That wasn't even true in Bosnia under Clinton, when just like in Iraq, the early stages of the conflict saw U.S. cluster antipersonnel bombs dropped from high, indiscriminate altitudes ("carpet bombing.")
The only purpose of "carpet bombing" is increase the chances of hitting a target when your ability to hit with any accuracy is low. Your notion that it is the dropping of said bombs from high altitude that is "indiscriminate" shows your incomplete understanding of how these weapons work. They can, in fact, cause significant collateral damage when used near civilians because they are area effect weapons and additionally have a 5% dud rate (which leaves a lot of unexploded munitions around). None of this, however, is "carpet bombing".
Oh, really? It is if you don't factor out the stop-loss orders. If you do, then it's a different story.
more details here
The first two links point to "coercion" that really isn't. When they (the soldiers) are offered a reenlistment bonus package that includes a guarantee that they won't be shipped off to Iraq, they're misinterpreting that as a threat that they'll be sent to Iraq if they don't reenlist. The odds of getting sent there are obviously greater if you don't take that guarantee. The longer the conflict in Iraq goes on, the greater the chance that you'll be rotated into a unit going over there. It's not punishment. It's what being in the army is about. If there's a war, you gotta expect that you'll end up there. I challenge you to point to where they're sending anyone who tells their retention officer "no" to the front. It just doesn't work that way.
As for that third link, it refers to enlistment shortcomings for national guard and reserve units, NOT the regular army. I mean, read the fucking title of the article: "National Guard falls short of enlisting enough new troops". In a time when those units are being called up for full-time service, it's a lot harder to get people to join up under the traditional selling point of "one weekend a month, two weeks a year". Anyone joining guard or reserve now is going to have to be willing to be called up, and if you're willing to do that, you might as well go Regular Army. So yeah, those that could normally only afford to give the military 30-odd days scattered across the year aren't joining the reserves and guard. Imagine that. Even with that, they still only fell 5,000 (about 10%) short of their goal. Regular army enlistment numbers, as of 30SEP04, are on target.
Why is it that everyone believes fantastic bulshit about the M1 and it's descendants?
:
Speed: 67 km/h (42 mph) (road) 48 km/h (30 mph) (off-road)
Probably because those numbers you state are only the "official" numbers, and they guys that actually drive the dang things say that you can push them significantly faster. When I was stationed at Ft. Hood TX, I personally witnessed M-1's doing upwards of 40mph off road (albeit on fairly even ground) and drivers assured me that they can hit 60mph or so in a straight line on pavement. This discrepancy between the "textbook" and "observed" max speeds has given rise to much hyperbole. Certainly no M-1 Abrams can go 100mph under its own power.
If nothing else, you'd have thought that by now engineers would realise that if you design something so it can be fitted backwards, sooner or later it will be.
Hah! Engineers are the most intelligent bunch of idiots you'll ever find. The problem with engineers is that often their own cleverness and/or familiarity with the item they're designing blinds them to the viewpoint of someone who's "not clever" or totally new to the item. With (for example) the classic non-reversable, yet perversely symmetrical accelerometers, it probably never occured to the engineer designing them that someone could "not know" which end goes up. Sometimes it looks like just plain stupid engineering, like with a particular telephone PBX control system I work with. It has two expansion slots, Slot 1 and Slot 2. When you want to add only one expansion card, where do you put it? Slot1? No, that's too obvious. You put it in Slot 2. If you out a second card in later, that goes in Slot 1. At first I thought it was just an error in labeling the slots on the cabinet, but then I noticed that the circuit board itself is marked the same way! I'm sure there's a perfectly rational reason for it that makes sense only to the engineers who designed the system.
I laugh myself sick thinking how much time my C++ developer friends waste on stuff that takes days in ATL/MFC/C++ that I can do in a few seconds in Delphi.
You can do the same thing with Borland C++ Builder. Plus you don't have to depend upon dreadfully picayune selection of modifiable source code if you want to (say) use a particular implementation of blowfish encryption.
It should be blatantly obvious if you're missing a } when you undo indenting without a }
Blatantly obvious to YOU because that's what you're used to. It's not blatantly obvious to EVERYONE. I've heard people who prefer the other way say it's NOT obvious because the '}' is aligned with the UNindented code you're returning to, rather than the block of code it's actually defining. I've worked for both kinds of people and had to write code in both formats. The only thing I can say for sure is that anyone arguing the blatantly obvious superiority of one style over the other is a nutcase. It's just a coding style. The superior way is the one you're accustomed to.
People often go to those bars to watch those TVs, so turning them off would entirely defeat the purpose. You want peace and quiet? Stay home or goto you local library.
