The kingdom of Kush, just below Egypt (that overran it a couple of times too, IIRC) is believed to be black.
Actually though, I think this whole black-Egyptian thing comes from that Michael Jackson video to "Do You Remember the Time", and a lot of sincere wishing on the part of a lot of African Americans.
I'm only going to respond to those points where I'm pretty sure you're mistaken:
The Vienna Convention.... Does prohibit securing a treaty through threat of force -In times of peace- but as Serbia was at war with the other parties to the treaty, we were within our rights to state that we would enter the war on their opponents side if they didn't sign - NO VIOLATION
Which parties to the treaty was Serbia at war with? I was always under the impression that the war in Kosovo was an internal conflict until NATO decided to involve itself. Please, which state was at war with the FRY prior to NATO involvement?
The Constitution... Makes the President the Commander in Chief, and gives him express permission to deploy U.S. forces as he will. Even the War Powers Act (not part of the constitution Chester) allows the President to deploy troops at will as long as he informs Congress (afterward) and gets comgressional approval within 60 days, or some other extented period as set by Congress - NO VIOLATION
The constitution states that only Congress has power to declare war. We could quibble over terms and say that this was a "police action" or some such nonsense, but even in this case it was called a war by our government.
And I know that the War Powers Act is not part of the constitution, which is why I listed it separately. (Bush Sr. even called the WPA "unconstitutional" at one point.) Even so, congress did not authorize military action in Serbia. Congress did approve funds for the operation, which was touted as the same as congressional approval (it isn't). A declaration of war was never sought, as it was clear it would never be approved. Even that meaningless approval of funding came 3 days past the 60-day deadline.
Oh for the last time, haiku does not have to involve a season!
Crack open the koukinwakashu or Oku e no Hosomichi sometime. Travel, love, and just about anything else are perfectly suitable haiku topics.
In 1999 attack on Yugoslavia alone the US violated:
The UN charter (by failing to get security council approval before attacking a UN member),
The Geneva convention (by using cluster bombs),
The Vienna convention (by threatening to attack if Yugoslavia did not sign the Ramboullet agreement),
The Constitution (by not getting Congressional approval before deploying troops),
The War Powers Act (by having troops in action longer than 30 days without Congressional approval), and:
The Prime Directive (by interfering in the first place.)
English has so much fluff that is unnescessary when communicating with a machine - "Hello Computer, please open my email client and show me new emails for today" might be fun the first time, but doing it every day would rapidly grow tiresome.
I agree. English as a language is too ambiguous for computer use. And the way Americans (like myself) speak it makes it even worse as American English is fraught with homonyms.
I know it will never be tried, but classical Latin would be far better for computer input, as it is the least ambiguous language I am aware of.
Back on the subject of gesture input though, I think the Chinese will be able to put this technology to practical use sooner than anyone else. I count at least half a dozen fully-mature products from Hong Kong and Taiwan (I use Power Pen) that use a wacom pad to enter Chinese and English (and Japanese) language text into Windows PC's. With Power Pen, you can use the stylus as the only interface to the PC.
The neat thing about Chinese is, if you draw the characters with the proper stroke order, you can enter entire sentences on the fly without lifting your pen.
So if the glove mentioned could be rigged to run Power Pen, or something like it, so one could just write characters on the desk with their fingers, a Chinese person could use it as the only interface to their PC pretty much immediately.
Now that I think about it, I don't think this will replace keyboards until they can simulate some kind of tactile feedback to the user. (force-feedback smart dust?)
Those roll-out mat keyboards have been around for some time. They drive touch typists nuts because they don't "feel" anything like typing.
I personally still use an 8-pound IBM PS/2 keyboard because I crave the clickety-clack of those wonderful mechanical switches.
Just assign different "hand positions" to all the meta-keys the editor uses. i.e.:
palms-down = normal
palms-45-degrees = ctrl
palms-sideways = alt
palms-up (yikes) = meta (or whatever)
etc.
and "type" normally.
And for vi, just turn your wrists sideways a bit to enter "edit mode."
Never mind, this is a stupid idea.
Re:Not to start a flame war;)
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2
Yes, but not all unices have vi. I don't recall which one, but it seems to me that there was a Linux distro where pico was standard and vi had to be installed.
Re:+1 Veracity on the MQR standard
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Has anyone noticed that if you preface your comment with "I'll probably get modded down for this..." that you hardly ever get modded down?
