Missed the part about hillbillies derailing trains, eh? There is nothing you can do to secure thousands of miles of rails. Just about any drunk lout can figure out how to derail a train. So it happens all the time, right? And nobody uses trains anymore, right? Oh.
I assume that's why you don't travel on trains, either, on account of all those darn hillbillies derailing them all the time, right?
You need to reread the EULA on Life(R): "No guarantees with regard to length, quality or fitness for any purpose. This contract may be terminated without prior notice at any time." Yes, life comes with risks. No, being shot down by hillbillies is not top of the list, which is probably occupied by participating in traffic on foot, bicycle, car, skateboard or motorcycle. Someone ought to sue the inventor of traffic. A guy could get killed out there.
I note that you are not following any non-American news sources. No, they are not 'objective', either, but they give a nice view on those aspects of the news on which ALL American media are aligned. You'd be surprised how enlightening that is. I recall NPR being at most carefully non-committal about WMD before the war, while many foreign media expressed open doubts. And then, two years later, NPR started running programs asking "how could we all be fooled so badly?"
During the run-up to the war, all American media smelled of Winston Smith's pen, and I still don't understand just how the White House did that.
As a side-note, "the world's Co2" weighs in at about 3x10^15 kg, or 3x10^12 tonnes, or 3,000,000 million tonnes, or 3,000 billion tonnes. All of human activity (fossil fuel burning and everything else) produces 27 billion tonnes of CO2 each year. That's right. ALL human activity contributes less than 1% to "the world's Co2" each year. We add nearly one percent each year to the atmosphere's CO2? So we will have doubled CO2 levels by 2100? And that's nothing much to you? Are you sure about those numbers? You see, nobody has managed to scare me about the extent of the problem quite as much as you just did. Man, you could get a job as Al Gore's script writer.
Right now, our way of treating these attacks is fundamentally flawed. By making these shootings global headline news and making the murderers global stars through in-depth articles and documentaries about them, we are encouraging every sidelined lonely little freak to do that to feed his hunger for attention. There should be a rule that these pathetic twerps are never named and always relegated to the back pages. Every day, somewhere on Earth, hundreds of husbands beat their wives to death and tens of thousands beat them into hospital and still women mostly do not feel that marrying is too dangerous. Instead, they fear amok runners, terrorists and rapists in the park, since those get the headlines.
Amok runners are more irrelevant than falling roof tiles, which kill far more people during any year.
Sorry, I just typed "amok" into Wikipedia. I don't recall where I read of it originally. Looking back at it, that statement about ending amok-running has a scent of colonial superciliousness, which makes it somewhat suspect.
I said "when it comes to business related legislation". In the USA, businesses get the best legislation money can buy regardless of the citizens' interests (calling them mere consumers is demeaning). That's not "poo-pooing" the US in general. If you start crying "Anti-American!" every time someone utters a word of doubt, your democracy is dead. Like I said, governments have no say in these standards bodies, so the "first world democracies" simply can't get their "shit together". It's none of their business. Businesses are fundamentally undemocratic organisations, so it is no surprise that any quasi-democratic body they set up is dysfunctional. The minute a manager starts acting for the common good where it opposes his company's interests, he gets fired. Imagine a democracy run by 100 % sociopaths. Herding cats is easier. This means that situations like the present one will crop up inevitably.
...reference recent news from omaha nnebraska if you think this scenario is not a constant danger throughout human existence...
The news media only report what is sensational and untypical. And yet the world is full of people who think the news describe the world as it is. You might just as well base your world view on the Guinness Book of World Records.
Most people throughout history have lived their lives in peace, untouched by violence. I know I have. We don't get mentioned in history or in the news, because we are boring. Violence is the exception, not the rule of human existence. Otherwise, we would still be apes squabbling in caves. You don't build roads or factories with samurai swords or bombs.
Running amok in the way you describe is originally a Malaysian tradition. A guy loses too much face, snaps, runs around with a knife and the crowd beats him to death. It's a manly way of committing suicide. Recently, these attacks have ended nearly completely in Malaysia: Today, amok-runners get restrained, arrested and sentenced to life in prison - which they apparently don't regard as a cool way to go. Using lethal force on a suicidal maniac means giving him the easy way out.
