"Beginning next year, NRO will be in charge of the new Offensive Counter-Space program, which will come up with plans to specifically deny the use of near-Earth space to other nations, said Teets."
I don't see how a nation can claim to deny the use of space to other nations without the implicit understanding that they will be 'brought down' if they try to launch without our explicit permission. That such permission will not generally be granted can be inferred from the fact that, as the article states, Canada is already denied equal use of freaking NORAD, of which they are a supposedly equal partner. To act or imply that because other nations are militarily weak compared to us that it doesn't matter what they think, is exactly the same kind of unilateral attitude that is at the root of our foreign policy, space and otherwise, at the moment.
Another quote from the article that speaks for itself, at least to my mind:
"After the administration renounced the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty last year, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made it clear that the abrogation of treaty constraints in the use of radar and tracking devices was not just for the benefit of fielding a missile-defense system, but to build better unilateral networks to manage the planet from space."
Last one, repeated again:
"Hints of such a policy showed up in the Rumsfeld Commission report of January 2001, which warned of a "space Pearl Harbor" if the United States did not dominate low-earth, geosynchronous and polar orbital planes, as well as all launch facilities and ground stations, to exploit space for battlefield advantage."
I really don't see how else this can be interpreted but that it ain't going up unless we allow it, and we likely won't be allowing much to, say, the Chinese.
"The nation's largest intelligence agency by budget and in control of all U.S. spy satellites, NRO is talking openly with the U.S. Air Force Space Command about actively denying the use of space for intelligence purposes to any other nation at any time--not just adversaries, but even longtime allies, according to NRO director Peter Teets.
At the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in early April, Teets proposed that U.S. resources from military, civilian and commercial satellites be combined to provide "persistence in total situational awareness, for the benefit of this nation's war fighters." If allies don't like the new paradigm of space dominance, said Air Force secretary James Roche, they'll just have to learn to accept it. The allies, he told the symposium, will have "no veto power."
Beginning next year, NRO will be in charge of the new Offensive Counter-Space program, which will come up with plans to specifically deny the use of near-Earth space to other nations, said Teets.
The program will include two components: the Counter Communication System, designed to disrupt other nations' communication networks from space; and the Counter Surveillance Reconnaissance System, formed to prevent other countries from using advanced intelligence-gathering technology in air or space.
"Negation implies treating allies poorly," Robert Lawson, senior policy adviser for nonproliferation in the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, said at a Toronto conference in late March. "It implies treaty busting."
Hints of such a policy showed up in the Rumsfeld Commission report of January 2001, which warned of a "space Pearl Harbor" if the United States did not dominate low-earth, geosynchronous and polar orbital planes, as well as all launch facilities and ground stations, to exploit space for battlefield advantage.
The European Union complained in no uncertain terms five years ago that the NRO and National Security Agency were using global electronic-snooping programs like Echelon outside the boundaries of mutual NATO advantage. The European Space Agency chimed in last fall, when the Defense Department tried to bully ESA into changing its design plans for a navigational-satellite system called Galileo.
In the aftermath of the successful Iraq campaign, concern goes much deeper and extends to the heart of NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command inside Cheyenne Mountain near here. While Canada is supposed to be an equal member of NORAD, representatives of Canada's military and civilian establishment are complaining that they are not allowed to use space-based communications and intelligence in the same way the United States can."
To repeat, Rumsfeld "warned of a "space Pearl Harbor" if the United States did not dominate low-earth, geosynchronous and polar orbital planes, as well as all launch facilities and ground stations, to exploit space for battlefield advantage."
The current administration is completely out of fucking control.
Euro/dollar activity has little to do with peoples general feelings toward America and much more to do with the fact that Fed Governor Bernanke said, paraphrasing, "we have this thing called a printing press, and we aren't afraid to use it", combined with Alan G saying that we don't have enough inflation.
"even for modern Linux distributions, it is a good idea to make full new installs rather then upgrading."
Check out Debian and say goodbye to your problem. I've NEVER, EVER had it leave my machine in an unstable state. Maybe it can, but from what I've seen it would be rare in the most extreme.
