Or do you expect that in all the human universe only the earth will have nations and conflict and all the rest of it will be one, big, happy, rainbow coalition commune?
Of course space will be one big happy rainbow coalition commune if they can keep America out, because we all know that America is the evilest country ever in history, right?
I mean, there was no war in the world until America existed, there was no racism and slavery until America, and there was no pollution until George Bush refused Kyoto. I think those are pretty widely accepted facts, don't you?
Remember, we were the GOOD ones. If we did look bad, it meant the commies were the good ones, so that simply had to go. This is all very convenient for you self-loathing types, you stomp around as much as you want.
Personally, I'll remember only that we WERE the good guys. Does that mean that we didn't do anything bad? No, and anyone who thinks it does is frankly pretty stupid. War sucks completely. Completely. But there is such a thing as a good and bad side to things nevertheless.
You say that "If we did look bad, it meant the commies were the good ones, so that simply had to go." - either you're confusing Nazis with Commies, or you're really talking about Communists, which is totally a different track but whatever.
So you draw moral parallels between the Allies and the a) Nazis with their engineered DEATH camps, or b) the Soviets, whose armies basically raped everything female in Berlin and other conquered German soil?
If you can't see a difference between "them" and "us" then you are a pretty sad individual.
For those of us who have fought in war, it doesn't matter for crap WHY you're killing that human over there. You ARE, and you will live with that fact the rest of your life.
But, I ask you to look carefully and imagine a world in which the Nazis had won. Was it worth doing just about anything - including killing helpless civilians, yes, even children - to end that?
I'd imagine the ash-piles of Auschwitz alone would say yes.
All the top modded posts on/. seem to keep saying "oh this is stupid" but I think most people are missing the point of the training.
It's about organizing, communicating, teamwork, learning to understand the situation from the various sources (some electronic, most contradictory), and leading remotely.
I've played WW2OL for 2+ years now, and it's a HUGE eye-opener to see how much better well-organized squads communicating constantly on teamspeak do, as compared to random lone wolfers running around with their l33t ski11z.
America's Army (the game, not the service) is the same way.
Nobody's saying that shooting a gun in a virtual world will train you how to shoot for real, or give you courage to stand in battle. But what it will give you is a sense of teamwork, and a familiarity with the SITUATION that might help you trust your real-life trained skills and coworkers/soldiers, and might just save your life.
This is from old net lore, but it's worth repeating IMO.
1 billion seconds ago it was 1972. 1 billion minutes ago it was 102 AD 1 billion hours ago (about 100,000 BC) the first Homo Sapiens appeared. 1 billion days ago, life was just beginning to learn how to photosynthesize in the oceans.
Lessee, handsome young professor, with EIGHT grad students. All coincidentally female and good looking. What are the odds of THAT? Spend a lot of time in the lab, do ya, Doc?
I'll support the industry in their efforts against this copying software, as long as they start using scratch-resistant lacquers on their cd/dvd surfaces, and/or promise to replace my original purchase disks for postage costs when they become so scratched they don't work anymore.
As long as they are going to assume I'm a pirate, and I *have* to stick the cd in the drive for my game to play, then I'd like them to cover the replacement of legitimately-purchased cd's damaged due to normal wear & tear. (If you have kids that use the computer, you know that those are usually the first ones to fail...)
I have at least 30 game cd's (out of maybe 300) that won't work anymore due to scratching, and the 'cd resurfacers' don't work as well as they claim. If I was smart, I guess I'd just pirate the games off Kazaa, but I don't want to do that.:(
""Socially, policy makers have made a series of choices very similar to what preceded the collapse into World War I."
Huh? Like?
Read something about WWI. Then the leaders of Europe weren't thinking hard about the economy but instead were spending tons of money on war equipment, which eventually the politicians were just too eager to try out, thus the pointless first world war. Sound familiar?"
No, actually maybe YOU should read something about WWI - I think you've rather misunderstood the root causes. It was hardly a matter of "gee, we have all these guns lying about, we've gotta use them on something" - no matter how that might fit your weak historical analogy. Which wouldn't parallel the current period anyway, so what was your point?
