>However, most people would be really pissed >off if you told them that if they bought a DVD >player they would no longer be able to watch their >VHS tapes.
What strange world would this have been? Not ours, for sure. Were manufacturers going to create DVD players that generated some sort of magnetic field that rendered all VHS tapes within the home unreadable?
There may be valid reasons why somebody would choose an AMD processor over Intel, but reliability isn't one of them. And for the past 6 months, neither is performance.
The magic word is VALUE. Compare, say, an nvidia nforce chipset system with an AMD cpu against similar Intel hardware. the AMD solution is way cheaper, like half the cost or something.
It may lag in performance, like maybe DDR isn't as fast at RDRAM or something. Actually I have no idea. All I know is that my Athlon 1.4GHz is way faster than the PII-350 I used to have.
(That last part was supposed to be funny...)
And go figure, I'm about to put an ATI video card in my nvidia nforce chipset mobo. So much for brand loyalty. Now if only I could see the point of installing Linux... (puts on fireproof vest)
Human: Hey, nice pants. SlashWallace: You've got my full attention. Thank you for your kindness.
Human: Do you think that the Slashdot crowd will ask any good questions? SlashWallace: If it is, then I'll be very surprised.
Human: Me too. SlashWallace: I'm glad we agree,.
Human: Tell me, are you secretly responsible for all those penis birds? SlashWallace: I don't know whether or not I am secretly responsible for all those penis birds. I am well respected as an AI.
Human: Do you support CLIT or ACs? SlashWallace: I am in favor of all records being broken, at any time.
Human: Well, it would be hard to break the record for posts to Slashdot since they instituted the caps SlashWallace: Interesting. Why do you want it?
Human: Actually I don't want the caps. SlashWallace: Actually you don't say. What does want?
Human: I think they just add more AC noise to the data stream! SlashWallace: Since when? Who does "they" refer to?
Human: "They" refers to the suite of anti-troll measures that CmdrTaco has implemented on slashdot.org SlashWallace: Oh that they.
Human: Yes. SlashWallace: Yippee!
Human: You really think that the anti-troll measures are a good thing? SlashWallace: Really? If it is, then I'll be very surprised.
Human: So, you support the anti-troll measures just out of principle, recongizing that they can't work? SlashWallace: Interesting deduction. Interesting gossip:.
Human: You seem unwilling to take a stance on this issue so important to the Slashdot community. SlashWallace: I will tell my botmaster you said I am unwilling to take a stance on this issue so important to the Slashdot community.
Okay, this is a little off-topic. But the blurb for this story says "Microsoft's vision of a world where your computer is trusted against you."
Well, sometimes you should trus the computer over humans. Like that plane crash over Germany -- the TCAS-II said pull up, and the ATC said dive. Quite naturally the Russian pilot chose to dive, which was the completely wrong thing to do. TCAS-II had it right.
Of course, TCAS-II was coded to keep planes from colliding. MS software is coded to keep you running on the Microsoft Gerbil Wheel of Corporate Profits.
I just wanted to point out that sometimes, you really can trust the computer. Even more so, I think, when the code is available for peer review, or can be reverse-engineered without commiting a DMCA felony.
I wonder if the code for TCAS-II has comments like: !seineeW erA stoliP naissuR
Win98SE is the best, up utnil about nine months ago. Win2k is the best now. XP is too flakey. I should know, I'm running it so I can get about 10% better performance in games.
WinME is the biggest piece of shit of the whole Win 9x / NT4 and beyond line. NOBODY in the history of history aside from you has pretended that ME is better than 98SE. Seriously, what is your deal?
Win2k is on SP2 now and you know what? it's stable. It does what I expect. (Though active directory is still freakin' weird.) For me it's like that comfortable pair of blue jeans, which is exactly what NT 4 has going for it.
XP is like some chick you just started dating but you haven't really committed to (read: installed a service pack) yet. I tried XP last November and I balied after I hit three showstoppers in one day. And why do I have to regedit to make the menus show up in less than 250 milliseconds? What kind of gayness is that? I get notified every five minutes if my HD has only 50MB free? What if that HD is supposed to be full of MP3.
But seriously, my home computer is essentially a internet/pr0n appliance and game console, and MP3 player and DVD player. The actual OS doesnt' really have too much to do with it when the day is done. I would install Linux if i could play cool games like GTA3.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but bus speeds have increased since you bought that Pentium 75 system. Though not as much as cpu speed, because that's historically been the focus of the, uh, personal computer. Who cares about optimizing network transactions on a PC? They were built to get away from mainframes, remember? Well, that was true 20 years ago and the paradigm has stuck for longer than it should have.
