Then why was the Army interested enough in kids' target scores to pay for the rifle team's bullets in exchange for them?
They weren't interested. I guarantee it. Collection of scores is probably just typical government aggregation of pointless data. It sounds to me like there's some failure to understand how the DCM/CMP(Director of Civilian Marksmanship/Civilian Marksmanship Program) works. It was created in 1908 by an act of congress to encourage rifle proficiency among an increasingly urban national population that was showing a dimishing familiarity with firearms. It's administered by the US Army, but has its own budget. It's no fiendish plot by dark forces trade bullets for recruitment leads, it's a nearly century old and largely irrelevant government program. DCM hands out free bullets, and generates useless reports saying "scores show that marksmanship has improved; good job we're doing; continue to fund us".
Au contraire--the better someone is with a rifle before drafting, the less marksmanship training they'll need.
Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. Everyone gets exactly the same amount of rifle training in basic training, regardless of prior experience. The Army doesn't need civilian marksmanship scores to find good shooters. By the end of basic training they already know who the good shots are, which gives them a much larger pool of potential snipers than they'll ever actually need. Combine that with the fact that (as an actual sniper noted above) the real difficulty of being a sniper is getting into a position to take the shot in the first place, and your armchair analysis falls to pieces.
Perhaps if they didn't treat recruits like children maybe they would have more luck. I almost enlisted in the army, but I wanted to talk it over with my family beforehand. I called and canceled my appointment only to have a recruiter call me up and try to play mind games in order to pressure me into joining.
They weren't treating you like a child, they were just being typical salesmen. You'd get the same damn treatment in any other high-pressure sales field (e.g. car dealership), and the reason they do it is because it works. Being a straight shooter and letting the [customer|potential recruit] come to you isn't an effective sales method. What a discovery you've made! Salesmen use mind games! Alert the media!
Really, if you were truly interested in joining the military you'd have told the recruiter to lay off the hard sell, or would have joined anyway, independent of some chairborne former Ranger staff sergeant's badgering.Getting all huffy and abandoning the prospect illustrates one of two things: either a) you never really wanted to join, or b) you are essentially a whiny 12 year old who'll let the gatekeeper's attitude keep you out of the dance. Crimony, I saw my recruiter literally three times (once to arrange my enlistment, once for testing, and once more for a ride to the MEPS station) and have never laid eyes on him since.
Soon they won't have to volunteer. Soon they will be drafted. They won't have a choice. Indeed, that is what this article is all about: the collection of the data necessary to facilitate a military draft of the American youth.
News flash, Einstein, that's not what the article was about. Selective Service already has all the info necessary for the draft, and this is nothing new. The article is about effective marketing.
They can't get enough people recruited and they're going to have to consider a draft. But they won't call it that... they'll want to call it something else. I'm thinking that if you neglect to opt-out at some stage you may find yourself "volunteering by default."
Believe it or not, the military doesn't want people too dumb to opt-out. They actually want people who are there voluntarily.
When this fails to get enough recruits can the draft be far behind?
Nah. The Chiken-Little's shouting "the draft is coming" are (naturally) unfamiliar with how the military is currently structured. The entire training system is geared towards willing, self-motivated recruits who are there of their own volition. Anyone can, at any time in the first 6 months of their enlistment, say "this isn't working for me" and get out with a simple Entry Level Separation. An ELS doesn't show up as a "black mark" on your record anywhere.
But moving to a draft system, suddenly everyone is there at gunpoint. Most draftees will be recalcitrant, unmotivated dregs suitable for nothing more complicated than cannon fodder infantry. This may have been OK during the Bad Old Days, but even being an infantryman these days requires a fair bit of technical competency. Furthermore, the real shortage in the military is in recruiting people for complex technical jobs rather than straight-up combat arms. So essentially they'd end up with a whole raft of uncooperative bedding-delousing specialists just to get a handfull of tactical intelligence analysts. The military doesn't want the draft. They want more volunteers.
Time to jack up the license fees on legal downloads!!! We'll make a killing at $4 a song!!
Yep. It's like the old joke about the man who opens the "Million Dollar Store". Inside he's got candy, snacks, junky taiwanese electronics, and second hand clothes-- all priced at $1,000,000 an item. He plans to retire after making a sale to his first customer.
