple, but it's nowhere near as difficult to live in as most people think. What makes it difficult is the nonexistent margin for error, the absolute minimalist approach we have to take to any equipment we bring (space is harsh! why else would we use sheet aluminum to build anything?), which is of course caused by having any payloads costing their weight in gold to ship up to LEO, a trip which is still far from a sure thing.
With cheap earth-to-orbit launch costs, most of the arguments againsnt manned space travel dry up. This is what NASA should have been working on for the past 40 years, opening up space to everyone. Instead they pissed it away on impressive but ultimately pointless endeavors like Apollo and the station and simply keeping the godawful Shuttles running.
Only if you're taking a minimalist approach. If your goal is to spend the absolute minimum just to get anything done whatsoever, then yes, a robot is cheaper. But try reversing the question: For the amount of resources you'd have to spend to get a real live person there, what sort of robots could you get? Would they be any better than what we're sending now? Would we get anything else out of them? I doubt it. But people could accomplish ever so much more.
Unmanned spaceflight has a lower minimum expense, sure, but it has a correspondingly lower 'maximum amount of stuff you can do', as well.
Moot point, anyways. There's one overriding reason for manned spaceflight: Survival. As long as the human race is stuck on this rock, our civilization and likely our species are, in the long run, doomed to extinction. 99.99999...% of all species that ever lived are gone, many of them wiped out by things we ourselves could not prevent today. The only way to ensure our survival is to spread as far and wide as we can.
Advertisements for roach motels, If I recall. In Hindi. Even with his eyes closed or in his sleep.
If you bear this in mind, then the conversation between Vader and Palpatine about turning Luke instead of killing him takes on new meaning. During the entire exchange, both was planning on turning Luke and then using him to help supplant the other, and both of them knew it. Palpatine originally wanted Vader to kill Luke and Vader couldn't _not_ do it, so he had to risk letting Palpatine get his hands on him in order to keep him alive long enough for Vader to turn him instead. Makes me wonder what Vader had in mind if he'd actually gotten Luke into the carbonite...
It _also_ suggests that during the 20 years or so between Episodes 3 and 4, Vader probably had to fend off an assassination attempt by Palpatine and another would-be apprentice. Or one of his own attempts had gone awry and he was stuck being low man on the totem pole until he could train up another one? Might explain why he was in such a bad mood at the start of Ep4?
It also totally explains why Republic Jedi (both New and Old) recruited like Scientologists, but even after decades in power, the Empire still only had the two Sith.
It was very hot and the air composition and water content was similar to what you'd find around active volcanoes. I can't say what kind of variations the "life in a test tube" experiment environment has been performed in, but I doubt there's a precise recipe for it.
these amino acids were created by an intelligent being in a strictly controlled environment
Uh, no, they weren't. Any more than I 'created' kittens by keeping two cats in my house, or 'created' mold by leaving the leftover pizza in my fridge too long.
hmmm, intelligent being created... sounds kinda like Genesis 1
Really? Genesis says, "And the Lord said, 'Let there be an environment in which ', and it was good"? Is there a detailed description of how the seas formed? Is it explained why the fossil record says there were plants and animals eons before humans, when the bible says otherwise? Sounds to me like you're just peddling your thoroughly debunked mythology.
these created amino acids lacked chirality.
This hack constantly claims that without chirality, DNA couldn't do it's job, nor the proteins and enzymes that modern organisms depend on. I've no idea if this is true, but who exactly was it that made the claim that it was DNA that formed by chance in these primordeal seas? Were you under the impression that every single protein that exists _today_ was formed in these vats of un-chiral amino acids? Are you implying that proteins of any kind, not necessarily the ones that exist today, could not form in such an environment? This article constantly works off the assumption that DNA has not itself done any evolving, and was formed entirely complete, right down to the self-repair mechanisms, all the way back at the beginning. The only people making that claim are guys like you.
The point is, when referring to how amino acids first became life forms, referring to DNA and modern proteins tells me only that you are making the usual bogus creationist argument that complex systems like eyeballs cannot occur naturally. You look at the finished product and say, "Could never happen by chance", without looking at all the useful interim steps that could have led to it.