Mind, since the USA is fundamentally corrupt when it comes to legislation concerning businesses (cf. DMCA), in whose favor would you weight the ISO then? Sweden has been repeatedly certified as one of the least corrupt countries on Earth, but even their standards body was overrun by MS, as was Finland's, another top contender in normal accountability stakes.
Standards bodies have been set up by businesses for businesses, with no democratic ideals involved, except where it doesn't matter. There is a tiny window of opportunity called "little or no installed base" that allows negotiations to be guided by technical excellence alone. This was never going to work with the MS Word format. If they had submitted MSOOXML in time to have it polished to perfection, there would have been competing products (gasp!) on the market in no time.
A single glance at pictures of Tibetans and natives from the Andean highlands convinced me of that years ago - but then I'm not a scientist and don't work under any burden of proof, so I have it easy.
...before printing press was invented, literature was only distributed by unregulated hand-copying.
Um, the Chinese have disseminated printed literature for more than a thousand years now. The copying by hand stems from the central position calligraphy has in their culture. The only way to attain a hand that will not expose you as an uncultured clod is by copying whole books hand-written by masters of the art. It is a learning method, not a way to keep literature in circulation, since those Confucian classics etc. would be massively available in woodblock print versions as well.
Who holds the Chinese government accountable? At least the Americans have a choice, and a mostly free press.
That reminds me of plain looking women who befriend ugly women just to look stunning by contrast. By European standards, neither your choices nor your press look particularly appealing. I don't see anybody holding the Bush administration accountable for anything.
Pure hearsay: A friend of mine returned from France to Finland and said that electricity bills in Paris were preposterously high compared to Finnish rates. Finland's electricity comes from a mixture of coal, Russian natural gas and nuclear. Consumers are given a choice of competing power providers, which may have lowered prices as well. But I've never heard a claim that electricity was fantastically cheap here.
I tend to give more credence to well written arguments. Your comment contained a) glaring typos (loose -> lose) b) mixed metaphors (print money on trees - the US Mint is run by monkeys?) c) interesting logic (the market will take care of the second part -> b) find politicians willing to exercise fiscal restraint? Huh? Now that's cynical.)
Regarding the contents of your statements: The US is not an export driven economy, compared to most any other industrialised nation, so expensive imports will hurt more than can be gained by exports. I will not start the standard flame war on environmental matters, so no comment. The citizens as well as the governments are deep in debt and a rise in interest rates and losses in credit ratings have already pushed many over the tipping point, with more to follow. I do not expect that banking crisis to be a short term correction.
Um, our programmers are all in conference negotiating the next shutdown dialog, but we have plenty of spare lawyers, so we'll fix this problem with a DMCA law suit in 5, 4, 3, 2...
Things we did not want to know #42: The reason Finnish speakers NEVER have problem spelling "per se", even if English is their fifth language, is that in Finnish "perse" is a rude word for "posterior". A similar reason explains why people named Pascal or Pascale never stay long in Finland...
When the competition considers their work "deeply unsexy", Apple can run circles around them. Smart phones just might sell a bit better, if the average consumer weren't convinced that most of those features are too hard to use. I definitely don't want to spend more than half an hour studying my phone manual. And that's where the sex appeal comes in. Unless you manage to get me all hot and bothered about your new product, I'm sticking with my five year old basic cell. It does calls and SMS! Whee!
You must be new here. There have been plenty of posts about the competition, so why rehash the basics every time?
Would you like an explanation of the Olympic Games on every sports site page that mentions it? The Urban Challenge and the RoboCup are the geek's equivalents and thus do not require explanation on Slashdot.
Oh, and a "wiki" is any site that allows user edits and is not short for Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
In other words, you suffer from precisely the same obfuscatory abbreviationitis you were complaining about.
Most of India and Africa have climates at least as hot as Texas. Most people there can't afford AC. Could it be that they know how to build houses you can live in, instead of copying the architecture of moderate climate regions and fixing its faults by brute force?
