9/11 was the most successful terrorist attack ever not because they took down the towers but because America is turning itself into a police state and starting wars and destroying our economy because of the attacks. Hence "the terrorists have won" in the sense that we are voluntarily doing their wishes.
Not even in the ballpark.
Funny how millions of US citizens have swallowed the pill of terrorist hating - and perhaps rightfully so - yet nearly no one even knows what they were trying to accomplish.
I'll give you a hint, they were not just being assholes. You don't kill yourself in a fashion that kills hundreds of ordinary people lightly. They had goals.
I encourage you to go find out for yourself what they were. Inducing fear is never the goal of a terrorist act. It's about disrupting the status quo, making headlines and getting people to pay attention to your message. What we, our media, and our government failed to do was even communicate that in any form to the people. You know, "We, the people...". The people that are supposed to be in charge. Now I'm not saying that we should negotiate, or given in, or anything of the sort. But it would behoove us to at least find out their motives don't you think?
Neither password reuse nor password reset questions are as bad as passwords that expire.
Seriously, everybody knows you pick one password then increment the number on the end. To make matters worse, companies will often shove network drives down your throat via the domain policy, that, once your password changes, lock you out of everything. Security through inconvenience of your authorized users. Great!
That's because building the kits can be boring, tedious and require more tools or materials than your parents will buy you.
Not to mention the igniters failed half the time, and we never had 6 freaking AA batteries to make the stupid launcher work anyway.
I got to the point where I would only use the kits with premade rockets. And then I would ignite them by sticking some cannon fuse down the engine and wedging it in with a stick. It was about 600% more reliable. And didn't require $6 worth of batteries. And at 2-3 seconds per inch of fuse, you could spend $6 and get enough to launch about 36 rockets with 5 second delays. More if you were cool with sprinting away from the rocket instead of walking. And what kid isn't?
Hell, I even lit a few motors without rockets out of boredom. Jam a broom in the ground, stick the engine in upside down, light the cannon fuse, back away, and watch the neighbor's dogs start barking at the noise. Those things are loud when they stay on the ground. Then, if you were less cautious you could try and catch the hot potato when the engine's ejection charge fires and launches it several feet into the air. I didn't try. Go go gadget newtons of thrust.
It's not always a matter of public inadequate transportation.
It's often a matter of simple sprawl.
Europe is fucking tiny. Ok? Most of our states are bigger than many countries. That's not being elitist, it's being realistic. Even our modestly sized states are bigger than many countries. And The population density in some areas is so low as to be silly to provide public transportation.
The cities where things are densely populated DO have public transportation. NY, DC and Atlanta to name a few.
But to covering the urban sprawl with the kinda of public transportation you would need for everyone to get around just isn't feasible yet.
The way to do damage is with a pulse laser. The shorter the pulse, the better.
And these pulses aren't measured in seconds or milliseconds. We're talking pico seconds and shorter here. That's the kind of time scale you're looking at. So unless your projectile is spinning around a million RPMs you're not even going to smudge the spot the laser makes. And if you can spin something that fast and not have to worry about it flying apart you probably don't have to worry about lasers anyway. Easiest defense against lasers: Make your projectiles fast, tiny, and reflective. After all tiny fast things are hard to hit, and lasers are just light.
Might be one of the easiest projects the airforce has undertaken. Should probably only cost a few hundred billion.
It's a generalization to reason from the few examples you have encountered, and make an unfounded claim that developmental changes which occur during puberty are responsible for lack of adequate representation.
I guess it's a generalization that I've seen girls that started out better than me, but failed to pursue it. But I'm not saying it's defacto proof of inferiority. Just that it's worth investigating further. Maybe the girls I know are a freak accident. I did grow up near a lot of chemical plants. I'm not saying that girls are inferior here. Or even that they all get fried during puberty. Only that I've seen examples that don't have a good explaination and it bears further investigating with the scientific method. It might turn out to be nothing. It might not.
It doesn't serve to reinforce anything. I'm not so dumb as to think that because a few select people chose not to go into tech that the whole sex is somehow broken. Only that there might be something there that bears investigating.
It's just a hypothesis that's yet to be subject to serious scrutiny. And as with all human behavioral sciences, it's a "soft" science where it's impossible to isolate all the variables. So we may never know one way or the other.
I'm sorry you've been mistreated, but that's hardly my fault. I'm a scientist at heart. Prove me wrong using the scientific method and I'll believe you, but I think there's something worth investigating.
