So yes, there is ignorance, ignorance spread by the education systems
So true.
What system of government are 90% of children subjected to for the first 18 years or so of their lives?
Dictatorship.
How is the family run? Does the child have any say? What about school? They can abduct you, tell you what to do with your time, tell you when to do it, tell you what to think about, DEMAND that you think about certain things. You're teaching the youth: "This is how the world works kids. Do what we say, we know what's right." and then they're given the right to vote at 18. Most of them don't vote because they don't think their voice will be heard, just as it hasn't been heard for the first many years of their life in a dictatorship.
Maybe if our children thought they had any say in things, they'd be more prone to saying things when the opportunity presented itself. I blame the public school system for the docile ignorance that plagues America today. I also blame the media, and the way we oversensationalize fictional stories and peoples' ability to "play" fictional characters. The fact that 2500 reporters covered the Jackson trial and maybe a half-dozen will show up at a nuclear arms summit is just fucking scary.
They usually have a website and a policy telling you what is supposed to be on that list, but they NEVER block mail. By publishing a list, they give a rating. Someone else takes action based on that rating. None of your mail goes through a DNS blacklist operator's mailserver. They are simply not in the position to block anything.
Yes, I know that. They just make a list. I said that, I also said that they believe that "just making a list" absolves them from all responsibility. I also said that blacklists are implemented (by people who implement them, namely system administrators) very poorly. Were you paying attention? Do you understand?
The implementation of a blacklist is how the ISP uses it. Do they notify the customers? Do they send a weekly "You got spam from these addresses..." message? Do they enable to customers to easily edit the blacklist so that illegitimately added hosts can be removed quickly? I really don't think you understood me. heh.
It's the principle of centrally administered DNS blacklists that is at fault here, not the individual operator.
I said that a few times. Are you sure you were paying attention when you read my comment? I said that having a list maintained by people who believe themselves to be absolved of responsibility and can edit the blacklist willy-nilly without vote or consensus is bad, and we should switch to something more wiki-style that more people would have a say in.
Actually, I'm with singletoned, and I think it's you that has a problem with understanding. Understanding something involves realizing implications which are not immediately obvious. Understanding is something that few people ever really do. Reading the facts isn't enough, you need to be able to manipulate those facts and draw provable conclusions from them. THAT is understanding.
For example, in order to get revenge on people they believed were spamming, MAPS would blacklist the mail server of the company hosting their site.
The problem with blacklists is that they're human controlled and extremely susceptible to egotistical vigilante-ism. If I'm getting spam from a server, I don't have to block just that server. I could block every server in the headers, for example. What I choose to add to my blocklist can be totally arbitrary, and that's the problem with blocklists controlled by individuals that can block huge IP blocks.
And, in terms of preventing the "sending" of mail, you could consider a blacklist to be a postman who would, whenever he saw a letter from a given return address, he'd destroy it. Any time you got a New Scientist magazine? destroyed, at their discretion. How many companies use a blacklist without saying what's on the blacklist, or making the blacklist easily searchable and editable? Does a user ever get a message on a regular basis "Hello so and so, you've received 274 emails this week from addresses in our blocked address list (which contains mostly spammers; click here to make a change." ? No, they don't provide that helpful information with links to the relevant information.
The mail is just blocked, it disappears into a void. By intercepting it before it reaches its intended recipient you are effectively preventing it from being sent. Because it's not the addressed recipient that decides whether or not to accept the mail according to the blacklist, it's an unnamed middle-man or middle-men. A blacklist allows any server in-between the sender and the recipient to say "no, sorry, your ass is blocked."
I do think people should be forced to accept every email that I send. They shouldn't be forced to READ them all, but they should be forced to accept them. As email becomes more and more prevalent as a form of legally recognized communication (emails are used in court as evidence) it's important to recognize the implications of interfering with that communication without disclosing such interference. Would you like it if I were your postman and every time I saw your electric bill, I took it and destroyed it because I didn't like the electric company and I didn't think anybody should be subjected to their tortures? Would you like me totally interfering with your legal communication and then not telling you, not even sending you a friendly "the electric company is evil, go solar!" letter? Would you like the way that could impact your finances, your credit, your reputation? What happens when somebody adds an obscure credit union to a blacklist and people don't get fraud alert emails from the CU, just because one server in their datacenter was compromised and used to send 10,000 spams? Do you REALLY understand, now? I still don't think you do.
