is the widespread belief that a descent into true tyranny is impossible in the USA.
When the average American hears tales of abuse of the Patriot act, he thinks of ACLU bleeding hearts protecting terrorists. At most, he might be able to conjure up government agents using personal data to catch a tax-evader or getting a list of a citizen's favorite pron sites. He concludes that this isn't so bad if it helps combat terrorism.
We've been taught to think of America being "the land of the free" and having a superior political system to the rest of the world. Therefore, many of us have difficulty making the connection between giving the government more power to go after "bad guys" with the possibility of such powers being used to quell political dissent.
I feel that we are firmly on a road that will lead to an dictatorship in the USA. We've given up important rights and more are sure to follow. Eventually, opposing views will be squashed to the point where only certain "approved" candidates will even be allowed to run for office (ala pre-invasion Iraq).
I believe that most of the 3 month delay was for the repair of the landing gear and airframe after the first powered flight. If anything is holding them up lately, it's probably the other projects they've got going (like the GlobalFlyer).
Not far at all really. The powered flight to 20km was flown with essentially the same hardware (engines, tanks, airframe, etc.) as they will take to 100km. It seems to me that the only major step remaining is to fill the tanks to the top an let 'er rip. Of course, they are easing into to it for safety's sake. My money is on Rutan's team.
This case is a perfect illustration of the biggest problem with donating ones time or money; even when it appears to be a good cause. All too often, the recipient comes to rely on the gift and view it as an entitlement.
I've always wondered why we don't place more responsibility on the owners of the systems that are being hacked to create spam or DDOS attacks. For an analogy, imagine that the owner of a sporting goods store refused to lock the door. Every night, someone would enter the store, steal a baseball bat, and hurt someone else with it. Sure, the thug doing the stealing and batting is wrong but so is the store owner. He would be help legally accountable (in the USA, anyway). Likewise, owners of insecure computers should also be held responsible for the harm caused by their negligence.
A sub is trying to evade an enemy warship overhead. On board the sub, everyone is looking up and wondering when the next depth charge will drop. In the engine room, the crew is desparately trying to get the engine working...
Rookie Ensign: "It's quiet." Seasoned Petty Officer: "Yeah. Too Quiet."
They should just fill it with coke and shake it then take the lid off sending it into orbit.
They tried this back in the early days of the space program. Since Coke was just a nickel a bottle back then, it was a cost-effective solution. The biggest drawback was that very few astronauts had strong enough thumbs to hold back the pressure of such large quantities of excited Coke. The last such series of rockets was the "Atlas" named after the famous body-builder amd astronaut Charles Atlas. These rockets were at the limit for even his strength though so larger rockets based on this principal were never built.
If this is verified, then maybe it explains the missing dark matter problem.
Perhaps the galaxies we've observed with excessive rotation rates relative to their observed mass have a lot of such black holes or maybe a single (even larger) one. Maybe all galaxies have black holes at their centers. I do recall that some researchers were having a difficult time getting their computer models of galaxies to show stable behavior.
Orwell was right. He just missed the date by 20 years or so.
-scsg
Does anybody else smell desperation?
on
Microsoft Buys Rare
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
375 megabucks is a lot of cash. MS has had significant problems marketing XBox. It seems to me that they must be really worried about losing a source of games.
Does anyone know how many employees work at Rare? I know it's not distributed evenly but they must be pretty happy about it on the average. Especially so for those whose stock is already vested.
To me, it seems easy to make such statements. I also think horses are obsolete for transportation even though they work (almost) as well for that purpose as they did prior to the invention of the automobile.
Obsolescence of a device or technology is a subjective concept and depends a lot on the value of the alternatives.
> Everyone realizes that if you eat more calories than you burn, you will gain weight
No. Actually this is not a universally accepted truth. One of the main premises behind the Atkins approach is that the calorie theory is wrong (80 years of dogmatic assertions notwithstanding). The caloric content of food is determined by burning it in a pure oxygen environment and measuring the heat output. The human body is nowhere near that simple. As a trivial example, imagine that you ate 5000 calories a day of wood chips. By the calorie theory, most people would be expected to gain a lot of weight on such a diet. Not all foods are treated equally by the body. Carbohydrates, in particular, have a catalytic effect (namely by causing insulin production). So eating an ounce of carbs my cause you to store (or fail to burn) two ounces of fat.
Scientific theorems are often taken as absolute laws. This is doubly true in the lay public. When new discoveries are made, there is great resistance until, possibly, the new discovery is accepted as the new "law". Even then, many will cling to the old paradigm. Perhaps the Atkins "Revolution" is an example of this. Time will tell.
BTW, I've lost 40 lb in 5 months on the diet with very little exercise. Probably, most of those who say "just eat less" have never had a serious weight/overeating problem. Believe it or not, it can be very difficult or impossible to do so. Atkins explains the reasons for this in his writings.
You're not an Atkins dieter, are you? The point of the diet is to acheive ketosis and remain there. You start with a very low carb intake (the "induction" phase) and work up to as many carbs as you can handle without killing the ketosis state. If you find that you're having trouble maintaining ketosis, then you try the induction phase again.