That doesn't make much sense since facts, according to copyright law, cannot be copyrighted.
A particular collection of facts, however, can be copyrighted.
More accurately, a particulr presentation of that collection of facts can be copyrighted. One could present those exact same facts in a different arrangement and sell them.
I dunno...there are some VERY potent chemicals out there. I've always heard that people like John Lennon and other famous people in the early days of LSD, had pints or more of liquid acid....which could have been enough to turn on a whole city.
Dunno how factual it was...but, it seemed feasible at the time...
Enough to dose an entire city, but only if ingested in large enough quatity at a single sitting by each person. Reservoirs often hold months worth of water supply. Of the water a city uses, only a tiny percentage of it actually comes in contact with humans at all, much less gets ingested. A thousand pints of liquid LSD in a reservoir wouldn't be enough to produce any measurable effect.
I've run into city and other public officials before who think the government is a business. They'll try to block your business in order to compete. Best thing to do is let them dive in fully and see how hard business truly is and why the government has no business in business.
Ugh. Only problem there is that private enterprise failing in business is limited by bankruptcy. Government can keep pouring money down a rathole because they're funded by money collected from us collected at gunpoint*.
* O'Rourke's Taxation is Armed Coercion theory: "Refusal to be taxed" (i.e. tax evasion) will inevitably get you jail time. "Refusal to be jailed for refusing taxation" (i.e. trying to escape) will get you shot. (taxing at gunpoint is perhaps the oldest US govt tax policy: see the Whiskey Rebellion)
And that's where we differ. You seem to believe than stopping oil shipments to a country isn't an act of war. I believe differently.
War is armed physical conflict between two large groups of people. Calling a trade embargo an act of war is a pretty big stretch, particularly since there are and have been scores of trade embargoes of the years that did not result in war. Most notably the 1973-74 Arab Oil Embargo, wherein the arab OPEC nations stopped selling oil to supporters of Israel (e.g. the US) in retaliation for the Yom Kippur war. So OK, you're welcome to your idiosyncratic view of embargo as an overt act of war, but the historical reality just doesn't agree with you.
I disagree...as a career assembly language programmer, it is often more convenient, smaller and faster, to have the length of something available for loading into a register, then loop through the array, auto-decrementing the register as you go, and stop when it hits 0, rather than doing a compare for 0 after each step through the array to see if you're done. Plus, it's kinda nice to be able to have strings with null characters in them...no can do in C.
You disagree with what? Convenience, size, and speed are issues entirely unrelated to consistent behavior of data types. If you want to encode your C strings to include their own length in the first two bytes, there's nothing stopping you from doing it, just like in assembly. C strings aren't "broken"-- they fit neatly with the rest into the larger scheme of C's data handling. The point is, C treats strings like any other array of data, and if you want more than that you gotta do it your own dang self, or use a different language.
Honestly, I'm not sure you understand the importance in an OS of interfacing with the hardware. This isn't a job you want to pawn off on the compiler with a bunch of canned, one-size-fits-all libraries. Not unless you want a crappy, slow, awkward OS.
Like the Amiga OS? IIRC it was written using SAS C++.;-)
Ja, this is true, but one could hardly compare C++ with the ridiculous "build your own OS construction set" language the OP was describing. Programming an OS in C is like building a tractor hawing only a steel mill as a resource. C++ is like building one having access to a collection of industrial machine parts. The OP's absurd wish-language is like having an assembled tractor that comes in a box and you get to pick the seats, stereo, paint color, and the style of chrome wheels it gets. It's not building an OS, it's skinning one someone else built.
And if you watch Some Kind of Monster, you may actualy appreciate the different stuff they did after the black album. It's not the Metallica we used to love, but after seeing the documentary about these guys, I kinda like the albums now. But that's also beside the point...
Yeesh. After watching Some Kind of Monster all I appreciated was that they were mostly* a bunch of spoiled, immature children. Lars realizing he was an idiot to get so self-righteous about Napster was a nice confession, but he never really demonstrated that he wasn't still such an idiot. Those losers are just now, in their freakin' FORTIES, coming to grips with the realities of being a grown up that most of us dealt with in our twenties. The problem is, they then feel compelled to express their epiphanies in their music, which will inevitably turns out lame. Their genre of music is all about youthfull anger, which they simply don't have available to them anymore.