I can think of at least one country that went from being lead by a Rhodes scholar to being lead by a drunkard who nearly flunked out of college. In theory the drunkard was elected, and thus the people were to blame but there was quite some doubt about the election as I recall.
I bet you spent all day on the Democratic Underground forums thinking that one up - very clever. But I don't know what country you're talking about. The one I live in was run for 8 years by a drunkard hick who was more interested in getting his wally polished than actually making policy decisions, and who was replaced by a president elected legally (the only people doubting it were the raving partisans for whom a win by anyone but Gore would have been "illegal" or "cheating" or some evil conspiracy) whose policies have led to SOLID economic growth (despite being handed a completely balloon economy), the defeat of two rogue states, the cowing of another two (Libya, N.Korea as of today), and success on so many fronts that his new Democratic challengers have nothing left to complain about.
If the Republican drunkard could accomplish this in 3 years, why the heck couldn't the previous Democratic drunkard get half as much accomplished in 8? I know that doesn't fit your political worldview, sorry about that.
I keep reading Sterling hoping to see what all the rest of you are apparently seeing, but all I get it someone deeply, deeply in love with hearing his own clever ideas, usually couched in some nebulously sardonic comment that makes it oh-so-hip.
Some random snippets... "Socially, policy makers have made a series of choices very similar to what preceded the collapse into World War I." Huh? Like?
"we've really turned our backs on a world that could have been pleasant, delight-ful, peaceful, and technocratic. Now we face a world that is religious, narrow-minded, fundamentalist, and violent." This is precisely the sort of vapid utopianism that begs so many questions it's meaningless. Really? How did "we" turn our backs on it Bruce?
"Sure, we hate Exxon because they're huge and they're everywhere." Personally, it seems a little L.Ron Hubbard-y to contrive a eco-social movement with designated hate subjects, if not downright Nineteenth Century. Wouldn't it be more intrinsically interesting to try to understand the reflexive envy in a society that's not all that zero-sum anymore? Doesn't Bruce feel some irony in poking at Ellison's "proper" enemies, when his own cachet cows look as stereotypically sacred as anyone elses?
I dunno. He's just got this 'end of history' thing cooking, looking for the McGuffin in a story that's just a stream-of-consciousness monologue. He keeps trying to refer to "the real story" or the very-much-italicized "truth", but I don't see how he manages it with a straight face. Maybe he's laughing all the way to the bank. I still cannot find the kernel of tangibility he seems to keep flourishing.
When your wife/GF comes in asks what the hell you are doing- tell her you are looking for martians on the Intra-Web. But what do I do if they BOTH walk in?;)
Hope to hell you actually find a Martian, because that at least has a CHANCE of distracting them long enough to give you a reasonable head start.
"... to dictate who should be depossed or who should be governing in any given country?"
A PERFECT example of the moral relativist BULLSHIT that is why we told France and Germany to go stuff themselves.
You don't think there's EVER a reason that a country can morally and ethically say that another government can be deposed? Jesus, that's stupid. So I suppose that you don't think anyone should have stopped the Hutu from massacring the Tuutsi in Rwanda? You were in favor of the Apartheid government of South Africa perhaps? Pol Pot? Stalin?
I'll say it again: Moral Relativist BULLSHIT. There are times when the EVIL of a government compels ethical individuals to say that war is justified to remove that government. And you know what? Then it DOES come down to power, which is what your particular Leftish Guilt is based upon, isn't it?
You may disagree on Iraq, but I bet I can find the families of 2-3 million Iraqis (not to even start counting Kurds) that would disagree with you. Or do the opinions of brown people not count?
An invasion of Japan would have cost lives on both sides, many more than were lost by using two atomic bombs. Noone in the longterm learnt from it, noone had to deal with the many dead that would have resulted from an invasion. The lessons that were presented by the 100,000 dead were easily forgotten, precisely because the deaths were all on one side, and were easily dealt. Two bombers dropping two bombs killed 100,000, and it was all too easy.
Please name me one other weapon that was invented, used twice, and THEN NEVER USED AGAIN FOR 60 years (and counting...)?
