NASA has been a millstone about the necks of honest taxpayers these last forty years.
If space exploration was so vital to private enterprise it wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar tax-payer's boondoggle. Private companies would be rushing to get there first if there was any tangible benefit to be had, which there isn't, apart from communications satellites and GPS.
That whole spin-off bullshit is plain nonsense. It's a notion worthy of the old Communist Bloc countries that the best way to develop better Velcro is not to invest a few thousand in an Earth-bound Velcro lab, but to first build a multi-billion dollar booster, a multi-billion dollar space lab, and send up million-dollar astronauts - all in the hope of getting some better fucking Velcro as a free fucking spinoff.
You want better Velcro - invest directly in Velcro research, not booster research. You want better medicine - buy biotech stock, not space stock. You want better plastics - send that donation to Dow Chemicals, not Acme Rocket, Inc.
If space exploration is really so fucking essential to Mankind, it had better pay its own fucking way.
But Yahoo Inc isn't publishing anything in France. Yahoo.fr removed the links, so its only being published in the US.
Well this is the first time I've heard of a dot com site being visible only in the US.
yahoo.fr and yahoo.com are domain names and have nothing to do with location. The machines hosting the dot com and the dot fr sites could be sitting in Timbuktu for all it matters. What matters is that the dot com site is visible in France and the French authorities say that it is Yahoo's responsibility to make sure it isn't. The site name itself means squat. Whether this is reasonable is another matter; I don't think so personally, but the judge has ruled otherwise.
If I were Yahoo Inc. I would refuse to obey. If the issue was pressed, just close up shop in France. If they don't want to lose the advertising revenue, setup something like fr.yahoo.com as opposed to yahoo.fr. Then see how far the Gov't of France can go with it.
The name is irrelevant. fr.yahoo.com, yahoo.org, yahoo.co.uk -- you name it, it doesn't matter. The ruling is irrelevant as far as domain names go, because -- get this -- a domain is not the same thing as a country. Re-registering your site to another domain name is not the same thing as crossing state lines. Registering a site to a dot br domain, for instance, does not make a US company Brazilian all of a sudden -- it remains USan, and subject to US law. The main jurisdictional problem is that Yahoo is a US company, and thus subject to US law, not French law -- unless they wish to do business in France. Domain names have nothing to do with it. This leaves Yahoo with two choices: do nothing, and hope the trouble of dragging this through to the WTO is too bothersome for the French; or comply;
... note that the US is also guilty of applying US law to internationally hosted sites. See this article on a similar, but not to be mentioned site.
Note that the French court was not banning the Yahoo pages in question for all internet users, just French users. This is perfectly within the jurisdiction of national courts; in this sense Internet is not any more special than other media, such as the TV, radio, or newspapers. There would be no big outcry if French courts would forbid the New York Times, for instance, from publishing such material in France -- even though the New York Times is based in the US (for New Yorkers: that includes the area outside city limits).
I think the problem people have with the ruling (apart from the usual reflexive furriner-bashing in any US-vs-Europe story), is that it is a lot easier for a newspaper to enforce a publishing ban in a given country ( just don't, to quote Nike), than it is for a dot com company, given the technical structure of the internet.
You miss the point in the original posting. The point was not that "smart weaponry" is a Bad Thing in and of itself, but that the prospects for reduced casualties also reduces the threshhold and perception of war-waging. There is a big difference between considering an expensive, protracted, bloody war, and a short, relatively clean war. There is little point in minimizing casualties (from an ethical viewpoint) if it means that the number of conflicts will escalate.
Or when both your allies and enemies are using the same type of equipment?
Then destroy them both. What the hell are my allies doing supplying my enemies with equipment?
You're a smart kid, ErikZ, but you need to learn to read better. No-one said your allies were supplying your enemies with equipment. Just that both may have the same kind of equipment.
The world's largest arms exporter is the US. Closely followed by France, Russia and Great Britain. In any conflict anywhere in the world, chances are that all weapons involved on both sides come from one of the four countries named, regardless of who the combatants are. Besides you don't just kill allies. That's a sure way to lose them.
Generally, scientifically speaking, when people get bored they don't go places, they pull out the ol' Sega, or fire up the ol' boob tube, or sag in the ol' couch and take a nap.
Cats, on the other hand, will chase balls of wool, or go outside (in any case SOMEWHERE) to f#ck or fight (or both): not for science, not for population pressure relief, not to 'save the whales', not for financial gain, but because they are cats, and that's what cats DO!
