Your comment looks rather stupid because of the last parts. However, it has been my long experience on the internet that about half of readers are simply too dense or unable to understand or detect obvious sarcasm, so unfortunately it appears to be needed in most cases. It's very sad. I think Jonathan Swift should be required reading for all schoolchildren.
To be fair, the OP didn't say we were "nothing better than monkeys", he said we're "one step up from chimpanzees and apes".
But you do have a point, we certainly are as close to any possible supreme being as anything we've come across, since we (or most of us at least) haven't come across anything that's obviously on a higher scale than us, which we can point to and effectively convince everyone else of. Some people have claims about meeting angels and djinn and such, but most people don't believe them and there's no repeatability there.
Why? I'd rather see more trials, because this would funnel tons of money out of SAP's and Oracle's corporate coffers and into the pockets of lawyers. Not that I care much for lawyers, but as horrible and despicable as they are, they're still better than Oracle and SAP. And anything that would lessen the power of these two software giants is a good thing in my book.
No way; RHEL, like any "enterprise" distro, is always way behind the times on everything, in the name of stability. The bleeding-edge stuff is what Fedora is for, to try it out before putting into the distro that giant corporate customers are paying tons of money for support for.
It's not insurance because it pays out for a situation that is extremely likely to happen.
Wrong. Ever heard of health insurance? Who doesn't need to ever go to the doctor? Insurance, these days, is not only for situations that are unlikely.
It's interesting how it's not theft when someone exploits a political system to get others to pay for their selfish gain
Who said that? I never said that.
and it is theft when someone doesn't want to pay into something that's they're not going to benefit from.
Who said that? I never said that.
Who made those "promises" that we're all supposed to keep?
Simple: your elected leaders made these promises. YOU elected these leaders to speak for you. They've made promises, and now YOU need to back up those promises. Don't like it? Then you should have made better selections at the voting booth. Stop whining that you're being made accountable for your actions.
It's that Social Security is a pointless and mandatory redistribution of wealth.
This is an utterly stupid statement. SS doesn't "redistribute" wealth, it gives more money to people who paid more into the system when they were working, just like any retirement fund.
apollo was a military program. if you really want technological development, start a new cold war with the russians or chinese. you don't even have to go to space.
We're in two shooting wars now, and there's almost no technological development resulting from it, except perhaps remotely-piloted aircraft. And what good does another cold war do? At least with space exploration, you actually get a lot of good science, plus you develop space-based capabilities that are good for many things besides military purposes.
There's tons of valuable minerals in asteroids; we already know this. There's also something even more important up there: energy. We're running out of it down here, and that which we have has a lot of serious downsides (atmospheric pollution, etc.).
No, giving money to people who've proved they can't manage it is stupid, and it rewards the wrongdoers. It never should have been done. If the banks are that important to the economy, they should have been seized by the government, and then broken apart and privatized later. Governments seize critical industries all the time. You don't leave the same morons in charge when things go south, and you sure as hell don't give them a fortune in taxpayer money so they can have a big bonus.
Just wait til they pull a Microsoft and start trying to push a crappy new UI on their customers which their customers hate. Businesses make big blunders all the time, and past performance is not a guarantee of success.
Also, more pertinently, this stuff shouldn't be concerning NASA at all. Their mission is (or should be) to pursue space exploration for the USA, and that's it, not to do diplomatic shit. Leave that to the diplomats in the State Department. The only time NASA should be doing anything international is when they're working on projects together with foreign space agencies, which would be JAXA, ESA, the Russians, etc. The Islamic countries don't have any space agencies, so NASA shouldn't be concerned with them in the slightest way. Their budget is already way too small, the last thing they need is any more distractions.
If the ME nations need the Americans to make them proud of their heritage, while simultaneously invading and occupying their countries, then they're hopeless. And the ME isn't the only cradle of civilization; there are two more in India and China that arose around the same time.
This guy need to be replaced with somebody with a vision of the future.
To do that, you need to first elect some people with a good vision of the future to run the country. We have consistently shown that we are not interested in such a person.
Reps tend to want lower gov spending except on military. Dems tend to want lower spending except on social entitlements of their liking.
No, they don't. They each talk that way, but when Reps are in office, government spending goes up. And when Dems are in office, government spending goes up (with the possible exception of Clinton, but he also had a giant revenue surplus to work with).
The Reps were all too happy to bail out the banksters, so any claims about them wanting lower spending are bullshit.
