Need I remind you that artists produced alot of really terrific music for thousands of years before patents ever existed. I'll grant that noone was making the obscene profits which the recording industry is making today, but artists produced art, they were compensated for it, and consumers got to listen to music.
We're almost all Linux.
Weve got 4 Sun450s running (surprise) Solaris.
We've got a couple of NT servers.
There are 5-10 Windows desktops.
Everything else is Linux, including about 20 linux rack mounts which we're serving web pages off of.
Actually there's growing evidence that we did know about the attacks before hand. More accurately parts of our government knew about parts of the plan before hand but because of shitty communications. They never manifested as any preventative measures.
Also, just knowing that someone is who they claims they are doesn't mean you can find the terrorists in the crowd. You can look at someone individually but you still have to match them against a large and possibly erroneous list of terrorists.
So we're planning on having a war on terrorism.
What will it be like?
Well we've never had a war against terrorism before but maybe we can extrapolate a bit from similar experiences.
The "War on Drugs" comes to mind.
In both cases there is no specific enemy. Instead the war is focused on a philosophy. Thus we attempt to eradicate the "enemy" by killing or arresting adherants of the philosophy.
In both cases it is a war which must be fought within our own borders as well as abroad.
In both cases there is no exit condition.It's unlikely that we'll ever be able to eliminate all terrorism but at what point will we have won the war? When we've elliminated 90% of all terrorism? When acts of terrorism fall below a certain acceptable frequency?
Both wars require gigantic expenditures of money over indefinate periods of time.
In my opinion the "War on Drugs" has been a spectacular failiur. We're spending ever increasing amounts and drug use is as high as it ever was. But now it's associated with terrible violence and the drug lords are rich.
Thus by my prediction, in a few years, when we're in the middle of the "War on Terrorism", we'll start to notice that we are spending way too much money without making any progress at all except to draw more attention to terrorists and eroding our own civil liberties.
In the gulf war we could do something, in Rwanda we could do nothing. You're saying that the most powerfull army in the world couldn't stop a bunch of machete weilding civilians from slaughtering their neighbors?
And if stopping the genocide in Rwanda would have made Vietnam look like a tea party how did the Tutusi pull it off when their refugees mounted an invading army? (Hint they didn't have to annihilate the Hutu).
Also while there may have been no good guys, there was clearly a bad guy. So who was the good guy in the Gulf war?
More Tutsi were killed in Rwanda than everyone who died in the golf war combined. How is this even vaguely acceptable if invading another country is way out of bounds?
It wasn't really a troll.
Blood centers in NY have a shortage of equipment and personell to take blood donations.
I went to two different blood centers today and in both cases they told me to come back tomorrow.
If you don't have type O blood they don't even want you back until later.
That said you can sign up as a volunteer. They're particularly looking for people with skills in medicine, foreign languages, and computers (hint hint).
Re:it seems we could do more to help the effort.
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 1
Oops. My mail server is down. Could someone else email them?
Re:it seems we could do more to help the effort.
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 1
I've read that IBL has been encrypting his communications to his minions.
Maybe the fine folks at distributed.net could modify their software to crack these codes.
I think I'll email them about this.
I don't know if you're aware of this but the fundamental problem in that area is that since the founding of Israel, the Arab countries have continuously devoted themselves to its destruction. I think you also have some major misconceptions regarding the nature of a "Palestinian homeland" which could be more accurately described as "whatever area happens to be under Israeli control at the moment". This is entirely understandable. Before the allies decided to give Israel to the Jews as a new homeland, the Arabs who had been living there for thousands of years, had just fought a bloody civil war to escape Turkish occupation. They got almost no help from their British "allies".
The use of the word "racist" is a non-event. The issue was conference ostensibly intended to fight racism that turned into a wildly anti-semitic assault depicting Israel (one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world) as the sole locus of evil. Yes, it's appropriate that the US government didn't lend legitimacy to it, and European countries should be ashamed of their compliance. Why were the US and Israel the only two countries to walk out of the UN conference on racism?