I'll hazard a guess that within in your tech career you have been praised and encouraged by family, friends and teachers, starting at a young age. Maybe not by everyone, but typically a guy will mention some particular teacher or work mentor who helped inspire and light the spark of lifelong interest.
You guess incorrectly. My family was too lazy to encourage me in any particular direction. All through elementary school and high school I was told I had no choice but to go college, but no mention of where. But when I graduated, they didn't care or lift a finger. In fact I took a year off before college and did some CAD work. It didn't pay that well, so I went to college on my own dime. I'll be paying for it for years to come too. So no, where I am today is solely to my credit. So who is making generalizations here?
That you think I somehow had it easy is insulting. Fresh out of college I had to fight to get a job, and was literally competing with my college roommate for one of the only positions I could find. Just because you've had it hard doesn't mean men haven't. I got to where I am because I had 3.5 in college, a 3.85 in my major (CompSci) for starters. I have talent, and I apply it. Not because I have a penis.
As far as journalism goes, I never bother to read an authors name, period. So it's mostly moot to me. I'm sure the study you're talking about is true. I'm not saying there aren't ignorant sexist dipshits out there. Only that I'm not one of them. There are talented female techs in my field that I know personally, so clearly the entire sex isn't entirely determinant. The proof is right in front of me.
And screaming, yes, all caps sentences are considered screaming, but I think you know that. I never said a thing about female ability. There were girls I went to grade school with that were BETTER than me. But they didn't join the IT field. I just want to know why. Was it bigotry? Was it family problems? Was it aliens? I don't know, but I sure would like to find out.
The comment was modded up as insightful because it was insightful. Not because it was sexist. I made an interesting observation that bears further investigation. You're the one that chose to interpret my post in a certain way and chose to be offended when the observation was quite clinical and very carefully worded to be as neutral as possible. Sorry you took offense, but time spent avoiding offending the easily offended is time wasted.
What if it serves to spark an idea for someone to actually test the hypothesis? And one way or the other, we find the answer? Wouldn't that be cool? More knowledge is ever awesome.
The internet must be regulated. Either by the government or competition. Right now it has neither in some places.
If we decide it should not be government regulation, then no broadband monopoly can be permitted in any location so that competition can regulate it.
And by "the internet", I mean "the internet in the US" because, I'm pretty sure that's all we're talking about here, and that's all the jurisdiction the FCC has.
You're probably right. They can do it better than me. And I'm not talking down to anyone. You saw the word "housewives" and then saw read and could see no further reason for whatever reason.
Sorry you took offense to the term "houseives" but I refuse to waste time avoiding offending the easily offended.
Clearly, someone lamenting the loss of the opportunity to share their passions with more people of the opposite sex is what's wrong with the educational system. *eyeroll*
The specific women I'm talking about are now in fact housewives. No degrees. No careers to date.
There isn't anything wrong with that, if that's what works for them and their husbands, I wish them happiness. And if that's the road to it for them, they might be better off than me.
I'll I'm saying is I saw in them the potential to be better than me at what I do, and whatever their reasoning, they chose not to pursue a career in computers. And it happened somewhere between grade school and adulthood.
I'm lamenting the loss of female talent in my field. And wondering why.
You're the one getting all defensive and screaming at me.
Back when I was in 5th grade, there were 2-3 girls in my computer class that were much better programmers than I. Much better.
Fast forward to today. They're housewives. I'm a Software Engineer. It's sad and disheartening. I wish there were more women in my field.
It's like puberty fried their brains completely. If it weren't for that I could easily envision them being much better at what I do than I am. But something happened in the intervening years. The only thing that makes any sense is puberty. Until that point the differences between boys and girls are superficial, but prior to that they were much better at it than I was.
I'd like to see the results of this experiment re-run on the same people when they're in their late 20s or early thirties.
WTF? Cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation. Last I checked the thousands of joules of that already passing us through us before cell phones were invented didn't cause any problems - well unless you count ultraviolet rays from the sun or tanning beds or radiant heat energy.
Did humanity suddenly evolve to become vulnerable to this type of radiation when I was asleep last night?
I included that last bit for the sake of honesty. But the fact is they, and other big bands make more from touring than albums. I believe he also once said that they could simply tour and not do albums at all, and get along fine. But I couldn't find that quote.
They understand the Bible as a guideline to live a good life, and quite frankly, it is a good book as such.
