Pragmatically speaking, even under arguably unjust government someone needs to take care of the public law and order. Wouldn't you prefer those people taking care of the safety of the streets to be of high moral stance and have some integrity, even if the state power itself is unjust? And no matter what some rosy-eyed idealists think, living under over-controlling government beats living in anarchy any day.
I will not even go into the whole topic of Russia some of the oppressive government policies may be mirroring the sentiments of the population at large, many of whom are nostalgic for Soviet past.
Anyway, these are real people living there, with real needs, and this cop addresses the issues that normal, middle class people care about and therefore deserves massive respect and kudos, both for speaking up, as well as jeopardizing his safety and career for doing so.
It's hard to sympathize with someone when their job description includes conducting laws made by an oppressive government regime.
Are you in your right mind? The guy works in the narcotics squad, how the hell is that "conducting laws made by and oppressive government"? It's not like he is running around arresting journalists and dissidents!
What you say is SOOO true. People who live and breathe new technology are the ones who develop new technology (scientists and hi-tech R&D crowd).
Everybody else focuses on toys and/or status symbols.
Imagine the overage fees when you exceed the 5 GB per month cap that the network imposes on your server's Internet connection.
Imagine living in a country with competitive telecom market where most GSM/3G providers don't have network traffic cap and flat-rate data plans cost peanuts! (hint: these places actually exist, and I live in one of them)
Sorry, but you are an idiot. The fact that we need more sustainable sources of fuels doesn't mean we should stop all research that is not "practical" here and now.
In fact, science is cheap, comparing to the lumps of money we waste on:
What are you saying? Discovering a "mere" fungus on another celestial body would be outright revolutionary, of course provided that the fungus hasn't been brought by the investigating probe from Earth. In fact, finding an extraterrestrial bacteria or plant (or their analogues) would probably be one of the most important discoveries humanity has _ever_ made! Not to mention that it would be exciting to see what sort of biochemistry it would have, its reproductive mechanisms, etc. The jump from no-life to life is conceptually much larger than the gap between various lifeforms.
And note that simply having been around longer doesn't denote higher intelligence- 21st century technology knocks Ancient Greek tech into a cocked hat, but I'm not about to claim that we're all far more intelligent than Socrates, Aristotle and Plato.
Once we get implants and augmented intelligence to play around with, the average Joe will easily outsmart Plato & Co, not to mention the potential DNA modifications that will likely be used to produce "faster" brains, with better analytical capabilities, thus making people "wiser" overall.
If aliens have had millions of years to perfect themselves, it's not hard to imagine them leaving their early forms behind, and having merged with space itself.
Humanity is still very young, and 8000+ years of semi-known history is but an instant.
I am sorry, but how is their technological disadvantage temporary? So far no totalitarian system has managed to gain a long term advantage over the "free world". Some exmples:
Nazis slaughtered and exhiled a lion's share of their scientists, thus limiting their own growth potential
Soviets never reached even the 90% of the total technical capability of the West, and even that made their empire go bankrupt during 1980s
In order for the countries of the Middle East to reach the Western levels of technology they would need to offer Western levels of education. Good education would encourage progressively larger degree of independent thought, subversive to the very values the current incarnation of fundamentalists hold so dear. I am talking especially about sciences such as physics and biology, which happen to have direct military applicability.
To make the long story short, in order for the Muslim world to overtake the West, they will have to liberalize, and once they liberalize they are unlikely to see our culture as abhorrent.
You are of course correct. For some reason I was thinking about the perimeter of the circle (which actually doesn't fit the context of this thread), and not the revolutions in degrees/radians.
I guess what you are pointing at is the difference in the quality of management by the governors and the local legislative and executive bodies in different places.
Certainly the quality of the bureaucrats in Russia has a lot of drastic improvements to make. Still, having a decent space program does in no way interfer with the management issues that plague the Russian "glubinka". Quite to the contrary, if the youth of the country will see that the once powerful scientific industry of the country is getting up on its feet again, they will be more eager to join the engineering courses, and other scientific studies that have lost a lot of their glitter and prestige during the wild 90's.
