Why was this modded insightful? This idiot has gotten no facts right yet.
Atrocities? You mean like shelling and killing civilians in towns as they flee the fighting? No wait that was the syrian government the rebels are fighting against.
Yes Al Qaeda is trying to involve itself, because they need the good will, the PR. But the rebels are not themselves Al Qaeda, and the rebel leadership have repeatedly denounces any association with the group, wanting nothing to do with them.
You have to be a troll. Given/.'s general leftist lean, and how simply bad you make everyone on the other side look (the one bad apple that spoils the bunch), you have to be a troll.
Its not a good comparison at all. The weapons werent disabled in any way. The fed's went to gun dealers, and told them to break the law (by selling to certain individuals if they should try to buy weapons, rather than deny them like they normally would given certain red flags). the feds wanted to follow the weapons and thereby prove that us weapon sales were going across the border.
The logic problem of course, was that if the dealers hadnt been told to allow the sales to happen...the sales wouldnt have happened and the guns wouldnt have gone across the border. the feds themselves were responsible for the massive increase in weapons going across. the tail wagged teh dog. what had been a minor thing, from a few shady disreputable dealers, was magnified many fold because the feds wanted to prove something was happeneing by causing that thing to happen.
and of course, then when they lost track of them, and someone got killed by one of the same weapons they lost.
ZOMG. Alert the presses! The leader of the free world in his role as chief diplomat invited the leader of another nation, one we have poor relations with, to the white house to talk, to negotiate, to do, you know, diplomatic stuff! SHOCKING!!!
You are as ignorant as you are racist. no I dont like these countries that dislike us a whole lot either. But the man wears multiple hats. The job of POTUS isnt to just shoot first and talk later. Teddy Roosevelt said it best: "Talk softly, but carry a big stick." The POTUS is both the chief diplomat, our face to the world, and the CIC of our military, our head general effectively. The diplomat side talks, the CIC side is the big stick. Shooting first cannot work unless you kill every last one of them because anyone left alive will hate us eternally, and full scale genocide will endear us to no one. So we talk. We be diplomatic. We dont shoot first, we are not Han Solo. We shoot when provoked, when talking has failed, when it is the last option.
addendum to myself: Now as to the original topic, of course this could backfire. Almost anything can. The typical guy who uses the weapon, no he wont be able to jury rig it to bypass the controls. But not all of them are rural yokels. Someone will eventually rig a few to get around it. So the thought that they can control who uses it, is flawed to begin with, and should be rejected. If you release the weapons into the wild, you should be prepared to see them again later.
That said, we very rarely give people our best shinies. The more we distrust them, the older the stuff we give them.
Like the previous poster I replied to, you also need to learn what you're talking about.
The MB was not the ones responsible for the attack on our ambassador. Nor did "we put them in power" or "give them two countries". Nor do those countries have "very substantial arsenals".
You really dont understand the time scale between the two conflicts do you? Or the differences in what we gave them then, and what they use today? Also that training? It wasn't a bootcamp. It wasnt combat skill training. "We trained them"...that phrase is so generic, so ambiguous, so utterly worthless. The media use it and it implies that we created a force that was as well trained as any of our basic troops. Guess what, that isnt the case.
Most of those enemy combatants for one thing are NOT the same ones we "trained" originally (re: they're mostly dead or too old to fight). Most of the EC's use spray and pray tactics. They used to fire rockets at our base at night....by wiring up a russian RPG launcher on a timer and pointing it in our general direction and then getting the hell out of dodge. Effectiveness? None.
You really, really need to learn what you're talking about before you open your mouth.
You are so horribly naive. You cannot failure proof a system. The more complex it is, the more you cannot do it.
Yours is the exact same voices that say "we dont need guns, we have missles now". and then vietnam proved them wrong. Yours is the exact same voices that say "we dont need candles anymore, we have electricity". And then every major storm proves them wrong. Yours is the exact same voices that say "we dont need LORAN we have GPS!". and then when a glitch interupts GPS for a few hours everyone freezes cause there is no backup. Yours is the exact same voices that say "we dont need guns, we have the police to protect us", until one day the police are too slow.