Only if you ignore the parts that say you should stone people, and eradicate whole villages if one of the members doesn't believe in the Bible's god, retain slaves, and that giving up your virgin daughter to a rape gang is preferable to turning over a foreign man to them. Those are just a few examples...
Apple has managed to conceptually sell the idea that owning apple products makes you better than someone who doesn't. And now they're literally selling it to you.
Most people this shallow have more money than sense (it overlaps with the SUV demographic) and thus will simply buy replacements when one breaks rather than filling out customer satisfaction surveys about the interaction with apple customer support that they didn't have.
But I believe in the company's ability to extract money from these people, which is why I own Apple stock.;)
That's at least part of it. Who is more likely to fill out a survey? The customer that's a rabid fanboi getting a chance to express his undying love for the company that he throws wads of cash at? Or the one who is pissed off because their ipod just broke? Yes, I kinda slanted the questions a bit, but you get the idea.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm not an anti-fanboy either. I'm simply rational, skeptical, and less susceptible to marketing than your average person.
I have a shuffle that I use at the gym almost daily. For a gym-music machine it's very hard to beat. Tiny, lightweight, clips on, stays out of the way, and plays music. Coupled with a pair of the cheapest, lightest, banded in-ear headphones I could find it's the perfect gym music player.
Oh, I did I forget to mention that the first shuffle broke within days? And nearly deafened me with its death scream? So as a customer, I'm pretty neutral myself. Sure, they overnighted me a replacement before I even shipped mine off, but I would have rather have one that worked the first time and didn't hurt my eardrums when it died.
So this particular customer is a little negative. Removing iPod download was reprehensible. And I've had two out of three ipods break. But they didn't give me a survey. And I probably wouldn't waste my time filling it out if they did.
Slashdot Mirror
So if it's a size issue, why is the limit placed on age instead of size?
Time spent avoiding offending the easily offended is time wasted.
So a 14 year old kicked a bunch of 16 year old gymnast asses.
Kudos to the girl for stomping her older competitors. That's all I have to say. That's all I think really matters.
Not even in the ballpark.
Funny how millions of US citizens have swallowed the pill of terrorist hating - and perhaps rightfully so - yet nearly no one even knows what they were trying to accomplish.
I'll give you a hint, they were not just being assholes. You don't kill yourself in a fashion that kills hundreds of ordinary people lightly. They had goals.
I encourage you to go find out for yourself what they were. Inducing fear is never the goal of a terrorist act. It's about disrupting the status quo, making headlines and getting people to pay attention to your message. What we, our media, and our government failed to do was even communicate that in any form to the people. You know, "We, the people...". The people that are supposed to be in charge. Now I'm not saying that we should negotiate, or given in, or anything of the sort. But it would behoove us to at least find out their motives don't you think?
The terrorists have little to do with it. We did this to ourselves in an overreaction to the trivial terrorist threat. Yes it's trivial. You're more likely to commit suicide than die from a terrorist attack. Even lumped together with all other forms of violence it's trivial.
Neither password reuse nor password reset questions are as bad as passwords that expire.
Seriously, everybody knows you pick one password then increment the number on the end. To make matters worse, companies will often shove network drives down your throat via the domain policy, that, once your password changes, lock you out of everything. Security through inconvenience of your authorized users. Great!
That's because building the kits can be boring, tedious and require more tools or materials than your parents will buy you.
Not to mention the igniters failed half the time, and we never had 6 freaking AA batteries to make the stupid launcher work anyway.
I got to the point where I would only use the kits with premade rockets. And then I would ignite them by sticking some cannon fuse down the engine and wedging it in with a stick. It was about 600% more reliable. And didn't require $6 worth of batteries. And at 2-3 seconds per inch of fuse, you could spend $6 and get enough to launch about 36 rockets with 5 second delays. More if you were cool with sprinting away from the rocket instead of walking. And what kid isn't?
Hell, I even lit a few motors without rockets out of boredom. Jam a broom in the ground, stick the engine in upside down, light the cannon fuse, back away, and watch the neighbor's dogs start barking at the noise. Those things are loud when they stay on the ground. Then, if you were less cautious you could try and catch the hot potato when the engine's ejection charge fires and launches it several feet into the air. I didn't try. Go go gadget newtons of thrust.
Agreed.
Buying faster hardware is generally much cheaper - and a more likely to see a quantifiable return on investment - than buying faster programmers.
It's not always a matter of public inadequate transportation.
