No concievable missile shield could shoot down any significant number of incoming missiles. The Russians would always be able to overwhelm the defenses with shear numbers, making the system worthless.
Even if that's true, it makes the system worthless only if your sole benchmark is "does it make us invulnerable to any hostile ICBM force, no matter how large?" But that isn't the only goal. First, there is a defense against a limited strike from a less-powerful adversary. Second, it makes it much, much more difficult to wipe out our ICBM force in a surprise attack and thus remain safe from retaliation. The odds of a given target surviving do not scale linearly with the number of attacking missiles. Consider (using round numbers for simplicity) that we have 1000 ICBMs, and a defense system with a 50/50 chance of shooting down an incoming missile.
Prior to having the defense, an enemy surprise attack can destroy our force on the ground using 1000 missiles (leaving aside factors like mechanical failure).
After we put in the defense, such an attack would destroy only 500 of our missiles, leaving us with 500 to retaliate with, far more than enough for a devastating return strike, given that we wouldn't need to bother attacking now-empty silos.
Suppose that the enemy decides to use twice as many missiles. That means that the odds of any given one of ours surviving is 0.5^2, or 25%. They attack with 2000 missiles. 250 of ours survive, still too much for any country to absorb and continue to effectively exist.
They decide to use three times as many. 0.5^3 = 12.5%, so 125 of ours survive to strike back. Still enough to wipe out a majority of the biggest country's military. If this were Russia we were talking about, their reward for destroying our ICBM force would probably be getting conquered by China.
4000 missiles are used. 0.5^4 = 6.25%. Losing 62 major military/industrial assets at once probably wouldn't eliminate a Russia-sized country as a cohesive entity, but they're not going to be invading anyone for a long time, and they're going to have chunks of their territory gobbled up by their neighbors. If they consider getting hit by 50 acceptable, they need to attack with 4322. Down to 10, they need 6643. To get it below 0.5 (i.e. to have the odds favor getting off unscathed) they need 10,965.
That's just against a poorly-performing defense. Suppose we have a 90% intercept rate. They need to attack with 28,433 (instead of 4322) missiles to get keep their losses below 50 targets. If we get it to 99%, they need 298,072.
To sum up after all the numbers: against even a minimally-effective missile defense, it becomes extremely costly for an attacker to field a force big enough for him to strike and wind up in a better strategic position than he started with, which is the whole point of attacking in the first place. As the defense becomes more effective, doing so becomes well-nigh impossible.
What Cerf has done has create a bundle forwarding protocol stack for the Android. It's not as "out there" as you'd think- someone send you data, you carry it, then forward it later. Lots of questions/issues in between as you might imagine.
That sounds exactly how "Fleetnet" works in the Axis of Time trilogy, once the 2021'ers get dumped in 1942 and no longer have access to satellite communications. When someone previously in Hawaii arrives in Los Angeles, carrying their flexipad (PDA/laptop-like device), it hooks up with other nearby devices and the owners of those devices receive the messages sent by other folks in Hawaii, not just those from the owner of the pad that made the trip.
I can't believe the comments that say that government-funded media will be Soviet-style Propaganda machines. Are you people out of your minds? Can anyone here name me one program or reporter more critical of the government than Bill Moyers? His programs get financed by PBS, a government corporation.
To pick one issue that's in the news and that I know he's spoken on a lot: can you name me a program or reporter less skeptical of the propriety and/or efficacy of government-run health care, than Bill Moyers?
In fact, that's exactly what corporations want you to believe, because public funding will be the only thing that frees journalists from the corporate teat. It will effectively shut down the corporate media oligarchy we have today.
Are you all slaves for the corporations or whatever organization pays your salaries? Is that the only lens through which you can see the world?
Oh, please. Most corporations don't give a damn about government policies that don't visibly impact them. I highly doubt the upper management of my employer (a software/hardware company) would care what I said about government press funding one way or another. You're basically espousing the Marxist idea of "class interest" (not that I'm calling you a Marxist), the belief that people act to further their perceived interests as "workers" or "the rich" or whatever -- in your case, "corporation" being an equivalent of a "class." Which is, of course, why Larry Ellison and Bill Gates got along so well, and why Apple and Google are in such agreement.