BTW, I'll probably get modded down for this, (-1, Offtopic)
I've been living and working in Japan this past year. I had been thinking about going back to the US and buying a house or some such.
Not after reading about this and the national ID card though. You all enjoy your fascist dictatorship. In the interests of myself and my family, I'm defecting -- to one of those "free" (as in speech) countries.
Japan is not a democracy. Japan just looks like a democracy. To the Japanese, the appearance is always more important than the reality.
Re:And here comes Carnivore...
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 2
"Please, we are all angry and upset... but now is the time to clear our heads and make sure we do the right thing. Now our nation has an opportunity to truly make an example of not only our enemies, but of ourselves.
Defend ourselves we must.
But to close our ears and eyes to the humanity of those we oppose, to howl for blood-- innocents be damned-- can we afford these things? When the billions of people in the world watch us solve this problem, what will we have taught them about freedom, democracy, and humanity?"
Can we afford not to?? Honestly people. Tolerance, forbearance and mercy are all noble values and I am pleased so many Americans posess them. But there is a time and a place for everything.
I think we may have enjoyed peace and security for a little too long and have forgotten what a barbaric place the world really is.
If we lose our will to defend ourselves, or are only willing to defend ourselves only if someone who might be innocent doesn't get hurt in the process, then we are at an evolutionary dead end folks, and we can kiss our nation goodbye.
I want my police and my legal system to be merciful and fair, because that is the basis of civil society.
I want my military to be bloodthirsty motherfucking berzerkers, because that is what wins wars.
Re:And here comes Carnivore...
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 1
How about we keep all Arabs off our airplaines. That would eliminate 99% of the threat right there.
Re:Yes. It is entirely about economics.
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 2
Cripes man, bin Laden is a Saudi and he is financed by Saudi oil money. You think he won that billion dollars in the lottery? Some of it is private holdings from his former businesses, but most of it comes from *donations*. Donations from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, and China.
I agree though. Israel doesn't deserve the aid they get from us.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 2
I don't think the solution would be that hard. All we need to do is simply close the border to all nationals of Arab countries that are suspect. All Americans of Arab descent may stay, of course (they are citizens), and Arabs who are here legally for legitimate purposes may stay for the duration of their visas.
This may seem to many to be racist policy, but it really isn't. It is nationalist policy. It is our right as a American citizens, whatever our ethnic background, to decide who can come here and who cannot.
This incident will be used by our government to whip up citizen support for whatever fucked up international adventure they decide to go on next. It won't matter that the country we decide to invade will have had little to do with this, Americans are so mad now I think they'd be willing to kill just about anybody.
It is interesting in and of itself that all the aircraft hijacked were bound for California. A nonstop flight across the US would contain a maximum amount of fuel. So it would seem at least _that_ much planning went into the attack.
This was a sophisticated attack. Let me point out what these guys HAD to know in order to do something that is pretty tough to do: collapse a building in on itself by fire-weakening all the steel verticals on one or more verticals, then cause the building to settle down on itself and use its "down" momentum to crush the remaining floors underneat it. Professional building exploders do this all the time -- and a lot of engineering work goes into such an implosion.
The key to an implosion (a vertical demolition, so the building collapses on itself -- which is what happened) -- is to sever or weaken the steel verticals as low as possible, then let the weakened and no-longer-supported upper half crash down on the remainder.
How do you do this? With a massive fire using a liquid fireball of sticky fuel -- and tens of tons of aircraft fuel from a just-departed airliner is a wonderful liquid-fireball source. You want to hit the building as low down as you can. Finally, you want to ram that fireball into the building as far as it will go -- and at 150 knots, a 150-ton airliner goes in quite a ways, right into the building's core structure, rippng everythingup and creating a massive conflagration zone extending up maybe 10 floors or more. Then you let the fire weaken the steel verticals.
In a few minutes, the "half building" directly above the impact area is no longer supported by the bottom "half building." It starts descending vertically -- like building implosions where you sever the columns at ground level and the building settles on itself -- only here you used an airplane to sever columns halfway up. You count on the momentum of the upper half-building, which will fall maybe 10 floors before meeting the still-standing lower byuilding half, to create an accelerating-downward "piledriver" effect that crushes the rest of the building on its way down to the street. This is very likely the first time that a major skyscraper has been demolished in this way -- but you can ONLY do it by ramming all that fuel tonnage into the building's core.
The depraved brilliance of this attack is worth noting -- because you had to know a lot beforehand to make it work -- for example:
1. What is the load strength of the steel verticals? What is the grid structure of the building at the planned point of impact?