* Kirk Hammett is the only rational, well-adjusted human being among them. He must be one hell of a zen buddhist to put up with those whiny babies.
B) Continue using military force, which you already have deployed around half the globe, to get the oil flowing again?
Like I said to the other poster, please explain how attacking Pearl Harbor got the oil flowing again. The closest argument he could come up with was that it allowed them to take over the Dutch East Indies, but even he conceded that this would not necessarily have resulted in the US declaring war on Japan. And even if it was a definite, foregone conclusion, it still in no way justifies a sneak attack. There's a huge difference between an embargo providing the impetus for an act of war, and a true provocation.
Uhm. I think your argument isn't very well thought out. I'd say this would be more a case of me going over and burning down your house in self-defence, partly because I wanted to see how my new flame thrower works on inhabited buildings.
Your lame analogy only works if you add the following:
"P.S. I am at war with my neighbor"
The US and Japan were both busy trying to kill as many of each other as possible. This is frequently how war works.
We were knee-deep in the war, without actually being in the war (or so we tell ourselves). But we basically forced the hand of the Japanese. Our embargo crippled them. They would have been unable to keep fighting the war had they not attacked Pearl Harbor, cause they would have run out of oil.
Errr....how did attacking Pearl Harbor end the embargo? Economic sanctions are hardly a reasonable justification for attacking anyway. At best they allow one to say "we have nothing significant to lose if we attack". So if by "provoking" you mean "refused to aid their war effort", maybe...
You think the Vietnam war was tough? Go back and find out what really happened in the Japanese conflict. Vietnam vets have no right to complain. When the Pacific Theater vets came back, they didn't complain. My own grandfather has never talked about what happened in Guadalcanal as a Marine foot soldier. All we know is that he was one of the handful of surviving troops. Most of his buddies never set foot on the sand.
My maternal grandfather was in the USMC in the pacific theater and absolutely refused to talk about. My paternal grandfather was in the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad, and I only ever got him to talking about it a couple times, after telling him about some of the stuff I saw in Desert Storm. The shit he described sure put my experience in perspective for me. I was pretty wigged out for a while when I came back, but listening to his stories made mine sound like a day at the circus. To top it all off, he only got out alive because he secretly took megadoses of beta carotene and memorized the symptoms of liver failure from a medical textbook he stole, thereby securing a slot on one of the last planes out before they started just leaving the sick and wounded there to die.
War up close is universally unpleasant, but some of those WW2 guys saw some shit that'd mess anyone up.
Both Childhood's End and Foundation were hard science-fiction, meaning "true science fiction" as opposed to "fantasy with the trappings of science".
I haven't read Childhood's End yet, but I've read the entire Foundation series. To call Foundationhard science fiction seems a bit of a stretch. The "science" of psychohistory is but an industry-standard weak McGuffin to give us the prescient prophet Hari Seldon. It creates a unified source of light to rally the plot around for a "Dark Ages, part Deux" series. The whole notion of "at a macro level, all the little stuff cancels out" which is the basis of psychohistory is a quaint throwback to Newtonian Determinism which flies in the face of the last 100 years of science. Throughout the series, the technology is highly advanced while never being explained beyond the usual "atomic powered" handwave. To paraphrase Clarke, it might as well be magic! All this, in addition to the complete fantasy of "psychic powers", makes it pretty far-out speculation. Asimov is a fascinating writer, but Foundation is solid 1950's-style pie in the sky science.
If you break your leg, you have to get it treated right away. You will have serious consequences if you wait a month to treat it.
If you don't treat your broken leg,you become more dependent on the people around you. More people with untreated broken legs just means a greater burden on the people around them.
Please tell me where I said people should have to pay in advance for having their broken leg fixed. I have no problem with no-questions-asked treatment followed by easy payment plans or discounts for the destitute. I'm talking about the notion of universal, state funded health care. To put it another way, why should we have a system where joe taxpayer foots the bill when Larry Ellison needs a cast after twisting his ankle skiing in Aspen?
And always remember to yell "Fire!" when you fall into the chocolate (and a Brownie Point to the first one who correctly answers why you yell "Fire!" without resorting to Google).