The Dems have been all too happy to continue to fund the mideast wars as well as the bailouts, and even step up the war in Afghanistan, so any claims about them wanting lower spending are also bullshit.
Social Security and Medicare must be massively reformed to be means based and not handouts to everyone over 65
Social Security is a government-run insurance program. The people getting those benefits (at least, the retirement benefits, I'm not addressing the other things SSI has gotten into) get them based on how much they paid into the system during their (or their spouse's) working years. Pay more in, get more out. It's no different than any private life insurance / retirement program, except the returns aren't as good (but they're guaranteed, and therefore much less risky). If you take that away, you're essentially stealing from those people, because when they paid that extra 15% into FICA, they were promised Medicare and SS benefits when they retired in exchange.
Are you going to take away peoples' private retirement pensions too, if you think they already have too much money? That sounds rather socialistic of you.
The Dems and Reps are both right about certain things; those are their talking points that they use to get votes. The problem is that they're both completely wrong about many more things.
Yes, we should stop spending on irrelevant things. But space isn't irrelevant; the computer you're using uses electronics technology developed in the Apollo program. However, all this military activity IS irrelevant, and should be cut. Giveaways to corrupt, mismanaged industries is a waste too, and should be cut. Tax breaks to corn and oil companies is a waste, and should be stopped.
You're right though: raising taxes won't help, because it will only go to wasteful things like wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran, to bailouts so companies can socialize their losses while privatizing their profits, and so Obama can shut down airspace in major cities constantly as he flies around for no good reason.
You don't get as much science, as fast, with robotic probes as you do with people walking around. You also don't develop technology nearly as quickly; the Apollo program contributed tons of things to our technology, and we're not seeing those contributions with robotic probes. They're nice for exploring far-off things where you're not in as much of a hurry or they're just too far away to feasibly reach with humans with present technology, and for doing so on a small budget, but that's it. If you want to actually develop technology and capabilities that will improve the economy, such as asteroid/moon mining or space-based solar power generation, you have to send humans up there to get it done any time soon. Then, you'll get a bunch of positive side-effects with technological developments, plus you can make money on space tourism.
I have no doubt that Charles Bolden was taken into the White House and that Barack Obama very likely said those things to him.
Exactly; what failed was that Bolden wasn't as politically savvy as the Obama Administration would have liked, and he basically repeated verbatim what he was told, and that didn't suit Obama at all, so they had to issue a "clarification". He's lucky they didn't remove him from his post, or worse have him disappeared.
Space policy is dead last in terms of things that the Obama administration is concerned about
Exactly. Obama doesn't give two shits about space. And neither does Romney.
Perhaps some day there will be some serious space policy. I expect to wait a decade or more for that to happen though.
I don't think so, I think it's all downhill from here, unless the country breaks apart and some section or sections decide to make space an important part of their own new national policy. This country is going the way of the Roman Empire and the Soviet Union. You can't maintain an economy on military adventurism indefinitely.
Holy shit, I didn't even realize how bad that was, and apparently this came straight from Obama himself. No wonder the right-wingers say Obama is a "closet Muslim"; with directives like this ("reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering") that's all the ammo they need. And what historic contribution anyway? Sure, the people living in those countries 1000 years ago did some pretty neat stuff with mathematics and astronomy, but that was a long time ago; 1000-1500 years before that, the ancient Romans and Greeks were doing some pretty neat stuff with mathematics and engineering too, but I don't see anyone saying we need to reach out to Italy and Greece to make them feel good about their historic contributions (and Italy is still making contributions to engineering, just look at Ferraris). Meanwhile, the Muslim world embraced fundamentalist around 500 years ago and it's been all down the shitter since then; this should serve as an important lesson for other countries, namely the USA.
Yep, and then the shitty summary talks about strength and toughness, which are totally different materials properties. You'd think a techie site could at least get technical terminology correct, but I guess not.
The article is totally full of shit, at least if the summary is anything to go by, and provides little real information, because they conflate the terms "hardness", "toughness", and "strength", which are all totally different material properties.
I'm guessing they tested on wisdom teeth precisely because lots of people get them removed, so there's probably tons of them available for doing random tests on. Are you volunteering to have your incisors removed so they can do some tests on those instead?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe what we need is to outsource our regulation to third parties, perhaps in foreign countries, since we obviously can't do it right ourselves.
Your comment looks rather stupid because of the last parts. However, it has been my long experience on the internet that about half of readers are simply too dense or unable to understand or detect obvious sarcasm, so unfortunately it appears to be needed in most cases. It's very sad. I think Jonathan Swift should be required reading for all schoolchildren.
