I meant the Pentagon specifically--whether the force is hired, conscripted or voluntary is secondary to the aims of the administration.
You can rest assured that the military leaders at the Pentagon would take a bona-fide U.S. soldier over a mercenary any day of the week.
I agree with you--I think #1 and #4 are our most likely outcomes. Hell, we've been working on the hardened, remote, permanent bases since the get-go.
This war is about many things--freedom, spreading democracy, oil, security, terrorism, removing despotic regimes, finishing old business, even petty revenge. They're all secondary and postfact, though, to the real motivator behind this war--power. At root, the war in Iraq is and has always been about America establishing and exercising power in a strategically and economically valuable region of the world. Go read The Project for the New American Century'sSeptember 2000 report on Rebuilding America's Defenses. Pay close attention to section III: Repositioning Today's Force. Notice anything eerily prescient?
It's a shame our leaders didn't feel confident enough in the merits of their plans to level with us in the first place. I bet they could have had far more success in their venture without all the smoke, mirrors and bullshit they used in lieu of being frank about what they were going about doing.
Of course the Pentagon is going to do this kind of thing. They are in desperate need of recruits. They're caught between a rock and a hard place: they're trying to fight a war that is unpopular with the majority of Americans, and a good chunk of those that do support it think that somebody other than themselves and their loved ones should be doing the actual fighting and dying part.
What do you do? Recruit, recruit, recruit like there's no tomorrow. Use every tool you can get your hands on. Raise the "financial incentives" of joining up--even if you were to double a grunt's pay, they'd still be waaaay cheaper than hiring another mercenary. Make lists. Get aggressive. Be persistent. Get every person you can lay your hands on.
One of the following things will most likely happen in the next few years:
We'll pour huge amounts of money into hiring more mercenary forces to augment our armed forces;
We'll reinstate the draft in one form or another;
We'll claim victory, pull our troops out, and hope that the Iraqis can sort it out themselves;
We'll claim victory, ensconce a substantial number of troops in hardened, remotely-located permanent bases, and hope that the Iraqis can sort it out themselves;
We'll get a massive surge in recruitment and will be able to meet our military needs with a full-strength volunteer service.
The insurgency will die and a stable Iraqi government will take hold.
The Pentagon would much rather have a healthy, full-strength, all-volunteer military force than an expensive, byzantine network of "independent contractors" doing more and more grunt work outside the scope of both military and civil law. To this end, they're gonna do everything in their power to meet their recruitment needs--and frankly, creating a database of students is pretty freakin' innocuous compared to some of the other recruiting shenanigans that have been going down lately...
Don't know what you're doing right now to reduce the spam, but maybe putting your email address on the front page of Slashdot is a step in the wrong direction.
If you're standing in the surf, a little rain ain't gonna matter much...
The fact is that the Linux GUI is constatnly approaching "Apple Quality" and it will only be a metter of a few years before it gets there.
Linux will continue to improve, but so will Apple; the question we need to ask is which one will improve faster in the GUI department. In this regard, my money is on Apple, simply because they have near total control over the user interface. They can stand up and say, "the behavior for X will by Y," and that's how it will work. Linux simply does not have this luxury. With Linux, you still have situations where applications work wonderfully with GUI A but have "quirks" if you try using certain features in GUI B, C, or D. Until there's a standard that desktop environment developers agree on and adhere to, you're going to have a fracured desktop experience.
Yes, in another few years, the Linux GUI will quite possibly be as "good" as the Apple GUI is today. You're fooling yourself, though, if you think Steve is gonna sit back and say, "well, that's good enough." The real challenge for Linux GUIs will be to get better faster than Apple can--and I'm not sure they can, for the reasons stated above.
While it may "work", if more energy has to be put in than is gotten out, I don't think the size of the apparatus really matters.
...bear in mind that this is a very, very early prototype--they haven't even published yet. As a rule, early working prototypes tend to be larger and less efficient than later models (the obvious exception being when you want to make later versions larger...)