Somethings stick around simply because you can't beat a classic. Sure, something shinier comes along, the old reliable gets put back in teh corner, gathering dust. But then when shiny breaks, as it always must, you still got Ol Reliable back in teh corner just waiting.
At somepoint we may get our cell system to where it is in the category of it simply just works, no maintenance needed, no matter what happens we'll just pop it out and bam it works (ya right). But technology is always advancing. By then there will likely be a new shiny. And once again someone will raise the cry "but its obsolete, get rid of it, we got teh neural net now, we dont need a backup. just engineer the nueral net to be failure proof".
Having a low-tech, old fashioned, "obsolete" backup is smart. You cannot prepare for everything. The more complex a system, the more ways it can fail. The KISS principle is an axiom for a reason. Overengineering exponentially adds to costs while giving exponentially less benefit in return. 100$ to get 95% there. 1000$ to get 98% thee. 10000$ to get 99% there. 100000$ to get 99.5% there. Etc etc.
Obsolete is not a bad word. Sure, payphones and landlines are "obsolete". but once your fancy high tech comm relays get taken out by SuperMegaStorm X, even after spending billions to overengineer it, you wont care how "obsolete" it is, unless it's to curse the morons who demanded it be removed.
Technology is great. But the higher the tech, the worse it is when it goes down without a backup. Having around old seldom used backups is a leg up, a boost, when the s*** hits the fans. Like a cheat sheet, lets you get back in the game quicker, back to normal faster.
The higher the technology, the bigger fall when it fails in a disaster. you cant overengineer everything. keeping around low tech backups is never bad, and is cheaper too.
if you're gonna belittle something, at least know what you're talking about.
nowhere in the story does it say he drowned innocent children.
in fact, the story makes it quite plain that the flood was punishment for wickedness and that only noah and his family were to be spared. the statement implicit in that is that everyone else was found wanting, ie, wicked.
he said if you own a thing, and you then give that thing over to SOMEONE ELSE FOR SAFEKEEPING, you lose control of it. which is logically sound, you do lose direct control of it; you have instead entrusted that SOMEONE ELSE with controling it in your interests usually defined by a contract.
however i believe that while you may have ceded direct control to someone else, you have -NOT- ceded ownership (no reciept, no bill of sale, etc). and as such, Constitutional protections should absolutely still apply.
the problem isnt even the head of the whitehousehold actually doing it. each pres has simply been letting the DOJ keep on doing whatever the hell they want. a sin by omission, in this case, omission of action or oversight. DOJ says "we want to do this" and the pres just says "sure fine whatever, dont bother me, i'm busy"
How is that any different from any other human managed habitat? Lakes stocked with fish from hatcheries, dams with fish ladders, wildlife preserves and parks that are artificially kept "wild" by eliminating "invasive" species from the neighborhood of houses across the street...etc, etc. All are managed habitats. This is simply less passive more active.
I believe his point was that no matter what idea you come up with, somewhere someone somehow will bitch about it, and say NIMBY or SAVE THE CRITTERS or something.
I care. Walnuts are one of the bigger crops of northern california. Now it maybe should be posted under the "idle" category, but still. It doesnt have to be all circuits all day. erally imo I care more about this than the constant posts about google/samsung/motorloa all suing each other (oh look, another lawsuit...and in other non-news, humans breathe air"). that stuff is barely relevant to me and imo is more suitable for a lawyer site.
actually i shouldnt say they arent that common. rather they arent that commonly identified, because the "resolution" so to speak required to identify them is typically so small. the bigger a critters range, the easier it is to identify its presence. though on the other hand, frequently these critters also arent distinct species but subspecies. in this case, it was a distinct species, and they wre numerous (TFA says ~17k individuals in a tiny area) prior to the dam. The artical also mentions disease as a factor, and that is als important to note. such microhabitat critters being so specialized to their small locations are extremely vulnerable to -any- outside influence or change such as disease. it would be unusual to see a critter like that reverse course and adapt back out of its specialized niche and not go extinct.