For the same reason that, if you're rock climbing, you yell "ROCK!" if you drop your lunch down the cliff-- because no one will know to duck if you yell "LUNCH!"
Likewise, no one will come to rescue you if you yell "CHOCOLATE!"
"I don't think the public knows what it wants Congress to do, but it wants Congress to do something,...They don't have a lot of confidence that Congress will do the right thing."
This short utterance perfectly encapsulates the main problem not only in governing the internet, but in governing in general. Once people get the dumb idea in their heads that the government is in charge, they start expecting it to do everything for them, including the impossible, forgetting (or not caring) that it's the taxpayer who's footing the bill. Honestly, if it's unreasonable to expect the government to pay for a mechanic to fix my car, why is it reasonable to expect the government to pay for a doctor to fix my broken leg?
Wow! It's as though there was *gasp* more than one person posting on Slashdot! With differeing opinions, no less!
How could that be?
Heh. This just in: the whole of Slashdot posters taken together also found to be simultaneously for and against copyrights! Will the madness never cease?
"Fallout? From what? The obvious retort to such an assertion is that it's not supposed to run on a Dell. It's not supposed to run on anything but Apple-branded hardware."
There's information and then there's FUD. I didn't say the blogs and articles would be pushing information.
Be this as it may, what sort of FUD could they spread that does anything but fly in the face of the obvious? They won't be selling OSX-86 (or whatever they call it) as stand alone software, so even a simple comment of "I tried OSX-86 and it didn't work for shit, so I erased it" already exposes the fact that it's a warezed copy not on Apple hardware. Such FUD would require people to be technically sophisticated enough to understand the difference between "Apple on x86" and "Apple on PPC", while at the same time dumb unough to believe a random blogger's spewing. I just don't see it ever being a major issue.
Then the fallout on many a P.C. site/blog will be all about how OSX is crap and can't run well on a Dell.
Fallout? From what? The obvious retort to such an assertion is that it's not supposed to run on a Dell. It's not supposed to run on anything but Apple-branded hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
They weren't interested. I guarantee it. Collection of scores is probably just typical government aggregation of pointless data. It sounds to me like there's some failure to understand how the DCM/CMP(Director of Civilian Marksmanship/Civilian Marksmanship Program) works. It was created in 1908 by an act of congress to encourage rifle proficiency among an increasingly urban national population that was showing a dimishing familiarity with firearms. It's administered by the US Army, but has its own budget. It's no fiendish plot by dark forces trade bullets for recruitment leads, it's a nearly century old and largely irrelevant government program. DCM hands out free bullets, and generates useless reports saying "scores show that marksmanship has improved; good job we're doing; continue to fund us".
Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. Everyone gets exactly the same amount of rifle training in basic training, regardless of prior experience. The Army doesn't need civilian marksmanship scores to find good shooters. By the end of basic training they already know who the good shots are, which gives them a much larger pool of potential snipers than they'll ever actually need. Combine that with the fact that (as an actual sniper noted above) the real difficulty of being a sniper is getting into a position to take the shot in the first place, and your armchair analysis falls to pieces.
They weren't treating you like a child, they were just being typical salesmen. You'd get the same damn treatment in any other high-pressure sales field (e.g. car dealership), and the reason they do it is because it works. Being a straight shooter and letting the [customer|potential recruit] come to you isn't an effective sales method. What a discovery you've made! Salesmen use mind games! Alert the media!
Really, if you were truly interested in joining the military you'd have told the recruiter to lay off the hard sell, or would have joined anyway, independent of some chairborne former Ranger staff sergeant's badgering.Getting all huffy and abandoning the prospect illustrates one of two things: either a) you never really wanted to join, or b) you are essentially a whiny 12 year old who'll let the gatekeeper's attitude keep you out of the dance. Crimony, I saw my recruiter literally three times (once to arrange my enlistment, once for testing, and once more for a ride to the MEPS station) and have never laid eyes on him since.
News flash, Einstein, that's not what the article was about. Selective Service already has all the info necessary for the draft, and this is nothing new. The article is about effective marketing.
Believe it or not, the military doesn't want people too dumb to opt-out. They actually want people who are there voluntarily.