The blacklist themselves aren't really responsible for breaking any rules, which they believe absolves them of acting responsibly. The fact of the matter is that blacklists are often implemented in the most infuckingcredibly ignorant ways possible, unfortunately. No e-mails as per my suggestion above, no way for the sysadmins that use the blacklist to audit/edit it, etc.
We need a wiki-style collaborative blacklist that has a membership of thousands who all collaborate on this issue. It's just one more example of how giving one person too much power before they're ready to use it responsibly with proper discretion results in a disaster. A blacklist affects too many people to be implemented so willy-nilly at only a few peoples' (poor) discretion. We need a collaboration, a large committee who will not become corrupted by power (as none of the members will individually have any power) but will be a gathering of individuals who maintain their individual opinions and ensure that the system remains fair and balanced.
Adobe did not lose a sale if an individual's budget is $100. In that circumstance, Adobe never would have had a sale in the first place, because their software is too expensive. Calling one man's choice of software a "lost sale" for whatever company whose software he didn't choose (or choose to pay for) is pure bullshit. The sale isn't lost unless it was guaranteed in the first place, and those sales were NEVER guaranteed.
Keeping the inside of the refrigerator cool requires less power if the ambient temperature is lower. The lower the ambient external temperature becomes, the less power is gradually required to maintain a certain temperature within the refrigerator/freezer.
You need to keep in mind that "cold" is just the absence of heat. You don't "make things cold" but rather you "remove their heat." The amount of heat that needs to be removed from the inside of the fridge/freezer can never be more than the average amount of heat in the surrounding air, unless something inside is radioactive. That is to say, nothing inside the fridge makes it innately hot that requires a lot of constant cooling. That's why the compressor isn't on all the time, it's only on when the temperature passes a certain upper limit. The lower the ambient air temperature, the less heat needs to be pumped out of the inside of the refrigerator, so the longer the things inside will stay cool between compressor cycles.
It isn't trying to be a perpetual motion machine at all, actually. I have no idea where that statement came from. Care to elaborate?
An additional idea I'll throw out (since you appear to know what you're talking about and you provided me with oodles of wikipedia-searchable goodness) is that of using a Boron target in the core of an IEC system. Inside the inner grid, at the exact center. Not to stimulate a direct initial p+B reaction, but to assist in maneuvering the naked deuterons (as D+D reactions are the easiest to get going) into position for fusion. I had thought that creating a tiny layer of deuterons around the boron core combined with enough D+D reactions near the surface of the boron would eventually stimulate a high enough "surface temperature" to facilitate direct p+B fusion with the surrounding deuterons, at which point the core would vaporize and the whole mess would be allowed to collapse into its true center, with the incoming deuteron rate now having been greatly increased so as to maintain the reaction until all of the boron has been fused. What do you think?
Maybe it's easy for you, but it's not easy for joe average.
Your ass is a stinky, dirty place. You DO NOT put things in there, if you're joe average. Things only come out of there. It doesn't occur to you that it's a place to "keep" anything.
E-mail, well shit, now THAT is easy, and you don't even need to wash your hands afterward. Click here, control-n, "hi, I just learned about project BlackZero, they're going to be doing a multi-tiered..." control-enter, close window... (although if you've read some of the articles out there on what's living on your keyboard, maybe you DO want to wash your hands afterward. heh.)
I was thinking about this recently and honestly, I think you're wrong. It is just an engineering challenge.
You cite bremsstrahlung ("braking radiation") losses. What causes bremsstrahlung losses? Electrons bouncing off of nuclei. You need to look into ways of eliminating the electrons. I was eyeing up the magnetic electron trap used in a hall effect thruster for this. Assuming that you could get the reactor running, you would likely have enough energy on-hand to heat your deuterium to a plasma state and then strip it of its electrons prior to injection. Can you think of other ways to get electrons off of atoms? I'm not a physicist.