Microecosystems are very fragile yes. But they are also not typically that common. that is micro-ecological systems where a species is severely restricted one waterfall, one pool (Devils Hole Pupfish), etc. Such critters are essentially relics, that got super attached to one thing, and that one thing is now cutoff. In essence, they overadapted in the wrong direction, and are thus naturally headed to extinction even if we didn't build the dam (unless the system somehow reverses itself and their small little niche grows once more).
It's like if a three legged cat in a world of dogs managed to still exist by only living on top of a high butte above the plain...and then an earthquake leveled the butte and now the cats are on the same level as the dogs, and thus now become dogchow.
And the call is....no foul on the editors! The summary says right there "extinct in the wild"
Extinct in the wild is a valid classification, used when biologists are unable to confirm a types existence in...the wild..., or when they are only able to find 1 or 2 specimens, which is also sometimes called "functionally extinct". such as the last of one of the giant tortoise subspecies that died recently, that was the sole remaining member known, and male, and as such totally unable to breed and continue the (sub)species.
I disagree with the paper's premise to be honest. At least as a blanket generality, I myself violate it. I am extremely logical very much of the time (why I make a good engineer). But I am also very empathetic, also much of the time. Maybe I'm a unique snowflake, but most people I interact with are similar to myself.
Slashdot Mirror
Geography fail.
It was called Iran-Contra.
Not Iraq-Contra.
Saddam never got any weapons from Reagan.
You got the wrong country.
Why was this modded insightful? This idiot has gotten no facts right yet.
Atrocities? You mean like shelling and killing civilians in towns as they flee the fighting?
No wait that was the syrian government the rebels are fighting against.
Yes Al Qaeda is trying to involve itself, because they need the good will, the PR. But the rebels are not themselves Al Qaeda, and the rebel leadership have repeatedly denounces any association with the group, wanting nothing to do with them.
You have to be a troll. Given /.'s general leftist lean, and how simply bad you make everyone on the other side look (the one bad apple that spoils the bunch), you have to be a troll.
History fail.
Its not a good comparison at all. The weapons werent disabled in any way. The fed's went to gun dealers, and told them to break the law (by selling to certain individuals if they should try to buy weapons, rather than deny them like they normally would given certain red flags). the feds wanted to follow the weapons and thereby prove that us weapon sales were going across the border.
The logic problem of course, was that if the dealers hadnt been told to allow the sales to happen...the sales wouldnt have happened and the guns wouldnt have gone across the border. the feds themselves were responsible for the massive increase in weapons going across. the tail wagged teh dog. what had been a minor thing, from a few shady disreputable dealers, was magnified many fold because the feds wanted to prove something was happeneing by causing that thing to happen.
and of course, then when they lost track of them, and someone got killed by one of the same weapons they lost.
ZOMG. Alert the presses! The leader of the free world in his role as chief diplomat invited the leader of another nation, one we have poor relations with, to the white house to talk, to negotiate, to do, you know, diplomatic stuff! SHOCKING!!!
You are as ignorant as you are racist. no I dont like these countries that dislike us a whole lot either. But the man wears multiple hats. The job of POTUS isnt to just shoot first and talk later. Teddy Roosevelt said it best: "Talk softly, but carry a big stick." The POTUS is both the chief diplomat, our face to the world, and the CIC of our military, our head general effectively. The diplomat side talks, the CIC side is the big stick. Shooting first cannot work unless you kill every last one of them because anyone left alive will hate us eternally, and full scale genocide will endear us to no one. So we talk. We be diplomatic. We dont shoot first, we are not Han Solo. We shoot when provoked, when talking has failed, when it is the last option.
addendum to myself:
Now as to the original topic, of course this could backfire. Almost anything can. The typical guy who uses the weapon, no he wont be able to jury rig it to bypass the controls. But not all of them are rural yokels. Someone will eventually rig a few to get around it. So the thought that they can control who uses it, is flawed to begin with, and should be rejected. If you release the weapons into the wild, you should be prepared to see them again later.