Cuts both ways. Some people think bars are for drinking and would say "You want TV? Go home and sit on your couch".
I'd like to see those idiots get tickets for being a nuisance.
I'd like to see drivers arrested for nearly killing guys on bikes.
I'd like to see both. I have a quarter pound of German stainless steel in my left leg from an jackass who turned left into me despite dual high-intensity high beam headlights.
I've also had to put up with scores of yuppie jackasses parading up and down the street in front of my apartment on their 90 decibel phallus-by-proxy machines. There simply is no excuse for a bike that makes that much noise. It's not cool, it's just fucking obnoxious.
the Borla exhaust system of my car does this all the time. The engine note is so low it sets off alarms that are set too sensitive. It's not too loud...just very low.
Amusing thing is...most of the cars I set of just don't look like a car with that much to protect...
Heh. Reminds me of the twin scourges of the last neighborhood I lived in: crappy 10+ year old japanese cars with A) overloud exhaust systems, and B) owner-installed alarms with motion detectors set too sensitive. Every time one of those jackass bastards would start his crap-car up and drive away, ALL THE OTHER crap-cars would start squealing their alarms. That, and the chain-smoking indian family of eight* living below me drove me to move.
* nothing against indians per se, but how long can you stand the smell of burnt, rancid ghee mixed with Marlboro Light smoke wafting in your windows 16 hours a day?
Re:Except Animals are more likely to be right.
on
Good Bad Attitude
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rediculous
For bog's sake it's spelled ridiculous. You can misspell whatever else you want, but please, let's all learn this one! Ridiculous, stems from the word "ridicule".
Incidentally, is there any good reason why people like the other way?
Code like this:
if(foo == 666)
{
EekItsTheDevilHimself = true;
}
CallForA.Priest(foo);
makes the bracketed subroutine stand out more because it's not only indented, but has a nearly empty line (the lines with the { and } ) top and bottom. It's also easier to make sure you don't forget the closing } --or find where it's missing when you HAVE forgotten it-- when it lines up with the opening { above it.
Isn't it bad enough that I have to put up with ads on my television, radio, public transportation, and web browser? Christ, give us five minutes of peace, you ad-serving bastards.
What really did it for me was when they started putting ads on the divider sticks you put down on grocery store checkout line conveyor belts to separate your stff from that of the person in front of you. Can't we have a single blank space without an ad?
Complaints about bias on a community newssite is stupid.
Yeah, people don't get that for some reason. They start shouting "bias! bias!" when nobody claimed to be unbiased. It's a leftover from the olden days when journalists were taught that they should report all pertinent facts and inject no opinion, and believed themselves to therefore be unbiased. Subsequently came the assumption that the media was for that reason supposed to always be unbiased. Bunch of nonsense, if you ask me. Everyone has an axe to grind somewhere, and it's gonna show up in reporting. The "unbiased media
" is a fable to pacify idealists, and some people still believe it.
HALF OF THE WORKING-AGE POPULATION IS NOT EMPLOYED FULL-TIME.
would you care to provide a source to back up your assertions? I do not intend to accuse you of pulling your info out of your ass but without sources such claims do seem.... questionable.
The statistical group he refers to is meaningless. The implication is that ALL working-age people should be employed full-time. It is possible, I suppose, to arrive at a figure of 50% if you include part-timers, the unemployed, college students living at home, the non-working half of 2 parent households, the disabled, the mentally ill, early retirees, off-the-books workers, those in jail or prison, and the independently wealthy. When I first read his statement, I thought he was refering to the UNDER-employed at %50, which is clearly untrue. Upon parsing the words more carefully, I realize his assertion isn't actually untrue, it's just totally irrelevant.
That was not very helpful...how about a link to a specific study or document. All your post did was further degrade your argument. Since you didn't provide a verifiable reference, I can only assume one doesn't exist until you post it.
I checked the BLS stats, and he's full of it. Only 16% of the workforce is part-time, and only 4% are part time because they can't find full-time work.
Why don't you check for yourself? His argument hasn't been degraded. He hasn't properly cited himself. He told you where you look. He still hasn't properly cited himself, but at least now you can determine if he is correct or not. Necause, and this will really shock you, they really do have statistics about the work force there!
I checked the BLS stats. They don't support his claim.
Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Department of Commerce.
You mean the stats available here from the BLS web site that show (let's use July 2004 as an example) 138 million non-ag workers employed in the US, out of which only 4.6 million are part timers for "Economic reasons" and 17.6 million for NON-economic reasons? That's only 16% total, and less than 4% part time because that's all they could find. I wanna know which BLS stats you're looking at for your claim of "HALF OF THE WORKING-AGE POPULATION IS NOT EMPLOYED FULL-TIME".