I've lost 40 lb on the Atkins diet in 5 months. It works as advertised.
I know that many movie "experts" consider dubbing as a terrible thing: breaking the director's original vision, etc. For certain foreign movies, I agree. However, for visually rich films like this one is supposed to be, I much prefer dubbing; even bad dubbing. I hate missing what's happening on the rest of the screen while staring at the words on the bottom.
> The incredible hulk is actually a very buff man who simply put on some halloween makeup once that caused a skin rash. Unfortunatly, while the makeup washed off, his skin stayed green
As for his voice, well that's pretty much how all body-builders talk. No mystery there.
>This demonstrates perfectly how the job of the police has gone from "protecting the law-abiding" to "hunting down criminals."
You've got it backwards. The original and correct role of the police force is to catch criminals. When they are very lucky, they sometimes catch crimals before the crime is committed. This is, theorectically, a "protection" function. However, their main function is now and has always been to apprehend those who actually break laws (forgetting for a moment the various sidelines that occasionally pop up such as various forms of corruption and padding the department's coffers with seized assets).
As far as I can tell, the notion that the police are there to protect you is a recent phenomenon (last half of 20th century). I have some theories that might explain where people get such ideas but they should be debated in some other context. Whatever people think, protection is definitely not the main role of the police.
Call me a scaredy-cat but the first thing I thought of when I saw this was protection from bad weather. The one time I did some ocean sailing we got stormed on a lot. It scared the hell out of me. If you got caught by a bad storm with one of these you could dive and sit until it passed.
If I read the specs right, it can operate submerged for 360 hours while traveling 240 miles at a max depth of nearly 1000'. It seems to me like that would let you avoid nearly any storm.
Sure it's expensive but if you've got the dough, the safety alone might be worth it (assuming it works reliably when submerged). Of course, the coolness factor makes it even more worth it.
On the other hand, it reminds me of the old movie "Operation Petticoat". I'll never forget the scene where there taking the seriously damaged (then refurbished) sub out for a shake-down cruise. Paraprhasing:
Captain: "Will she dive Chief?" Cheif: "Like a rock sir!"
Slashdot Mirror
is the widespread belief that a descent into true tyranny is impossible in the USA.
When the average American hears tales of abuse of the Patriot act, he thinks of ACLU bleeding hearts protecting terrorists. At most, he might be able to conjure up government agents using personal data to catch a tax-evader or getting a list of a citizen's favorite pron sites. He concludes that this isn't so bad if it helps combat terrorism.
We've been taught to think of America being "the land of the free" and having a superior political system to the rest of the world. Therefore, many of us have difficulty making the connection between giving the government more power to go after "bad guys" with the possibility of such powers being used to quell political dissent.
I feel that we are firmly on a road that will lead to an dictatorship in the USA. We've given up important rights and more are sure to follow. Eventually, opposing views will be squashed to the point where only certain "approved" candidates will even be allowed to run for office (ala pre-invasion Iraq).
-- scsg
I believe that most of the 3 month delay was for the repair of the landing gear and airframe after the first powered flight. If anything is holding them up lately, it's probably the other projects they've got going (like the GlobalFlyer).
-- scsg
Not far at all really. The powered flight to 20km was flown with essentially the same hardware (engines, tanks, airframe, etc.) as they will take to 100km. It seems to me that the only major step remaining is to fill the tanks to the top an let 'er rip. Of course, they are easing into to it for safety's sake. My money is on Rutan's team.
-scsg
To play Daryl's advocate (get it? hee hee) for a brief moment:
If he is really only intent on cashing out, why hasn't he sold yet?
-- scsg
We all need to accept it. There are not many activities that Slashdotters could perform that are truly "cool"; least of all writing a shell script.
-- scsg
This case is a perfect illustration of the biggest problem with donating ones time or money; even when it appears to be a good cause. All too often, the recipient comes to rely on the gift and view it as an entitlement.
- scsg
Signal Strength is generally rated on a 125 point scale with Dish Network (100 points with DirecTV if memory serves)
So, basically, you're saying that your signal strength dial goes to 11? Cool!
scsg
I've always wondered why we don't place more responsibility on the owners of the systems that are being hacked to create spam or DDOS attacks. For an analogy, imagine that the owner of a sporting goods store refused to lock the door. Every night, someone would enter the store, steal a baseball bat, and hurt someone else with it. Sure, the thug doing the stealing and batting is wrong but so is the store owner. He would be help legally accountable (in the USA, anyway). Likewise, owners of insecure computers should also be held responsible for the harm caused by their negligence.
A sub is trying to evade an enemy warship
overhead. On board the sub, everyone is looking
up and wondering when the next depth charge
will drop. In the engine room, the crew is
desparately trying to get the engine working...
Rookie Ensign: "It's quiet."
Seasoned Petty Officer: "Yeah. Too Quiet."
They should just fill it with coke and shake it then take the lid off sending it into orbit.
They tried this back in the early days of the space program. Since Coke was just a nickel a bottle back then, it was a cost-effective solution. The biggest drawback was that very few astronauts had strong enough thumbs to hold back the pressure of such large quantities of excited Coke. The last such series of rockets was the "Atlas" named after the famous body-builder amd astronaut Charles Atlas. These rockets were at the limit for even his strength though so larger rockets based on this principal were never built.If this is verified, then maybe it explains the missing dark matter problem.