Actually, now that I think about it, my employer would probably prefer a government-funded press. Our biggest customers are Las Vegas casinos. As the major tax base in Nevada they definitely get listened to by politicians, all the way up to Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader. I'm sure if some news story came along that would hurt the casinos, they'd love to be able to ask Senator Reid to drop a pointed hint to the right people about not covering the story (can't have reporters wasting tax money on something that's "not newsworthy" after all), and what's good for my employer's customers is good for my employer.
Accepted how? It is true that in common usage "American" came to become a short-hand for "the citizen of USA". But "Americans" are, by definition, denizens of America, the continent.
Most words have multiple definitions, and those definitions are for the most part determined by common usage. In the lack of a specific context, when someone uses a word, listeners assume he means the most common definition. The word used to denote a citizen of the United States is "American" both because that's the word people usually use for that purpose and because that's the purpose for which people usually use that word. I have co-workers who come from Bangalore in the Republic of India. Should I start referring to them as "RoIians" so as not to offend citizens of Pakistan and Bangladesh, both of which are located on the Indian subcontinent?
It only underlines my point, as to the self-centred, narcissistic attitudes of the citizens of the USA that they would claim a continent-wide description for themselves exclusively and not bat an eye at this. I used "USian" here as a shortcut, because it is more precise.
The word you're looking for is "asinine", not "precise." It makes you sound like someone arguing vehemently that you must refer to a tomato as a fruit rather than vegetable, as if the botanical definition automatically trumps the culinary one.
Thats almost as dumb as putting a Halliburton CEO in charge of the entire military.
Luckily nothing that stupid would ever happen here in America.
Yet again someone who just can't turn off their "everything -> Bush administration!" association reflex, no matter what the topic is. There's been a new president for over nine months, and the subject is still so prominent in your thoughts that this story reminds you of it? It's like picking up a Madlibs sheet and seeing it filled out like:
"Today ___Bush___ visited __Bush__ to ___Bush____ a __Bush____ __Bush__."
But to take your comment with a grain of seriousness: no, dumb was putting the president of Ford Motors in charge of the entire military.
Dont get me wrong, im all for freedom of speech, but... does that mean that you can say *anything* you like ? Like for example,... Deny the Holocaust ?
Yes. Why not? If a government has the power to ban beliefs, it has the power to ban belief in the truth. In fact, with the right person interpreting the rules, hate speech laws could just as easily ban acknowledging the Holocaust as a racist slander against poor innocent Germans. That's precisely analogous to how mention of the Armenian Genocide is handled in Turkey.
Say you want all 'insert-favorite-group-here' burned by fire for what race they are, or belief system they have, or sexual preference ?
Yes. Unless you can somehow stop me from wanting bad things, what is the point of stopping me from saying I want bad things?
Allow people to promote or encourage killing, or discrimination people for what they are or stand for ?
Up until you start making plans to carry out such killings -- at which point it becomes conspiracy or incitement -- then yes.
You have to draw the line somewhere.
That line exists where speech becomes planning towards specific acts (see above). Otherwise, as others have noted in this discussion, it's a sticks-and-stones vs. words distinction.
And I am not saying that I should decide what that line is
But that's exactly the issue: someone will be drawing that line, and you have no idea to what extent that person will share your intent. Someone will be deciding, in each case, whether the speech in question is "hate speech." You can make whatever rules or guidelines you want, but in the end someone must interpret them. Now, imagine that person is someone 180-degrees from you politically. If you're liberal, pick Michael Savage. If you're conservative, pick Michael Moore. Now craft your "hate speech" definition such that the chosen person won't be able to twist it into something that makes you weep.
, or exactly where it lies, but I do feel that we should always keep having the discussion on where to draw the line.
Just because you *can* say anything you like, it doesn't mean that you should.
True as far as it goes, but beside the point. Laws are about "must" or "must not"; matters of "should" or "should not" are outside their scope. Arrests of homicide suspects aren't based on laws that say "murder isn't a good idea."
I think meddling would probably be the worst thing to do. What is Obama going to do? March troops in? Bomb Tehran? Drop propaganda?
None of that is necessary. How about just doing what the leaders of France, Canada, and Germany have done: call a fraud a fraud, and offer moral support to the Iranian people seeking freedom. That's all. Frankly, it's almost as if Obama is worried that, once the dust settles, the folks in charge in Iran won't be ones he can brag about not being afraid to talk to.
And I don't mean Mousavi, even if he does become President. At this point the protests have gotten too big, gone on too long, spread too far, and gotten too much attention for things to stop with punting Akhmadinejad or even Khamenei. It's either going to get Tiananmen-esque, or there's going to be a significant reduction of the power of the mullahs in general.