It's often a matter of simple sprawl.
Europe is fucking tiny. Ok? Most of our states are bigger than many countries. That's not being elitist, it's being realistic. Even our modestly sized states are bigger than many countries. And The population density in some areas is so low as to be silly to provide public transportation.
The cities where things are densely populated DO have public transportation. NY, DC and Atlanta to name a few.
But to covering the urban sprawl with the kinda of public transportation you would need for everyone to get around just isn't feasible yet.
You're thinking beam lasers.
The way to do damage is with a pulse laser. The shorter the pulse, the better.
And these pulses aren't measured in seconds or milliseconds. We're talking pico seconds and shorter here. That's the kind of time scale you're looking at. So unless your projectile is spinning around a million RPMs you're not even going to smudge the spot the laser makes. And if you can spin something that fast and not have to worry about it flying apart you probably don't have to worry about lasers anyway. Easiest defense against lasers: Make your projectiles fast, tiny, and reflective. After all tiny fast things are hard to hit, and lasers are just light.
Might be one of the easiest projects the airforce has undertaken. Should probably only cost a few hundred billion.
If you want karma, be informative rather than funny.
This comment is informative, not funny.
It should actually be "The correct spelling of Berkley[sic] is Berkeley."
Your statement was a sentence fragment.
Ok, not really, but I was just continuing (beating) the joke (dead horse).
I guess it's a generalization that I've seen girls that started out better than me, but failed to pursue it. But I'm not saying it's defacto proof of inferiority. Just that it's worth investigating further. Maybe the girls I know are a freak accident. I did grow up near a lot of chemical plants. I'm not saying that girls are inferior here. Or even that they all get fried during puberty. Only that I've seen examples that don't have a good explaination and it bears further investigating with the scientific method. It might turn out to be nothing. It might not.
It doesn't serve to reinforce anything. I'm not so dumb as to think that because a few select people chose not to go into tech that the whole sex is somehow broken. Only that there might be something there that bears investigating.
It's just a hypothesis that's yet to be subject to serious scrutiny. And as with all human behavioral sciences, it's a "soft" science where it's impossible to isolate all the variables. So we may never know one way or the other.
I'm sorry you've been mistreated, but that's hardly my fault. I'm a scientist at heart. Prove me wrong using the scientific method and I'll believe you, but I think there's something worth investigating.
You guess incorrectly. My family was too lazy to encourage me in any particular direction. All through elementary school and high school I was told I had no choice but to go college, but no mention of where. But when I graduated, they didn't care or lift a finger. In fact I took a year off before college and did some CAD work. It didn't pay that well, so I went to college on my own dime. I'll be paying for it for years to come too. So no, where I am today is solely to my credit. So who is making generalizations here?
That you think I somehow had it easy is insulting. Fresh out of college I had to fight to get a job, and was literally competing with my college roommate for one of the only positions I could find. Just because you've had it hard doesn't mean men haven't. I got to where I am because I had 3.5 in college, a 3.85 in my major (CompSci) for starters. I have talent, and I apply it. Not because I have a penis.
As far as journalism goes, I never bother to read an authors name, period. So it's mostly moot to me. I'm sure the study you're talking about is true. I'm not saying there aren't ignorant sexist dipshits out there. Only that I'm not one of them. There are talented female techs in my field that I know personally, so clearly the entire sex isn't entirely determinant. The proof is right in front of me.
And screaming, yes, all caps sentences are considered screaming, but I think you know that. I never said a thing about female ability. There were girls I went to grade school with that were BETTER than me. But they didn't join the IT field. I just want to know why. Was it bigotry? Was it family problems? Was it aliens? I don't know, but I sure would like to find out.
The comment was modded up as insightful because it was insightful. Not because it was sexist. I made an interesting observation that bears further investigation. You're the one that chose to interpret my post in a certain way and chose to be offended when the observation was quite clinical and very carefully worded to be as neutral as possible. Sorry you took offense, but time spent avoiding offending the easily offended is time wasted.
What if it serves to spark an idea for someone to actually test the hypothesis? And one way or the other, we find the answer? Wouldn't that be cool? More knowledge is ever awesome.
The internet must be regulated. Either by the government or competition. Right now it has neither in some places.
If we decide it should not be government regulation, then no broadband monopoly can be permitted in any location so that competition can regulate it.
And by "the internet", I mean "the internet in the US" because, I'm pretty sure that's all we're talking about here, and that's all the jurisdiction the FCC has.