The size of the apparatus matters insofar as this isn't a warehouse-sized gizmo, such as a Tokamak reactor. Even if they eventually need a device fifty times as voluminous as this one to actually generate power, you're still looking at something you can move in the back of an ordinary delivery truck and install in an electrical substation, submarine, office building, or house. That is significant.
Re:The first of many steps.
on
Spore on GDCTV
·
· Score: 1
What Will missed was the next logical step in this evolution of game design and how this will affect MMOG games.
I'm not so sure Will "missed" this logical step so much as he decided not to bite off more than he could chew. Judging by the Spore video, one can imagine that he's already got an insanely complex game to take care of; I'd wager he'd be thrilled to get this one out the door before he starts trying to tackle massively multi-player network synchronization and content sharing issues.
Making a game is hard.
Making a good game is insanely hard.
Making a game as ambitious as Spore is nigh on suicidal, even for the gods of video gaming.
Trying to cram MM functionality onto what could very well be a genre-redefining game is sheer madness.
Either Will has consciously decided to ignore the realtime MM possibilities for Spore, or he's elected to delay them for future iterations of the game. I doubt the possibility hasn't crossed his mind, though.
Perhaps AJAX will finally deliver what Java promised. Perhaps it will really provide a solid way to distribute software seamlessly.
All "AJAX" is going to do is sell a bunch more four-color glossies to those IT types with more stars in their eyes than substance in their heads. It's just another vaguely-defined acronym with a catchy ring to it.
For anybody who actually writes code, things like Google Maps are simply a happy marriage of time-honored techniques and modern browser tricks. They're cool, they're novel, they're useful, they're quite well-written, and they're letting us do things in the browser that used to require plugins--but there's nothing terribly eye-popping about the techniques themselves.
It is pure ignorance that tells you Tritium is perfectly OK.
Kindly point out where I say "tritium is perfectly OK." You'll find that I haven't. Kindly explain why you are putting words in my mouth, and further explain why you think I'd be so blindingly stupid as to suggest that any radioisotope is "perfectly OK".
What the heck happens to the crap when the "battery runs out"? What happens to the stupid "ever on night lights" when the light is low enough that you can't see it anymore? That's right, it end up being thrown out. Then it migrates and eventually will end up in oganic compounts (it IS hydrogen after all) and well, might end up killing hell of a lot of people.
Take your pick: a landfill full of mostly-decayed tritium batteries, or a landfill full of lithium-ion, nickel-hydride, nickel-cadmium, and alkaline batteries. Which is going to pose the greater environmental health hazard--the radioisotope with a half-life of 12 years, or the battery acids and durable heavy metals?
I'm not suggesting that we should all pony up to the bar for a round of trititinis. I am saying that tritium batteries, at least at first glance, would appear to be much less hazardous to our health and environment than the batteries we use today. A constructive argument in this situation would be to debunk the notion that tritium batteries are safer than the batteries we use today.
And please don't give me crap about how quickly tritiated water leaves your body (one lifetime in human body is about 14 days since you pee it out! - I say one lifetime, not bullshit like "it all leaves your body within a month").
Well shit, Sparky, you'd better get right on the horn and set the EPA straight. Those knuckle-draggers clearly don't have the first clue what this "tritium" stuff is. I eagerly await links to scientific abstracts that support this assertion of yours.
Current modding when it comes to Nuclear on shashdot seems "Nuclear good" without any context. It is like blind leading the blind.
Again, show me where I say "nuclear good". All I did was directly link to and quote from the EPA's information. I'm not so much of a dullard as to think that tritium is harmless. That said, I'm quite willing to entertain the notion that a tritium cell could be significantly safer than what we use today.