Nah. The Chiken-Little's shouting "the draft is coming" are (naturally) unfamiliar with how the military is currently structured. The entire training system is geared towards willing, self-motivated recruits who are there of their own volition. Anyone can, at any time in the first 6 months of their enlistment, say "this isn't working for me" and get out with a simple Entry Level Separation. An ELS doesn't show up as a "black mark" on your record anywhere.
But moving to a draft system, suddenly everyone is there at gunpoint. Most draftees will be recalcitrant, unmotivated dregs suitable for nothing more complicated than cannon fodder infantry. This may have been OK during the Bad Old Days, but even being an infantryman these days requires a fair bit of technical competency. Furthermore, the real shortage in the military is in recruiting people for complex technical jobs rather than straight-up combat arms. So essentially they'd end up with a whole raft of uncooperative bedding-delousing specialists just to get a handfull of tactical intelligence analysts. The military doesn't want the draft. They want more volunteers.
Yep. It's like the old joke about the man who opens the "Million Dollar Store". Inside he's got candy, snacks, junky taiwanese electronics, and second hand clothes-- all priced at $1,000,000 an item. He plans to retire after making a sale to his first customer.
A particular collection of facts, however, can be copyrighted.
More accurately, a particulr presentation of that collection of facts can be copyrighted. One could present those exact same facts in a different arrangement and sell them.
Enough to dose an entire city, but only if ingested in large enough quatity at a single sitting by each person. Reservoirs often hold months worth of water supply. Of the water a city uses, only a tiny percentage of it actually comes in contact with humans at all, much less gets ingested. A thousand pints of liquid LSD in a reservoir wouldn't be enough to produce any measurable effect.
Ugh. Only problem there is that private enterprise failing in business is limited by bankruptcy. Government can keep pouring money down a rathole because they're funded by money collected from us collected at gunpoint*.
* O'Rourke's Taxation is Armed Coercion theory: "Refusal to be taxed" (i.e. tax evasion) will inevitably get you jail time. "Refusal to be jailed for refusing taxation" (i.e. trying to escape) will get you shot. (taxing at gunpoint is perhaps the oldest US govt tax policy: see the Whiskey Rebellion)
War is armed physical conflict between two large groups of people. Calling a trade embargo an act of war is a pretty big stretch, particularly since there are and have been scores of trade embargoes of the years that did not result in war. Most notably the 1973-74 Arab Oil Embargo, wherein the arab OPEC nations stopped selling oil to supporters of Israel (e.g. the US) in retaliation for the Yom Kippur war. So OK, you're welcome to your idiosyncratic view of embargo as an overt act of war, but the historical reality just doesn't agree with you.
You disagree with what? Convenience, size, and speed are issues entirely unrelated to consistent behavior of data types. If you want to encode your C strings to include their own length in the first two bytes, there's nothing stopping you from doing it, just like in assembly. C strings aren't "broken"-- they fit neatly with the rest into the larger scheme of C's data handling. The point is, C treats strings like any other array of data, and if you want more than that you gotta do it your own dang self, or use a different language.
Like the Amiga OS? IIRC it was written using SAS C++. ;-)
Ja, this is true, but one could hardly compare C++ with the ridiculous "build your own OS construction set" language the OP was describing. Programming an OS in C is like building a tractor hawing only a steel mill as a resource. C++ is like building one having access to a collection of industrial machine parts. The OP's absurd wish-language is like having an assembled tractor that comes in a box and you get to pick the seats, stereo, paint color, and the style of chrome wheels it gets. It's not building an OS, it's skinning one someone else built.
Yeesh. After watching Some Kind of Monster all I appreciated was that they were mostly* a bunch of spoiled, immature children. Lars realizing he was an idiot to get so self-righteous about Napster was a nice confession, but he never really demonstrated that he wasn't still such an idiot. Those losers are just now, in their freakin' FORTIES, coming to grips with the realities of being a grown up that most of us dealt with in our twenties. The problem is, they then feel compelled to express their epiphanies in their music, which will inevitably turns out lame. Their genre of music is all about youthfull anger, which they simply don't have available to them anymore.
* Kirk Hammett is the only rational, well-adjusted human being among them. He must be one hell of a zen buddhist to put up with those whiny babies.