Hemos, you're a tactless fucker. You read the blurb, you know it's only a 3MHz machine, you KNOW that millions of slashgeeks worldwide will click that link and bring that guy's machine to a halt. Don't say it's stress testing, don't say anything like that.
Have a little common sense (and maybe some respect) and don't link stuff like this on the front page. Link a mirror. Hemos, you're pretty nerdy I bet, I'm sure you can use wget to mirror somebody's site and find a place to host it for a while. I mean, if it's a tiny page on a 3mhz computer, it shouldn't take much to mirror it and be nice to the fellow and his project. Or even a coral cache link would be fine, so we don't break this guy's handmade computer.
Have you ever hand-made something as an imitation of something else which is bigger/better/more powerful than your imitation, and then had somebody come along and use your imitation just like it's the real thing, and break it? Any adult who constructs model aircraft and has children should know this one by heart. Hemos is the annoying child who comes into our garage and plays with our model aircraft like they're toys and eventually breaks them because he doesn't understand that they aren't toys. He's actually a lot worse than that, because he's inviting over a million of his friends to come into our garage and play with our model aircraft like they're toys, ensuring only that they'll get broken faster and those with the mental capacity to enjoy the models as something other than toys will be left with nothing.
I mean, really. I am not trying to be a troll here at all. Does anybody else see what Hemos did as totally tactless?
How is having closed source not equivalent to not providing technical information? Having closed source is the EPITOME of not providing technical information...
This is not a wedge issue that should be used to push open source.
Indeed, the title is deeply misleading. A court requiring evidence about how software works is not the same as requiring the software to be Open Source, nor anything close to it.
Slow down, here. The title is not misleading. The title says it all, really. If the technical information underlying the technical evidence and affirming its validity cannot be supplied, the charges are dismissed. Closed Source -> Charges Dismissed.
Furthermore, this is definitely a wedge issue that could (should is a word I dislike using) be used to push open source. More government applications such as breathalyzers, radar guns, and so forth, could benefit from being open-sourced simply because it would eliminate this loophole in the system caused by closed source and a company's desire to keep it closed.
Legally, the breathalyzer company's IP is protected and should not be ordered to be handed over. Logistically, there's nothing forcing the government to buy closed-source technologies other than cost and possibly availability. Logical conclusion: They need to stop being cheap and buy something that they can really stand behind, and that their prosecuting attorneys can stand behind too.
Actually, I think it's you that has forgotten. Forgotten many things, including the grand circle known as the circle of life.
Most radio active elements, but particularly the ones we are tlaking about here (uraunium and plutonium) are very, very heavy materials. This means their airborne time is very low. Well if you just spread them around, you really aren't going to cause a lot of effect. They need to get inside people to do real damage, or people need prolonged exposure. Just being externally exposed to a little uranium lying somewhere near you won't do much.
Ok, so you've got a bunch of uranium on/in the ground. Where does that uranium EVENTUALLY go? It goes into animals who drink contaminated groundwater and it goes into plants that absorb it through their roots (and those plants are then consumed by other animals, or by humans). Having irradiated land makes crop cultivation (and farming in general) totally impossible and would totally ruin a small to mid-sized country, leading to mass starvation, war over arable land within that and neighboring countries, and so on. Also, what happens when all your vegetation dies off due to radiation poisoning? Wind and water erosion, landslides, etc.
How can you be so ignorant as to overlook things like groundwater, food crops, livestock, and so on? Do you not eat? Or maybe you just don't think about where your food comes from...? Dropping a dirty nuke in a farming district is the ideal scorched earth tactic.
You want to take a perfectly functioning PC and turn it into a crippled game console? I'll turn your question back on you: WHY?
Yeah, tech support might be great, but CUSTOMER support would be a nightmare...when a user realises they need to do a full system reboot to make a quick change to their homework before submitting it and returning to their game. (many, if not all modern games support task switching completely under Windows) Not to mention the whole quandary of using a livecd. How do I save my game, smart guy? Do I now need a CD-RW drive just to play your stupid liveCD game? Or maybe an extra $20 for a USB flash drive? What's your niche target market; like eight people who'll tolerate you crippling their PC and turning it into a shitty console, removing their ability to perform simple PC tasks in the process? Can't check my e-mail without a full reboot back into my operating system? No thanks.