What bout people that are forced to work part time, but would rather not work at all.
That stat is probably statistically meaningless. I'd say at least 80% the population would rather sit around watching TV than go to work. Most people don't work because they want to , but because they have to. If you won $100 million in the PowerBall lottery would you go to work on monday afterward? Neither would I....
One day, I think business apps will be programmed using tools something like Visio - drag and drop your 'web service' 'component' match up the inputs and outputs, and connect a GUI at one end (that provides inputs) and a DB 'component' at the other (to provide outputs).
You've just described Borland C++ Builder or MS Visual C++. All that drag n' drop, set input on object A to watch input on object B, etc.-- it gives you a quick and easy framework to start with, but none of those canned components actually do anything. There's no way to tell a button (for example) to "check inputs in column two of table 1 against the square of those in column three and pop an error box if the difference is negative" without a fairly flexible and sophisticated system of mathematical instructions. User interface, storage, and communication modules can be represented by visual objects, but how do you represent the real work which is done by loops, branches, and calculations?
Something like this would be suitable for programming 99% of business applications and would be useable by 'business people', not dedicated programmers.
Hah! Only if 99% of business apps are for pushing raw or lightly massaged data from forms into databases. Ever try to explain recursive parsing to a suit? Some fundamental programming concepts just plain require study. You can't dumb down everything without creating a gazillion specific-case "black box" objects for every forseeable need, and even then they'd still have to understand the problem well enough to choose the correct one. Programming isn't quantum physics, but it still requires more educational investment than most 'business people' have the [time|desire|capacity] for.
Actually, when the lights go out, so does the interference from BPL.
If the lights go out and you need to communicate with someone, that someone is generally somewhere where the lights are NOT out. Only being able to talk to other people in the disaster area isn't particularly useful. You need to be able to talk to people OUTSIDE who can help you.
--you brought up an interestng point and something I'd like to see more research in, and that is using grids as passive electric generators.
I think we've been going about this backwards, we should be harvesting that electrical potential somehow.
Nah. It's not reliable enough nor easy enough to capture. Like lightning.
Thank you all who pointed out that a stick can't move faster than the speed of light. Let me also add that you can't really have a stick one light year long either. I was attempting to use humorous exagerration to make a point, but both the point and the humor were lost in my intoxicated ineptitude. Please don't make an old drunk explain the punchline of his joke again. Thank you.
If you tried to move the stick to propagate a signal faster than the speed of light, you would break the stick.
There is no way to transmit a signal faster than the speed of light right now. None.
I was going to add that the situation I posited was, of course, pure gedanken experiment foolery, but I thought it was obvious. Then I lost interest.
LIQUID CO2 would be in tanks. It's very, very cold -100 F or so (not checking), and requires an insulated storage tank.
liquid CO2 doesn't have any specific temperature. Pressure determines at what temperature it turns to liquid. That's why they talk about injecting it at the ocean floor, where the pressure keeps it liquid.
Electrons on copper travel 3cm per nanosecond. At four Gigahertz, each clock cycle, the electrons can only travel a theoretical maximum of 0.75cm. I don't even think that covers the diameter of a single core these days.
It doesn't quite work like that. A current along a conductor isn't shooting electrons like a radio signal, where it coems out at Point A and you have to wait till it arrives at Point B. It's more like pushing a long rigid stick. Pretty much as soon as you push your end, the guy at the other end is going to feel it move. If you had a stick that was (for the sake of argument) one light-minute long, you could push and pull your end and communicate information to the guy at the other end faster than a radio signal moving at the speed of light.
Slashdot Mirror
The only purpose of "carpet bombing" is increase the chances of hitting a target when your ability to hit with any accuracy is low. Your notion that it is the dropping of said bombs from high altitude that is "indiscriminate" shows your incomplete understanding of how these weapons work. They can, in fact, cause significant collateral damage when used near civilians because they are area effect weapons and additionally have a 5% dud rate (which leaves a lot of unexploded munitions around). None of this, however, is "carpet bombing".
Oh, really? It is if you don't factor out the stop-loss orders. If you do, then it's a different story. more details here
The first two links point to "coercion" that really isn't. When they (the soldiers) are offered a reenlistment bonus package that includes a guarantee that they won't be shipped off to Iraq, they're misinterpreting that as a threat that they'll be sent to Iraq if they don't reenlist. The odds of getting sent there are obviously greater if you don't take that guarantee. The longer the conflict in Iraq goes on, the greater the chance that you'll be rotated into a unit going over there. It's not punishment. It's what being in the army is about. If there's a war, you gotta expect that you'll end up there. I challenge you to point to where they're sending anyone who tells their retention officer "no" to the front. It just doesn't work that way.