Interestingly enough, however, scientists have the same problem with the Big Bang theory. According to theory, when energy condenses down to matter, it should do so into equal parts matter and antimatter. In fact, when we make antimatter, that's exactly what we get. This sort of process would not yield the universe of stuff we see today. And yet nobody thinks that this is proof positive that god exists and wants you to be christian. Real scientists go back and try to figure out what they missed. They don't just play the "Omnipotent Deity" wildcard to explain away all the unknowns like creationists do.
At this point, we're reduced to problems of biology. We have easily produced amino acids in recreations of primordial Earth, so clearly organic compounds in general are not difficult. Similarly, life on Earth has proved to be ridiculously tenacious, reproducing and thriving in even the most disgusting conditions. Bridging the gap between amino acids barely capable of forming proteins and self-reproducing molecules is the only real unlikelihood here. But there are a number of plausible theories that don't involve seeding by extraterrestrials, merely time and chance.
If we assume that life can easily form on planets that can support it (which would definitely be backed up by the discovery of ancient life on Mars), it is highly reasonable to conclude that among the stars, life is as commonplace as dirt.
The development of sapience is probably the most unlikely item on the list. There's nothing about primates that tends towards intelligence that hasn't happened before, it just took a combination of the right evolutionary and environmental coincidences. On Earth, the inner workings of DNA and RNA biochemistry got about as good as it ever will eons ago. But it still took a billion years of recombination for sentience to develop. Whether or not it occurs elsewhere is something we'll just have to go and see for ourselves, but with (potentially) trillions of planets and eons upon eons of history to work with, the odds are pretty good.
Click-through agreements within the software are not worth the phosphers they're printed on. Every so often I come across a program in which the license text is stored in a plaintext file. I could modify it to read "By clicking 'I agree', the User agrees to accept one meeeeeelion dollars from the Company". The software accepted the changes in the renegotiated license, so it must be valid and binding, right?
Reminds me of the comment from an ABC exec awhile back. He claimed that simply by turning on the TV and looking at it, you are implicitly agreeing to watch the ads, and using a Tivo to skip them put you in breach of contract.
Is it happy? Can we taunt it?
Really. Which traditions would those be? I don't believe the whole 'innocent until proven guilty' thing is in the Bible anywhere. And I'm pretty sure the Inquisition didn't invent trial by jury. There is that bit about "Thou shalt worship me and only me", which of course is totally countermanded by the 1st Ammendment. In fact, only 2 (and in some cases 3) of the 10 commandments have any real analog in the US code of law.
So what if freedom of religion is enshrined in Christian dogma (it certainly didn't originate there)? Every single time they are in power, Christians try to renege on it. How many states are atheists legally barred from holding office in? How many Christian judges publicly proclaim their intent to dispense Biblical justice?
Now, how does this happen in a secular government like, say, the Soviet Union? Well, all the poor slobs tired of never being able to buy shoes or toilet paper, tired of living in the 19th century while their government declares their enemy to be the people who can actually afford to buy stuff. When push came to shove, there were just too many unhappy people. Soviet economics was clearly bunk to anyone not way the hell up on the food chain.
How does this happen in a theocracy where the populace actually buys into the mumbo-jumbo? When the clerics spout their nonsense about how getting to the afterlife is dependent on being oppressed by and dying at the hands of the government for being divinely naughty, what examples can the people look at that even an idiot could tell disproved the party line? They generally rig things so that only the dead can talk about what a load of crap it all is. Isn't it wierd how Christianity, which has historically been _monstrously_ oppressive and cruel when in power, to this day maintains the mantra of "The meek shall inherit the earth"? They tell you to bend over, to take everything you're given and like it, because that's the only that way will you get to heaven. And they can do it because there's too many suckers willing to buy into it for the 'sight unseen' rewards. Secular Western nations are way the hell better off than _any_ theocracy that ever existed, but there's no way to show that we are better off 'spiritually' (whatever that means) and that's all that fundies care about. So they try to wreck it with bombs from without and religious legislation from within.
My problem isn't religions, per se, it's people stupid enough to take things on faith in general; after all, the former wouldn't exist without the latter. They'll believe anything and then be willing to do anything, to kill anyone, for that belief. This is not to say that people wouldn't hurt each other anyways, but it's so much _easier_ to justify the pogroms, the genocides, the centuries-long crusades and jihads, the purges and the 'cleansings', the sheer brutality of it all when you can just make up any old bullshit and have people willing to believe it.