If it makes you feel better, think about how much we spend on defense each year. Now think about the dollar value of the fact that Iraq didn't have nukes in 1991. Was aid to Israel cost effective? We don't need Israel to blow up nuclear power plants. We're perfectly capable of doing it ourselves. And besides what right did we have to attack Iraq? Because we wanted to controle the price Iraq could charge for THEIR oil. If you think it was to save the poor Kuwaitis, where were we when the Hutu were commiting genocide against the Tutsi in Rowanda? At it's height the Tutsi were slaughtered at the greatest rate in history and we didn't lift a finger. (Yes I know that more Jews were killed by the Nazis but it was over a much longer period)
And also that the current hostility isn't because Israel denied the Palestinians a homeland but because it offered them one. The current hostility is because the Palestinians see the Israelis as invaders who have spent the last 50 years makeing themselves at home on land which the Palestinians had been calling home for thousands of years.
>This drug will not make Brazillians stop fucking >each other or sharing needles or whatever it is >that Brazillians do to get AIDS.
You fucking racist. And I'm half Austrian. Brazil can't afford the education programs that we have.
Up untill a few decades we couldn't either. The United States used to steal every patent under the sun.
It's not as if drug companies pay for all of the FDA testing costs though.
They get done in research studies which are largely funded by government grants, through the NIH (ie tax dollars).
Wow. You're not only rude, you're an idiot too.
Governments certainly do pay for medical development. Ever heard of the NIH? They are the single largest source of medical research funding, and they are paid for by the government.
Yes pharmaceutical research is intensly expensive
but most of the cost is not born by the pharmaceutical companies. Government grants pay for large portions of the research. This money comes from taxpayes who shouldn't be double charged for a product.
Not really.
In spherical coordinates, there are certain triangles( ie isocelese triangles with lengths = 1/4 the circumfrence of the sphere which actually have 3 right angles)
I've gotten some great stuff second hand.
Most of my computer stuff:
A dual proc PIII 650 soon to be upgraded with 60
GB of hardware raid.
2 sparc20s
My friend has gotten some even cooler stuff.
He has an old centrifuge (which he hasn't found a use for yet.
He also got a still which had previously only been used for distilling distilled water (they needed really pure water for this experiment). Now he uses it to make moonshine;)
This will never work as a missile defense shield.
Right now we can barely manage to shoot down single missiles in optimal conditions. In a nuclear war with Russia there would be thousands of incomming missiles masked by tens of thousands of decoy missiles with dummy warheads. In this scenario you couldn't just have a system that was 99% reliable.
I think the real purpose of the Star Wars project is to develop and test weapons for use in space.
The Air Force's mission statement for 2020 include domination of space as a goal. The scramjet actually has a good chance of working. And the technology from the missile defense shield would give the US a huge leg up in any space based armed conflict.
It's hard to shoot down missiles when you've got 45 minutes to aim. But if you've got 2 months to aim, or move the whole target out of the way, you'll have a pretty good chance.
How about shooting down enemy satelites?
Or breaking the Bogota convention and putting a few of you own nukes up there? That would drop you delivery time down to a few minutes.
Finding the center of mass of an asteroid is easy.
Asteroid rotate around their center of mass. Even if your asteroid wasn't rotating asteroids have very densities, so you anyone who took first year calculus can find the center of mass of an asteroid of known shape.
It is German for "My life!" but it's not something you would ever say. Someone who's just been shot doesn't say "My life." Neither in German nor in English. Besides the pronunciation doesn't exactly make them sound like native German speakers.
Whatever happened to the idea of sending high voltage down the ionized paths formed by UV pulse lasers? It seems to me that these burn lasers will encounter all the same humanitarian opposition as rubber bulltets, tear gas, and water hoses do. And what happens when one of these lasers hits you in the eye? From what I understand of MW radiation it's wavelength is the same as the diameter of water molecules and resonates them. My guess is that shining one of these in someones face will probably make their eyes explode after about 2 seconds.