Even so, Consumer hard drives can now claim ATA-133 speeds, that's probably an order of magnitude faster than the 1.2 GB drives from five years ago. And SerialATA is coming. On the server side, I think U320 SCSI is out now. SCSI started at 5, now it's at 320. THat's like 64 times faster.
RAM has kept up, too. The first DIMMS were 66MHz, now you can get effectively 400MHZ DDR, or faster than that if you want soon-to-be-out-of-business RAMBUS.
Heck they invented the AGP port so we could play games, and that's at 4X now, with 8X on the horizon and some really bigtime advances in GPU power in just the past two years.
None of these have seen the speed increases of the CPU, but they are moving along at a nice clip. The PCI bus is maybe the weakest link here, but it's gotten better.
I think there's a lot of room for growth left in the current physical materials. I keep hearing 15 years until we hit the quantum barrier in CPUs, if we keep up with Moore's Law. There was a great article not so long ago about hard drives, and how they are basically doubling in areal storage density every year. In ten years, you can get a 120 Terabyte drive. Only one problem: What the hell would you put on it to fill it up?
Kinda like the predicament they find with broadband. There's nothing else to do with all that bandwidth than download mp3s and pr0n and warez. Oops.
Dude. A separate power source for each wheel. That is just like when I played Autoduel (by Origin Systems) on my Commodore 64.
In the game, it meant that you had to get a whole new chassis if you wanted to go faster, since the wheels and the rest of the car had to be tightly integrated. (Pardon my use of modern-day buzzwords to describe a video game from the '80s.) It sounds like you'd need to do the same thing here, or at least upgrade all four wheels at the same time. Otherwise it would be like upgrading just one CPU in your quad-xeon box and that's not right.
The internal combustion engine is great and all, but fuel cells are like twice as efficient, if not more. There are some brilliant ideas for more efficient vehicles out there (I remember reading about a diesel-electric bus that runs the diesel at efficient, low-polluting RPMs to charge a battery, and the bus draws power from the battery) but the tool-up cost for cars is SO HIGH that most conecpts never get off the drawing board.
If GM pulls this off they just owned the market in Europe.
As for the bioweapons treaty, the ratification problem is that ANY facility which could potentially be used to produce such weapons would be subject to inspection
That's exactly the sort of double-standardt that sets me off! We bomb a pharmaceutical factory in The Sudan because it might be involved in the manufacture of chemical weapons; in Pentagonese it's a "dual-use" target. But we get gunshy when the same standard is to be applied to ourselves.
Need I mention the destruction of Iraq's desalination plants at the outset of the Gulf War? I can dig up the DIA report on the projected casualties from that one if you're interested.
As for Iraq, they agreed to a set of conditions at the end of the Gulf War, including the destruction of their weapons of mass destruction and international inspections to verify compliance, if they didn't like the terms, they could have kept fighting.
Look, I'm not saying I want Iraq to have Weapons of Mass Destruction. And they didn't comply with the UNSCOM inspectors. However, Saddam was RIGHT when he said that they're spying on him. Then, as I recall, we bombed Iraq again for kicking out the inspectors, even though it's public knowledge that the "inspectors" were also spying on Iraqi military communications, in a clear violation of UNSCOM's role.
I have more than a passing familiarity with reality, it seems to me like you're the one who ought to quit whining about your life being on the line and take a look at what you're actually defending, if you can see through all the American Flags obscuring your vision of the real world. By the way, "dying to save my sorry ass" in IN YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION. Much like Iraq agreed to UNSCOM after the Gulf War, you agreed to a set of conditions when you joined the military.
(Though I'm not against compulsory military service with a pacifist option, but that's a whole different topic and would somewhat deflate my ad hominem attacks.)
By the way, where are you stationed, I can send you some fresh AA batteries, candy bars, or girlie mags if you want. Seriously.
> The USA, of course, has more chemical and > biological weapons than any other country on > earth...
Why would you assume that?
I'm not assuming it. I was watching TV late one night in Maryland, and an official spokesperson from the the Department of Defense came on Channel 20 at about 3AM. She announced that chemical weapons would be destroyed in a series of explosions over the next few days, at no risk to the public... It sure was reassuring to see that our military has TV studios and everything ready to go in case they ever need to sieze control of the airwaves!