Please elaborate, I'm not sure what you mean. The ECB has said they don't want to risk inflation by lowering rates further and the Fed is saying it can't raise rates without jeopardizing the "recovery". The Fed is between a rock and a hard place BIGTIME right now. Lower rates and court inflation or raise rates and bust the borrowers/lenders. They are betting on inflation not getting out of control before the cheap money somehow sparks a recovery. Think Alan has his fingers crossed though? I don't. There is something else at work and it's related to oil IMO. In particular, OPEC is no longer in a position to dictate prices to the US. That pressure on the dollar being removed, by itself, has to have fundamental repercussions.
Not entirely a troll. The Euro is stronger than the dollar right now, with the dollar having lost ~25% of it's value relative to it over the last several months, and in fact days (check the dollar index chart). The only reason this hasn't bitten the Average Joe in the US square in the ass and HARD is that China has their exchange rate fixed at 8 renminbi to 1 dollar. With our most massive trading partner at a safely fixed rate the current administration is OK with a weakening of the dollar vs the euro for a couple of reasons, the (much) lesser of which is as a boon to US manufacturers (all three or so of them that are still left). The big reason is as a slap at the EU as now all European goods will cost much more in the US, which tend to be the more 'up-market' goods (German cars, French wine, Danish furniture, etc). When the price of an already expensive item is suddenly 25% higher, it has an effect. That'll teach them to go against the wishes of the US, as in the case of Iraq. Also take note of the fact that the major dollar fall of the last week or so coincides nicely with the acquisition of a big fat huge pool of oil.
It's a big mean game being played out there with our money. The new bills are but a sideshow.
We'd settle for "sell things to us in the manner we want them sold, with reasonable terms and at a fair price".
Instead we get, "We'll sell you only what we want, when we want (lots of good stuff is no longer available because they can't see a way to profit from it enough), with egregiously unfair terms and insane prices."
Normally this thing called "customer service" and "competition" prevents this from happening. The p2p rebellion is in no small part fueled by a complete lack of it on the part of the music industry. From bullshit manufactured teen groups and the RIAA, to Ticketmaster and Clearchannel, the entire industry is geared towards not just profiting, but greedily and extortionately sucking every last dime of revenue from both the artists and fans alike. If the well of public sympathy is so dry for them that the people they should have been courting rather than fucking have become so alienated, to the point of ignoring them completely the moment a way to do so became available, too freaking bad. Changes are often necessary, but seldom neat, pretty and entirely 'legal'.
That said, I do see what you are saying and wish it were that simple.
Re:Why are we always nitpicking?
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 1
So now it's our job to go around the world enforcing our sense of ethics on all the petty dictators? Or just the ones with strategic value?
1. The books are not what most people would consider any sort of canon to be drawn from for future movies. Boils down to: % of people who've seen the prior movies (huge) vs. % of people who would have read some random SW 'universe' book (tiny).
2. "The previous stories connecting characters was alluded to in the original trilogy" -- Please be specific.
3. Offtopic perhaps, though most of the criticism levelled at the last two movies has been far from unfounded. For me, the root of the matter lies in the fact that while the original movies appealed to me both as a child (SW came out when I was eight) and as an adult, the most recent ones lack the ability to appeal to me as an adult, even with a starting handicap of goodwill from the originals. And I really, really do not think it's just nostalgia that makes me like the originals as an adult and to be able to keep watching them once a year or so, as there are other shows and movies that I'm very nostalgic over yet almost cannot bear to watch at all now. Battlestar Galactica is the prime example. Or how about Knight Rider? Embarrassingly, I do remember actually liking that show when I was a kid. Now it actually induces pain and blackouts!;) Rant over, just been carrying these thoughts for a while.