As for that third link, it refers to enlistment shortcomings for national guard and reserve units, NOT the regular army. I mean, read the fucking title of the article: "National Guard falls short of enlisting enough new troops". In a time when those units are being called up for full-time service, it's a lot harder to get people to join up under the traditional selling point of "one weekend a month, two weeks a year". Anyone joining guard or reserve now is going to have to be willing to be called up, and if you're willing to do that, you might as well go Regular Army. So yeah, those that could normally only afford to give the military 30-odd days scattered across the year aren't joining the reserves and guard. Imagine that. Even with that, they still only fell 5,000 (about 10%) short of their goal. Regular army enlistment numbers, as of 30SEP04, are on target.
I find your selective interpretation laughable.
Speed: 67 km/h (42 mph) (road) 48 km/h (30 mph) (off-road)
Probably because those numbers you state are only the "official" numbers, and they guys that actually drive the dang things say that you can push them significantly faster. When I was stationed at Ft. Hood TX, I personally witnessed M-1's doing upwards of 40mph off road (albeit on fairly even ground) and drivers assured me that they can hit 60mph or so in a straight line on pavement. This discrepancy between the "textbook" and "observed" max speeds has given rise to much hyperbole. Certainly no M-1 Abrams can go 100mph under its own power.
Hah! Engineers are the most intelligent bunch of idiots you'll ever find. The problem with engineers is that often their own cleverness and/or familiarity with the item they're designing blinds them to the viewpoint of someone who's "not clever" or totally new to the item. With (for example) the classic non-reversable, yet perversely symmetrical accelerometers, it probably never occured to the engineer designing them that someone could "not know" which end goes up. Sometimes it looks like just plain stupid engineering, like with a particular telephone PBX control system I work with. It has two expansion slots, Slot 1 and Slot 2. When you want to add only one expansion card, where do you put it? Slot1? No, that's too obvious. You put it in Slot 2. If you out a second card in later, that goes in Slot 1. At first I thought it was just an error in labeling the slots on the cabinet, but then I noticed that the circuit board itself is marked the same way! I'm sure there's a perfectly rational reason for it that makes sense only to the engineers who designed the system.
You can do the same thing with Borland C++ Builder. Plus you don't have to depend upon dreadfully picayune selection of modifiable source code if you want to (say) use a particular implementation of blowfish encryption.
statement;
statement;
}
It should be blatantly obvious if you're missing a } when you undo indenting without a }
Blatantly obvious to YOU because that's what you're used to. It's not blatantly obvious to EVERYONE. I've heard people who prefer the other way say it's NOT obvious because the '}' is aligned with the UNindented code you're returning to, rather than the block of code it's actually defining. I've worked for both kinds of people and had to write code in both formats. The only thing I can say for sure is that anyone arguing the blatantly obvious superiority of one style over the other is a nutcase. It's just a coding style. The superior way is the one you're accustomed to.
Cuts both ways. Some people think bars are for drinking and would say "You want TV? Go home and sit on your couch".
I'd like to see drivers arrested for nearly killing guys on bikes.
I'd like to see both. I have a quarter pound of German stainless steel in my left leg from an jackass who turned left into me despite dual high-intensity high beam headlights.
I've also had to put up with scores of yuppie jackasses parading up and down the street in front of my apartment on their 90 decibel phallus-by-proxy machines. There simply is no excuse for a bike that makes that much noise. It's not cool, it's just fucking obnoxious.
Heh. Reminds me of the twin scourges of the last neighborhood I lived in: crappy 10+ year old japanese cars with A) overloud exhaust systems, and B) owner-installed alarms with motion detectors set too sensitive. Every time one of those jackass bastards would start his crap-car up and drive away, ALL THE OTHER crap-cars would start squealing their alarms. That, and the chain-smoking indian family of eight* living below me drove me to move.
* nothing against indians per se, but how long can you stand the smell of burnt, rancid ghee mixed with Marlboro Light smoke wafting in your windows 16 hours a day?
For bog's sake it's spelled ridiculous. You can misspell whatever else you want, but please, let's all learn this one! Ridiculous, stems from the word "ridicule".
Code like this:
if(foo == 666)
CallForA.Priest(foo);
makes the bracketed subroutine stand out more because it's not only indented, but has a nearly empty line (the lines with the { and } ) top and bottom. It's also easier to make sure you don't forget the closing } --or find where it's missing when you HAVE forgotten it-- when it lines up with the opening { above it.