2. How well are the verticals fireproofed -- or how well could they remain fire-proofed in a violent impact that might strip away the typical very-low-adhesion spray-on coatings? Most fireproofing of steel beams is NOT designed to accomodate a 150-ton airliner slamming into the building core and creating a fireball effect that dumps flaming fuel over exposed verticals within seconds.
These guys knew exactly what they were doing to create the first unconventional building implosion of its type. Somebody put a lot of engineering work into this, calculating -- probably from public or stolen drawings of the WTC's steelwork -- how much steel (nominally fireproofed or otherwise) might be exposed in a fireball created by the ram-impact of a large airliner coming in frontally through the side, rathert than a glancing impact. Somebody had to figure out whether a 737 or larger plane carried enough fuel to do the job. You needed something with lots of fuel and lots of mass (weight) and lots of speed. An airliner fits the bill well.
Seizing the plane was probably the simplest part. But knowing how to take the building down took more engineering than is initially apparent. These guys used some damn good structural engineers and fire-safety experts who knew what kind of fire-cladding the WTC towers had higher up.
Slashdot Mirror
The kingdom of Kush, just below Egypt (that overran it a couple of times too, IIRC) is believed to be black.
Actually though, I think this whole black-Egyptian thing comes from that Michael Jackson video to "Do You Remember the Time", and a lot of sincere wishing on the part of a lot of African Americans.
I'm only going to respond to those points where I'm pretty sure you're mistaken:
The Vienna Convention.... Does prohibit securing a treaty through threat of force -In times of peace- but as Serbia was at war with the other parties to the treaty, we were within our rights to state that we would enter the war on their opponents side if they didn't sign - NO VIOLATION
Which parties to the treaty was Serbia at war with? I was always under the impression that the war in Kosovo was an internal conflict until NATO decided to involve itself. Please, which state was at war with the FRY prior to NATO involvement?
The Constitution... Makes the President the Commander in Chief, and gives him express permission to deploy U.S. forces as he will. Even the War Powers Act (not part of the constitution Chester) allows the President to deploy troops at will as long as he informs Congress (afterward) and gets comgressional approval within 60 days, or some other extented period as set by Congress - NO VIOLATION
The constitution states that only Congress has power to declare war. We could quibble over terms and say that this was a "police action" or some such nonsense, but even in this case it was called a war by our government.
And I know that the War Powers Act is not part of the constitution, which is why I listed it separately. (Bush Sr. even called the WPA "unconstitutional" at one point.) Even so, congress did not authorize military action in Serbia. Congress did approve funds for the operation, which was touted as the same as congressional approval (it isn't). A declaration of war was never sought, as it was clear it would never be approved. Even that meaningless approval of funding came 3 days past the 60-day deadline.
Oh for the last time, haiku does not have to involve a season!
Crack open the koukinwakashu or Oku e no Hosomichi sometime. Travel, love, and just about anything else are perfectly suitable haiku topics.
In 1999 attack on Yugoslavia alone the US violated:
The UN charter (by failing to get security council approval before attacking a UN member),
The Geneva convention (by using cluster bombs),
The Vienna convention (by threatening to attack if Yugoslavia did not sign the Ramboullet agreement),
The Constitution (by not getting Congressional approval before deploying troops),
The War Powers Act (by having troops in action longer than 30 days without Congressional approval), and:
The Prime Directive (by interfering in the first place.)
A treaty only applies to the countries that have signed it.
Treaties apply to all signatories except the United States. I think that's in the UN charter or something.
English has so much fluff that is unnescessary when communicating with a machine - "Hello Computer, please open my email client and show me new emails for today" might be fun the first time, but doing it every day would rapidly grow tiresome.
I agree. English as a language is too ambiguous for computer use. And the way Americans (like myself) speak it makes it even worse as American English is fraught with homonyms.
I know it will never be tried, but classical Latin would be far better for computer input, as it is the least ambiguous language I am aware of.
Back on the subject of gesture input though, I think the Chinese will be able to put this technology to practical use sooner than anyone else. I count at least half a dozen fully-mature products from Hong Kong and Taiwan (I use Power Pen) that use a wacom pad to enter Chinese and English (and Japanese) language text into Windows PC's. With Power Pen, you can use the stylus as the only interface to the PC.
The neat thing about Chinese is, if you draw the characters with the proper stroke order, you can enter entire sentences on the fly without lifting your pen.