After you place that ridiculousness to the side, however, I found something odd. The person making the comparison is "Scientology religion's chief executive officer Mr. David Miscavige". A religion's "chief executive officer"? Since when does a religion have a CEO?
However, IF Adobe made CS4 for Linux, and IF you P2P downloaded it and installed it, you too could have this Trojan on Linux.
Serious question: what would happen if you tried to run malware-infected Windows software using WINE? For example, say it tried to write a virus.exe file into the same folder as the app, then add a new registry value under HKLM...\Run?
People around the world eat some strange shit. Snails, dog, pork guts (chitterlings), carob-coated insects, fish eggs, and probably some nasty shit I've never heard of. Some of this stuff might be considered a delicacy tody, but I am sure it all started due to hunger.
Lots of food that we go out of our way to eat now, started out that way, usually as a way to use food that would otherwise be wasted. Fajitas (ranchhands finding a way to use the tougher cuts of meat they were left with after the rest of the steer was butchered and sold), French toast (a way to use old bread), coq de vin (rooster past his prime). Heck, buffalo wings supposedly started out along those lines, and now there are several restaurant chains dedicated to them.
Not to mention that Christians (and Hindus, Buddhists, etc) don't file DMCA complaints against people who quote their church's scriptures. Pope Benedict isn't going to sue you for copyright violation if you post a passage from the Bible on Usenet and make fun of it (which is analogous to what Scientology did).
The folks pushing this don't want the labels so that they can avoid cloned meat. Anyone who really cares about it can buy from sources that target them (fx. the Trader Joe's chain). What they are interested in is making the average non-caring consumer think that there's something wrong with cloned meat, since there's what appears to be a warning label on it, and thus deter producers from using cloning.
That the FDA is set to allow sale of cloned meat without special labelling means that they've determined that it's not a distinction pertinent to anyone's health. That makes it the secular equivalent of a religious dietary restriction. The costs associated with making sure that the meat in a package isn't cloned should fall on those who care about it, not those who don't. If enough people do want badly enough to avoid cloned meat, specialty stores and sections within stores will cater to that. But it's not a health concern, so it shouldn't be depicted as such on the label. There are "contains nuts" labels because people can have serious allergic reactions to them. But there aren't big red "Warning! Not Kosher!" and "Not Halal!" labels on ham, nor "Contains Beef!" or "Contains Caffeine!" stickers on sausages and energy drinks despite devout Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Mormons not wanting to consume those things. Orthodox Jews pay a premium for kosher products, since they're the ones to whom it matters. So do people who want organic produce or "fair trade" coffee. And so should people wanting to avoid cloned meat, for the same reason: they're the ones wanting something different from the norm for other than objective health reasons.
I've come to understand that seeing in only one/two color(s) (ie black and white, nightvision, etc) helps see movement a LOT easiar, which is why many predators have black and white vision.
If I recall correctly, it's not that seeing in black and white makes seeing movement easier, it's that an eye optimized for seeing movement only sees in black and white. Rods (monochromatic) are more sensitive and work in low light, whereas cones (color) require brighter light. If you replace the cones with rods, you get an eye that's more sensitive (hence detects motion better) and works better in darkness, but can no longer see in color. Going from monochromatic to color nightvision gear wouldn't reduce a human's ability to detect motion, because the number of rod cells in their retina would remain the same. The difference would be that the cone cells would be working, whereas before they weren't.
I think this technology would be great if deployed to South Korea, Japan, Tiawan, or Isreal. Nothing says "Screw you, Kim" like a system to completely nullify the technology that he's spent years and an equivalent of about his entire country's GDP to develop.
Gratifying as it would be to tell Kim to screw himself, that wouldn't help South Korea very much. North Korea has a huge number of artillery pieces and rocket launchers, in hardened sites, aimed at Seoul and capable of hitting it with several hundred thousand shells per hour. As far as civilian casualties go, it would be at least a Hiroshima death level, even if chemical weapons weren't used. Kim really has no need to use nukes on South Korea, due to their bad luck of having their capital and biggest economic center only 30 miles from the DMZ.
Japan, on the other hand, would definitely have a use for this -- if NK has been able to engineer a nuke small/light enough to be used as a missile warhead.
Uhhh. Excuse me. Smart growth agenda? What the hell?