Like I said to the other poster, please explain how attacking Pearl Harbor got the oil flowing again. The closest argument he could come up with was that it allowed them to take over the Dutch East Indies, but even he conceded that this would not necessarily have resulted in the US declaring war on Japan. And even if it was a definite, foregone conclusion, it still in no way justifies a sneak attack. There's a huge difference between an embargo providing the impetus for an act of war, and a true provocation.
Your lame analogy only works if you add the following:
"P.S. I am at war with my neighbor"
The US and Japan were both busy trying to kill as many of each other as possible. This is frequently how war works.
Errr....how did attacking Pearl Harbor end the embargo? Economic sanctions are hardly a reasonable justification for attacking anyway. At best they allow one to say "we have nothing significant to lose if we attack". So if by "provoking" you mean "refused to aid their war effort", maybe...
My maternal grandfather was in the USMC in the pacific theater and absolutely refused to talk about. My paternal grandfather was in the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad, and I only ever got him to talking about it a couple times, after telling him about some of the stuff I saw in Desert Storm. The shit he described sure put my experience in perspective for me. I was pretty wigged out for a while when I came back, but listening to his stories made mine sound like a day at the circus. To top it all off, he only got out alive because he secretly took megadoses of beta carotene and memorized the symptoms of liver failure from a medical textbook he stole, thereby securing a slot on one of the last planes out before they started just leaving the sick and wounded there to die.
War up close is universally unpleasant, but some of those WW2 guys saw some shit that'd mess anyone up.
I haven't read Childhood's End yet, but I've read the entire Foundation series. To call Foundation hard science fiction seems a bit of a stretch. The "science" of psychohistory is but an industry-standard weak McGuffin to give us the prescient prophet Hari Seldon. It creates a unified source of light to rally the plot around for a "Dark Ages, part Deux" series. The whole notion of "at a macro level, all the little stuff cancels out" which is the basis of psychohistory is a quaint throwback to Newtonian Determinism which flies in the face of the last 100 years of science. Throughout the series, the technology is highly advanced while never being explained beyond the usual "atomic powered" handwave. To paraphrase Clarke, it might as well be magic! All this, in addition to the complete fantasy of "psychic powers", makes it pretty far-out speculation. Asimov is a fascinating writer, but Foundation is solid 1950's-style pie in the sky science.
Please tell me where I said people should have to pay in advance for having their broken leg fixed. I have no problem with no-questions-asked treatment followed by easy payment plans or discounts for the destitute. I'm talking about the notion of universal, state funded health care. To put it another way, why should we have a system where joe taxpayer foots the bill when Larry Ellison needs a cast after twisting his ankle skiing in Aspen?
For the same reason that, if you're rock climbing, you yell "ROCK!" if you drop your lunch down the cliff-- because no one will know to duck if you yell "LUNCH!"
Likewise, no one will come to rescue you if you yell "CHOCOLATE!"
This short utterance perfectly encapsulates the main problem not only in governing the internet, but in governing in general. Once people get the dumb idea in their heads that the government is in charge, they start expecting it to do everything for them, including the impossible, forgetting (or not caring) that it's the taxpayer who's footing the bill. Honestly, if it's unreasonable to expect the government to pay for a mechanic to fix my car, why is it reasonable to expect the government to pay for a doctor to fix my broken leg?
Heh. This just in: the whole of Slashdot posters taken together also found to be simultaneously for and against copyrights! Will the madness never cease?
There's information and then there's FUD. I didn't say the blogs and articles would be pushing information.
Be this as it may, what sort of FUD could they spread that does anything but fly in the face of the obvious? They won't be selling OSX-86 (or whatever they call it) as stand alone software, so even a simple comment of "I tried OSX-86 and it didn't work for shit, so I erased it" already exposes the fact that it's a warezed copy not on Apple hardware. Such FUD would require people to be technically sophisticated enough to understand the difference between "Apple on x86" and "Apple on PPC", while at the same time dumb unough to believe a random blogger's spewing. I just don't see it ever being a major issue.
Fallout? From what? The obvious retort to such an assertion is that it's not supposed to run on a Dell. It's not supposed to run on anything but Apple-branded hardware.