Not five minutes ago I aborted trying to edit an image in GIMP on my Linux box that I had created initially in Photoshop. After futzing with adding layers to do things that PS does in the layer properties (or whatever it's called when you double-click on a layer, I was using a color overlay in particular), I gave up when I saw how anemic the text control tool was. No inter-character spacing adjustment, and even if I overcame that somehow, mimicing the slight outline and shadow that the text had in PS would likely have meant adding more layers, etc. Fuck all that, back to PS on my old box. Yes, I could probably relearn the stuff that can be still be accomplished though differently in GIMP, but from what I saw there's no parity when it comes to # of steps, ease of accessibility and intuitiveness, etc.
And to top it all off, I'm primarily a developer, not even someone who knows how to make PS really stand up and whistle Dixie.
Because there are a few poor bastards like myself out here who want to and is allowed to run Linux on my desktop, but lives in an MS/VFP dominated shop doing other stuff(Java). Would be nice to not have to have two boxes. And it might be a way to finally get the old farts to try Linux if they can run their precious Fox on it.
Speaking as the lone Java guy in an MS/FoxPro dominated shop, this subject is of special interest to me. In a nutshell, no other environment has the native data handling capabilities combined with a syntactically simple (which I think can still run dbIII+ era code!) base language that at the same time is still evolving (mutating?) to allow for some real OO design if you want it combined with a decently friendly dev environ and GUI builder tools combined with a single point of sale and support that makes the PHBs feel comfy. Someone nailed it in an earlier comment when they mentioned that the user community is keeping Fox alive. The users have been so vocal and tenacious that I think MS has said, "Screw it, let's just keep five or ten guys working on Fox and they can do whatever the hell they want with it." Every time a new version comes out, my Fox flag waving compatriot mentions how it has about ten new features that he's thought of since the last version and that he's been wanting, or that replace a hacked together solution the community has come up with, etc. Most of the time I point out that the new geegaws are already in Java, but it's never sufficient to make up for the lack of native data handling or GUI building...ugh. Fox is a product MS got right in spite of their best efforts to kill it.
The Remover of Obstacles. After defeating all the gods except Vishnu, who had attacked him for covering the moon, he gained immortality, became the mount of Vishnu on his travels and is regarded as the King of Birds. He's also familiar to a significant portion of the worlds current population (India, Indonesia, SE Asia, Buddhists in general...).
I'm quite sure it was my favorite because it was concise. Are you quite sure he is not a lawyer? Are you quite sure he has not read the law? And realize that everything the original poster of that message said has already happened to people. No, it isn't widespread. That doesn't make it right.
Since you brought it up and apparently missed yesterday's thread with FIFTEEN HUNDRED FSCKING MESSAGES on why Ashcroft/Patriot are bad, here's my favorite:
Re:Not A Joke (Score:5, Informative) by bricriu (184334) on Wednesday April 09, @03:39PM (#5695030) (http://slashdot.org/) You can be detained, without being charged, indefinitely, having been investigated under a sealed warrant, an unsigned warrant, or no warrant at all, and then be denied access to a lawyer.
You must not create web apps that require much data entry then, because pushing all validation to the server side is simply retarded. Regardless, the fact that the article was of no use _to you_ doesn't make it propaganda.
Ancient and obsolete versions don't help your argument. Yes, the release for other arches IN THE PAST. No they will not release them EVER AGAIN. Yes, they will release for IA64, sorry I left that in by mistake. Otherwise, MS is a one architecture outfit. You will never see anything they release run on any of the architectures I listed (except IA64 OBVIOUSLY and whatever CE runs on, which is largely irrelevant).
Slashdot Mirror
It's a little out of date now, but the field is largely still the same:
Ultra-Concentrated Media
The article says:
"Beginning next year, NRO will be in charge of the new Offensive Counter-Space program, which will come up with plans to specifically deny the use of near-Earth space to other nations, said Teets."
I don't see how a nation can claim to deny the use of space to other nations without the implicit understanding that they will be 'brought down' if they try to launch without our explicit permission. That such permission will not generally be granted can be inferred from the fact that, as the article states, Canada is already denied equal use of freaking NORAD, of which they are a supposedly equal partner. To act or imply that because other nations are militarily weak compared to us that it doesn't matter what they think, is exactly the same kind of unilateral attitude that is at the root of our foreign policy, space and otherwise, at the moment.