That said, we very rarely give people our best shinies. The more we distrust them, the older the stuff we give them.
Like the previous poster I replied to, you also need to learn what you're talking about.
The MB was not the ones responsible for the attack on our ambassador.
Nor did "we put them in power" or "give them two countries".
Nor do those countries have "very substantial arsenals".
You really dont understand the time scale between the two conflicts do you? Or the differences in what we gave them then, and what they use today?
Also that training? It wasn't a bootcamp. It wasnt combat skill training. "We trained them"...that phrase is so generic, so ambiguous, so utterly worthless. The media use it and it implies that we created a force that was as well trained as any of our basic troops. Guess what, that isnt the case.
Most of those enemy combatants for one thing are NOT the same ones we "trained" originally (re: they're mostly dead or too old to fight). Most of the EC's use spray and pray tactics. They used to fire rockets at our base at night....by wiring up a russian RPG launcher on a timer and pointing it in our general direction and then getting the hell out of dodge. Effectiveness? None.
You really, really need to learn what you're talking about before you open your mouth.
You are so horribly naive. You cannot failure proof a system. The more complex it is, the more you cannot do it.
Yours is the exact same voices that say "we dont need guns, we have missles now". and then vietnam proved them wrong.
Yours is the exact same voices that say "we dont need candles anymore, we have electricity". And then every major storm proves them wrong.
Yours is the exact same voices that say "we dont need LORAN we have GPS!". and then when a glitch interupts GPS for a few hours everyone freezes cause there is no backup.
Yours is the exact same voices that say "we dont need guns, we have the police to protect us", until one day the police are too slow.
Somethings stick around simply because you can't beat a classic. Sure, something shinier comes along, the old reliable gets put back in teh corner, gathering dust. But then when shiny breaks, as it always must, you still got Ol Reliable back in teh corner just waiting.
At somepoint we may get our cell system to where it is in the category of it simply just works, no maintenance needed, no matter what happens we'll just pop it out and bam it works (ya right). But technology is always advancing. By then there will likely be a new shiny. And once again someone will raise the cry "but its obsolete, get rid of it, we got teh neural net now, we dont need a backup. just engineer the nueral net to be failure proof".
Having a low-tech, old fashioned, "obsolete" backup is smart. You cannot prepare for everything. The more complex a system, the more ways it can fail. The KISS principle is an axiom for a reason. Overengineering exponentially adds to costs while giving exponentially less benefit in return. 100$ to get 95% there. 1000$ to get 98% thee. 10000$ to get 99% there. 100000$ to get 99.5% there. Etc etc.
Obsolete is not a bad word. Sure, payphones and landlines are "obsolete". but once your fancy high tech comm relays get taken out by SuperMegaStorm X, even after spending billions to overengineer it, you wont care how "obsolete" it is, unless it's to curse the morons who demanded it be removed.
Technology is great. But the higher the tech, the worse it is when it goes down without a backup. Having around old seldom used backups is a leg up, a boost, when the s*** hits the fans. Like a cheat sheet, lets you get back in the game quicker, back to normal faster.
The higher the technology, the bigger the fall when it fails in a disaster.
you cant overengineer everything, and the more complex/higher tech a thing is, the MORE likely it will fail in a disaster.
keeping around low tech backups is never bad, and its cheaper too.