In fact, name me another 60 year period of peace between the Great Powers?
I think it's all too easy to say "oh look at the horror that nukes hath wrought" without considering that maybe, just maybe, the horror that is nuclear armageddon is so horrible that we haven't had a nuclear war for precisely that reason. Maybe we HAVE learned something as a species?
Not to sound like an ass or something but this seems like a really childish behaviour.
R-i-g-h-t. Because opposing the removal of a homocidal dictator because of some rash weapons sales in the 1990's is a much more reasonable and mature position. Because millions of dead Iraqis have no impact on French foreign policy.
Actually SketchUp is very cool, plus they have a demo that lets you do everything you want for 6 hours of program-run time.
Very simple to use, and they've thought of everything to make it simpler. Draw a line, and then click near the middle, it'll assume you want to find the center point (but you don't have to). It's really slick in realtime shading & rendering too.
Wish I had the $$ to buy it, just 'cause it's fun. Now I've used my 6 hours on my computer at home, computer at work, laptop, and wife's computer.:(
First hint was as an expansion for HL. Then as a standalone. Then an expansion for HL/CS Then a standalone. I believe the latest incarnation is as a standalone, running the HL2 engine.
It's been so long, I don't even REMEMBER if I pre-ordered it via Amazon.com - but that was when it was a $30 expansion. Do they still have my ticket? Did I pay? I truly don't remember.
5 - Insightful? Yeah, because it's so much easier to dismiss him as a glassy-eyed born again than to try to really UNDERSTAND who he is, why 50%+ of the American electorate (and far more than 50%, if you eliminate the votes cast by government workers and people on the federal dole as conflict-of-interest votes, BTW) agrees with him.
I bet you think we invaded Iraq for the oil too, right?
Then again, no one owns Antarctica so why shouldn't people do what they want.
Not to argue 2nd-person here, but nobody's SAYING that people can't (or even shouldn't) do what they want - it's the whole "I expect someone will take care of me if things go wrong" attitude.
And let's be honest - they ARE taking care of him. They're feeding & housing him which is already reasonable charity. They're shipping him home on one of their regular flights, again, reasonable charity. The whole "give/sell me some of your relatively precious fuelstocks, and let me fly my plane home because I want to" (no guarantee he won't get lost, or crash, or somesuch that would require ANOTHER rescue) is asking too much, and they're right to refuse both in principle, and to set a precedent.
Hey, science funding isn't doing well enough, offer to sell him fuel at $10,000 per gallon. Or ship his plane home for $1,000,000. Take it or leave it.
Perhaps some people care more about actual issues than about getting money for themselves and receiving government approval?
Then perhaps someone shouldn't bitch if they: a) don't have money b) face the disapproval of their government. Which is about 80% of the content of his website.
Jesus Christ, the My-Cause-is-SO-Holy Attitude makes me sick sometimes.
One very simple way to earn a few brownie points is to scuttle the very project that the USA deemed to be "unhelpful".
Perhaps in retrospect, standing up on the internet, waving your hands over your head, and virtually shouting "Nyah, nyah I can build a cheap do-it-yourself cruise missile!" wasn't the *wisest* course of action? Perhaps something a little more low-key and with a less inflammatory name might have ended you with a juicy research grant and a government pat on the head.
I can't speak for this gentleman, but I can speak for myself. In the US, even if you believe you are an employee of a company, and you believe they are witholding your taxes as they should be, you are personally liable if they didn't.
When you are first hired YOU fill out your W4 withholdings, and then your tax debit is shown on every single pay stub you get, whether you have direct deposit or not. AND at the end of each year you get W2 forms restating all this. So yes, you ARE responsible for your taxes. The company can't be responsible for whatever withholding amount you declare - what if you're lying? The only way I can see this happening is if the company wasn't paying THEIR share of your social security, while simultaneously still deducting your pre-tax SS deductions, so you didn't see any discrepancy - IANAL but this seems pretty clearly a case of the COMPANY's fault, for which you could pursue a civil action.
Eventually all houses will be well sound proofed and you've improved everyone's standard of living. What's wrong with that?
And the money comes from where, again? Trees?