Well, yes, unnecessary for the aircraft used in my example. I was attempting to conjure imagery of a gas-guzzling beast when I said "Stealth Bomber."
My point is that having lots of cheap fuel accessible to all of your equipment is really nice when you're undertaking military operations. Aircraft, or otherwise.
It's the first step in a long-standing strategy, I thought that was explicitly implied.
It's not like Iraq's neighbors are going to sit idly by and not see what such a democracy can be like. They will take notice. The women will take notice especially. (in nations governed by systems of fundamental Islam, an unmarried rape victim who becomes pregnant can be and often is put to death in order to preserve family honor.) And then all the US needs is an invitation from "the people" who are "in need of liberation" and bingo, bango, bongo, we're in the middle of Operation Somenewname.
Social change will be affected simply due to geographic proximity to the proper social system. Think of the general region over there as a pool of water. We just dropped the rock of democracy into that pool, and now ripple will ride its way outward.
In my post, I was giving some of the reasons for which we chose Iraq over, say, Iran. or Saudi Arabia. Or whatever. Iraq was just a convenient takeover location in the middle of it all. Well, I mean, we started with Afghanistan, but that's a whole other story. Given what's come out lately about the Downing Street Memo and all that business, it's hard to tell how much of an agenda was really had prior to ever starting any new actions in the Middle East. You know, where is the point when/where/how it all "started"... like I said, whole other story.
The truth is that a person who rips music off is just a lower form of life then the person who plays by the rules.
So you're saying that somebody who plays by the rules (presumably the rules of a system, possibly any arbitrary system) is a higher form of "life" than someone who does not? Adherence to a totally abstract notion such as that of a system which involves governing rules not explicitly dictated by nature (the laws of physics and biology which preclude me from, say, levitating in place) elevates one to a higher level of life form?
You just said that a sheeple is better than a free-thinker. Your concept of "truth" eludes me, young jedi.
Because Iraq is smack dab in the middle of the world of Islam, making it a nice tactical jumping-off point for further military exercises in the region.
Because Iraq's citizens were ruled by a tyrant that many of the citizens wanted removed, meaning that the general populace would welcome an incursion.
Because Iraq's secularity would not preclude establishing a non-Islam system of government.
Because Iraq, as a nation, produces oil. Oil can be refined into fuel, and Stealth Bombers use quite a lot of fuel. Having a fuel production facility right next to your airbase is pretty convenient, isn't it?
Prior to occupation, fuel sold for $0.05 per gallon outside of Basra (where a major refinery is located). Yes, that's a nickel a gallon. In some places, fuel was cheaper than water in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Following the occupation, however, the US took over control of the supply lines, monoplized the market, and jacked up the prices to $1.00 to $1.50 per gallon. It still likely costs the same amount to produce the oil, but somebody (read: haliburton; they took over oil operations in Iraq) is making a hell of a profit now...
So that's another reason: Because there was a fuckload of money to be made.
The point the great-grandparent was making is that today it's "in style" to blame everybody but yourself for the way you are. They're fat so they blame fast food and not their lazy ass; they're stupid so they blame the school system and not their incapacity to pick up a book instead of watch the television; etc.
Right-wingedness pushes a mentality of self-direction and personal responsibility to the tune of "If you fail, it's your own fault. If you succeed, it is your own success." Right wingers aren't about pointing fingers or finding reasons or excuses for the way they are; if they're upset with themselves, they're about decisive action in a direction opposite the one they're going. If they're lazy and fat and they don't like it, they will stop being lazy and fat and start exercising. If they're stupid, they'll put an ad in the paper for a math tutor or whatever and bring up their intelligence in a certain area.
In short--
Left wing: First, we say we're addicted to email. Next, we'll be talking about all the bad things this addiction causes. Lost productivity, wasted personal time, overtime pay that need not be paid, and so on. Finally we'll be looking at ways to combat this email problem. I'm sure there will be a panel, maybe a national commission, a couple organizations, maybe an international coordinated effort between multiple nations to eradicate this terrible addiction once and for all. ("War on e-mail, next on 60 minutes.")