But it's probably true that the USSR *had* more. Arms races are like that sometimes. USA must be #2 then, don't you think?
As for stopping research into biological weapons into the 70s... Remember those Anthrax attacks? You know, the ones where the Anthrax was determined to be from a strain of Anthrax that the Army sheepishly admitted had gone missing? From Fort Detrick MD as I recall. Or was it Ft. Meade? Or was it Walter Reed? Heck, there are three facilities that deal with chemical and biological agents in the tiny state of Maryland, just think how many there must be in the whole U.S. of A!
The only way to reconcile the Anthrax mailer with your claim that we've stopped producing biological weapons is that we have so much stockpiled that we don't need to produce any more. I mean really, if you're gonna believe everything you read in a treaty, then perhaps you'd like to explain the existence of the Antrhax at Army labs in light of this statement:
Interesting links: Destruction of chemical weapons in USA: http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/demil/default.htm
"SBCCOM also provides for safe chemical weapons storage;" http://www.sbccom.army.mil/
I guess the reason I come down hard on the USA for not supporting the land mine ban but I don't take it to China for not signing the bioweapons ban is because we supposedly value human rights and freedom, yadda yadda yadda, yet we won't agree to a bioweapons treaty that involves inspection. Meanwhile we bomb Iraq when they kick out inspectors, who were later shown to be U.S. spies. Double standard, anyone?
And since you're going to ask, here are a few refs: US balks at bioterror convention: http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story/ 0,7369,494257,00.html
UN weapons inspectors in Iraq were U.S. spies: http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/mar1999/ iraq-m04.shtml or in case the socialists aren't liberal enough, there's frontline: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontlin e/shows/unsc om/etc/script.html
about 3 seconds round trip. Math: moon is 250,000 miles away. Light goes 186,000 miles per second. Round trip = 500,000 miles, or about 3 sec at c.
Supposedly you can cut that in half if they ever figure out how to do the quantum-entangled photon thing; my physics buddy doesn't think that will be happening anytime soon. Entangled photons are very hard to create. (In case you're wondering the idea is this; you send one photon to the moon and when it is detected, it will change state. Its partner down on earth will simultaneously chage, so the outbound communication is limited to the speed of light but the return of information is instant. Or something like that.)
There are plenty of places where landmines from previous conflicts are waiting to be cleaned up. Southeast Asia is probably the best example. Africa has its share of problems too.
The United States does deploy land mines, (a.k.a. Area Denial Weapons) mostly along the South Korea / North Korea border. The USA stands alone among Western countries in not banning the use of the devices. Regardless, land mines can be bought for about six dollars on the open market! (Gotta love those economies of scale)
So the problem is people wanting to kill others. The antimine people look to me to be avoiding the real issue in favor of blaming the tool.
The problem is not people wanting to kill others. The problem is *land mines*, which continue to kill and maim long after the war is over. The world considers this to be acceptable. Part of the problem is that the USA considers this to be acceptable.
We were able to ban the use of poison gas after World War I, and Western nations have not used it since. Poison gas kills indiscriminantly, without regard for civilian or military status, and it is a very unpleasant way to die. Civlized nations decided that even in war, there are rules. The USA, of course, has more chemical and biological weapons than any other country on earth...
Like we did with poison gas, we should ban land mines, and stop using them, and most of all stop producing them.
We can't prevent people from having bad intentions but we can set some boundaries on acceptable behavior. Poison gas was deemed unacceptable. Land mines kill indiscriminantly long after the war is over. They must be banned, and they should be removed from the face of the earth.
I've never looked into this too closely so I haven't made up my mind on anything but it looks like once again the problem is people w/bad intentions. Can't ban that.
Look closely. The problem is not people with bad intentions. It is that these people continue to use a weapon which keeps fighting after the war is over. The combatants have gone home, but the land mines they left behind keep blowing up.
This is the most pathetic response to an ask slashdot ever.
Like half of the people have suggested "landscape" when it's pretty obvious that's not what the guy is asking about. He's got a page that's like ten screens wide. Printing in landscape will give him maybe another half-a-screen of width. The question is: How to get the next eight screens of width?
The only thing I can think of on this one would be to somehow render the HTML page in PostScript (or eps). I don't know what out there would do that. Once you have PostScript, it should be pretty easy to make the printer do what you want, even if it means rotating it 90 degrees so it's on its side.