"Eventually..." you're right, but at the cost of capital which would have been spent on other things. This is what it comes down to: some people (Liberals in US parlance, Social Democrats just about everywhere else) believe that Government can do more good with everyone's money than everyone could do for themselves individually, and I simply don't accept that.
Where does it stop? I have an annoying neighbor, who raises tension in the whole neighborhood - can we have the gov't tax everyone a little more to hire a hit man to get rid of him? Clearly, this should be paid for out of my OWN pocket.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Or do you expect that in all the human universe only the earth will have nations and conflict and all the rest of it will be one, big, happy, rainbow coalition commune?
Of course space will be one big happy rainbow coalition commune if they can keep America out, because we all know that America is the evilest country ever in history, right?
I mean, there was no war in the world until America existed, there was no racism and slavery until America, and there was no pollution until George Bush refused Kyoto. I think those are pretty widely accepted facts, don't you?
Remember, we were the GOOD ones. If we did look bad, it meant the commies were the good ones, so that simply had to go.
This is all very convenient for you self-loathing types, you stomp around as much as you want.
Personally, I'll remember only that we WERE the good guys. Does that mean that we didn't do anything bad? No, and anyone who thinks it does is frankly pretty stupid. War sucks completely. Completely. But there is such a thing as a good and bad side to things nevertheless.
You say that "If we did look bad, it meant the commies were the good ones, so that simply had to go." - either you're confusing Nazis with Commies, or you're really talking about Communists, which is totally a different track but whatever.
So you draw moral parallels between the Allies and the
a) Nazis with their engineered DEATH camps, or
b) the Soviets, whose armies basically raped everything female in Berlin and other conquered German soil?
If you can't see a difference between "them" and "us" then you are a pretty sad individual.
For those of us who have fought in war, it doesn't matter for crap WHY you're killing that human over there. You ARE, and you will live with that fact the rest of your life.
But, I ask you to look carefully and imagine a world in which the Nazis had won. Was it worth doing just about anything - including killing helpless civilians, yes, even children - to end that?
I'd imagine the ash-piles of Auschwitz alone would say yes.
All the top modded posts on /. seem to keep saying "oh this is stupid" but I think most people are missing the point of the training.
It's about organizing, communicating, teamwork, learning to understand the situation from the various sources (some electronic, most contradictory), and leading remotely.
I've played WW2OL for 2+ years now, and it's a HUGE eye-opener to see how much better well-organized squads communicating constantly on teamspeak do, as compared to random lone wolfers running around with their l33t ski11z.
America's Army (the game, not the service) is the same way.
Nobody's saying that shooting a gun in a virtual world will train you how to shoot for real, or give you courage to stand in battle. But what it will give you is a sense of teamwork, and a familiarity with the SITUATION that might help you trust your real-life trained skills and coworkers/soldiers, and might just save your life.
L'hall ilmak puuto terrikka algokrintak!
(Martian, trans: We welcome our wheeled robot masters from Earth!)
This is from old net lore, but it's worth repeating IMO.
1 billion seconds ago it was 1972.
1 billion minutes ago it was 102 AD
1 billion hours ago (about 100,000 BC) the first Homo Sapiens appeared.
1 billion days ago, life was just beginning to learn how to photosynthesize in the oceans.
A billion is a *lot*
9.06% > 10%?
Sounds like you've bought into that 'new math' too, son.
Lessee, handsome young professor, with EIGHT grad students. All coincidentally female and good looking. What are the odds of THAT? Spend a lot of time in the lab, do ya, Doc?
m .j pg
http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/04/images/thetea
I'm going to let everyone ELSE make the jokes, thanks.
I'll support the industry in their efforts against this copying software, as long as they start using scratch-resistant lacquers on their cd/dvd surfaces, and/or promise to replace my original purchase disks for postage costs when they become so scratched they don't work anymore.
:(
As long as they are going to assume I'm a pirate, and I *have* to stick the cd in the drive for my game to play, then I'd like them to cover the replacement of legitimately-purchased cd's damaged due to normal wear & tear. (If you have kids that use the computer, you know that those are usually the first ones to fail...)