Try searching for the string "a-life". Google doesn't support this. Using altavista you can at least get some results.
But searching for "Alife" on Google works like a charm. Google is a tool. Judicious use of keywords and alternate keywords makes it a very powerful one. Other search engines pale in comparison.
That's easily demonstrated as false. A 5 year old child can be taught to read just about any book (but not understand all the words, of course). Can a 5 year old chinese child read any chinese book?
Clearly you have not been to an elementary school recently. Most 5 year olds have trouble reading easy words, let alone just about any book.
Phonetic rules don't help either, because most languages, and especially English, are a mass of exceptions.
"Cough, slough, through, plough, thought"
Considering the fact that./ers are presumably more intelligent than the average 5 year old, the fact that I regularly see words like "optomise", "rediculous", "flexable" means that even us hyperintelligent folk on./ have trouble with spelling rules.
Not to mention that Alphabets are much more flexible in accepting new words.
I have no idea if this is true, but I wouldn't accept it on face value.
Disclaimer: I am not a fan of ideographs, give me an alphabet any day.
Is this a troll?
Where do you think spent boosters from the ESA or NASA are dumped? In addition, when the Russians say they are going to dump the Mir in the Pacific they don't mean it is going to survive re-entry structurally intact; they just want to avoid an incident like the time a chunk of Skylab fell to ground on Australia when Skylab was being, er, retired.
And no, residual radiation from the Mir (if there is any; it was primarily solar powered) will not be significant.
European governments collectively spend a fraction of what the US spends on defense and (counter)-intelligence; a single European government spends probably two orders of magnitude (at least) less, and some countries three orders of magnitude less.
In addition Europe is not a country, nor is the EU, and forces are definitely not being pooled as far as espionage and military intelligence go.
While European governments are probably not innately morally any "purer" than the US, the US is way out there on its own as far as Echelon-like practices go. If Echelon is reality (and that's a big "if"), the US is the only player.
The author certainly understands Hawking radiation better than you do. Here's where you go wrong:
1. Hawking radiation is not a "rather slow phenomenon". The rate of radiation is inversely proportional to the size of the black hole. Huge black holes radiate very slowly. Small black holes radiate like mad.
2. It's not "merely kicked around in order to explain away why we're not constantly colliding with microscopic black holes left over from the big bang", it's neccessary to save a damn number of conservation laws from the waste bin.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA has been a millstone about the necks of honest taxpayers these last forty years.
If space exploration was so vital to private enterprise it wouldn't be a multi-billion dollar tax-payer's boondoggle. Private companies would be rushing to get there first if there was any tangible benefit to be had, which there isn't, apart from communications satellites and GPS.
That whole spin-off bullshit is plain nonsense. It's a notion worthy of the old Communist Bloc countries that the best way to develop better Velcro is not to invest a few thousand in an Earth-bound Velcro lab, but to first build a multi-billion dollar booster, a multi-billion dollar space lab, and send up million-dollar astronauts - all in the hope of getting some better fucking Velcro as a free fucking spinoff.
You want better Velcro - invest directly in Velcro research, not booster research. You want better medicine - buy biotech stock, not space stock. You want better plastics - send that donation to Dow Chemicals, not Acme Rocket, Inc.
If space exploration is really so fucking essential to Mankind, it had better pay its own fucking way.
Well this is the first time I've heard of a dot com site being visible only in the US. yahoo.fr and yahoo.com are domain names and have nothing to do with location. The machines hosting the dot com and the dot fr sites could be sitting in Timbuktu for all it matters. What matters is that the dot com site is visible in France and the French authorities say that it is Yahoo's responsibility to make sure it isn't. The site name itself means squat. Whether this is reasonable is another matter; I don't think so personally, but the judge has ruled otherwise.
If I were Yahoo Inc. I would refuse to obey. If the issue was pressed, just close up shop in France. If they don't want to lose the advertising revenue, setup something like fr.yahoo.com as opposed to yahoo.fr. Then see how far the Gov't of France can go with it.