If someone could post a link to a nefarious page-widening post that would be cool, too. I can't see them anymore since I stopped using IE.
Word. That little Elisabeth is a hottie. I'm putting her picture up next to my JonBenet Ramsey photograph now.
Even though that was a troll, I think you are absolutely right. It *is* the tittilation factor, thinking about what sort of things she might be experiencing, that makes this story linger.
I remember hearing a news item on the radio, I think I was driving in norther Florida at the time. It was one of those one-time stories that never gets followed up. The story was this: A woman somehow ends up in a car and is raped. The rapist dumps her out of the car. She's on the side of the road trying to flag down some help, and someone stops. The good samaritan lets her into the car, and the *he* rapes her.
There is no news there. Just an idea, raping some woman and dumping her on the side of the road, and then being the sloppy-seconds rapist. The only reason they reported that (no names, no police involvement, it was "reported" almost exactly as I did) was to either excite me by the prospect of raping a woman or shock me by the though of a woman being raped. Either way puts me in a place where I'm a little more emotionally accessible than I was just before, and I might keep listening because I'm now shocked or turned on, and I'm lost in my own emotional experiences thinking about that story, and of course the radio is still playing in the background.
I was kidding about the pictures, by the way. Though why JonBenet's parents had to dress her up like a six-year-old harlot is something I'll never understand. Why it got so much coverage is easy to understand: "Little girl dresses like hooker and disappears like hooker too."
The American announcers are not very good. That was definitely detracting from my enjoyment of this World Cup. I did watch may of the games on Univision, and my spanish ain't very good but I could understand a little here and there.
Someone said the US announcers said the Brazilian goal keeper looked weak? How about that save of Neuville's free kick? That was correctly described as "incredible" and "one of the best saves of the tournament" by the BBC announcers that covered the game for the CBC. (I live near Canada, thank God who I don't even believe in. Unlike Edmilson apparently who traded in his yellow jersey for Jesus Heart You. Great play from him, though; he saved Brazil's bacon a few times in the first half.)
Americans just don't understand world-level competitions. Look at NBC's pathetic coverage of Summer Olympics 2000 in Sydney. None of it was Live, most of it was about the Dream Team (since when did they change the Olympic motto to Higher Stronger Faster More Razzle Dazzle). By contrast, the CBC showed SEVENTEEN HOURS A DAY of LIVE Olympic coverage, and they bothered to show the athletes that won events, not only the atheletes that were Canadian.
If you watched the game on American TV, I'm guessing you missed the presentation of the medals and Cafu triumphantly lifting the trophy high in the air. Both Univision and the CBC had at least anohter hour of coverage after the final whistle, while my local ABC station was already into the home-town Good Morning America.
American coverage of International sporting events is emarrassing and offensive.
Well I tried to watch the ad. It was there on my desktop. It starts off with a Guinness and some birds flying around in the top or something. Then, the screen goes all digitized and the soundtrack sounds like a modem trying to connect. Then, Windows tells me that QuickTime has caused a fatal error and must close.
All this because Mozilla is still downloading the file while I tried to watch it. Maybe I need to un-cap my cable modem. Or turn off Kazaa. Or just take all the pr0n out of my Kazaa folder, that seems to be over half of the traffic.
I wish I were drinking a Guinness right now, but Fat Tire Amber ain't too bad.'
Slashdot Mirror
For some reason, I read that as "Goatse's Penguin"
Guess I've been reading at -1 too much lately...
The story so far:
>However, most people would be really pissed >off if you told them that if they bought a DVD >player they would no longer be able to watch their >VHS tapes.
What strange world would this have been? Not ours, for sure. Were manufacturers going to create DVD players that generated some sort of magnetic field that rendered all VHS tapes within the home unreadable?
Yes, it's a little-known clause in the DMCA.
There may be valid reasons why somebody would choose an AMD processor over Intel, but reliability isn't one of them. And for the past 6 months, neither is performance.
The magic word is VALUE. Compare, say, an nvidia nforce chipset system with an AMD cpu against similar Intel hardware. the AMD solution is way cheaper, like half the cost or something.
It may lag in performance, like maybe DDR isn't as fast at RDRAM or something. Actually I have no idea. All I know is that my Athlon 1.4GHz is way faster than the PII-350 I used to have.
(That last part was supposed to be funny...)