I buy computers with a three year lag, so this summer, I had no problems knowing that this Pentium IV thingy is faster than my previous Pentium III doodad. I have a vague recollection that Celeron means an el-cheapo PIV with less cache, but I'm going to have to bone up on these Centrino, Core, Duo thingamajigs etc. three years from now when I buy my next used computer. Or I'll just shrug and figure that any of those is bound to be faster than this old heap.
First, I'd have to find something I can't do on my present machine, though. Unlike some systems, GNU/Linux isn't getting much slower over the years, if you ignore the huge windowing environments. Go EvilWM!
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
3739 fruke 15 0 2856 1100 928 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.19 evilwm
And yeah, I know I'm just killing the computer industry. I do office work, process audio, surf the net and watch videos. Why would I need a supercomputer on my desk?
Having to spend months or years of your life and money defending yourself against charges that are obviously ridiculous from the outset is punishment by itself. What did the man who found the Atlanta Olympics bomb learn from his experience? "Next time I see something suspicious, I'll look the other way." If I ever see something that looks like a bomb, will I report it and risk being suspected of setting it myself? I don't know. There are nicer places to spend your life than courtrooms and jails.
Mind, for Mr. Kurtz this is just brilliant publicity. As I googled for him, one link spoke of his superior anti-Bush credentials...
Mistaking an artist who works in full view of the public, whose work can be found in a minute's googling, who documents every step he takes,
for a terrorist who might be expected to make at least a token effort to keep his doings secret, no matter how inept he is,
is pretty idiotic.
These are face-saving measures, nothing else. And if, in mailing out harmless bacteria to a person, the institute did not at least google his university and status, to make sure he was permitted to receive said harmless bacteria, Mr. Kurtz did the authorities a favor in uncovering sloppy security procedures at said institute, which should then be the party requiring prosecution instead of Mr. Kurtz.
But perhaps you think that journalists who smuggle guns on airplanes and then reveal the flaws in airport security to the public should be thrown in jail as well. If intentions don't count, then every tank truck driver carrying hazardous substances who has an accident should be prosecuted as a terrorist.
...put lead paint into the mouths of our children, make industrial installations kill workers, airplanes fall out of the sky, poison our rivers and reduce companies to give subcontracting contracts only to companies with known track records to avoid buying substandard components from non-accountable foreign suppliers. Yeah, been there, done that, which is why the ISO quality standards were developed. It's a horribly bureaucratic solution, but how else do you ensure you're not buying useless crap or that you get one good shipment and then useless crap in the next one?
There are plenty of non-ISO certified companies who will gladly sell you crap at half the price, if you want to end up like Mattel.
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Missed the part about hillbillies derailing trains, eh? There is nothing you can do to secure thousands of miles of rails. Just about any drunk lout can figure out how to derail a train. So it happens all the time, right? And nobody uses trains anymore, right? Oh.
I assume that's why you don't travel on trains, either, on account of all those darn hillbillies derailing them all the time, right?
You need to reread the EULA on Life(R): "No guarantees with regard to length, quality or fitness for any purpose. This contract may be terminated without prior notice at any time." Yes, life comes with risks. No, being shot down by hillbillies is not top of the list, which is probably occupied by participating in traffic on foot, bicycle, car, skateboard or motorcycle. Someone ought to sue the inventor of traffic. A guy could get killed out there.
I note that you are not following any non-American news sources. No, they are not 'objective', either, but they give a nice view on those aspects of the news on which ALL American media are aligned. You'd be surprised how enlightening that is. I recall NPR being at most carefully non-committal about WMD before the war, while many foreign media expressed open doubts. And then, two years later, NPR started running programs asking "how could we all be fooled so badly?"
During the run-up to the war, all American media smelled of Winston Smith's pen, and I still don't understand just how the White House did that.
...unless their famous hulls could survive the explosion of their travelling sun.