So if the glove mentioned could be rigged to run Power Pen, or something like it, so one could just write characters on the desk with their fingers, a Chinese person could use it as the only interface to their PC pretty much immediately.
Now that I think about it, I don't think this will replace keyboards until they can simulate some kind of tactile feedback to the user. (force-feedback smart dust?)
Those roll-out mat keyboards have been around for some time. They drive touch typists nuts because they don't "feel" anything like typing.
I personally still use an 8-pound IBM PS/2 keyboard because I crave the clickety-clack of those wonderful mechanical switches.
Just assign different "hand positions" to all the meta-keys the editor uses. i.e.:
palms-down = normal
palms-45-degrees = ctrl
palms-sideways = alt
palms-up (yikes) = meta (or whatever)
etc.
and "type" normally.
And for vi, just turn your wrists sideways a bit to enter "edit mode."
Never mind, this is a stupid idea.
Yes, but not all unices have vi. I don't recall which one, but it seems to me that there was a Linux distro where pico was standard and vi had to be installed.
Has anyone noticed that if you preface your comment with "I'll probably get modded down for this..." that you hardly ever get modded down?
BTW, I'll probably get modded down for this, (-1, Offtopic)
This is the later Klingon look, but in TNG Worf says "something happened" to change the Klingons' appearance that they don't discuss.
Actually, that was DS9. Not to pick nits or anything.
now make hacking crimes retroactively punishable.
Isn't congress forbidden under the constitution to pass ex-post-facto legislation?
I've been living and working in Japan this past year. I had been thinking about going back to the US and buying a house or some such.
Not after reading about this and the national ID card though. You all enjoy your fascist dictatorship. In the interests of myself and my family, I'm defecting -- to one of those "free" (as in speech) countries.
Japan is not a democracy. Japan just looks like a democracy. To the Japanese, the appearance is always more important than the reality.
"Please, we are all angry and upset... but now is the time to clear our heads and make sure we do the right thing. Now our nation has an opportunity to truly make an example of not only our enemies, but of ourselves.
Defend ourselves we must.
But to close our ears and eyes to the humanity of those we oppose, to howl for blood-- innocents be damned-- can we afford these things? When the billions of people in the world watch us solve this problem, what will we have taught them about freedom, democracy, and humanity?"
Can we afford not to?? Honestly people. Tolerance, forbearance and mercy are all noble values and I am pleased so many Americans posess them. But there is a time and a place for everything.
I think we may have enjoyed peace and security for a little too long and have forgotten what a barbaric place the world really is.
If we lose our will to defend ourselves, or are only willing to defend ourselves only if someone who might be innocent doesn't get hurt in the process, then we are at an evolutionary dead end folks, and we can kiss our nation goodbye.
I want my police and my legal system to be merciful and fair, because that is the basis of civil society.
I want my military to be bloodthirsty motherfucking berzerkers, because that is what wins wars.
How about we keep all Arabs off our airplaines. That would eliminate 99% of the threat right there.
Cripes man, bin Laden is a Saudi and he is financed by Saudi oil money. You think he won that billion dollars in the lottery? Some of it is private holdings from his former businesses, but most of it comes from *donations*. Donations from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, and China.
I agree though. Israel doesn't deserve the aid they get from us.
I don't think the solution would be that hard. All we need to do is simply close the border to all nationals of Arab countries that are suspect. All Americans of Arab descent may stay, of course (they are citizens), and Arabs who are here legally for legitimate purposes may stay for the duration of their visas.
This may seem to many to be racist policy, but it really isn't. It is nationalist policy. It is our right as a American citizens, whatever our ethnic background, to decide who can come here and who cannot.
The comparisons are not accidental.
This incident will be used by our government to whip up citizen support for whatever fucked up international adventure they decide to go on next. It won't matter that the country we decide to invade will have had little to do with this, Americans are so mad now I think they'd be willing to kill just about anybody.
It is interesting in and of itself that all the aircraft hijacked were bound for California. A nonstop flight across the US would contain a maximum amount of fuel. So it would seem at least _that_ much planning went into the attack.
So... we lose 20,000 citizens, and 3 or 4 terrorists get brought to justice after a long and expensive investigation at the taxpayers' expense?
Seems to me that those numbers work in the the terrorists' favor.
This can't be true.
:)
GW is NOT a great leader
Fuck you.
May you die a traitor's death.
I read elsewhere that all Sun employees were evacuated safely.