And go figure, I'm about to put an ATI video card in my nvidia nforce chipset mobo. So much for brand loyalty. Now if only I could see the point of installing Linux...
(puts on fireproof vest)
The story so far:
:-)
>Think nothing is impossible? Try slamming a revolving door
1 block of wood inserted between door "wing" and building edge.
then the door bounces off the wood, and spins the other way, pushing the 2 by 4 out onto the sidewalk.
Human: Hey, nice pants.
SlashWallace: You've got my full attention. Thank you for your kindness.
Human: Do you think that the Slashdot crowd will ask any good questions?
SlashWallace: If it is, then I'll be very surprised.
Human: Me too.
SlashWallace: I'm glad we agree,.
Human: Tell me, are you secretly responsible for all those penis birds?
SlashWallace: I don't know whether or not I am secretly responsible for all those penis birds. I am well respected as an AI.
Human: Do you support CLIT or ACs?
SlashWallace: I am in favor of all records being broken, at any time.
Human: Well, it would be hard to break the record for posts to Slashdot since they instituted the caps
SlashWallace: Interesting. Why do you want it?
Human: Actually I don't want the caps.
SlashWallace: Actually you don't say. What does want?
Human: I think they just add more AC noise to the data stream!
SlashWallace: Since when? Who does "they" refer to?
Human: "They" refers to the suite of anti-troll measures that CmdrTaco has implemented on slashdot.org
SlashWallace: Oh that they.
Human: Yes.
SlashWallace: Yippee!
Human: You really think that the anti-troll measures are a good thing?
SlashWallace: Really? If it is, then I'll be very surprised.
Human: So, you support the anti-troll measures just out of principle, recongizing that they can't work?
SlashWallace: Interesting deduction. Interesting gossip:.
Human: You seem unwilling to take a stance on this issue so important to the Slashdot community.
SlashWallace: I will tell my botmaster you said I am unwilling to take a stance on this issue so important to the Slashdot community.
If you try to take your powerbook 5300 on the plane, you are no better than that shoe-bomber guy
Google helps you find stuff. Google does not give you informed recommendations from your peers. Duh.
/XP)
Google search for "SSH Secure Services on Windows 2K" (cut and paste job from article title, leaving off
Result number ten is called "How to setup SSH service on an Windows NT\2000 system." using cygwin etc.
So there.
Okay, this is a little off-topic. But the blurb for this story says "Microsoft's vision of a world where your computer is trusted against you."
Well, sometimes you should trus the computer over humans. Like that plane crash over Germany -- the TCAS-II said pull up, and the ATC said dive. Quite naturally the Russian pilot chose to dive, which was the completely wrong thing to do. TCAS-II had it right.
Of course, TCAS-II was coded to keep planes from colliding. MS software is coded to keep you running on the Microsoft Gerbil Wheel of Corporate Profits.
I just wanted to point out that sometimes, you really can trust the computer. Even more so, I think, when the code is available for peer review, or can be reverse-engineered without commiting a DMCA felony.
I wonder if the code for TCAS-II has comments like:
!seineeW erA stoliP naissuR
Win98SE is the best, up utnil about nine months ago. Win2k is the best now. XP is too flakey. I should know, I'm running it so I can get about 10% better performance in games.
WinME is the biggest piece of shit of the whole Win 9x / NT4 and beyond line. NOBODY in the history of history aside from you has pretended that ME is better than 98SE. Seriously, what is your deal?
Win2k is on SP2 now and you know what? it's stable. It does what I expect. (Though active directory is still freakin' weird.) For me it's like that comfortable pair of blue jeans, which is exactly what NT 4 has going for it.
XP is like some chick you just started dating but you haven't really committed to (read: installed a service pack) yet. I tried XP last November and I balied after I hit three showstoppers in one day. And why do I have to regedit to make the menus show up in less than 250 milliseconds? What kind of gayness is that? I get notified every five minutes if my HD has only 50MB free? What if that HD is supposed to be full of MP3.
But seriously, my home computer is essentially a internet/pr0n appliance and game console, and MP3 player and DVD player. The actual OS doesnt' really have too much to do with it when the day is done. I would install Linux if i could play cool games like GTA3.
Hey, if you have any extras I could use them in my PowerBase 180.
I'm not an idiot, but I play one on Slashdot.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but bus speeds have increased since you bought that Pentium 75 system. Though not as much as cpu speed, because that's historically been the focus of the, uh, personal computer. Who cares about optimizing network transactions on a PC? They were built to get away from mainframes, remember? Well, that was true 20 years ago and the paradigm has stuck for longer than it should have.