Yes, agenda. The majority of the folks pushing "smart" (read: "centrally managed by government bureaucrats") growth are architects, city planners, and politicians. Their objections to "sprawl" are aesthetic and philosophical, not health or whatnot. They didn't think "we want to make people healthier," do some research, and come to the conclusion that "sprawl" was bad. They have a visceral, non-objective distaste for suburbs (and more generally the idea of people building and living where and how they like), and go searching for other objections to suburbs that people who don't share their emotional response will sympathize with. It's roughly analagous to, say, Jerry Falwell advocating legal penalties against gays as a way to fight the spread of HIV.
Note: I'm not commenting on whether or not the obesity effects are real or not. I'm commenting on your perception of the motives of the "smart growth" advocates.
Is it not logical for the well-being of the earth (and now- surprise- our health) to live in higher density urban centres, thus expending less energy to travel?
I don't give a damn about the "well-being of the earth" as such. I care to the degree that it (directly or indirectly) effects humans, but I'm not going to try to impose my opinion of a best way on humanity at large, nor should you. If the cost of energy continues to rise, and if it is indeed more energy-cost-effective to have a higher population density, each individual person or family will have to rethink how much their elbow room is worth.
Most likely it will wind up costing them more, but that's just one of the costs of living in a more-rural area, the same as traffic congestion (the automotive kind) is one of penalties you pay for being a big city dweller. I have (probably) a better selection of shops and restaurants than they do. They have better air quality and easier-to-buy houses than me. Wherever you go, you pay for the pluses with minuses.
You have our administration to thank for this state of affairs, where foreigners the world over who otherwise couldn't care less about us--I mean, except for the Palestine thing--now consider us their mortal enemies.
Go read up on the ideology of those mortal enemies a bit. Their "grievances" go back well before the liberation of Iraq or any actions of President Bush 2.0. In one of his statements immediately 9/11 attacks, Bin Laden talks about the sword reaching the US "after 80 years", referring to the breakup of the Ottomon Empire after WW1, at a time when the US was barely world power. Ayman al-Zawahiri (Al Qaeda's second-in-command, more or less) frames the Israeli/Palestinian dispute in terms of the "Al Andalus tragedy", the end of Moslem rule in southern Spain -- in 14-freaking-92. And while that's probably not a majority outlook, neither is it an isolated one. If Americans thought like this, the first thing we would have done upon perfecting the atomic bomb would have been to drop one on Buckingham Palace to get back at the British for burning the White House during the War of 1812. That's one basic problem: an inability to "get over it." Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, we A-bomb'ed them, yet sixty years later we're the closest of allies. Germany conquered France, now those two nations are the core of the EU. Yet in the Middle East they're still upset about the Crusades.
This isn't a problem that started with Bush, nor will it end once he's gone. It's a war that's been going on, at a lower level of intensity, for quite a while -- the recent phase having begun in 1979. 9/11 was merely the first time something happened where people couldn't ignore it, and the Middle East military operations under Bush just the first time the US has attempted (whether you agree with how he's conducted it or not) to actually do something about it. It's going to continue, whether we try to influence the outcome or not, and the US will be a target. We're just too big to be ignored, given how ubiquitous our worldwide economic and cultural presence is.
Nor is this an exclusively a US, or even Western, problem. Or do you maintain that it's Bush's fault that Moslems are killing Buddhists in Thailand, Hindus in India, and animists in Darfur, whilst threatening to murder British authors, Danish cartoonists, and Dutch parliamentarians, and succeed in murdering a Dutch film-maker?
Now, as to the original article about Google's maps and the idea of restricting them somehow, that seems pretty useless. Anything on Goggle Maps/Earth is derived from sources which are publically (or at least commercially) available, anyway.
That's actually more true than you might think. One of the things I wish they'd do (or at least, do more of than they did when I went) in CS courses is show you not just how to do things, but how not to do things. Having to deal with, or at least look closely at, something done badly can be quite enlightening.
To give an example: in one of my CS courses we went over cohesion and coupling. I understood them fine, and could see why you'd want high cohesion and weak coupling -- or at least, I thought I saw. Then I went to work at my first maintainance programming job. Our main app had upwards of 50 modules, each with anywhere from one routine to close to a hundred. One of these utility modules had an 80-character string variable named S. Routines in other modules used S for all sorts of things: error messages, line printer formatting, input/output from the serial port, file names, items in the menu display, string justification, you name it. All sorts of functions that should have passed data as parameters used S instead, expecting you to put stuff in it, call them, and look at it once they were done. Just a little bit of dealing with that made a light come on: "So that's what they meant by strong coupling."