I'm not one of those killjoys who think you have to completely solve all human ills before launching anything into space, but it's a big mystery how Russia can come up with money for space, and yet can't seem to raise the standard of living enough to stop its demographic implosion and high rates of unemployment and deadly alcoholism.
Because if you actually studied Economics instead of minority languages, you would understand that Russia is already overspending on its social programmes. Giving money to the poor is the best way to fuel the inflation. Plus 65M$ is a drop in a bucket compared to the current Russian currency reserves.
I am not one of those killjoys who think that poor people shouldn't be helped at all and that the markets should completely take over the welfare functions but it's a big mystery how some people fail to see the big picture even though they routinely travel through the country and are exposed to the economic processes taking care there.
False analogy. Community maintained distro is bound to have a lot of potentially beta code in it.
Linux distro is, ahem, a distro - boatload of software on top of kernel and essential shell utilities. In case of Win32 or OS X you only get the basic OS (kernel, shell, some very basic utils) without the 4000 additional software packages.
The only downside is that it restricts you to working in a text shell [...] ssh -X should take care of that, provided you can run X client (or was it server ) on the local computer.
You are being silly when comparing making cars to designing spaceships in the context of USSR. The reason all Soviet consumer goods are of such shit quality, is because there was no competition, so the consumers were ready to buy whatever crap thrown at them (there were huge shortages of even the crappiest cars, so consumer couldn't afford to demand better quality).
Space industry, on the other hand was in a direct competition with the _best_ products of the West - of course Soviet space program yielded world-class technology, it was an absolute imperative to deliver, lest the country would fall face down into the dirt.
Maybe you are a geek that was working in Soviet labs, nevertheless, your words lack credibility, since you demonstrated an inability to see simple causal relationships.
um, no, scientific research will continue to thrive with private funding. No, it won't. There's no money to be made from basic research. And anyway, product oriented R&D mostly isn't scientific research.
[...] throw lots of money at the problem and hope some sticks... What money? Read the RTFA! It was an impromptu project by one man and his team of scientists, a creative effort to push the existing tech and skills to their limits, not a government project with slipping deadlines and inflated funding. And anyway, Russian space program was funded sparingly for most of its history, when compared to NASA.
When you look at the history of Soviet space exploration, you often get the impression that "it builds and fits together, launch it" was more often than not the deciding factor. Isn't this one of the main tenets of Hacker Philosophy - to play around with technology and see where that gets you?
Slashdot Mirror
In the second paragraph:
s/ some of the/n/g
Sorry...
Pragmatically speaking, even under arguably unjust government someone needs to take care of the public law and order. Wouldn't you prefer those people taking care of the safety of the streets to be of high moral stance and have some integrity, even if the state power itself is unjust? And no matter what some rosy-eyed idealists think, living under over-controlling government beats living in anarchy any day.
I will not even go into the whole topic of Russia some of the oppressive government policies may be mirroring the sentiments of the population at large, many of whom are nostalgic for Soviet past.
Anyway, these are real people living there, with real needs, and this cop addresses the issues that normal, middle class people care about and therefore deserves massive respect and kudos, both for speaking up, as well as jeopardizing his safety and career for doing so.
It's hard to sympathize with someone when their job description includes conducting laws made by an oppressive government regime.
Are you in your right mind? The guy works in the narcotics squad, how the hell is that "conducting laws made by and oppressive government"? It's not like he is running around arresting journalists and dissidents!
What you say is SOOO true. People who live and breathe new technology are the ones who develop new technology (scientists and hi-tech R&D crowd). Everybody else focuses on toys and/or status symbols.
Imagine the overage fees when you exceed the 5 GB per month cap that the network imposes on your server's Internet connection.