What really did it for me was when they started putting ads on the divider sticks you put down on grocery store checkout line conveyor belts to separate your stff from that of the person in front of you. Can't we have a single blank space without an ad?
Yeah, people don't get that for some reason. They start shouting "bias! bias!" when nobody claimed to be unbiased. It's a leftover from the olden days when journalists were taught that they should report all pertinent facts and inject no opinion, and believed themselves to therefore be unbiased. Subsequently came the assumption that the media was for that reason supposed to always be unbiased. Bunch of nonsense, if you ask me. Everyone has an axe to grind somewhere, and it's gonna show up in reporting. The "unbiased media " is a fable to pacify idealists, and some people still believe it.
would you care to provide a source to back up your assertions? I do not intend to accuse you of pulling your info out of your ass but without sources such claims do seem.... questionable.
The statistical group he refers to is meaningless. The implication is that ALL working-age people should be employed full-time. It is possible, I suppose, to arrive at a figure of 50% if you include part-timers, the unemployed, college students living at home, the non-working half of 2 parent households, the disabled, the mentally ill, early retirees, off-the-books workers, those in jail or prison, and the independently wealthy. When I first read his statement, I thought he was refering to the UNDER-employed at %50, which is clearly untrue. Upon parsing the words more carefully, I realize his assertion isn't actually untrue, it's just totally irrelevant.
I checked the BLS stats, and he's full of it. Only 16% of the workforce is part-time, and only 4% are part time because they can't find full-time work.
I checked the BLS stats. They don't support his claim.
You mean the stats available here from the BLS web site that show (let's use July 2004 as an example) 138 million non-ag workers employed in the US, out of which only 4.6 million are part timers for "Economic reasons" and 17.6 million for NON-economic reasons? That's only 16% total, and less than 4% part time because that's all they could find. I wanna know which BLS stats you're looking at for your claim of "HALF OF THE WORKING-AGE POPULATION IS NOT EMPLOYED FULL-TIME".
That stat is probably statistically meaningless. I'd say at least 80% the population would rather sit around watching TV than go to work. Most people don't work because they want to , but because they have to. If you won $100 million in the PowerBall lottery would you go to work on monday afterward? Neither would I....
You've just described Borland C++ Builder or MS Visual C++. All that drag n' drop, set input on object A to watch input on object B, etc.-- it gives you a quick and easy framework to start with, but none of those canned components actually do anything. There's no way to tell a button (for example) to "check inputs in column two of table 1 against the square of those in column three and pop an error box if the difference is negative" without a fairly flexible and sophisticated system of mathematical instructions. User interface, storage, and communication modules can be represented by visual objects, but how do you represent the real work which is done by loops, branches, and calculations?
Something like this would be suitable for programming 99% of business applications and would be useable by 'business people', not dedicated programmers.
Hah! Only if 99% of business apps are for pushing raw or lightly massaged data from forms into databases. Ever try to explain recursive parsing to a suit? Some fundamental programming concepts just plain require study. You can't dumb down everything without creating a gazillion specific-case "black box" objects for every forseeable need, and even then they'd still have to understand the problem well enough to choose the correct one. Programming isn't quantum physics, but it still requires more educational investment than most 'business people' have the [time|desire|capacity] for.
If the lights go out and you need to communicate with someone, that someone is generally somewhere where the lights are NOT out. Only being able to talk to other people in the disaster area isn't particularly useful. You need to be able to talk to people OUTSIDE who can help you.
Nah. It's not reliable enough nor easy enough to capture. Like lightning.
Thank you all who pointed out that a stick can't move faster than the speed of light. Let me also add that you can't really have a stick one light year long either. I was attempting to use humorous exagerration to make a point, but both the point and the humor were lost in my intoxicated ineptitude. Please don't make an old drunk explain the punchline of his joke again. Thank you.
I was going to add that the situation I posited was, of course, pure gedanken experiment foolery, but I thought it was obvious. Then I lost interest.
liquid CO2 doesn't have any specific temperature. Pressure determines at what temperature it turns to liquid. That's why they talk about injecting it at the ocean floor, where the pressure keeps it liquid.
It doesn't quite work like that. A current along a conductor isn't shooting electrons like a radio signal, where it coems out at Point A and you have to wait till it arrives at Point B. It's more like pushing a long rigid stick. Pretty much as soon as you push your end, the guy at the other end is going to feel it move. If you had a stick that was (for the sake of argument) one light-minute long, you could push and pull your end and communicate information to the guy at the other end faster than a radio signal moving at the speed of light.