To be fair, the OP didn't say we were "nothing better than monkeys", he said we're "one step up from chimpanzees and apes".
But you do have a point, we certainly are as close to any possible supreme being as anything we've come across, since we (or most of us at least) haven't come across anything that's obviously on a higher scale than us, which we can point to and effectively convince everyone else of. Some people have claims about meeting angels and djinn and such, but most people don't believe them and there's no repeatability there.
Yep, most of Nokia is infested with cancer; best to just pick the good parts off, and leave the rest to fester and rot.
That said, I hope Intel or Google or someone else worthy buys Qt from Nokia soon, before Nokia ruins it.
Why? I'd rather see more trials, because this would funnel tons of money out of SAP's and Oracle's corporate coffers and into the pockets of lawyers. Not that I care much for lawyers, but as horrible and despicable as they are, they're still better than Oracle and SAP. And anything that would lessen the power of these two software giants is a good thing in my book.
No way; RHEL, like any "enterprise" distro, is always way behind the times on everything, in the name of stability. The bleeding-edge stuff is what Fedora is for, to try it out before putting into the distro that giant corporate customers are paying tons of money for support for.
Citation needed. Last I heard, RHEL was still using Gnome2, and it was going to be a bit before Gnome3 came out.
It's not insurance because it pays out for a situation that is extremely likely to happen.
Wrong. Ever heard of health insurance? Who doesn't need to ever go to the doctor? Insurance, these days, is not only for situations that are unlikely.
It's interesting how it's not theft when someone exploits a political system to get others to pay for their selfish gain
Who said that? I never said that.
and it is theft when someone doesn't want to pay into something that's they're not going to benefit from.
Who said that? I never said that.
Who made those "promises" that we're all supposed to keep?
Simple: your elected leaders made these promises. YOU elected these leaders to speak for you. They've made promises, and now YOU need to back up those promises. Don't like it? Then you should have made better selections at the voting booth. Stop whining that you're being made accountable for your actions.
It's that Social Security is a pointless and mandatory redistribution of wealth.
This is an utterly stupid statement. SS doesn't "redistribute" wealth, it gives more money to people who paid more into the system when they were working, just like any retirement fund.
apollo was a military program. if you really want technological development, start a new cold war with the russians or chinese. you don't even have to go to space.
We're in two shooting wars now, and there's almost no technological development resulting from it, except perhaps remotely-piloted aircraft. And what good does another cold war do? At least with space exploration, you actually get a lot of good science, plus you develop space-based capabilities that are good for many things besides military purposes.
There's tons of valuable minerals in asteroids; we already know this. There's also something even more important up there: energy. We're running out of it down here, and that which we have has a lot of serious downsides (atmospheric pollution, etc.).
I'm not a dentist, but I seriously doubt wisdom teeth are substantially different in composition from any other tooth, especially the other molars.
No, giving money to people who've proved they can't manage it is stupid, and it rewards the wrongdoers. It never should have been done. If the banks are that important to the economy, they should have been seized by the government, and then broken apart and privatized later. Governments seize critical industries all the time. You don't leave the same morons in charge when things go south, and you sure as hell don't give them a fortune in taxpayer money so they can have a big bonus.
Just wait til they pull a Microsoft and start trying to push a crappy new UI on their customers which their customers hate. Businesses make big blunders all the time, and past performance is not a guarantee of success.
Stupid Slashdot, no edit function like Reddit....
Also, more pertinently, this stuff shouldn't be concerning NASA at all. Their mission is (or should be) to pursue space exploration for the USA, and that's it, not to do diplomatic shit. Leave that to the diplomats in the State Department. The only time NASA should be doing anything international is when they're working on projects together with foreign space agencies, which would be JAXA, ESA, the Russians, etc. The Islamic countries don't have any space agencies, so NASA shouldn't be concerned with them in the slightest way. Their budget is already way too small, the last thing they need is any more distractions.
If the ME nations need the Americans to make them proud of their heritage, while simultaneously invading and occupying their countries, then they're hopeless. And the ME isn't the only cradle of civilization; there are two more in India and China that arose around the same time.
This guy need to be replaced with somebody with a vision of the future.
To do that, you need to first elect some people with a good vision of the future to run the country. We have consistently shown that we are not interested in such a person.
Reps tend to want lower gov spending except on military. Dems tend to want lower spending except on social entitlements of their liking.
No, they don't. They each talk that way, but when Reps are in office, government spending goes up. And when Dems are in office, government spending goes up (with the possible exception of Clinton, but he also had a giant revenue surplus to work with).