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No concievable missile shield could shoot down any significant number of incoming missiles. The Russians would always be able to overwhelm the defenses with shear numbers, making the system worthless.
Even if that's true, it makes the system worthless only if your sole benchmark is "does it make us invulnerable to any hostile ICBM force, no matter how large?" But that isn't the only goal. First, there is a defense against a limited strike from a less-powerful adversary. Second, it makes it much, much more difficult to wipe out our ICBM force in a surprise attack and thus remain safe from retaliation. The odds of a given target surviving do not scale linearly with the number of attacking missiles. Consider (using round numbers for simplicity) that we have 1000 ICBMs, and a defense system with a 50/50 chance of shooting down an incoming missile.
To sum up after all the numbers: against even a minimally-effective missile defense, it becomes extremely costly for an attacker to field a force big enough for him to strike and wind up in a better strategic position than he started with, which is the whole point of attacking in the first place. As the defense becomes more effective, doing so becomes well-nigh impossible.
What Cerf has done has create a bundle forwarding protocol stack for the Android. It's not as "out there" as you'd think- someone send you data, you carry it, then forward it later. Lots of questions/issues in between as you might imagine.
That sounds exactly how "Fleetnet" works in the Axis of Time trilogy, once the 2021'ers get dumped in 1942 and no longer have access to satellite communications. When someone previously in Hawaii arrives in Los Angeles, carrying their flexipad (PDA/laptop-like device), it hooks up with other nearby devices and the owners of those devices receive the messages sent by other folks in Hawaii, not just those from the owner of the pad that made the trip.
I can't believe the comments that say that government-funded media will be Soviet-style Propaganda machines. Are you people out of your minds? Can anyone here name me one program or reporter more critical of the government than Bill Moyers? His programs get financed by PBS, a government corporation.
To pick one issue that's in the news and that I know he's spoken on a lot: can you name me a program or reporter less skeptical of the propriety and/or efficacy of government-run health care, than Bill Moyers?
In fact, that's exactly what corporations want you to believe, because public funding will be the only thing that frees journalists from the corporate teat. It will effectively shut down the corporate media oligarchy we have today.
Are you all slaves for the corporations or whatever organization pays your salaries? Is that the only lens through which you can see the world?
Oh, please. Most corporations don't give a damn about government policies that don't visibly impact them. I highly doubt the upper management of my employer (a software/hardware company) would care what I said about government press funding one way or another. You're basically espousing the Marxist idea of "class interest" (not that I'm calling you a Marxist), the belief that people act to further their perceived interests as "workers" or "the rich" or whatever -- in your case, "corporation" being an equivalent of a "class." Which is, of course, why Larry Ellison and Bill Gates got along so well, and why Apple and Google are in such agreement.
Actually, now that I think about it, my employer would probably prefer a government-funded press. Our biggest customers are Las Vegas casinos. As the major tax base in Nevada they definitely get listened to by politicians, all the way up to Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader. I'm sure if some news story came along that would hurt the casinos, they'd love to be able to ask Senator Reid to drop a pointed hint to the right people about not covering the story (can't have reporters wasting tax money on something that's "not newsworthy" after all), and what's good for my employer's customers is good for my employer.
Will it finally be able to send/receive files over Bluetooth?
I don't know about natively, but there's already an app on Marketplace for that.
Accepted how? It is true that in common usage "American" came to become a short-hand for "the citizen of USA". But "Americans" are, by definition, denizens of America, the continent.
Most words have multiple definitions, and those definitions are for the most part determined by common usage. In the lack of a specific context, when someone uses a word, listeners assume he means the most common definition. The word used to denote a citizen of the United States is "American" both because that's the word people usually use for that purpose and because that's the purpose for which people usually use that word. I have co-workers who come from Bangalore in the Republic of India. Should I start referring to them as "RoIians" so as not to offend citizens of Pakistan and Bangladesh, both of which are located on the Indian subcontinent?
It only underlines my point, as to the self-centred, narcissistic attitudes of the citizens of the USA that they would claim a continent-wide description for themselves exclusively and not bat an eye at this. I used "USian" here as a shortcut, because it is more precise.