Perhaps the galaxies we've observed with excessive rotation rates relative to their
observed mass have a lot of such black holes or maybe a single (even larger) one.
Maybe all galaxies have black holes at their centers. I do recall that some researchers
were having a difficult time getting their computer models of galaxies to show stable
behavior.
Just a thought,
-scsg
Dang. The link I was attempting to write was: this. Basically, even with glasses my vision is too valuable to take such risks.
I was considering Lasik but gave up on the idea after reading this . Basically, even with glasses my vision is too valuable to take such risks.
Orwell was right. He just missed the date by 20 years or so.
-scsg
375 megabucks is a lot of cash. MS has had significant problems marketing XBox. It seems to me that they must be really worried about losing a source of games.
Does anyone know how many employees work at Rare? I know it's not distributed evenly but they must be pretty happy about it on the average.
Especially so for those whose stock is already vested.
-scsg
To me, it seems easy to make such statements. I also think horses are obsolete for transportation even though they work (almost) as well for that purpose as they did prior to the invention of the automobile.
Obsolescence of a device or technology is a subjective concept and depends a lot on the value of the alternatives.
- scsg
> Everyone realizes that if you eat more calories than you burn, you will gain weight
No. Actually this is not a universally accepted truth. One of the main premises behind the Atkins approach is that the calorie theory is wrong (80 years of dogmatic assertions notwithstanding). The caloric content of food is determined by burning it in a pure oxygen environment and measuring the heat output. The human body is nowhere near that simple. As a trivial example, imagine that you ate 5000 calories a day of wood chips. By the calorie theory, most people would be expected to gain a lot of weight on such a diet. Not all foods are treated equally by the body. Carbohydrates, in particular, have a catalytic effect (namely by causing insulin production). So eating an ounce of carbs my cause you to store (or fail to burn) two ounces of fat.
Scientific theorems are often taken as absolute laws. This is doubly true in the lay public. When new discoveries are made, there is great resistance until, possibly, the new discovery is accepted as the new "law". Even then, many will cling to the old paradigm. Perhaps the Atkins "Revolution" is an example of this. Time will tell.
BTW, I've lost 40 lb in 5 months on the diet with very little exercise. Probably, most of those who say "just eat less" have never had a serious weight/overeating problem. Believe it or not, it can be very difficult or impossible to do so. Atkins explains the reasons for this in his writings.
You're not an Atkins dieter, are you? The point of the diet is to acheive ketosis and remain there. You start with a very low carb intake (the "induction" phase) and work up to as many carbs as you can handle without killing the ketosis state. If you find that you're having trouble maintaining ketosis, then you try the induction phase again.
I've lost 40 lb on the Atkins diet in 5 months.
It works as advertised.
I know that many movie "experts" consider dubbing as a terrible thing: breaking the director's original vision, etc. For certain foreign movies, I agree. However, for visually rich films like this one is supposed to be, I much prefer dubbing; even bad dubbing. I hate missing what's happening on the rest of the screen while staring at the words on the bottom.
> The incredible hulk is actually a very buff man who simply put on some halloween makeup once that caused a skin rash. Unfortunatly, while the makeup washed off, his skin stayed green
As for his voice, well that's pretty much how all body-builders talk. No mystery there.
>This demonstrates perfectly how the job of the police has gone from "protecting the law-abiding" to "hunting down criminals."
You've got it backwards. The original and correct role of the police force is to catch criminals. When they are very lucky, they sometimes catch crimals before the crime is committed. This is, theorectically, a "protection" function. However, their main function is now and has always been to apprehend those who actually break laws (forgetting for a moment the various sidelines that occasionally pop up such as various forms of corruption and padding the department's coffers with seized assets).
As far as I can tell, the notion that the police are there to protect you is a recent phenomenon (last half of 20th century). I have some theories that might explain where people get such ideas but they should be debated in some other context. Whatever people think, protection is definitely not the main role of the police.
Mmmm. Tripe.
SC (homer) SG
Ooops. Try this
http://www.nnsa.doe.gov/docs/2002-03-07-ASCI_Miles tone_Release.pdf
Call me a scaredy-cat but the first thing I thought of when I saw this was protection from bad weather. The one time I did some ocean sailing we got stormed on a lot. It scared the hell out of me. If you got caught by a bad storm with one of these you could dive and sit until it passed.
If I read the specs right, it can operate submerged for 360 hours while traveling 240 miles at a max depth of nearly 1000'. It seems to me like that would let you avoid nearly any storm.
Sure it's expensive but if you've got the dough, the safety alone might be worth it (assuming it works reliably when submerged). Of course, the coolness factor makes it even more worth it.
On the other hand, it reminds me of the old movie "Operation Petticoat". I'll never forget the scene where there taking the seriously damaged (then refurbished) sub out for a shake-down cruise. Paraprhasing:
Captain: "Will she dive Chief?"
Cheif: "Like a rock sir!"
SCSG