Even so, Consumer hard drives can now claim ATA-133 speeds, that's probably an order of magnitude faster than the 1.2 GB drives from five years ago. And SerialATA is coming. On the server side, I think U320 SCSI is out now. SCSI started at 5, now it's at 320. THat's like 64 times faster.
RAM has kept up, too. The first DIMMS were 66MHz, now you can get effectively 400MHZ DDR, or faster than that if you want soon-to-be-out-of-business RAMBUS.
Heck they invented the AGP port so we could play games, and that's at 4X now, with 8X on the horizon and some really bigtime advances in GPU power in just the past two years.
None of these have seen the speed increases of the CPU, but they are moving along at a nice clip. The PCI bus is maybe the weakest link here, but it's gotten better.
I think there's a lot of room for growth left in the current physical materials. I keep hearing 15 years until we hit the quantum barrier in CPUs, if we keep up with Moore's Law. There was a great article not so long ago about hard drives, and how they are basically doubling in areal storage density every year. In ten years, you can get a 120 Terabyte drive. Only one problem: What the hell would you put on it to fill it up?
Kinda like the predicament they find with broadband. There's nothing else to do with all that bandwidth than download mp3s and pr0n and warez. Oops.
Dude. A separate power source for each wheel. That is just like when I played Autoduel (by Origin Systems) on my Commodore 64.
In the game, it meant that you had to get a whole new chassis if you wanted to go faster, since the wheels and the rest of the car had to be tightly integrated. (Pardon my use of modern-day buzzwords to describe a video game from the '80s.) It sounds like you'd need to do the same thing here, or at least upgrade all four wheels at the same time. Otherwise it would be like upgrading just one CPU in your quad-xeon box and that's not right.
The internal combustion engine is great and all, but fuel cells are like twice as efficient, if not more. There are some brilliant ideas for more efficient vehicles out there (I remember reading about a diesel-electric bus that runs the diesel at efficient, low-polluting RPMs to charge a battery, and the bus draws power from the battery) but the tool-up cost for cars is SO HIGH that most conecpts never get off the drawing board.
If GM pulls this off they just owned the market in Europe.
As for the bioweapons treaty, the ratification problem is that ANY facility which could potentially be used to produce such weapons would be subject to inspection
That's exactly the sort of double-standardt that sets me off! We bomb a pharmaceutical factory in The Sudan because it might be involved in the manufacture of chemical weapons; in Pentagonese it's a "dual-use" target. But we get gunshy when the same standard is to be applied to ourselves.
Need I mention the destruction of Iraq's desalination plants at the outset of the Gulf War? I can dig up the DIA report on the projected casualties from that one if you're interested.
As for Iraq, they agreed to a set of conditions at the end of the Gulf War, including the destruction of their weapons of mass destruction and international inspections to verify compliance, if they didn't like the terms, they could have kept fighting.
Look, I'm not saying I want Iraq to have Weapons of Mass Destruction. And they didn't comply with the UNSCOM inspectors. However, Saddam was RIGHT when he said that they're spying on him. Then, as I recall, we bombed Iraq again for kicking out the inspectors, even though it's public knowledge that the "inspectors" were also spying on Iraqi military communications, in a clear violation of UNSCOM's role.
I have more than a passing familiarity with reality, it seems to me like you're the one who ought to quit whining about your life being on the line and take a look at what you're actually defending, if you can see through all the American Flags obscuring your vision of the real world. By the way, "dying to save my sorry ass" in IN YOUR JOB DESCRIPTION. Much like Iraq agreed to UNSCOM after the Gulf War, you agreed to a set of conditions when you joined the military.
(Though I'm not against compulsory military service with a pacifist option, but that's a whole different topic and would somewhat deflate my ad hominem attacks.)
By the way, where are you stationed, I can send you some fresh AA batteries, candy bars, or girlie mags if you want. Seriously.
> The USA, of course, has more chemical and
/ 0,7369,494257 ,00.html
/ iraq-m04 .shtmln e/shows/unsc om/etc/script.html
> biological weapons than any other country on
> earth...
Why would you assume that?
I'm not assuming it. I was watching TV late one night in Maryland, and an official spokesperson from the the Department of Defense came on Channel 20 at about 3AM. She announced that chemical weapons would be destroyed in a series of explosions over the next few days, at no risk to the public... It sure was reassuring to see that our military has TV studios and everything ready to go in case they ever need to sieze control of the airwaves!