Disposal: Tritium decays into helium-3, a non-radioactive, safe, and quite valuable helium isotope. (It is used in cryogenics and fusion research, for example.) If released into the air, tritium naturally interacts with oxygen to form tritiated water; helium-3 would simply mix harmlessly into the air. It's certainly a far cry easier and less harmful to dispose of than modern batteries are.
Accidents: see above. Unless we're talking massive quantities, a tritium leak isn't a big deal; if we are talking massive quantities, then it can be a big deal--but then, this is true for pretty much all power generation or battery manufacturing.
Manufacture: is currently expensive, but we already manufacture a non-trivial amount of tritium for our nuclear arsenal. (It's a key element in modern warheads.) Increasing production would be more a question of scaling our existing infrastructure up as opposed to researching how to go about manufacturing tritium in the first place.
I just wonder, no matter how efficient, safe, and cheap this thing can be, if it will ever sell.
I dunno--the promise of never having to plug your computer/cell phone in to anything may sway a significant portion of the population.
Seriously. 100% self-contained, self-sustaining portable systems. Elimination of the single most annoying part of modern gadgetry--the external power source.
nuclear decay is a completely spontaneous process. the only way to get more beta particles is to have more radioactive material. long lasting does not mean lots of power.
Consider the following:
You could engineer your batteries to produce significantly more power than the system needs. As the isotope decays, you approach the system's minimum power needs. System alerts you six months before it needs a new battery.
You could design a hybrid battery--part traditional power storage, part nuclear generation. As the traditional battery is drained, the nuclear battery charges it; best of all, when you're not using the laptop, it charges by default. You wouldn't need a nuclear battery big enough to run the whole laptop--just big enough to stretch that five hour standard battery to a ten-hour battery, with the added bonus of automatic, cordless recharging when the system isn't in use...
Next time your laptop battery runs out, you get to replace the entire laptop.
Because the concept of a removable and replaceable tritium battery is simply beyond the scope of modern cognition, right?
That said, raise your hand if you're still regularly using a ten-year-old laptop. Keep your hand up if you'd expect the battery to be the first critical system component to fail after ten years of use.
Sure, who doesn't want to keep volatile nuclear material near their crotch for several hours at a time?
...seeing as a tritium battery would only irradiate you if it broke open, take your pick. Would you rather:
A) Have a freshly-maimed lap full of delicious, toxic, viscous, burning battery acid; or
B) Inhale the rough equivalent of breathing a couple months' worth of naturally-occuring tritium?
To help answer some of the imminent "nukular batteries? Isn't that going to kill us all?" questions, here's a sampling from the EPA's webpage on tritium:
How does tritium affect people's health?
As with all ionizing radiation, exposure to tritium increases the risk of developing cancer. However, tritium is one of the least dangerous radionuclides because it emits very weak radiation and leaves the body relatively quickly. Since tritium is almost always found as water, it goes directly into soft tissues and organs. The associated dose to these tissues are generally uniform and dependent on the tissues' water content.
How does tritium change in the environment?
Tritium readily forms water when exposed to oxygen. As it undergoes radioactive decay, tritium emits a very weak beta particle and transforms to stable, nonradioactive helium. Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years.
How do people come in contact with tritium?
People are exposed to small amounts of tritium every day, since it is widely dispersed in the environment and in the food chain. People who live near or work in federal weapons facilities or nuclear fuel cycle facilities may have increased exposure. People working in research laboratories may also come in contact with tritium.
How does tritium get into the body?
Tritium primarily enters the body when people swallow tritiated water. People may also inhale tritium as a gas in the air, and absorb it through their skin.
What does tritium do once it gets into the body?
Tritium is almost always found as water, or "tritiated" water. Once tritium enters the body, it disperses quickly and is uniformly distributed throughout the body. Tritium is excreted through the urine within a month or so after ingestion. Organically bound tritium (tritium that is incorporated in organic compounds) can remain in the body for a longer period.
Open Source Is A License
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Folks, if you want your code used in a certain way, you put the terms in the damned license. That's what it's there for.