Right wing: We feel like we're checking our email too often. So, we decided to cut down.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with singletoned on the notion that you didn't read the article.
I'm still convinced you didn't.
So yes, there is ignorance, ignorance spread by the education systems
So true.
What system of government are 90% of children subjected to for the first 18 years or so of their lives?
Dictatorship.
How is the family run? Does the child have any say? What about school? They can abduct you, tell you what to do with your time, tell you when to do it, tell you what to think about, DEMAND that you think about certain things. You're teaching the youth: "This is how the world works kids. Do what we say, we know what's right." and then they're given the right to vote at 18. Most of them don't vote because they don't think their voice will be heard, just as it hasn't been heard for the first many years of their life in a dictatorship.
Maybe if our children thought they had any say in things, they'd be more prone to saying things when the opportunity presented itself. I blame the public school system for the docile ignorance that plagues America today. I also blame the media, and the way we oversensationalize fictional stories and peoples' ability to "play" fictional characters. The fact that 2500 reporters covered the Jackson trial and maybe a half-dozen will show up at a nuclear arms summit is just fucking scary.
They usually have a website and a policy telling you what is supposed to be on that list, but they NEVER block mail. By publishing a list, they give a rating. Someone else takes action based on that rating. None of your mail goes through a DNS blacklist operator's mailserver. They are simply not in the position to block anything.
Yes, I know that. They just make a list. I said that, I also said that they believe that "just making a list" absolves them from all responsibility. I also said that blacklists are implemented (by people who implement them, namely system administrators) very poorly. Were you paying attention? Do you understand?
The implementation of a blacklist is how the ISP uses it. Do they notify the customers? Do they send a weekly "You got spam from these addresses..." message? Do they enable to customers to easily edit the blacklist so that illegitimately added hosts can be removed quickly? I really don't think you understood me. heh.
It's the principle of centrally administered DNS blacklists that is at fault here, not the individual operator.
I said that a few times. Are you sure you were paying attention when you read my comment? I said that having a list maintained by people who believe themselves to be absolved of responsibility and can edit the blacklist willy-nilly without vote or consensus is bad, and we should switch to something more wiki-style that more people would have a say in.
Actually, I'm with singletoned, and I think it's you that has a problem with understanding. Understanding something involves realizing implications which are not immediately obvious. Understanding is something that few people ever really do. Reading the facts isn't enough, you need to be able to manipulate those facts and draw provable conclusions from them. THAT is understanding.
For example, in order to get revenge on people they believed were spamming, MAPS would blacklist the mail server of the company hosting their site.
The problem with blacklists is that they're human controlled and extremely susceptible to egotistical vigilante-ism. If I'm getting spam from a server, I don't have to block just that server. I could block every server in the headers, for example. What I choose to add to my blocklist can be totally arbitrary, and that's the problem with blocklists controlled by individuals that can block huge IP blocks.
And, in terms of preventing the "sending" of mail, you could consider a blacklist to be a postman who would, whenever he saw a letter from a given return address, he'd destroy it. Any time you got a New Scientist magazine? destroyed, at their discretion. How many companies use a blacklist without saying what's on the blacklist, or making the blacklist easily searchable and editable? Does a user ever get a message on a regular basis "Hello so and so, you've received 274 emails this week from addresses in our blocked address list (which contains mostly spammers; click here to make a change." ? No, they don't provide that helpful information with links to the relevant information.
The mail is just blocked, it disappears into a void. By intercepting it before it reaches its intended recipient you are effectively preventing it from being sent. Because it's not the addressed recipient that decides whether or not to accept the mail according to the blacklist, it's an unnamed middle-man or middle-men. A blacklist allows any server in-between the sender and the recipient to say "no, sorry, your ass is blocked."
I do think people should be forced to accept every email that I send. They shouldn't be forced to READ them all, but they should be forced to accept them. As email becomes more and more prevalent as a form of legally recognized communication (emails are used in court as evidence) it's important to recognize the implications of interfering with that communication without disclosing such interference. Would you like it if I were your postman and every time I saw your electric bill, I took it and destroyed it because I didn't like the electric company and I didn't think anybody should be subjected to their tortures? Would you like me totally interfering with your legal communication and then not telling you, not even sending you a friendly "the electric company is evil, go solar!" letter? Would you like the way that could impact your finances, your credit, your reputation? What happens when somebody adds an obscure credit union to a blacklist and people don't get fraud alert emails from the CU, just because one server in their datacenter was compromised and used to send 10,000 spams? Do you REALLY understand, now? I still don't think you do.