It could have been a depth perception issue.
Humans determine visual distance using a several factors.
When both eyes are working our eyes form two vertices of a triangle. The third vertex is whatever we are looking at. We "know" the distance between our eyes and the angles of the eye vertices. This is enough information to determine the distance of the object vertex from our eyes. This works fairly well at close range, but you need both eyes.
We also "know" how big most things in our environment are and can make distance estimates based on perceptual deviations from these sizes.
Thirdly our eyes focus on whatever we are looking at. We can feel how much our eyes need to strain to put an object into focus and derive distance information from that.
You were using one eye so the first, and most reliable method, was unavailable to you. Distance perception via size is not too good because objects come in different sizes and guessing distance based on size is a rather high level process.
Since you can't focus well with your bad eye the third option doesn't work very well either. Thus when you tore of your eye patch you suddenly made your depth perception much more accurate, and since your perception of velocity, in terms of distance from you, is based on depth perception, you could suddenly tell at what rate the car in front of you was accellerating.
I hate argue with someone of such grand intelect as yourself but SAR is Synthetic Aperature Radar. SAR does involve image resolution enhancement but in the case of SAR it seems to be more along the lines of optimizing sweep ranges and frequencies for single shot images.
By taking mutiple, slightly offset immages of the same area you can increase the resolution by averaging overlapped values at particular positions.
The actual algo is a bit more complicated but I don't remember it off hand.
The problem is I think the process scales at n^2 so you need alot of processing and alot of pictures to really boost the resolution.
But it is pretty easy to increase the resolution by a couple of factors.
Slashdot Mirror
Need I remind you that artists produced alot of really terrific music for thousands of years before patents ever existed. I'll grant that noone was making the obscene profits which the recording industry is making today, but artists produced art, they were compensated for it, and consumers got to listen to music.
We're almost all Linux.
Weve got 4 Sun450s running (surprise) Solaris.
We've got a couple of NT servers.
There are 5-10 Windows desktops.
Everything else is Linux, including about 20 linux rack mounts which we're serving web pages off of.
Actually there's growing evidence that we did know about the attacks before hand. More accurately parts of our government knew about parts of the plan before hand but because of shitty communications. They never manifested as any preventative measures.
Also, just knowing that someone is who they claims they are doesn't mean you can find the terrorists in the crowd. You can look at someone individually but you still have to match them against a large and possibly erroneous list of terrorists.
So we're planning on having a war on terrorism.
What will it be like?
Well we've never had a war against terrorism before but maybe we can extrapolate a bit from similar experiences.
The "War on Drugs" comes to mind.
In both cases there is no specific enemy. Instead the war is focused on a philosophy. Thus we attempt to eradicate the "enemy" by killing or arresting adherants of the philosophy.
In both cases it is a war which must be fought within our own borders as well as abroad.
In both cases there is no exit condition.It's unlikely that we'll ever be able to eliminate all terrorism but at what point will we have won the war? When we've elliminated 90% of all terrorism? When acts of terrorism fall below a certain acceptable frequency?
Both wars require gigantic expenditures of money over indefinate periods of time.
In my opinion the "War on Drugs" has been a spectacular failiur. We're spending ever increasing amounts and drug use is as high as it ever was. But now it's associated with terrible violence and the drug lords are rich.
Thus by my prediction, in a few years, when we're in the middle of the "War on Terrorism", we'll start to notice that we are spending way too much money without making any progress at all except to draw more attention to terrorists and eroding our own civil liberties.
In the gulf war we could do something, in Rwanda we could do nothing.
You're saying that the most powerfull army in the world couldn't stop a bunch of machete weilding civilians from slaughtering their neighbors?