The word you're looking for is "asinine", not "precise." It makes you sound like someone arguing vehemently that you must refer to a tomato as a fruit rather than vegetable, as if the botanical definition automatically trumps the culinary one.
Just tell me which UNIX command you would use to get instructions on a program and deny that this isn't intentional.
That's fixed. See: http://laughnet.net/politically-correct-unix-p-172.html
Thats almost as dumb as putting a Halliburton CEO in charge of the entire military.
Luckily nothing that stupid would ever happen here in America.
Yet again someone who just can't turn off their "everything -> Bush administration!" association reflex, no matter what the topic is. There's been a new president for over nine months, and the subject is still so prominent in your thoughts that this story reminds you of it? It's like picking up a Madlibs sheet and seeing it filled out like:
"Today ___Bush___ visited __Bush__ to ___Bush____ a __Bush____ __Bush__."
But to take your comment with a grain of seriousness: no, dumb was putting the president of Ford Motors in charge of the entire military.
Dont get me wrong, im all for freedom of speech, but ... does that mean that you can say *anything* you like ? Like for example, ... Deny the Holocaust ?
Yes. Why not? If a government has the power to ban beliefs, it has the power to ban belief in the truth. In fact, with the right person interpreting the rules, hate speech laws could just as easily ban acknowledging the Holocaust as a racist slander against poor innocent Germans. That's precisely analogous to how mention of the Armenian Genocide is handled in Turkey.
Say you want all 'insert-favorite-group-here' burned by fire for what race they are, or belief system they have, or sexual preference ?
Yes. Unless you can somehow stop me from wanting bad things, what is the point of stopping me from saying I want bad things?
Allow people to promote or encourage killing, or discrimination people for what they are or stand for ?
Up until you start making plans to carry out such killings -- at which point it becomes conspiracy or incitement -- then yes.
You have to draw the line somewhere.
That line exists where speech becomes planning towards specific acts (see above). Otherwise, as others have noted in this discussion, it's a sticks-and-stones vs. words distinction.
And I am not saying that I should decide what that line is
But that's exactly the issue: someone will be drawing that line, and you have no idea to what extent that person will share your intent. Someone will be deciding, in each case, whether the speech in question is "hate speech." You can make whatever rules or guidelines you want, but in the end someone must interpret them. Now, imagine that person is someone 180-degrees from you politically. If you're liberal, pick Michael Savage. If you're conservative, pick Michael Moore. Now craft your "hate speech" definition such that the chosen person won't be able to twist it into something that makes you weep.
, or exactly where it lies, but I do feel that we should always keep having the discussion on where to draw the line. Just because you *can* say anything you like, it doesn't mean that you should.
True as far as it goes, but beside the point. Laws are about "must" or "must not"; matters of "should" or "should not" are outside their scope. Arrests of homicide suspects aren't based on laws that say "murder isn't a good idea."
Call me all the bad names you want. If you want to go the racial route you can call me a kike, kraut, polack, limey or mutt (probably your best bet).
"There is no racial bigotry here. I do not look down on niggers, kikes, wops or greasers. Here you are all equally worthless."
I do think it would be hilarious to have a 90 year old woman as the main character in GTA though.
"Freeze! I'm Ma Baker, put yer hands in the air and gimme all yer money!"
I think meddling would probably be the worst thing to do. What is Obama going to do? March troops in? Bomb Tehran? Drop propaganda?
None of that is necessary. How about just doing what the leaders of France, Canada, and Germany have done: call a fraud a fraud, and offer moral support to the Iranian people seeking freedom. That's all. Frankly, it's almost as if Obama is worried that, once the dust settles, the folks in charge in Iran won't be ones he can brag about not being afraid to talk to.
And I don't mean Mousavi, even if he does become President. At this point the protests have gotten too big, gone on too long, spread too far, and gotten too much attention for things to stop with punting Akhmadinejad or even Khamenei. It's either going to get Tiananmen-esque, or there's going to be a significant reduction of the power of the mullahs in general.
After you place that ridiculousness to the side, however, I found something odd. The person making the comparison is "Scientology religion's chief executive officer Mr. David Miscavige". A religion's "chief executive officer"? Since when does a religion have a CEO?
Why not? They have trade secrets after all.
Aaah good old terminate-and-stay-resident programs,
Terminate and stay resident? You mean, when a cyborg that looks like Arnold Scharzenegger kills someone and then moves into their house?
However, IF Adobe made CS4 for Linux, and IF you P2P downloaded it and installed it, you too could have this Trojan on Linux.