Right now, our way of treating these attacks is fundamentally flawed. By making these shootings global headline news and making the murderers global stars through in-depth articles and documentaries about them, we are encouraging every sidelined lonely little freak to do that to feed his hunger for attention. There should be a rule that these pathetic twerps are never named and always relegated to the back pages. Every day, somewhere on Earth, hundreds of husbands beat their wives to death and tens of thousands beat them into hospital and still women mostly do not feel that marrying is too dangerous. Instead, they fear amok runners, terrorists and rapists in the park, since those get the headlines.
Amok runners are more irrelevant than falling roof tiles, which kill far more people during any year.
Sorry, I just typed "amok" into Wikipedia. I don't recall where I read of it originally. Looking back at it, that statement about ending amok-running has a scent of colonial superciliousness, which makes it somewhat suspect.
I said "when it comes to business related legislation". In the USA, businesses get the best legislation money can buy regardless of the citizens' interests (calling them mere consumers is demeaning). That's not "poo-pooing" the US in general. If you start crying "Anti-American!" every time someone utters a word of doubt, your democracy is dead.
Like I said, governments have no say in these standards bodies, so the "first world democracies" simply can't get their "shit together". It's none of their business.
Businesses are fundamentally undemocratic organisations, so it is no surprise that any quasi-democratic body they set up is dysfunctional. The minute a manager starts acting for the common good where it opposes his company's interests, he gets fired. Imagine a democracy run by 100 % sociopaths. Herding cats is easier.
This means that situations like the present one will crop up inevitably.
...reference recent news from omaha nnebraska if you think this scenario is not a constant danger throughout human existence...The news media only report what is sensational and untypical. And yet the world is full of people who think the news describe the world as it is. You might just as well base your world view on the Guinness Book of World Records.
Most people throughout history have lived their lives in peace, untouched by violence. I know I have. We don't get mentioned in history or in the news, because we are boring. Violence is the exception, not the rule of human existence. Otherwise, we would still be apes squabbling in caves. You don't build roads or factories with samurai swords or bombs.
Running amok in the way you describe is originally a Malaysian tradition. A guy loses too much face, snaps, runs around with a knife and the crowd beats him to death. It's a manly way of committing suicide. Recently, these attacks have ended nearly completely in Malaysia: Today, amok-runners get restrained, arrested and sentenced to life in prison - which they apparently don't regard as a cool way to go. Using lethal force on a suicidal maniac means giving him the easy way out.
Standards bodies have been set up by businesses for businesses, with no democratic ideals involved, except where it doesn't matter. There is a tiny window of opportunity called "little or no installed base" that allows negotiations to be guided by technical excellence alone. This was never going to work with the MS Word format. If they had submitted MSOOXML in time to have it polished to perfection, there would have been competing products (gasp!) on the market in no time.
A single glance at pictures of Tibetans and natives from the Andean highlands convinced me of that years ago - but then I'm not a scientist and don't work under any burden of proof, so I have it easy.
...before printing press was invented, literature was only distributed by unregulated hand-copying.Um, the Chinese have disseminated printed literature for more than a thousand years now. The copying by hand stems from the central position calligraphy has in their culture. The only way to attain a hand that will not expose you as an uncultured clod is by copying whole books hand-written by masters of the art. It is a learning method, not a way to keep literature in circulation, since those Confucian classics etc. would be massively available in woodblock print versions as well.
That reminds me of plain looking women who befriend ugly women just to look stunning by contrast. By European standards, neither your choices nor your press look particularly appealing. I don't see anybody holding the Bush administration accountable for anything.
Pure hearsay: A friend of mine returned from France to Finland and said that electricity bills in Paris were preposterously high compared to Finnish rates. Finland's electricity comes from a mixture of coal, Russian natural gas and nuclear. Consumers are given a choice of competing power providers, which may have lowered prices as well. But I've never heard a claim that electricity was fantastically cheap here.
I tend to give more credence to well written arguments. Your comment contained
a) glaring typos (loose -> lose)
b) mixed metaphors (print money on trees - the US Mint is run by monkeys?)
c) interesting logic (the market will take care of the second part -> b) find politicians willing to exercise fiscal restraint? Huh? Now that's cynical.)
Regarding the contents of your statements:
The US is not an export driven economy, compared to most any other industrialised nation, so expensive imports will hurt more than can be gained by exports.