You're probably right. They can do it better than me. And I'm not talking down to anyone. You saw the word "housewives" and then saw read and could see no further reason for whatever reason.
Sorry you took offense to the term "houseives" but I refuse to waste time avoiding offending the easily offended.
Clearly, someone lamenting the loss of the opportunity to share their passions with more people of the opposite sex is what's wrong with the educational system. *eyeroll*
Grow up and reread my post.
It is not a generalization.
The specific women I'm talking about are now in fact housewives. No degrees. No careers to date.
There isn't anything wrong with that, if that's what works for them and their husbands, I wish them happiness. And if that's the road to it for them, they might be better off than me.
I'll I'm saying is I saw in them the potential to be better than me at what I do, and whatever their reasoning, they chose not to pursue a career in computers. And it happened somewhere between grade school and adulthood.
I'm lamenting the loss of female talent in my field. And wondering why.
You're the one getting all defensive and screaming at me.
Making meth is essentially chemistry.
Selling drugs is essentially business.
Planting bombs is essentially engineering.
Back when I was in 5th grade, there were 2-3 girls in my computer class that were much better programmers than I. Much better.
Fast forward to today. They're housewives. I'm a Software Engineer. It's sad and disheartening. I wish there were more women in my field.
It's like puberty fried their brains completely. If it weren't for that I could easily envision them being much better at what I do than I am. But something happened in the intervening years. The only thing that makes any sense is puberty. Until that point the differences between boys and girls are superficial, but prior to that they were much better at it than I was.
I'd like to see the results of this experiment re-run on the same people when they're in their late 20s or early thirties.
Retroactive Darwin Award.
I know, I know, that's not cool, flame bait & all that, but I know I'm not the only one thinking it.
It's not really funny....it just....is.
WTF? Cell phones emit non-ionizing radiation. Last I checked the thousands of joules of that already passing us through us before cell phones were invented didn't cause any problems - well unless you count ultraviolet rays from the sun or tanning beds or radiant heat energy.
Did humanity suddenly evolve to become vulnerable to this type of radiation when I was asleep last night?
It also says Lot is a good man for doing it what he did. Or did you skip that part too? I'm not trying to flame. Seriously, it's in there.
They bands still make far more money from touring than albums sold. To quote Maynard Keenan from Tool:
Seen here.
I included that last bit for the sake of honesty. But the fact is they, and other big bands make more from touring than albums. I believe he also once said that they could simply tour and not do albums at all, and get along fine. But I couldn't find that quote.
Only if you ignore the parts that say you should stone people, and eradicate whole villages if one of the members doesn't believe in the Bible's god, retain slaves, and that giving up your virgin daughter to a rape gang is preferable to turning over a foreign man to them. Those are just a few examples...
Image.
Apple has managed to conceptually sell the idea that owning apple products makes you better than someone who doesn't. And now they're literally selling it to you.
Most people this shallow have more money than sense (it overlaps with the SUV demographic) and thus will simply buy replacements when one breaks rather than filling out customer satisfaction surveys about the interaction with apple customer support that they didn't have.
But I believe in the company's ability to extract money from these people, which is why I own Apple stock. ;)
That's at least part of it. Who is more likely to fill out a survey? The customer that's a rabid fanboi getting a chance to express his undying love for the company that he throws wads of cash at? Or the one who is pissed off because their ipod just broke? Yes, I kinda slanted the questions a bit, but you get the idea.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm not an anti-fanboy either. I'm simply rational, skeptical, and less susceptible to marketing than your average person.
I have a shuffle that I use at the gym almost daily. For a gym-music machine it's very hard to beat. Tiny, lightweight, clips on, stays out of the way, and plays music. Coupled with a pair of the cheapest, lightest, banded in-ear headphones I could find it's the perfect gym music player.
Oh, I did I forget to mention that the first shuffle broke within days? And nearly deafened me with its death scream? So as a customer, I'm pretty neutral myself. Sure, they overnighted me a replacement before I even shipped mine off, but I would have rather have one that worked the first time and didn't hurt my eardrums when it died.
So this particular customer is a little negative. Removing iPod download was reprehensible. And I've had two out of three ipods break. But they didn't give me a survey. And I probably wouldn't waste my time filling it out if they did.
Unfucking believable.
Seriously.
I can't believe you just said that.
There's no way in hell that that could possibly be even remotely true.
No one on slashdot lost only four years to Diablo.