But it's probably true that the USSR *had* more. Arms races are like that sometimes. USA must be #2 then, don't you think?
As for stopping research into biological weapons into the 70s... Remember those Anthrax attacks? You know, the ones where the Anthrax was determined to be from a strain of Anthrax that the Army sheepishly admitted had gone missing? From Fort Detrick MD as I recall. Or was it Ft. Meade? Or was it Walter Reed? Heck, there are three facilities that deal with chemical and biological agents in the tiny state of Maryland, just think how many there must be in the whole U.S. of A!
The only way to reconcile the Anthrax mailer with your claim that we've stopped producing biological weapons is that we have so much stockpiled that we don't need to produce any more. I mean really, if you're gonna believe everything you read in a treaty, then perhaps you'd like to explain the existence of the Antrhax at Army labs in light of this statement:
Under the terms of the convention, the parties undertake not to develop, produce, stockpile, or acquire biological agents or toxins "of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective, and other peaceful purposes," as well as weapons and means of delivery. All such material is to be destroyed within nine months of the conventions entry into force. In January 1976, all heads of Federal departments and agencies certified to the President that as of December 26, 1975, their respective departments and agencies were in full compliance with the convention.
Interesting links:
Destruction of chemical weapons in USA: http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/demil/default.htm
"SBCCOM also provides for safe chemical weapons storage;"
http://www.sbccom.army.mil/
I guess the reason I come down hard on the USA for not supporting the land mine ban but I don't take it to China for not signing the bioweapons ban is because we supposedly value human rights and freedom, yadda yadda yadda, yet we won't agree to a bioweapons treaty that involves inspection. Meanwhile we bomb Iraq when they kick out inspectors, who were later shown to be U.S. spies. Double standard, anyone?
And since you're going to ask, here are a few refs:
US balks at bioterror convention:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story
UN weapons inspectors in Iraq were U.S. spies:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/mar1999
or in case the socialists aren't liberal enough, there's frontline:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontli
about 3 seconds round trip. Math: moon is 250,000 miles away. Light goes 186,000 miles per second. Round trip = 500,000 miles, or about 3 sec at c.
Supposedly you can cut that in half if they ever figure out how to do the quantum-entangled photon thing; my physics buddy doesn't think that will be happening anytime soon. Entangled photons are very hard to create. (In case you're wondering the idea is this; you send one photon to the moon and when it is detected, it will change state. Its partner down on earth will simultaneously chage, so the outbound communication is limited to the speed of light but the return of information is instant. Or something like that.)
There are plenty of places where landmines from previous conflicts are waiting to be cleaned up. Southeast Asia is probably the best example. Africa has its share of problems too.
The United States does deploy land mines, (a.k.a. Area Denial Weapons) mostly along the South Korea / North Korea border. The USA stands alone among Western countries in not banning the use of the devices. Regardless, land mines can be bought for about six dollars on the open market! (Gotta love those economies of scale)
So the problem is people wanting to kill others. The antimine people look to me to be avoiding the real issue in favor of blaming the tool.
The problem is not people wanting to kill others. The problem is *land mines*, which continue to kill and maim long after the war is over. The world considers this to be acceptable. Part of the problem is that the USA considers this to be acceptable.
We were able to ban the use of poison gas after World War I, and Western nations have not used it since. Poison gas kills indiscriminantly, without regard for civilian or military status, and it is a very unpleasant way to die. Civlized nations decided that even in war, there are rules. The USA, of course, has more chemical and biological weapons than any other country on earth...
Like we did with poison gas, we should ban land mines, and stop using them, and most of all stop producing them.
We can't prevent people from having bad intentions but we can set some boundaries on acceptable behavior. Poison gas was deemed unacceptable. Land mines kill indiscriminantly long after the war is over. They must be banned, and they should be removed from the face of the earth.
I've never looked into this too closely so I haven't made up my mind on anything but it looks like once again the problem is people w/bad intentions. Can't ban that.
Look closely. The problem is not people with bad intentions. It is that these people continue to use a weapon which keeps fighting after the war is over. The combatants have gone home, but the land mines they left behind keep blowing up.
Me Three! I think I will go to H2K2 and perform this on the piano in the hotel lobby.
WHoever writes these songs is doing a really good job. My favorite was "Goatse be good" to the tune of Johnny Be Good.