The Reps were all too happy to bail out the banksters, so any claims about them wanting lower spending are bullshit.
The Dems have been all too happy to continue to fund the mideast wars as well as the bailouts, and even step up the war in Afghanistan, so any claims about them wanting lower spending are also bullshit.
Social Security and Medicare must be massively reformed to be means based and not handouts to everyone over 65
Social Security is a government-run insurance program. The people getting those benefits (at least, the retirement benefits, I'm not addressing the other things SSI has gotten into) get them based on how much they paid into the system during their (or their spouse's) working years. Pay more in, get more out. It's no different than any private life insurance / retirement program, except the returns aren't as good (but they're guaranteed, and therefore much less risky). If you take that away, you're essentially stealing from those people, because when they paid that extra 15% into FICA, they were promised Medicare and SS benefits when they retired in exchange.
Are you going to take away peoples' private retirement pensions too, if you think they already have too much money? That sounds rather socialistic of you.
The Dems and Reps are both right about certain things; those are their talking points that they use to get votes. The problem is that they're both completely wrong about many more things.
Yes, we should stop spending on irrelevant things. But space isn't irrelevant; the computer you're using uses electronics technology developed in the Apollo program. However, all this military activity IS irrelevant, and should be cut. Giveaways to corrupt, mismanaged industries is a waste too, and should be cut. Tax breaks to corn and oil companies is a waste, and should be stopped.
You're right though: raising taxes won't help, because it will only go to wasteful things like wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran, to bailouts so companies can socialize their losses while privatizing their profits, and so Obama can shut down airspace in major cities constantly as he flies around for no good reason.
You don't get as much science, as fast, with robotic probes as you do with people walking around. You also don't develop technology nearly as quickly; the Apollo program contributed tons of things to our technology, and we're not seeing those contributions with robotic probes. They're nice for exploring far-off things where you're not in as much of a hurry or they're just too far away to feasibly reach with humans with present technology, and for doing so on a small budget, but that's it. If you want to actually develop technology and capabilities that will improve the economy, such as asteroid/moon mining or space-based solar power generation, you have to send humans up there to get it done any time soon. Then, you'll get a bunch of positive side-effects with technological developments, plus you can make money on space tourism.
This post reminds me why I like reddit's moderation system better; I'd give you an up-mod if I could, because you're exactly correct.
I have no doubt that Charles Bolden was taken into the White House and that Barack Obama very likely said those things to him.
Exactly; what failed was that Bolden wasn't as politically savvy as the Obama Administration would have liked, and he basically repeated verbatim what he was told, and that didn't suit Obama at all, so they had to issue a "clarification". He's lucky they didn't remove him from his post, or worse have him disappeared.
Space policy is dead last in terms of things that the Obama administration is concerned about
Exactly. Obama doesn't give two shits about space. And neither does Romney.
Perhaps some day there will be some serious space policy. I expect to wait a decade or more for that to happen though.
I don't think so, I think it's all downhill from here, unless the country breaks apart and some section or sections decide to make space an important part of their own new national policy. This country is going the way of the Roman Empire and the Soviet Union. You can't maintain an economy on military adventurism indefinitely.
Holy shit, I didn't even realize how bad that was, and apparently this came straight from Obama himself. No wonder the right-wingers say Obama is a "closet Muslim"; with directives like this ("reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering") that's all the ammo they need. And what historic contribution anyway? Sure, the people living in those countries 1000 years ago did some pretty neat stuff with mathematics and astronomy, but that was a long time ago; 1000-1500 years before that, the ancient Romans and Greeks were doing some pretty neat stuff with mathematics and engineering too, but I don't see anyone saying we need to reach out to Italy and Greece to make them feel good about their historic contributions (and Italy is still making contributions to engineering, just look at Ferraris). Meanwhile, the Muslim world embraced fundamentalist around 500 years ago and it's been all down the shitter since then; this should serve as an important lesson for other countries, namely the USA.
Yep, and then the shitty summary talks about strength and toughness, which are totally different materials properties. You'd think a techie site could at least get technical terminology correct, but I guess not.
The article is totally full of shit, at least if the summary is anything to go by, and provides little real information, because they conflate the terms "hardness", "toughness", and "strength", which are all totally different material properties.
I'm guessing they tested on wisdom teeth precisely because lots of people get them removed, so there's probably tons of them available for doing random tests on. Are you volunteering to have your incisors removed so they can do some tests on those instead?