The higher the technology, the bigger fall when it fails in a disaster.
you cant overengineer everything.
keeping around low tech backups is never bad, and is cheaper too.
if you're gonna belittle something, at least know what you're talking about.
nowhere in the story does it say he drowned innocent children.
in fact, the story makes it quite plain that the flood was punishment for wickedness and that only noah and his family were to be spared. the statement implicit in that is that everyone else was found wanting, ie, wicked.
that has nothing do with what he said.
he said if you own a thing, and you then give that thing over to SOMEONE ELSE FOR SAFEKEEPING, you lose control of it. which is logically sound, you do lose direct control of it; you have instead entrusted that SOMEONE ELSE with controling it in your interests usually defined by a contract.
however i believe that while you may have ceded direct control to someone else, you have -NOT- ceded ownership (no reciept, no bill of sale, etc). and as such, Constitutional protections should absolutely still apply.
but your analogy is still wrong and retarded.
the problem isnt even the head of the whitehousehold actually doing it. each pres has simply been letting the DOJ keep on doing whatever the hell they want. a sin by omission, in this case, omission of action or oversight. DOJ says "we want to do this" and the pres just says "sure fine whatever, dont bother me, i'm busy"
How is that any different from any other human managed habitat? Lakes stocked with fish from hatcheries, dams with fish ladders, wildlife preserves and parks that are artificially kept "wild" by eliminating "invasive" species from the neighborhood of houses across the street...etc, etc. All are managed habitats. This is simply less passive more active.
And the summary right below (literally, about 1/8th inch) says "in the wild". Shortening headlines for space is commonly accepted.
No, the real lesson is DONT PAY FOR PORN!
I believe his point was that no matter what idea you come up with, somewhere someone somehow will bitch about it, and say NIMBY or SAVE THE CRITTERS or something.
if they're bitter they're not ripe and were picked too soon. a good ripe one is almost buttery. mmmm
I care. Walnuts are one of the bigger crops of northern california. Now it maybe should be posted under the "idle" category, but still. It doesnt have to be all circuits all day. erally imo I care more about this than the constant posts about google/samsung/motorloa all suing each other (oh look, another lawsuit...and in other non-news, humans breathe air"). that stuff is barely relevant to me and imo is more suitable for a lawyer site.
RTFA: "extinct int he wild"
actually i shouldnt say they arent that common. rather they arent that commonly identified, because the "resolution" so to speak required to identify them is typically so small. the bigger a critters range, the easier it is to identify its presence. though on the other hand, frequently these critters also arent distinct species but subspecies. in this case, it was a distinct species, and they wre numerous (TFA says ~17k individuals in a tiny area) prior to the dam. The artical also mentions disease as a factor, and that is als important to note. such microhabitat critters being so specialized to their small locations are extremely vulnerable to -any- outside influence or change such as disease. it would be unusual to see a critter like that reverse course and adapt back out of its specialized niche and not go extinct.
Microecosystems are very fragile yes. But they are also not typically that common. that is micro-ecological systems where a species is severely restricted one waterfall, one pool (Devils Hole Pupfish), etc. Such critters are essentially relics, that got super attached to one thing, and that one thing is now cutoff. In essence, they overadapted in the wrong direction, and are thus naturally headed to extinction even if we didn't build the dam (unless the system somehow reverses itself and their small little niche grows once more).
It's like if a three legged cat in a world of dogs managed to still exist by only living on top of a high butte above the plain...and then an earthquake leveled the butte and now the cats are on the same level as the dogs, and thus now become dogchow.
And the call is....no foul on the editors! The summary says right there "extinct in the wild"
Extinct in the wild is a valid classification, used when biologists are unable to confirm a types existence in...the wild..., or when they are only able to find 1 or 2 specimens, which is also sometimes called "functionally extinct". such as the last of one of the giant tortoise subspecies that died recently, that was the sole remaining member known, and male, and as such totally unable to breed and continue the (sub)species.
So you are very very -NOT- insightful.
I disagree with the paper's premise to be honest. At least as a blanket generality, I myself violate it.
I am extremely logical very much of the time (why I make a good engineer).
But I am also very empathetic, also much of the time.
Maybe I'm a unique snowflake, but most people I interact with are similar to myself.