Imagine living in a country with competitive telecom market where most GSM/3G providers don't have network traffic cap and flat-rate data plans cost peanuts! (hint: these places actually exist, and I live in one of them)
In fact, science is cheap, comparing to the lumps of money we waste on:
What are you saying? Discovering a "mere" fungus on another celestial body would be outright revolutionary, of course provided that the fungus hasn't been brought by the investigating probe from Earth. In fact, finding an extraterrestrial bacteria or plant (or their analogues) would probably be one of the most important discoveries humanity has _ever_ made! Not to mention that it would be exciting to see what sort of biochemistry it would have, its reproductive mechanisms, etc. The jump from no-life to life is conceptually much larger than the gap between various lifeforms.
And note that simply having been around longer doesn't denote higher intelligence- 21st century technology knocks Ancient Greek tech into a cocked hat, but I'm not about to claim that we're all far more intelligent than Socrates, Aristotle and Plato.
Once we get implants and augmented intelligence to play around with, the average Joe will easily outsmart Plato & Co, not to mention the potential DNA modifications that will likely be used to produce "faster" brains, with better analytical capabilities, thus making people "wiser" overall.
If aliens have had millions of years to perfect themselves, it's not hard to imagine them leaving their early forms behind, and having merged with space itself.
Humanity is still very young, and 8000+ years of semi-known history is but an instant.
In order for the countries of the Middle East to reach the Western levels of technology they would need to offer Western levels of education. Good education would encourage progressively larger degree of independent thought, subversive to the very values the current incarnation of fundamentalists hold so dear. I am talking especially about sciences such as physics and biology, which happen to have direct military applicability.
To make the long story short, in order for the Muslim world to overtake the West, they will have to liberalize, and once they liberalize they are unlikely to see our culture as abhorrent.
Who in the hell would want to neuter an animal worth US$10M?!?
Whoever owns the animal, in order to protect his investment by preventing unauthorized copies!
You are of course correct. For some reason I was thinking about the perimeter of the circle (which actually doesn't fit the context of this thread), and not the revolutions in degrees/radians.
The disaster you are referring to has a name. It's called "watersports".
For sure, you must have meant "radii" instead of "radians"...?
I guess what you are pointing at is the difference in the quality of management by the governors and the local legislative and executive bodies in different places.
Certainly the quality of the bureaucrats in Russia has a lot of drastic improvements to make. Still, having a decent space program does in no way interfer with the management issues that plague the Russian "glubinka". Quite to the contrary, if the youth of the country will see that the once powerful scientific industry of the country is getting up on its feet again, they will be more eager to join the engineering courses, and other scientific studies that have lost a lot of their glitter and prestige during the wild 90's.
In the last sentence:
s/taking care there/taking place there/
I'm not one of those killjoys who think you have to completely solve all human ills before launching anything into space, but it's a big mystery how Russia can come up with money for space, and yet can't seem to raise the standard of living enough to stop its demographic implosion and high rates of unemployment and deadly alcoholism.
Because if you actually studied Economics instead of minority languages, you would understand that Russia is already overspending on its social programmes. Giving money to the poor is the best way to fuel the inflation. Plus 65M$ is a drop in a bucket compared to the current Russian currency reserves.
I am not one of those killjoys who think that poor people shouldn't be helped at all and that the markets should completely take over the welfare functions but it's a big mystery how some people fail to see the big picture even though they routinely travel through the country and are exposed to the economic processes taking care there.
False analogy. Community maintained distro is bound to have a lot of potentially beta code in it.
Linux distro is, ahem, a distro - boatload of software on top of kernel and essential shell utilities. In case of Win32 or OS X you only get the basic OS (kernel, shell, some very basic utils) without the 4000 additional software packages.
You are being silly when comparing making cars to designing spaceships in the context of USSR. The reason all Soviet consumer goods are of such shit quality, is because there was no competition, so the consumers were ready to buy whatever crap thrown at them (there were huge shortages of even the crappiest cars, so consumer couldn't afford to demand better quality).
Space industry, on the other hand was in a direct competition with the _best_ products of the West - of course Soviet space program yielded world-class technology, it was an absolute imperative to deliver, lest the country would fall face down into the dirt.
Maybe you are a geek that was working in Soviet labs, nevertheless, your words lack credibility, since you demonstrated an inability to see simple causal relationships.
s/RTFA/TFA/
(slaps himself)
My point expressed in GP still holds.