I have at least 30 game cd's (out of maybe 300) that won't work anymore due to scratching, and the 'cd resurfacers' don't work as well as they claim. If I was smart, I guess I'd just pirate the games off Kazaa, but I don't want to do that.
"Your high for the day is a nice and cool 291 Kelvin."
I'm in Minneapolis, dude, that's about 20 deg K warmer than here.
No, actually maybe YOU should read something about WWI - I think you've rather misunderstood the root causes. It was hardly a matter of "gee, we have all these guns lying about, we've gotta use them on something" - no matter how that might fit your weak historical analogy. Which wouldn't parallel the current period anyway, so what was your point?
I bet you spent all day on the Democratic Underground forums thinking that one up - very clever. But I don't know what country you're talking about. The one I live in was run for 8 years by a drunkard hick who was more interested in getting his wally polished than actually making policy decisions, and who was replaced by a president elected legally (the only people doubting it were the raving partisans for whom a win by anyone but Gore would have been "illegal" or "cheating" or some evil conspiracy) whose policies have led to SOLID economic growth (despite being handed a completely balloon economy), the defeat of two rogue states, the cowing of another two (Libya, N.Korea as of today), and success on so many fronts that his new Democratic challengers have nothing left to complain about.
If the Republican drunkard could accomplish this in 3 years, why the heck couldn't the previous Democratic drunkard get half as much accomplished in 8? I know that doesn't fit your political worldview, sorry about that.
I keep reading Sterling hoping to see what all the rest of you are apparently seeing, but all I get it someone deeply, deeply in love with hearing his own clever ideas, usually couched in some nebulously sardonic comment that makes it oh-so-hip.
Some random snippets...
"Socially, policy makers have made a series of choices very similar to what preceded the collapse into World War I."
Huh? Like?
"we've really turned our backs on a world that could have been pleasant, delight-ful, peaceful, and technocratic. Now we face a world that is religious, narrow-minded, fundamentalist, and violent."
This is precisely the sort of vapid utopianism that begs so many questions it's meaningless. Really? How did "we" turn our backs on it Bruce?
"Sure, we hate Exxon because they're huge and they're everywhere." Personally, it seems a little L.Ron Hubbard-y to contrive a eco-social movement with designated hate subjects, if not downright Nineteenth Century. Wouldn't it be more intrinsically interesting to try to understand the reflexive envy in a society that's not all that zero-sum anymore? Doesn't Bruce feel some irony in poking at Ellison's "proper" enemies, when his own cachet cows look as stereotypically sacred as anyone elses?
I dunno. He's just got this 'end of history' thing cooking, looking for the McGuffin in a story that's just a stream-of-consciousness monologue. He keeps trying to refer to "the real story" or the very-much-italicized "truth", but I don't see how he manages it with a straight face. Maybe he's laughing all the way to the bank. I still cannot find the kernel of tangibility he seems to keep flourishing.
It's probably just me.
Hope to hell you actually find a Martian, because that at least has a CHANCE of distracting them long enough to give you a reasonable head start.
"... to dictate who should be depossed or who should be governing in any given country?"
A PERFECT example of the moral relativist BULLSHIT that is why we told France and Germany to go stuff themselves.
You don't think there's EVER a reason that a country can morally and ethically say that another government can be deposed? Jesus, that's stupid. So I suppose that you don't think anyone should have stopped the Hutu from massacring the Tuutsi in Rwanda? You were in favor of the Apartheid government of South Africa perhaps? Pol Pot? Stalin?
I'll say it again: Moral Relativist BULLSHIT. There are times when the EVIL of a government compels ethical individuals to say that war is justified to remove that government. And you know what? Then it DOES come down to power, which is what your particular Leftish Guilt is based upon, isn't it?
You may disagree on Iraq, but I bet I can find the families of 2-3 million Iraqis (not to even start counting Kurds) that would disagree with you. Or do the opinions of brown people not count?
Please name me one other weapon that was invented, used twice, and THEN NEVER USED AGAIN FOR 60 years (and counting...)?
In fact, name me another 60 year period of peace between the Great Powers?