Serious question: what would happen if you tried to run malware-infected Windows software using WINE? For example, say it tried to write a virus.exe file into the same folder as the app, then add a new registry value under HKLM...\Run?
People around the world eat some strange shit. Snails, dog, pork guts (chitterlings), carob-coated insects, fish eggs, and probably some nasty shit I've never heard of. Some of this stuff might be considered a delicacy tody, but I am sure it all started due to hunger.
Lots of food that we go out of our way to eat now, started out that way, usually as a way to use food that would otherwise be wasted. Fajitas (ranchhands finding a way to use the tougher cuts of meat they were left with after the rest of the steer was butchered and sold), French toast (a way to use old bread), coq de vin (rooster past his prime). Heck, buffalo wings supposedly started out along those lines, and now there are several restaurant chains dedicated to them.
Not to mention that Christians (and Hindus, Buddhists, etc) don't file DMCA complaints against people who quote their church's scriptures. Pope Benedict isn't going to sue you for copyright violation if you post a passage from the Bible on Usenet and make fun of it (which is analogous to what Scientology did).
The Internet is for porn!
The Internet is for porn!
Why you think the Net was born?
Porn, porn, porn!
The folks pushing this don't want the labels so that they can avoid cloned meat. Anyone who really cares about it can buy from sources that target them (fx. the Trader Joe's chain). What they are interested in is making the average non-caring consumer think that there's something wrong with cloned meat, since there's what appears to be a warning label on it, and thus deter producers from using cloning.
That the FDA is set to allow sale of cloned meat without special labelling means that they've determined that it's not a distinction pertinent to anyone's health. That makes it the secular equivalent of a religious dietary restriction. The costs associated with making sure that the meat in a package isn't cloned should fall on those who care about it, not those who don't. If enough people do want badly enough to avoid cloned meat, specialty stores and sections within stores will cater to that. But it's not a health concern, so it shouldn't be depicted as such on the label. There are "contains nuts" labels because people can have serious allergic reactions to them. But there aren't big red "Warning! Not Kosher!" and "Not Halal!" labels on ham, nor "Contains Beef!" or "Contains Caffeine!" stickers on sausages and energy drinks despite devout Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Mormons not wanting to consume those things. Orthodox Jews pay a premium for kosher products, since they're the ones to whom it matters. So do people who want organic produce or "fair trade" coffee. And so should people wanting to avoid cloned meat, for the same reason: they're the ones wanting something different from the norm for other than objective health reasons.
I've come to understand that seeing in only one/two color(s) (ie black and white, nightvision, etc) helps see movement a LOT easiar, which is why many predators have black and white vision.
If I recall correctly, it's not that seeing in black and white makes seeing movement easier, it's that an eye optimized for seeing movement only sees in black and white. Rods (monochromatic) are more sensitive and work in low light, whereas cones (color) require brighter light. If you replace the cones with rods, you get an eye that's more sensitive (hence detects motion better) and works better in darkness, but can no longer see in color. Going from monochromatic to color nightvision gear wouldn't reduce a human's ability to detect motion, because the number of rod cells in their retina would remain the same. The difference would be that the cone cells would be working, whereas before they weren't.
I think this technology would be great if deployed to South Korea, Japan, Tiawan, or Isreal. Nothing says "Screw you, Kim" like a system to completely nullify the technology that he's spent years and an equivalent of about his entire country's GDP to develop.
Gratifying as it would be to tell Kim to screw himself, that wouldn't help South Korea very much. North Korea has a huge number of artillery pieces and rocket launchers, in hardened sites, aimed at Seoul and capable of hitting it with several hundred thousand shells per hour. As far as civilian casualties go, it would be at least a Hiroshima death level, even if chemical weapons weren't used. Kim really has no need to use nukes on South Korea, due to their bad luck of having their capital and biggest economic center only 30 miles from the DMZ.
Japan, on the other hand, would definitely have a use for this -- if NK has been able to engineer a nuke small/light enough to be used as a missile warhead.
Uhhh. Excuse me. Smart growth agenda? What the hell?