Another quote from the article that speaks for itself, at least to my mind:
"After the administration renounced the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty last year, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made it clear that the abrogation of treaty constraints in the use of radar and tracking devices was not just for the benefit of fielding a missile-defense system, but to build better unilateral networks to manage the planet from space."
Last one, repeated again:
"Hints of such a policy showed up in the Rumsfeld Commission report of January 2001, which warned of a "space Pearl Harbor" if the United States did not dominate low-earth, geosynchronous and polar orbital planes, as well as all launch facilities and ground stations, to exploit space for battlefield advantage."
I really don't see how else this can be interpreted but that it ain't going up unless we allow it, and we likely won't be allowing much to, say, the Chinese.
U.S. 'negation' policy raises concerns abroad
A snip from the start of it:
"The nation's largest intelligence agency by budget and in control of all U.S. spy satellites, NRO is talking openly with the U.S. Air Force Space Command about actively denying the use of space for intelligence purposes to any other nation at any time--not just adversaries, but even longtime allies, according to NRO director Peter Teets.
At the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in early April, Teets proposed that U.S. resources from military, civilian and commercial satellites be combined to provide "persistence in total situational awareness, for the benefit of this nation's war fighters." If allies don't like the new paradigm of space dominance, said Air Force secretary James Roche, they'll just have to learn to accept it. The allies, he told the symposium, will have "no veto power."
Beginning next year, NRO will be in charge of the new Offensive Counter-Space program, which will come up with plans to specifically deny the use of near-Earth space to other nations, said Teets.
The program will include two components: the Counter Communication System, designed to disrupt other nations' communication networks from space; and the Counter Surveillance Reconnaissance System, formed to prevent other countries from using advanced intelligence-gathering technology in air or space.
"Negation implies treating allies poorly," Robert Lawson, senior policy adviser for nonproliferation in the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, said at a Toronto conference in late March. "It implies treaty busting."
Hints of such a policy showed up in the Rumsfeld Commission report of January 2001, which warned of a "space Pearl Harbor" if the United States did not dominate low-earth, geosynchronous and polar orbital planes, as well as all launch facilities and ground stations, to exploit space for battlefield advantage.
The European Union complained in no uncertain terms five years ago that the NRO and National Security Agency were using global electronic-snooping programs like Echelon outside the boundaries of mutual NATO advantage. The European Space Agency chimed in last fall, when the Defense Department tried to bully ESA into changing its design plans for a navigational-satellite system called Galileo.
In the aftermath of the successful Iraq campaign, concern goes much deeper and extends to the heart of NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command inside Cheyenne Mountain near here. While Canada is supposed to be an equal member of NORAD, representatives of Canada's military and civilian establishment are complaining that they are not allowed to use space-based communications and intelligence in the same way the United States can."
To repeat, Rumsfeld "warned of a "space Pearl Harbor" if the United States did not dominate low-earth, geosynchronous and polar orbital planes, as well as all launch facilities and ground stations, to exploit space for battlefield advantage."
The current administration is completely out of fucking control.
Euro/dollar activity has little to do with peoples general feelings toward America and much more to do with the fact that Fed Governor Bernanke said, paraphrasing, "we have this thing called a printing press, and we aren't afraid to use it", combined with Alan G saying that we don't have enough inflation.
Card in pocket, it is far from "just as easy" to take it from me as it would be to pass a wand over my butt without me noticing.
"even for modern Linux distributions, it is a good idea to make full new installs rather then upgrading."
Check out Debian and say goodbye to your problem. I've NEVER, EVER had it leave my machine in an unstable state. Maybe it can, but from what I've seen it would be rare in the most extreme.
How am I supposed to pay my mechanic friend for a quick fix, late in the afternoon on a Sunday, when I have to be somewhere immediately?
Or any of about a billion other scenarios in which requiring additional technology is impractical.