I think it's all too easy to say "oh look at the horror that nukes hath wrought" without considering that maybe, just maybe, the horror that is nuclear armageddon is so horrible that we haven't had a nuclear war for precisely that reason. Maybe we HAVE learned something as a species?
R-i-g-h-t. Because opposing the removal of a homocidal dictator because of some rash weapons sales in the 1990's is a much more reasonable and mature position. Because millions of dead Iraqis have no impact on French foreign policy.
Moderate, -2 D'oh!
Actually SketchUp is very cool, plus they have a demo that lets you do everything you want for 6 hours of program-run time.
:(
Very simple to use, and they've thought of everything to make it simpler. Draw a line, and then click near the middle, it'll assume you want to find the center point (but you don't have to).
It's really slick in realtime shading & rendering too.
Wish I had the $$ to buy it, just 'cause it's fun.
Now I've used my 6 hours on my computer at home, computer at work, laptop, and wife's computer.
Teamfortress 2
First hint was as an expansion for HL.
Then as a standalone.
Then an expansion for HL/CS
Then a standalone.
I believe the latest incarnation is as a standalone, running the HL2 engine.
It's been so long, I don't even REMEMBER if I pre-ordered it via Amazon.com - but that was when it was a $30 expansion. Do they still have my ticket? Did I pay? I truly don't remember.
"Because Bush is a bible-thumper"
5 - Insightful?
Yeah, because it's so much easier to dismiss him as a glassy-eyed born again than to try to really UNDERSTAND who he is, why 50%+ of the American electorate (and far more than 50%, if you eliminate the votes cast by government workers and people on the federal dole as conflict-of-interest votes, BTW) agrees with him.
I bet you think we invaded Iraq for the oil too, right?
Not to argue 2nd-person here, but nobody's SAYING that people can't (or even shouldn't) do what they want - it's the whole "I expect someone will take care of me if things go wrong" attitude.
And let's be honest - they ARE taking care of him. They're feeding & housing him which is already reasonable charity. They're shipping him home on one of their regular flights, again, reasonable charity. The whole "give/sell me some of your relatively precious fuelstocks, and let me fly my plane home because I want to" (no guarantee he won't get lost, or crash, or somesuch that would require ANOTHER rescue) is asking too much, and they're right to refuse both in principle, and to set a precedent.
Hey, science funding isn't doing well enough, offer to sell him fuel at $10,000 per gallon. Or ship his plane home for $1,000,000. Take it or leave it.
Then perhaps someone shouldn't bitch if they:
a) don't have money
b) face the disapproval of their government.
Which is about 80% of the content of his website.
Jesus Christ, the My-Cause-is-SO-Holy Attitude makes me sick sometimes.
Perhaps in retrospect, standing up on the internet, waving your hands over your head, and virtually shouting "Nyah, nyah I can build a cheap do-it-yourself cruise missile!" wasn't the *wisest* course of action?
Perhaps something a little more low-key and with a less inflammatory name might have ended you with a juicy research grant and a government pat on the head.
Yeah, and where do YOU think Godzilla came from, smart guy?
When you are first hired YOU fill out your W4 withholdings, and then your tax debit is shown on every single pay stub you get, whether you have direct deposit or not. AND at the end of each year you get W2 forms restating all this. So yes, you ARE responsible for your taxes. The company can't be responsible for whatever withholding amount you declare - what if you're lying?
The only way I can see this happening is if the company wasn't paying THEIR share of your social security, while simultaneously still deducting your pre-tax SS deductions, so you didn't see any discrepancy - IANAL but this seems pretty clearly a case of the COMPANY's fault, for which you could pursue a civil action.
And the money comes from where, again? Trees?
"Eventually..." you're right, but at the cost of capital which would have been spent on other things. This is what it comes down to: some people (Liberals in US parlance, Social Democrats just about everywhere else) believe that Government can do more good with everyone's money than everyone could do for themselves individually, and I simply don't accept that.
Where does it stop? I have an annoying neighbor, who raises tension in the whole neighborhood - can we have the gov't tax everyone a little more to hire a hit man to get rid of him? Clearly, this should be paid for out of my OWN pocket.