Besides, last I checked, the KHTML folks don't have a beef with Apple. They do have a beef with the fanbois who can't seem to grasp the fact that Apple using KHTML's Open Source code does not immediately mean that they're best buddies.
All it means is that Apple is using Open Source code. Period. Apple isn't violating anybody's trust.
The image acquisition will be done throughout 2005 and use the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument of the Envisat environmental satellite
Niles will be happy to hear she's orbiting the planet...
We all know that Al Gore misspoke when he said he invented the Internet.
No, Al Gore did not misspeak, nor did he ever say he invented the Internet. Here's the quote, courtesy of Snopes:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
Yes, yes, he wasn't there for the crafting of RFC 1, but the crux of what he's saying is true: he was one of the key players in Congress when it came to promoting and creating the Internet we know and use today.
That this balls-out lie about what Al Gore said still manages to exist today is demonstrative of just how little truth matters in American politics. Rather than set the record straight, there's a very sizeable chunk of powerful people who would rather perpetuate an obvious and easily debunked lie for the sake of hurting their opponent. Frankly, the Republicans engage in this kind of chicanery to a far greater extent than the Democrats do--which is a large part of why I'm not a Republican. There are plenty of self-aggrandizing, self-serving Democrats out there, but on balance, they're more oriented to reason and honesty than the Republicans are these days.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you--I think #1 and #4 are our most likely outcomes. Hell, we've been working on the hardened, remote, permanent bases since the get-go.
This war is about many things--freedom, spreading democracy, oil, security, terrorism, removing despotic regimes, finishing old business, even petty revenge. They're all secondary and postfact, though, to the real motivator behind this war--power. At root, the war in Iraq is and has always been about America establishing and exercising power in a strategically and economically valuable region of the world. Go read The Project for the New American Century's September 2000 report on Rebuilding America's Defenses. Pay close attention to section III: Repositioning Today's Force. Notice anything eerily prescient?
It's a shame our leaders didn't feel confident enough in the merits of their plans to level with us in the first place. I bet they could have had far more success in their venture without all the smoke, mirrors and bullshit they used in lieu of being frank about what they were going about doing.
What do you do? Recruit, recruit, recruit like there's no tomorrow. Use every tool you can get your hands on. Raise the "financial incentives" of joining up--even if you were to double a grunt's pay, they'd still be waaaay cheaper than hiring another mercenary. Make lists. Get aggressive. Be persistent. Get every person you can lay your hands on.
One of the following things will most likely happen in the next few years:
The Pentagon would much rather have a healthy, full-strength, all-volunteer military force than an expensive, byzantine network of "independent contractors" doing more and more grunt work outside the scope of both military and civil law. To this end, they're gonna do everything in their power to meet their recruitment needs--and frankly, creating a database of students is pretty freakin' innocuous compared to some of the other recruiting shenanigans that have been going down lately...
This is a man who thinks the plural of goose is sheep!
If you're standing in the surf, a little rain ain't gonna matter much...
Linux will continue to improve, but so will Apple; the question we need to ask is which one will improve faster in the GUI department. In this regard, my money is on Apple, simply because they have near total control over the user interface. They can stand up and say, "the behavior for X will by Y," and that's how it will work. Linux simply does not have this luxury. With Linux, you still have situations where applications work wonderfully with GUI A but have "quirks" if you try using certain features in GUI B, C, or D. Until there's a standard that desktop environment developers agree on and adhere to, you're going to have a fracured desktop experience.
Yes, in another few years, the Linux GUI will quite possibly be as "good" as the Apple GUI is today. You're fooling yourself, though, if you think Steve is gonna sit back and say, "well, that's good enough." The real challenge for Linux GUIs will be to get better faster than Apple can--and I'm not sure they can, for the reasons stated above.