"but far too often government processes are hijacked by either open source zealots..."
An example or two of this would be nice.
"Leaning in either direction can cause great technical difficulty and cost to the public."
In what specific ways would 'leaning' toward open source incur "great technical difficulty and cost"?
Please elaborate, I'm not sure what you mean. The ECB has said they don't want to risk inflation by lowering rates further and the Fed is saying it can't raise rates without jeopardizing the "recovery". The Fed is between a rock and a hard place BIGTIME right now. Lower rates and court inflation or raise rates and bust the borrowers/lenders. They are betting on inflation not getting out of control before the cheap money somehow sparks a recovery. Think Alan has his fingers crossed though? I don't. There is something else at work and it's related to oil IMO. In particular, OPEC is no longer in a position to dictate prices to the US. That pressure on the dollar being removed, by itself, has to have fundamental repercussions.
Not entirely a troll. The Euro is stronger than the dollar right now, with the dollar having lost ~25% of it's value relative to it over the last several months, and in fact days (check the dollar index chart). The only reason this hasn't bitten the Average Joe in the US square in the ass and HARD is that China has their exchange rate fixed at 8 renminbi to 1 dollar. With our most massive trading partner at a safely fixed rate the current administration is OK with a weakening of the dollar vs the euro for a couple of reasons, the (much) lesser of which is as a boon to US manufacturers (all three or so of them that are still left). The big reason is as a slap at the EU as now all European goods will cost much more in the US, which tend to be the more 'up-market' goods (German cars, French wine, Danish furniture, etc). When the price of an already expensive item is suddenly 25% higher, it has an effect. That'll teach them to go against the wishes of the US, as in the case of Iraq. Also take note of the fact that the major dollar fall of the last week or so coincides nicely with the acquisition of a big fat huge pool of oil.
It's a big mean game being played out there with our money. The new bills are but a sideshow.
We'd settle for "sell things to us in the manner we want them sold, with reasonable terms and at a fair price".
Instead we get, "We'll sell you only what we want, when we want (lots of good stuff is no longer available because they can't see a way to profit from it enough), with egregiously unfair terms and insane prices."
Normally this thing called "customer service" and "competition" prevents this from happening. The p2p rebellion is in no small part fueled by a complete lack of it on the part of the music industry. From bullshit manufactured teen groups and the RIAA, to Ticketmaster and Clearchannel, the entire industry is geared towards not just profiting, but greedily and extortionately sucking every last dime of revenue from both the artists and fans alike. If the well of public sympathy is so dry for them that the people they should have been courting rather than fucking have become so alienated, to the point of ignoring them completely the moment a way to do so became available, too freaking bad. Changes are often necessary, but seldom neat, pretty and entirely 'legal'.
That said, I do see what you are saying and wish it were that simple.
So now it's our job to go around the world enforcing our sense of ethics on all the petty dictators? Or just the ones with strategic value?
The people in the villages asked for internet access specifically. They have the basics of food, water, schools and medicine already.
1. The books are not what most people would consider any sort of canon to be drawn from for future movies. Boils down to: % of people who've seen the prior movies (huge) vs. % of people who would have read some random SW 'universe' book (tiny).
;) Rant over, just been carrying these thoughts for a while.
2. "The previous stories connecting characters was alluded to in the original trilogy" -- Please be specific.
3. Offtopic perhaps, though most of the criticism levelled at the last two movies has been far from unfounded. For me, the root of the matter lies in the fact that while the original movies appealed to me both as a child (SW came out when I was eight) and as an adult, the most recent ones lack the ability to appeal to me as an adult, even with a starting handicap of goodwill from the originals. And I really, really do not think it's just nostalgia that makes me like the originals as an adult and to be able to keep watching them once a year or so, as there are other shows and movies that I'm very nostalgic over yet almost cannot bear to watch at all now. Battlestar Galactica is the prime example. Or how about Knight Rider? Embarrassingly, I do remember actually liking that show when I was a kid. Now it actually induces pain and blackouts!