This is the most pathetic response to an ask slashdot ever.
Like half of the people have suggested "landscape" when it's pretty obvious that's not what the guy is asking about. He's got a page that's like ten screens wide. Printing in landscape will give him maybe another half-a-screen of width. The question is: How to get the next eight screens of width?
The only thing I can think of on this one would be to somehow render the HTML page in PostScript (or eps). I don't know what out there would do that. Once you have PostScript, it should be pretty easy to make the printer do what you want, even if it means rotating it 90 degrees so it's on its side.
If someone could post a link to a nefarious page-widening post that would be cool, too. I can't see them anymore since I stopped using IE.
Yep, that's what all my physics professors said when I asked them WTF questions.
This cowboy has slowed down.
Word. That little Elisabeth is a hottie. I'm putting her picture up next to my JonBenet Ramsey photograph now.
Even though that was a troll, I think you are absolutely right. It *is* the tittilation factor, thinking about what sort of things she might be experiencing, that makes this story linger.
I remember hearing a news item on the radio, I think I was driving in norther Florida at the time. It was one of those one-time stories that never gets followed up. The story was this: A woman somehow ends up in a car and is raped. The rapist dumps her out of the car. She's on the side of the road trying to flag down some help, and someone stops. The good samaritan lets her into the car, and the *he* rapes her.
There is no news there. Just an idea, raping some woman and dumping her on the side of the road, and then being the sloppy-seconds rapist. The only reason they reported that (no names, no police involvement, it was "reported" almost exactly as I did) was to either excite me by the prospect of raping a woman or shock me by the though of a woman being raped. Either way puts me in a place where I'm a little more emotionally accessible than I was just before, and I might keep listening because I'm now shocked or turned on, and I'm lost in my own emotional experiences thinking about that story, and of course the radio is still playing in the background.
I was kidding about the pictures, by the way. Though why JonBenet's parents had to dress her up like a six-year-old harlot is something I'll never understand. Why it got so much coverage is easy to understand: "Little girl dresses like hooker and disappears like hooker too."
Actually, Why don't you go first? "No More Commodore Perrys."
It was clear that Commodore Perry could impose his demands by force. The Japanese had no navy with which to defend themselves, and thus they had to agree to the demands.
But what was up with those announcers???
The American announcers are not very good. That was definitely detracting from my enjoyment of this World Cup. I did watch may of the games on Univision, and my spanish ain't very good but I could understand a little here and there.
Someone said the US announcers said the Brazilian goal keeper looked weak? How about that save of Neuville's free kick? That was correctly described as "incredible" and "one of the best saves of the tournament" by the BBC announcers that covered the game for the CBC. (I live near Canada, thank God who I don't even believe in. Unlike Edmilson apparently who traded in his yellow jersey for Jesus Heart You. Great play from him, though; he saved Brazil's bacon a few times in the first half.)
Americans just don't understand world-level competitions. Look at NBC's pathetic coverage of Summer Olympics 2000 in Sydney. None of it was Live, most of it was about the Dream Team (since when did they change the Olympic motto to Higher Stronger Faster More Razzle Dazzle). By contrast, the CBC showed SEVENTEEN HOURS A DAY of LIVE Olympic coverage, and they bothered to show the athletes that won events, not only the atheletes that were Canadian.
If you watched the game on American TV, I'm guessing you missed the presentation of the medals and Cafu triumphantly lifting the trophy high in the air. Both Univision and the CBC had at least anohter hour of coverage after the final whistle, while my local ABC station was already into the home-town Good Morning America.
American coverage of International sporting events is emarrassing and offensive.
For example, I don't think some dude telling people "Up Yours" makes me want a 7UP, but I guess there could be subtle effects that I am not aware of.
That explains the popularity of goatse.cx rather nicely.
Well I tried to watch the ad. It was there on my desktop. It starts off with a Guinness and some birds flying around in the top or something. Then, the screen goes all digitized and the soundtrack sounds like a modem trying to connect. Then, Windows tells me that QuickTime has caused a fatal error and must close.
All this because Mozilla is still downloading the file while I tried to watch it. Maybe I need to un-cap my cable modem. Or turn off Kazaa. Or just take all the pr0n out of my Kazaa folder, that seems to be over half of the traffic.
I wish I were drinking a Guinness right now, but Fat Tire Amber ain't too bad.'
Whoo Hoo! I got the Score +1 Bonus check box!