The size of the apparatus matters insofar as this isn't a warehouse-sized gizmo, such as a Tokamak reactor. Even if they eventually need a device fifty times as voluminous as this one to actually generate power, you're still looking at something you can move in the back of an ordinary delivery truck and install in an electrical substation, submarine, office building, or house. That is significant.
I'm not so sure Will "missed" this logical step so much as he decided not to bite off more than he could chew. Judging by the Spore video, one can imagine that he's already got an insanely complex game to take care of; I'd wager he'd be thrilled to get this one out the door before he starts trying to tackle massively multi-player network synchronization and content sharing issues.
Making a game is hard.
Making a good game is insanely hard.
Making a game as ambitious as Spore is nigh on suicidal, even for the gods of video gaming.
Trying to cram MM functionality onto what could very well be a genre-redefining game is sheer madness.
Either Will has consciously decided to ignore the realtime MM possibilities for Spore, or he's elected to delay them for future iterations of the game. I doubt the possibility hasn't crossed his mind, though.
Crimony. Another few years of the word-hackery that brought us "blogebrities", and we're all gonna sound like some freakish variant of the Smurfs.
All "AJAX" is going to do is sell a bunch more four-color glossies to those IT types with more stars in their eyes than substance in their heads. It's just another vaguely-defined acronym with a catchy ring to it.
For anybody who actually writes code, things like Google Maps are simply a happy marriage of time-honored techniques and modern browser tricks. They're cool, they're novel, they're useful, they're quite well-written, and they're letting us do things in the browser that used to require plugins--but there's nothing terribly eye-popping about the techniques themselves.
Kindly point out where I say "tritium is perfectly OK." You'll find that I haven't. Kindly explain why you are putting words in my mouth, and further explain why you think I'd be so blindingly stupid as to suggest that any radioisotope is "perfectly OK".
What the heck happens to the crap when the "battery runs out"? What happens to the stupid "ever on night lights" when the light is low enough that you can't see it anymore? That's right, it end up being thrown out. Then it migrates and eventually will end up in oganic compounts (it IS hydrogen after all) and well, might end up killing hell of a lot of people.
Take your pick: a landfill full of mostly-decayed tritium batteries, or a landfill full of lithium-ion, nickel-hydride, nickel-cadmium, and alkaline batteries. Which is going to pose the greater environmental health hazard--the radioisotope with a half-life of 12 years, or the battery acids and durable heavy metals?
I'm not suggesting that we should all pony up to the bar for a round of trititinis. I am saying that tritium batteries, at least at first glance, would appear to be much less hazardous to our health and environment than the batteries we use today. A constructive argument in this situation would be to debunk the notion that tritium batteries are safer than the batteries we use today.
And please don't give me crap about how quickly tritiated water leaves your body (one lifetime in human body is about 14 days since you pee it out! - I say one lifetime, not bullshit like "it all leaves your body within a month").
Well shit, Sparky, you'd better get right on the horn and set the EPA straight. Those knuckle-draggers clearly don't have the first clue what this "tritium" stuff is. I eagerly await links to scientific abstracts that support this assertion of yours.
Current modding when it comes to Nuclear on shashdot seems "Nuclear good" without any context. It is like blind leading the blind.
Again, show me where I say "nuclear good". All I did was directly link to and quote from the EPA's information. I'm not so much of a dullard as to think that tritium is harmless. That said, I'm quite willing to entertain the notion that a tritium cell could be significantly safer than what we use today.
Accidents: see above. Unless we're talking massive quantities, a tritium leak isn't a big deal; if we are talking massive quantities, then it can be a big deal--but then, this is true for pretty much all power generation or battery manufacturing.
Manufacture: is currently expensive, but we already manufacture a non-trivial amount of tritium for our nuclear arsenal. (It's a key element in modern warheads.) Increasing production would be more a question of scaling our existing infrastructure up as opposed to researching how to go about manufacturing tritium in the first place.
I dunno--the promise of never having to plug your computer/cell phone in to anything may sway a significant portion of the population.