Not five minutes ago I aborted trying to edit an image in GIMP on my Linux box that I had created initially in Photoshop. After futzing with adding layers to do things that PS does in the layer properties (or whatever it's called when you double-click on a layer, I was using a color overlay in particular), I gave up when I saw how anemic the text control tool was. No inter-character spacing adjustment, and even if I overcame that somehow, mimicing the slight outline and shadow that the text had in PS would likely have meant adding more layers, etc. Fuck all that, back to PS on my old box. Yes, I could probably relearn the stuff that can be still be accomplished though differently in GIMP, but from what I saw there's no parity when it comes to # of steps, ease of accessibility and intuitiveness, etc.
And to top it all off, I'm primarily a developer, not even someone who knows how to make PS really stand up and whistle Dixie.
Because there are a few poor bastards like myself out here who want to and is allowed to run Linux on my desktop, but lives in an MS/VFP dominated shop doing other stuff(Java). Would be nice to not have to have two boxes. And it might be a way to finally get the old farts to try Linux if they can run their precious Fox on it.
"How about moving away from FoxPro and MS"
Speaking as the lone Java guy in an MS/FoxPro dominated shop, this subject is of special interest to me. In a nutshell, no other environment has the native data handling capabilities combined with a syntactically simple (which I think can still run dbIII+ era code!) base language that at the same time is still evolving (mutating?) to allow for some real OO design if you want it combined with a decently friendly dev environ and GUI builder tools combined with a single point of sale and support that makes the PHBs feel comfy. Someone nailed it in an earlier comment when they mentioned that the user community is keeping Fox alive. The users have been so vocal and tenacious that I think MS has said, "Screw it, let's just keep five or ten guys working on Fox and they can do whatever the hell they want with it." Every time a new version comes out, my Fox flag waving compatriot mentions how it has about ten new features that he's thought of since the last version and that he's been wanting, or that replace a hacked together solution the community has come up with, etc. Most of the time I point out that the new geegaws are already in Java, but it's never sufficient to make up for the lack of native data handling or GUI building...ugh. Fox is a product MS got right in spite of their best efforts to kill it.
The Remover of Obstacles. After defeating all the gods except Vishnu, who had attacked him for covering the moon, he gained immortality, became the mount of Vishnu on his travels and is regarded as the King of Birds. He's also familiar to a significant portion of the worlds current population (India, Indonesia, SE Asia, Buddhists in general...).
I'm quite sure it was my favorite because it was concise. Are you quite sure he is not a lawyer? Are you quite sure he has not read the law? And realize that everything the original poster of that message said has already happened to people. No, it isn't widespread. That doesn't make it right.
Since you brought it up and apparently missed yesterday's thread with FIFTEEN HUNDRED FSCKING MESSAGES on why Ashcroft/Patriot are bad, here's my favorite:
Re:Not A Joke (Score:5, Informative)
by bricriu (184334) on Wednesday April 09, @03:39PM (#5695030)
(http://slashdot.org/)
You can be detained, without being charged, indefinitely, having been investigated under a sealed warrant, an unsigned warrant, or no warrant at all, and then be denied access to a lawyer.
And that is un-American. Period.
You must not create web apps that require much data entry then, because pushing all validation to the server side is simply retarded. Regardless, the fact that the article was of no use _to you_ doesn't make it propaganda.
"But, hey, anything to insult MS, right?"
Nah, no sport in it. Like hunting cows with a machine gun...
"Please notice hardware it runs - just 64KB of RAM!"
Just for the sake of pointing it out, if you're referring to the C64, it only had 32k of ram. The other 32k was the os/basic interpreter in rom. IIRC.
Ancient and obsolete versions don't help your argument. Yes, the release for other arches IN THE PAST. No they will not release them EVER AGAIN. Yes, they will release for IA64, sorry I left that in by mistake. Otherwise, MS is a one architecture outfit. You will never see anything they release run on any of the architectures I listed (except IA64 OBVIOUSLY and whatever CE runs on, which is largely irrelevant).
All you did is prove that you have no reading comprehension skills.