I will not start the standard flame war on environmental matters, so no comment.
The citizens as well as the governments are deep in debt and a rise in interest rates and losses in credit ratings have already pushed many over the tipping point, with more to follow. I do not expect that banking crisis to be a short term correction.
Um, our programmers are all in conference negotiating the next shutdown dialog, but we have plenty of spare lawyers, so we'll fix this problem with a DMCA law suit in 5, 4, 3, 2...
Things we did not want to know #42: The reason Finnish speakers NEVER have problem spelling "per se", even if English is their fifth language, is that in Finnish "perse" is a rude word for "posterior".
A similar reason explains why people named Pascal or Pascale never stay long in Finland...
When the competition considers their work "deeply unsexy", Apple can run circles around them. Smart phones just might sell a bit better, if the average consumer weren't convinced that most of those features are too hard to use. I definitely don't want to spend more than half an hour studying my phone manual. And that's where the sex appeal comes in. Unless you manage to get me all hot and bothered about your new product, I'm sticking with my five year old basic cell. It does calls and SMS! Whee!
Hans Reiser's father has the coolest Ramones name in the universe: http://www.flapjackempire.com/ramones/
You must be new here. There have been plenty of posts about the competition, so why rehash the basics every time? Would you like an explanation of the Olympic Games on every sports site page that mentions it? The Urban Challenge and the RoboCup are the geek's equivalents and thus do not require explanation on Slashdot.
Oh, and a "wiki" is any site that allows user edits and is not short for Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki In other words, you suffer from precisely the same obfuscatory abbreviationitis you were complaining about.
Most of India and Africa have climates at least as hot as Texas. Most people there can't afford AC. Could it be that they know how to build houses you can live in, instead of copying the architecture of moderate climate regions and fixing its faults by brute force?
I buy computers with a three year lag, so this summer, I had no problems knowing that this Pentium IV thingy is faster than my previous Pentium III doodad. I have a vague recollection that Celeron means an el-cheapo PIV with less cache, but I'm going to have to bone up on these Centrino, Core, Duo thingamajigs etc. three years from now when I buy my next used computer. Or I'll just shrug and figure that any of those is bound to be faster than this old heap.
First, I'd have to find something I can't do on my present machine, though. Unlike some systems, GNU/Linux isn't getting much slower over the years, if you ignore the huge windowing environments. Go EvilWM!
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
3739 fruke 15 0 2856 1100 928 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.19 evilwm
And yeah, I know I'm just killing the computer industry. I do office work, process audio, surf the net and watch videos. Why would I need a supercomputer on my desk?
Mind, for Mr. Kurtz this is just brilliant publicity. As I googled for him, one link spoke of his superior anti-Bush credentials...
http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/16146/
Mistaking an artist
who works in full view of the public,
whose work can be found in a minute's googling,
who documents every step he takes,
for a terrorist
who might be expected to make at least a token effort to keep his doings secret, no matter how inept he is,
is pretty idiotic.
These are face-saving measures, nothing else.
And if, in mailing out harmless bacteria to a person, the institute did not at least google his university and status, to make sure he was permitted to receive said harmless bacteria, Mr. Kurtz did the authorities a favor in uncovering sloppy security procedures at said institute, which should then be the party requiring prosecution instead of Mr. Kurtz.
But perhaps you think that journalists who smuggle guns on airplanes and then reveal the flaws in airport security to the public should be thrown in jail as well. If intentions don't count, then every tank truck driver carrying hazardous substances who has an accident should be prosecuted as a terrorist.
...put lead paint into the mouths of our children, make industrial installations kill workers, airplanes fall out of the sky, poison our rivers and reduce companies to give subcontracting contracts only to companies with known track records to avoid buying substandard components from non-accountable foreign suppliers. Yeah, been there, done that, which is why the ISO quality standards were developed. It's a horribly bureaucratic solution, but how else do you ensure you're not buying useless crap or that you get one good shipment and then useless crap in the next one?
There are plenty of non-ISO certified companies who will gladly sell you crap at half the price, if you want to end up like Mattel.