Yes, agenda. The majority of the folks pushing "smart" (read: "centrally managed by government bureaucrats") growth are architects, city planners, and politicians. Their objections to "sprawl" are aesthetic and philosophical, not health or whatnot. They didn't think "we want to make people healthier," do some research, and come to the conclusion that "sprawl" was bad. They have a visceral, non-objective distaste for suburbs (and more generally the idea of people building and living where and how they like), and go searching for other objections to suburbs that people who don't share their emotional response will sympathize with. It's roughly analagous to, say, Jerry Falwell advocating legal penalties against gays as a way to fight the spread of HIV.
Note: I'm not commenting on whether or not the obesity effects are real or not. I'm commenting on your perception of the motives of the "smart growth" advocates.
Is it not logical for the well-being of the earth (and now- surprise- our health) to live in higher density urban centres, thus expending less energy to travel?
I don't give a damn about the "well-being of the earth" as such. I care to the degree that it (directly or indirectly) effects humans, but I'm not going to try to impose my opinion of a best way on humanity at large, nor should you. If the cost of energy continues to rise, and if it is indeed more energy-cost-effective to have a higher population density, each individual person or family will have to rethink how much their elbow room is worth.
Most likely it will wind up costing them more, but that's just one of the costs of living in a more-rural area, the same as traffic congestion (the automotive kind) is one of penalties you pay for being a big city dweller. I have (probably) a better selection of shops and restaurants than they do. They have better air quality and easier-to-buy houses than me. Wherever you go, you pay for the pluses with minuses.
You have our administration to thank for this state of affairs, where foreigners the world over who otherwise couldn't care less about us--I mean, except for the Palestine thing--now consider us their mortal enemies.
Go read up on the ideology of those mortal enemies a bit. Their "grievances" go back well before the liberation of Iraq or any actions of President Bush 2.0. In one of his statements immediately 9/11 attacks, Bin Laden talks about the sword reaching the US "after 80 years", referring to the breakup of the Ottomon Empire after WW1, at a time when the US was barely world power. Ayman al-Zawahiri (Al Qaeda's second-in-command, more or less) frames the Israeli/Palestinian dispute in terms of the "Al Andalus tragedy", the end of Moslem rule in southern Spain -- in 14-freaking-92. And while that's probably not a majority outlook, neither is it an isolated one. If Americans thought like this, the first thing we would have done upon perfecting the atomic bomb would have been to drop one on Buckingham Palace to get back at the British for burning the White House during the War of 1812. That's one basic problem: an inability to "get over it." Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, we A-bomb'ed them, yet sixty years later we're the closest of allies. Germany conquered France, now those two nations are the core of the EU. Yet in the Middle East they're still upset about the Crusades.
This isn't a problem that started with Bush, nor will it end once he's gone. It's a war that's been going on, at a lower level of intensity, for quite a while -- the recent phase having begun in 1979. 9/11 was merely the first time something happened where people couldn't ignore it, and the Middle East military operations under Bush just the first time the US has attempted (whether you agree with how he's conducted it or not) to actually do something about it. It's going to continue, whether we try to influence the outcome or not, and the US will be a target. We're just too big to be ignored, given how ubiquitous our worldwide economic and cultural presence is.
Nor is this an exclusively a US, or even Western, problem. Or do you maintain that it's Bush's fault that Moslems are killing Buddhists in Thailand, Hindus in India, and animists in Darfur, whilst threatening to murder British authors, Danish cartoonists, and Dutch parliamentarians, and succeed in murdering a Dutch film-maker?
Now, as to the original article about Google's maps and the idea of restricting them somehow, that seems pretty useless. Anything on Goggle Maps/Earth is derived from sources which are publically (or at least commercially) available, anyway.
Oh, great. You'd hope Slashdot would be the last place someone would use top-posting.
That's actually more true than you might think. One of the things I wish they'd do (or at least, do more of than they did when I went) in CS courses is show you not just how to do things, but how not to do things. Having to deal with, or at least look closely at, something done badly can be quite enlightening.
To give an example: in one of my CS courses we went over cohesion and coupling. I understood them fine, and could see why you'd want high cohesion and weak coupling -- or at least, I thought I saw. Then I went to work at my first maintainance programming job. Our main app had upwards of 50 modules, each with anywhere from one routine to close to a hundred. One of these utility modules had an 80-character string variable named S. Routines in other modules used S for all sorts of things: error messages, line printer formatting, input/output from the serial port, file names, items in the menu display, string justification, you name it. All sorts of functions that should have passed data as parameters used S instead, expecting you to put stuff in it, call them, and look at it once they were done. Just a little bit of dealing with that made a light come on: "So that's what they meant by strong coupling."