Seriously. 100% self-contained, self-sustaining portable systems. Elimination of the single most annoying part of modern gadgetry--the external power source.
Right--seems my brain followed the wrong disambiguation link...
Dude, beer is the treatment for everything.
Consider the following:
You could engineer your batteries to produce significantly more power than the system needs. As the isotope decays, you approach the system's minimum power needs. System alerts you six months before it needs a new battery.
You could design a hybrid battery--part traditional power storage, part nuclear generation. As the traditional battery is drained, the nuclear battery charges it; best of all, when you're not using the laptop, it charges by default. You wouldn't need a nuclear battery big enough to run the whole laptop--just big enough to stretch that five hour standard battery to a ten-hour battery, with the added bonus of automatic, cordless recharging when the system isn't in use...
Because the concept of a removable and replaceable tritium battery is simply beyond the scope of modern cognition, right?
That said, raise your hand if you're still regularly using a ten-year-old laptop. Keep your hand up if you'd expect the battery to be the first critical system component to fail after ten years of use.
A) Have a freshly-maimed lap full of delicious, toxic, viscous, burning battery acid; or
B) Inhale the rough equivalent of breathing a couple months' worth of naturally-occuring tritium?
Take your time. This one's a toughie.
How does tritium affect people's health?
As with all ionizing radiation, exposure to tritium increases the risk of developing cancer. However, tritium is one of the least dangerous radionuclides because it emits very weak radiation and leaves the body relatively quickly. Since tritium is almost always found as water, it goes directly into soft tissues and organs. The associated dose to these tissues are generally uniform and dependent on the tissues' water content.
How does tritium change in the environment?
Tritium readily forms water when exposed to oxygen. As it undergoes radioactive decay, tritium emits a very weak beta particle and transforms to stable, nonradioactive helium. Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years.
How do people come in contact with tritium?
People are exposed to small amounts of tritium every day, since it is widely dispersed in the environment and in the food chain. People who live near or work in federal weapons facilities or nuclear fuel cycle facilities may have increased exposure. People working in research laboratories may also come in contact with tritium.
How does tritium get into the body?
Tritium primarily enters the body when people swallow tritiated water. People may also inhale tritium as a gas in the air, and absorb it through their skin.
What does tritium do once it gets into the body?
Tritium is almost always found as water, or "tritiated" water. Once tritium enters the body, it disperses quickly and is uniformly distributed throughout the body. Tritium is excreted through the urine within a month or so after ingestion. Organically bound tritium (tritium that is incorporated in organic compounds) can remain in the body for a longer period.
Besides, last I checked, the KHTML folks don't have a beef with Apple. They do have a beef with the fanbois who can't seem to grasp the fact that Apple using KHTML's Open Source code does not immediately mean that they're best buddies.
All it means is that Apple is using Open Source code. Period. Apple isn't violating anybody's trust.
If you must post fat jokes to the front page, could you at least make sure they're funny?
What's next, "How To Conduct Your Very Own Segmentation Fault"?
Niles will be happy to hear she's orbiting the planet...
I am truly moved by your eloquence.
No, Al Gore did not misspeak, nor did he ever say he invented the Internet. Here's the quote, courtesy of Snopes:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
Yes, yes, he wasn't there for the crafting of RFC 1, but the crux of what he's saying is true: he was one of the key players in Congress when it came to promoting and creating the Internet we know and use today.
That this balls-out lie about what Al Gore said still manages to exist today is demonstrative of just how little truth matters in American politics. Rather than set the record straight, there's a very sizeable chunk of powerful people who would rather perpetuate an obvious and easily debunked lie for the sake of hurting their opponent. Frankly, the Republicans engage in this kind of chicanery to a far greater extent than the Democrats do--which is a large part of why I'm not a Republican. There are plenty of self-aggrandizing, self-serving Democrats out there, but on balance, they're more oriented to reason and honesty than the Republicans are these days.