The blacklist themselves aren't really responsible for breaking any rules, which they believe absolves them of acting responsibly. The fact of the matter is that blacklists are often implemented in the most infuckingcredibly ignorant ways possible, unfortunately. No e-mails as per my suggestion above, no way for the sysadmins that use the blacklist to audit/edit it, etc.
We need a wiki-style collaborative blacklist that has a membership of thousands who all collaborate on this issue. It's just one more example of how giving one person too much power before they're ready to use it responsibly with proper discretion results in a disaster. A blacklist affects too many people to be implemented so willy-nilly at only a few peoples' (poor) discretion. We need a collaboration, a large committee who will not become corrupted by power (as none of the members will individually have any power) but will be a gathering of individuals who maintain their individual opinions and ensure that the system remains fair and balanced.
Adobe did not lose a sale if an individual's budget is $100. In that circumstance, Adobe never would have had a sale in the first place, because their software is too expensive. Calling one man's choice of software a "lost sale" for whatever company whose software he didn't choose (or choose to pay for) is pure bullshit. The sale isn't lost unless it was guaranteed in the first place, and those sales were NEVER guaranteed.
Keeping the inside of the refrigerator cool requires less power if the ambient temperature is lower. The lower the ambient external temperature becomes, the less power is gradually required to maintain a certain temperature within the refrigerator/freezer.
You need to keep in mind that "cold" is just the absence of heat. You don't "make things cold" but rather you "remove their heat." The amount of heat that needs to be removed from the inside of the fridge/freezer can never be more than the average amount of heat in the surrounding air, unless something inside is radioactive. That is to say, nothing inside the fridge makes it innately hot that requires a lot of constant cooling. That's why the compressor isn't on all the time, it's only on when the temperature passes a certain upper limit. The lower the ambient air temperature, the less heat needs to be pumped out of the inside of the refrigerator, so the longer the things inside will stay cool between compressor cycles.
It isn't trying to be a perpetual motion machine at all, actually. I have no idea where that statement came from. Care to elaborate?
I got that one, so we're up to at least 11.
An additional idea I'll throw out (since you appear to know what you're talking about and you provided me with oodles of wikipedia-searchable goodness) is that of using a Boron target in the core of an IEC system. Inside the inner grid, at the exact center. Not to stimulate a direct initial p+B reaction, but to assist in maneuvering the naked deuterons (as D+D reactions are the easiest to get going) into position for fusion. I had thought that creating a tiny layer of deuterons around the boron core combined with enough D+D reactions near the surface of the boron would eventually stimulate a high enough "surface temperature" to facilitate direct p+B fusion with the surrounding deuterons, at which point the core would vaporize and the whole mess would be allowed to collapse into its true center, with the incoming deuteron rate now having been greatly increased so as to maintain the reaction until all of the boron has been fused. What do you think?
Maybe it's easy for you, but it's not easy for joe average.
Your ass is a stinky, dirty place. You DO NOT put things in there, if you're joe average. Things only come out of there. It doesn't occur to you that it's a place to "keep" anything.
E-mail, well shit, now THAT is easy, and you don't even need to wash your hands afterward. Click here, control-n, "hi, I just learned about project BlackZero, they're going to be doing a multi-tiered..." control-enter, close window... (although if you've read some of the articles out there on what's living on your keyboard, maybe you DO want to wash your hands afterward. heh.)
I was thinking about this recently and honestly, I think you're wrong. It is just an engineering challenge.
You cite bremsstrahlung ("braking radiation") losses. What causes bremsstrahlung losses? Electrons bouncing off of nuclei. You need to look into ways of eliminating the electrons. I was eyeing up the magnetic electron trap used in a hall effect thruster for this. Assuming that you could get the reactor running, you would likely have enough energy on-hand to heat your deuterium to a plasma state and then strip it of its electrons prior to injection. Can you think of other ways to get electrons off of atoms? I'm not a physicist.