The name is irrelevant. fr.yahoo.com, yahoo.org, yahoo.co.uk -- you name it, it doesn't matter. The ruling is irrelevant as far as domain names go, because -- get this -- a domain is not the same thing as a country. Re-registering your site to another domain name is not the same thing as crossing state lines. Registering a site to a dot br domain, for instance, does not make a US company Brazilian all of a sudden -- it remains USan, and subject to US law. The main jurisdictional problem is that Yahoo is a US company, and thus subject to US law, not French law -- unless they wish to do business in France. Domain names have nothing to do with it. This leaves Yahoo with two choices: do nothing, and hope the trouble of dragging this through to the WTO is too bothersome for the French; or comply;
Note that the French court was not banning the Yahoo pages in question for all internet users, just French users. This is perfectly within the jurisdiction of national courts; in this sense Internet is not any more special than other media, such as the TV, radio, or newspapers. There would be no big outcry if French courts would forbid the New York Times, for instance, from publishing such material in France -- even though the New York Times is based in the US (for New Yorkers: that includes the area outside city limits).
I think the problem people have with the ruling (apart from the usual reflexive furriner-bashing in any US-vs-Europe story), is that it is a lot easier for a newspaper to enforce a publishing ban in a given country ( just don't , to quote Nike), than it is for a dot com company, given the technical structure of the internet.
You miss the point in the original posting. The point was not that "smart weaponry" is a Bad Thing in and of itself, but that the prospects for reduced casualties also reduces the threshhold and perception of war-waging. There is a big difference between considering an expensive, protracted, bloody war, and a short, relatively clean war. There is little point in minimizing casualties (from an ethical viewpoint) if it means that the number of conflicts will escalate.
Then destroy them both. What the hell are my allies doing supplying my enemies with equipment?
You're a smart kid, ErikZ, but you need to learn to read better. No-one said your allies were supplying your enemies with equipment. Just that both may have the same kind of equipment.
The world's largest arms exporter is the US. Closely followed by France, Russia and Great Britain. In any conflict anywhere in the world, chances are that all weapons involved on both sides come from one of the four countries named, regardless of who the combatants are. Besides you don't just kill allies. That's a sure way to lose them.
Generally, scientifically speaking, when people get bored they don't go places, they pull out the ol' Sega, or fire up the ol' boob tube, or sag in the ol' couch and take a nap.
Cats, on the other hand, will chase balls of wool, or go outside (in any case SOMEWHERE) to f#ck or fight (or both): not for science, not for population pressure relief, not to 'save the whales', not for financial gain, but because they are cats, and that's what cats DO!
Ya don't want our weather. Landscape's not much to look at either -- mainly flat, flat flat and more flatness.
But searching for "Alife" on Google works like a charm. Google is a tool. Judicious use of keywords and alternate keywords makes it a very powerful one. Other search engines pale in comparison.
They don't. It's called pre-pay.
The last time I bought a mobile phone (outside the US) I didn't even need to supply my name or address.
Clearly you have not been to an elementary school recently. Most 5 year olds have trouble reading easy words, let alone just about any book. Phonetic rules don't help either, because most languages, and especially English, are a mass of exceptions.
"Cough, slough, through, plough, thought"
Considering the fact that ./ers are presumably more intelligent than the average 5 year old, the fact that I regularly see words like "optomise", "rediculous", "flexable" means that even us hyperintelligent folk on ./ have trouble with spelling rules.
Not to mention that Alphabets are much more flexible in accepting new words.
I have no idea if this is true, but I wouldn't accept it on face value.
Disclaimer: I am not a fan of ideographs, give me an alphabet any day.
And no, residual radiation from the Mir (if there is any; it was primarily solar powered) will not be significant.
Violent crime in the UK is decreasing, and has been decreasing the last 8 years. Petty crime, OTOH, has slowly but steadily been on the rise.
The distributed OS from Bell labs, Plan 9 seems to fit the bill for big iron more suitably than Hurd.
In addition Europe is not a country, nor is the EU, and forces are definitely not being pooled as far as espionage and military intelligence go.
While European governments are probably not innately morally any "purer" than the US, the US is way out there on its own as far as Echelon-like practices go. If Echelon is reality (and that's a big "if"), the US is the only player.
The author certainly understands Hawking radiation better than you do. Here's where you go wrong:
1. Hawking radiation is not a "rather slow phenomenon". The rate of radiation is inversely proportional to the size of the black hole. Huge black holes radiate very slowly. Small black holes radiate like mad.
2. It's not "merely kicked around in order to explain away why we're not constantly colliding with microscopic black holes left over from the big bang", it's neccessary to save a damn number of conservation laws from the waste bin.