And if stopping the genocide in Rwanda would have made Vietnam look like a tea party how did the Tutusi pull it off when their refugees mounted an invading army? (Hint they didn't have to annihilate the Hutu).
Also while there may have been no good guys, there was clearly a bad guy. So who was the good guy in the Gulf war?
More Tutsi were killed in Rwanda than everyone who died in the golf war combined. How is this even vaguely acceptable if invading another country is way out of bounds?
It wasn't really a troll.
Blood centers in NY have a shortage of equipment and personell to take blood donations.
I went to two different blood centers today and in both cases they told me to come back tomorrow.
If you don't have type O blood they don't even want you back until later.
That said you can sign up as a volunteer. They're particularly looking for people with skills in medicine, foreign languages, and computers (hint hint).
Oops. My mail server is down. Could someone else email them?
I've read that IBL has been encrypting his communications to his minions.
Maybe the fine folks at distributed.net could modify their software to crack these codes.
I think I'll email them about this.
I don't know if you're aware of this but the fundamental problem in that area is that since the founding of Israel, the Arab countries have continuously devoted themselves to its destruction. I think you also have some major misconceptions regarding the nature of a "Palestinian homeland" which could be more accurately described as "whatever area happens to be under Israeli control at the moment".
This is entirely understandable. Before the allies decided to give Israel to the Jews as a new homeland, the Arabs who had been living there for thousands of years, had just fought a bloody civil war to escape Turkish occupation. They got almost no help from their British "allies".
The use of the word "racist" is a non-event. The issue was conference ostensibly intended to fight racism that turned into a wildly anti-semitic assault depicting Israel (one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world) as the sole locus of evil. Yes, it's appropriate that the US government didn't lend legitimacy to it, and European countries should be ashamed of their compliance.
Why were the US and Israel the only two countries to walk out of the UN conference on racism?
If it makes you feel better, think about how much we spend on defense each year. Now think about the dollar value of the fact that Iraq didn't have nukes in 1991. Was aid to Israel cost effective?
We don't need Israel to blow up nuclear power plants. We're perfectly capable of doing it ourselves. And besides what right did we have to attack Iraq? Because we wanted to controle the price Iraq could charge for THEIR oil. If you think it was to save the poor Kuwaitis, where were we when the Hutu were commiting genocide against the Tutsi in Rowanda? At it's height the Tutsi were slaughtered at the greatest rate in history and we didn't lift a finger. (Yes I know that more Jews were killed by the Nazis but it was over a much longer period)
And also that the current hostility isn't because Israel denied the Palestinians a homeland but because it offered them one.
The current hostility is because the Palestinians see the Israelis as invaders who have spent the last 50 years makeing themselves at home on land which the Palestinians had been calling home for thousands of years.
A) Drug companies do get paid for R&D (see grant money)
B) There's already a treatment for malaria.
>This drug will not make Brazillians stop fucking >each other or sharing needles or whatever it is >that Brazillians do to get AIDS.
You fucking racist. And I'm half Austrian. Brazil can't afford the education programs that we have.
Up untill a few decades we couldn't either. The United States used to steal every patent under the sun.
It's not as if drug companies pay for all of the FDA testing costs though.
They get done in research studies which are largely funded by government grants, through the NIH (ie tax dollars).
Wow. You're not only rude, you're an idiot too.
Governments certainly do pay for medical development. Ever heard of the NIH? They are the single largest source of medical research funding, and they are paid for by the government.
Yes pharmaceutical research is intensly expensive
but most of the cost is not born by the pharmaceutical companies. Government grants pay for large portions of the research. This money comes from taxpayes who shouldn't be double charged for a product.
Making bucket loads of cash ending peoples misery
with research done on other peoples tax money.
Almost all medical research is funded by grant money. Huge amounts of this money get paid for by
tax dollars.
Given that the public is already paying the bulk of the cost for these medications they shouldn't have to pay again to reap their benefits.