Search for "high security" site:ups.com via google.
Hemos, you're a tactless fucker. You read the blurb, you know it's only a 3MHz machine, you KNOW that millions of slashgeeks worldwide will click that link and bring that guy's machine to a halt. Don't say it's stress testing, don't say anything like that.
Have a little common sense (and maybe some respect) and don't link stuff like this on the front page. Link a mirror. Hemos, you're pretty nerdy I bet, I'm sure you can use wget to mirror somebody's site and find a place to host it for a while. I mean, if it's a tiny page on a 3mhz computer, it shouldn't take much to mirror it and be nice to the fellow and his project. Or even a coral cache link would be fine, so we don't break this guy's handmade computer.
Have you ever hand-made something as an imitation of something else which is bigger/better/more powerful than your imitation, and then had somebody come along and use your imitation just like it's the real thing, and break it? Any adult who constructs model aircraft and has children should know this one by heart. Hemos is the annoying child who comes into our garage and plays with our model aircraft like they're toys and eventually breaks them because he doesn't understand that they aren't toys. He's actually a lot worse than that, because he's inviting over a million of his friends to come into our garage and play with our model aircraft like they're toys, ensuring only that they'll get broken faster and those with the mental capacity to enjoy the models as something other than toys will be left with nothing.
I mean, really. I am not trying to be a troll here at all. Does anybody else see what Hemos did as totally tactless?
How is having closed source not equivalent to not providing technical information? Having closed source is the EPITOME of not providing technical information...
Slow down, here. The title is not misleading. The title says it all, really. If the technical information underlying the technical evidence and affirming its validity cannot be supplied, the charges are dismissed. Closed Source -> Charges Dismissed.
Furthermore, this is definitely a wedge issue that could (should is a word I dislike using) be used to push open source. More government applications such as breathalyzers, radar guns, and so forth, could benefit from being open-sourced simply because it would eliminate this loophole in the system caused by closed source and a company's desire to keep it closed.
Legally, the breathalyzer company's IP is protected and should not be ordered to be handed over. Logistically, there's nothing forcing the government to buy closed-source technologies other than cost and possibly availability. Logical conclusion: They need to stop being cheap and buy something that they can really stand behind, and that their prosecuting attorneys can stand behind too.
"Life feeds on life feeds on life" -- Maynard of Tool
Ok, so you've got a bunch of uranium on/in the ground. Where does that uranium EVENTUALLY go? It goes into animals who drink contaminated groundwater and it goes into plants that absorb it through their roots (and those plants are then consumed by other animals, or by humans). Having irradiated land makes crop cultivation (and farming in general) totally impossible and would totally ruin a small to mid-sized country, leading to mass starvation, war over arable land within that and neighboring countries, and so on. Also, what happens when all your vegetation dies off due to radiation poisoning? Wind and water erosion, landslides, etc.
How can you be so ignorant as to overlook things like groundwater, food crops, livestock, and so on? Do you not eat? Or maybe you just don't think about where your food comes from...? Dropping a dirty nuke in a farming district is the ideal scorched earth tactic.
Why not? Why NOT? What kind of idiot are you?
You want to take a perfectly functioning PC and turn it into a crippled game console? I'll turn your question back on you: WHY?
Yeah, tech support might be great, but CUSTOMER support would be a nightmare...when a user realises they need to do a full system reboot to make a quick change to their homework before submitting it and returning to their game. (many, if not all modern games support task switching completely under Windows) Not to mention the whole quandary of using a livecd. How do I save my game, smart guy? Do I now need a CD-RW drive just to play your stupid liveCD game? Or maybe an extra $20 for a USB flash drive? What's your niche target market; like eight people who'll tolerate you crippling their PC and turning it into a shitty console, removing their ability to perform simple PC tasks in the process? Can't check my e-mail without a full reboot back into my operating system? No thanks.
Well, yes, unnecessary for the aircraft used in my example. I was attempting to conjure imagery of a gas-guzzling beast when I said "Stealth Bomber."
My point is that having lots of cheap fuel accessible to all of your equipment is really nice when you're undertaking military operations. Aircraft, or otherwise.