This is exactly the sort of thing that worries me. The developed nations are having the most terrifically difficult time coming to grips with infinitely reproducible information today. How bad will it be in 50 or 100 years when we develop exactly the tech you described; being able to infinitely reproduce stuff in the Real World? Can you imagine the kind of pressure all the various manufacturing industries would exert to make such devices illegal? If our Beloved Leaders aren't capable of seeing the net benefits of being able to efficient move large quantities of data around, how are they going to react when farmers, manufacturers, cooks, artists, damned near anyone who depends on maintaining scarcity of physical objects comes to them and tells them that this new tech is bad?
I would agree, except it does it on both my work machine (1.0 celeron w/ 192MB) and my home machine (2.4 P4 w/ 512 DDR), both Win2k & Opera 7.23, both can browse like a dream otherwise. But if you tell me it's not totally ubiquitous, I will see what I can see.
On that note, it seems like every IE patch will reset the homepage to msn.com. Trying to cancel this in mid-render will make IE just totally halt. I've seen it sit there for 30 seconds on a 1.8GHz machine, just trying to stop rendering Microsoft's own webpage.
I concur. Opera caches every page, so even for ones that are dynamically rendered, there's no reconnecting to the server. The _only_ site I've ever seen that took longer to load in Opera is here. Some sort of script runs which totally halts Opera for about 5 seconds. Drives me nuts, but at least it's only the first time per session.
Actually, Netscape did this ages ago (at least as early as 95 or 96). It was one of the main reasons why I switched to IE only when Navigator had totally de-evolved into a puddle of unusable goo. I ditched it for Opera ASAP.
Opera is also way faster, but largely due to the tremendous memory cache it maintains. At any time on my machine, it's using more memory than any 3 other programs (no kidding! The next highest: Outlook, Trillian, and Explorer combined don't even reach Opera's usage).
Still, it kicks copious amounts of ass.
I dunno how they do things back home by you, but around here, adding a % to a number automatically reduces the value by a factor of 100. So when you say $1 = 0.003% of a number, I can only assume that the gun in question costs over $33,000. For that kind of money, I'd expect a gun with AI target tracking and 50 rounds per second auto-cannon-fire mode. So it was a great disappointment when I actually RTFL.
Israel is an exception to the rule of "Governments kills more of their own citizens than terrorists". Not an exception to the definition of terrorist. My apologies, I guess that could have been interpreted wrong.
How on earth did you get anti-semitism from what I wrote? If you'd bothered to read what I wrote, you'd notice that being an exception to the rule is a good thing.
I'm not trying to invoke Godwin here by comparing the PATRIOT act or its supporters in particular to counterparts in 1930's Berlin. I'm really not. It is merely an historical example of an otherwise benign government transmuting into something fearsome, terrible, and utterly despicable under the guises of 'necessary', 'security', and 'expediency'. I maintain that "It won't be abused" is not sufficient protection for citizens from their government. Not now, not ever. And it is for that reason that I find the arguments for the PATRIOT act, even moreso than the act itself, to be of greater danger to the US populace than every terrorist who lives today. The moment the people truly believe that "It can't happen here" is usually followed by the moment when they find themselves to be totally screwed.
And how do you define a terrorist network? Were McVeigh and Nichols a terrorist network? Were the Minutemen terrorists? Was Hitler a terrorist in his own country?
Very good point. People who specifically attack civilians with intent to kill large numbers of them for political, religious, or ideological reasons, but not operating at the behest of the governance. So McVeigh was. Minutemen and guerillas in general are not, insofar as they refrained from explicitly attacking civilians (and no, I don't imagine this is always the case). Hitler was not, because he was the government.
Insanely enough, Israel may be one of the only nations to actually be an exception. Not by virtue of having a nice government, but simply by having so damned many terrorists.
Except that with few exceptions, more people have been killed at the hands of their own governments than have ever died from foreign or even domestic terrorist networks.
Occasionally I get something that actually comes with two rebates. One requires the UPC, but the other will (has to, really) make do with a photocopy.