Not really.
In spherical coordinates, there are certain triangles( ie isocelese triangles with lengths = 1/4 the circumfrence of the sphere which actually have 3 right angles)
I've gotten some great stuff second hand. ;)
Most of my computer stuff:
A dual proc PIII 650 soon to be upgraded with 60
GB of hardware raid.
2 sparc20s
My friend has gotten some even cooler stuff.
He has an old centrifuge (which he hasn't found a use for yet.
He also got a still which had previously only been used for distilling distilled water (they needed really pure water for this experiment). Now he uses it to make moonshine
This will never work as a missile defense shield.
Right now we can barely manage to shoot down single missiles in optimal conditions. In a nuclear war with Russia there would be thousands of incomming missiles masked by tens of thousands of decoy missiles with dummy warheads. In this scenario you couldn't just have a system that was 99% reliable.
I think the real purpose of the Star Wars project is to develop and test weapons for use in space.
The Air Force's mission statement for 2020 include domination of space as a goal. The scramjet actually has a good chance of working. And the technology from the missile defense shield would give the US a huge leg up in any space based armed conflict.
It's hard to shoot down missiles when you've got 45 minutes to aim. But if you've got 2 months to aim, or move the whole target out of the way, you'll have a pretty good chance.
How about shooting down enemy satelites?
Or breaking the Bogota convention and putting a few of you own nukes up there? That would drop you delivery time down to a few minutes.
Finding the center of mass of an asteroid is easy.
Asteroid rotate around their center of mass. Even if your asteroid wasn't rotating asteroids have very densities, so you anyone who took first year calculus can find the center of mass of an asteroid of known shape.
It is German for "My life!" but it's not something you would ever say. Someone who's just been shot doesn't say "My life." Neither in German nor in English. Besides the pronunciation doesn't exactly make them sound like native German speakers.
Whatever happened to the idea of sending high voltage down the ionized paths formed by UV pulse lasers? It seems to me that these burn lasers will encounter all the same humanitarian opposition as rubber bulltets, tear gas, and water hoses do. And what happens when one of these lasers hits you in the eye? From what I understand of MW radiation it's wavelength is the same as the diameter of water molecules and resonates them. My guess is that shining one of these in someones face will probably make their eyes explode after about 2 seconds.
My favorit part was always the fscked up German that the guards would babble out as they shot at you or died.
It could have been a depth perception issue.
Humans determine visual distance using a several factors.
When both eyes are working our eyes form two vertices of a triangle. The third vertex is whatever we are looking at. We "know" the distance between our eyes and the angles of the eye vertices. This is enough information to determine the distance of the object vertex from our eyes. This works fairly well at close range, but you need both eyes.
We also "know" how big most things in our environment are and can make distance estimates based on perceptual deviations from these sizes.
Thirdly our eyes focus on whatever we are looking at. We can feel how much our eyes need to strain to put an object into focus and derive distance information from that.
You were using one eye so the first, and most reliable method, was unavailable to you. Distance perception via size is not too good because objects come in different sizes and guessing distance based on size is a rather high level process.
Since you can't focus well with your bad eye the third option doesn't work very well either. Thus when you tore of your eye patch you suddenly made your depth perception much more accurate, and since your perception of velocity, in terms of distance from you, is based on depth perception, you could suddenly tell at what rate the car in front of you was accellerating.
I hate argue with someone of such grand intelect as yourself but SAR is Synthetic Aperature Radar. SAR does involve image resolution enhancement but in the case of SAR it seems to be more along the lines of optimizing sweep ranges and frequencies for single shot images.
By taking mutiple, slightly offset immages of the same area you can increase the resolution by averaging overlapped values at particular positions.
The actual algo is a bit more complicated but I don't remember it off hand.
The problem is I think the process scales at n^2 so you need alot of processing and alot of pictures to really boost the resolution.
But it is pretty easy to increase the resolution by a couple of factors.