It's the first step in a long-standing strategy, I thought that was explicitly implied.
... like I said, whole other story.
It's not like Iraq's neighbors are going to sit idly by and not see what such a democracy can be like. They will take notice. The women will take notice especially. (in nations governed by systems of fundamental Islam, an unmarried rape victim who becomes pregnant can be and often is put to death in order to preserve family honor.) And then all the US needs is an invitation from "the people" who are "in need of liberation" and bingo, bango, bongo, we're in the middle of Operation Somenewname.
Social change will be affected simply due to geographic proximity to the proper social system. Think of the general region over there as a pool of water. We just dropped the rock of democracy into that pool, and now ripple will ride its way outward.
In my post, I was giving some of the reasons for which we chose Iraq over, say, Iran. or Saudi Arabia. Or whatever. Iraq was just a convenient takeover location in the middle of it all. Well, I mean, we started with Afghanistan, but that's a whole other story. Given what's come out lately about the Downing Street Memo and all that business, it's hard to tell how much of an agenda was really had prior to ever starting any new actions in the Middle East. You know, where is the point when/where/how it all "started"
The truth is that a person who rips music off is just a lower form of life then the person who plays by the rules.
So you're saying that somebody who plays by the rules (presumably the rules of a system, possibly any arbitrary system) is a higher form of "life" than someone who does not? Adherence to a totally abstract notion such as that of a system which involves governing rules not explicitly dictated by nature (the laws of physics and biology which preclude me from, say, levitating in place) elevates one to a higher level of life form?
You just said that a sheeple is better than a free-thinker. Your concept of "truth" eludes me, young jedi.
Sticking out? My cd gun puts enough oomph behind 'em that they go clean through!
You should try those mini-cds too, they're great for warning shots.
Well...
Because Iraq is smack dab in the middle of the world of Islam, making it a nice tactical jumping-off point for further military exercises in the region.
Because Iraq's citizens were ruled by a tyrant that many of the citizens wanted removed, meaning that the general populace would welcome an incursion.
Because Iraq's secularity would not preclude establishing a non-Islam system of government.
Because Iraq, as a nation, produces oil. Oil can be refined into fuel, and Stealth Bombers use quite a lot of fuel. Having a fuel production facility right next to your airbase is pretty convenient, isn't it?
Prior to occupation, fuel sold for $0.05 per gallon outside of Basra (where a major refinery is located). Yes, that's a nickel a gallon. In some places, fuel was cheaper than water in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Following the occupation, however, the US took over control of the supply lines, monoplized the market, and jacked up the prices to $1.00 to $1.50 per gallon. It still likely costs the same amount to produce the oil, but somebody (read: haliburton; they took over oil operations in Iraq) is making a hell of a profit now...
So that's another reason: Because there was a fuckload of money to be made.
Do I need to keep going?
The point the great-grandparent was making is that today it's "in style" to blame everybody but yourself for the way you are. They're fat so they blame fast food and not their lazy ass; they're stupid so they blame the school system and not their incapacity to pick up a book instead of watch the television; etc.
Right-wingedness pushes a mentality of self-direction and personal responsibility to the tune of "If you fail, it's your own fault. If you succeed, it is your own success." Right wingers aren't about pointing fingers or finding reasons or excuses for the way they are; if they're upset with themselves, they're about decisive action in a direction opposite the one they're going. If they're lazy and fat and they don't like it, they will stop being lazy and fat and start exercising. If they're stupid, they'll put an ad in the paper for a math tutor or whatever and bring up their intelligence in a certain area.
In short--
Left wing:
First, we say we're addicted to email. Next, we'll be talking about all the bad things this addiction causes. Lost productivity, wasted personal time, overtime pay that need not be paid, and so on. Finally we'll be looking at ways to combat this email problem. I'm sure there will be a panel, maybe a national commission, a couple organizations, maybe an international coordinated effort between multiple nations to eradicate this terrible addiction once and for all. ("War on e-mail, next on 60 minutes.")
Right wing:
We feel like we're checking our email too often.
So, we decided to cut down.
You know, sex. aka 53x, 5ex, s3x, se7x.
heh.
Yes, that is what I meant.