Why do Red and Blue have to be up against one another? Can't they just get along? I bet if they worked together they could make a lovely shade of purple.
You talk about other people being fascists, but you're one of the most fascist people I've seen on this site. Examples of posts you've made relating to other stories:
Similarly, the line "Arabs and Muslism [sic] in general are filth and should be exterminated. I long for a war of civilizations, particularly a nuclear war because we'd have a great opportunity to cleanse those maggots from the earth."
Are you still denying that you're xenophobic? Or are those post the imagination of my "leftwing pablum"?
China is not a threat to the US at this moment. But we certainly don't know what their intentions are in teh future as they become more powerful. It's prudent on the part of the US to make sure that it has the ability to check a belligerent China.
How about this then:
The Vatican City is not a threat to the US at this moment. But we certainly don't know what their intentions are in teh future as they become more powerful. It's prudent on the part of the US to make sure that it has the ability to check a belligerent Vatican City.
The problem with your simplistic viewpoint of the world is that you see everyone as a potential enemy. You started this whole thread by positioning China, Russia and India as the bad guys (for which your were moderated as flamebait; rightly so IMHO), and then you carried on labelling those countries as completely untrustworthythreats, and talking about how the US could kick their asses no sweat, without even stopping to acknowledge that that scenario ends with nuclear winter for everyone.
So China, Russia and India are possible bad guys because they can launch stuff into space? Why stop there? Why not include the EU and Japan? They've both got independent launch capability. Surely they're just as dangerous?
Frankly, your arguments are both xenophobic and flawed.
You talk about the US blowing countries "off the map if they are 'bad'", yet you talk about how "only the Americans can be trusted not to abuse the power".
You denigrate Russia because they've "shown no compunction about killing millions of their own people", thereby ascribing all Russians with the homicidal tendencies shown by Stalin, yet you conveniently forget that the US was built by the destruction of a range of cultures (native American peoples) and through the subjugation of another (imported African slaves).
You're a pathetic little troll, with a serious "we're great and good, the rest of you all suck and are evil" complex. As I said before, do yourself (and your countrymen) a favour: shut your mouth, educate yourself and try to look at other societies and cultures as something other than ICBM targets.
Hey, it looks like those napkins are pretty useful for basic feasibility testing! Perhaps we should order a cargo container full and have them shipped to the White House!
And I imagine your government pulled out of the WTO too appeal China's inclusion. And they probably also pulled out of the UN because Taiwan was booted in place of China?
No, but I'm not the one suggesting that my country should nuke them if they so much as blink, am I? I'm the one simply pointing out to you that human rights abuses, such as those you mentioned, don't mean a thing when it comes to how nations regard their allies or trading partners.
And your government doesn't trade or cooperate with either nation [Saudi Arabia and Pakistan], right?
Again, my nation's relationship with those countries is little different to that of the US, but I'm not blind to the fact that these nations have almost identical stances to human rights as the Taliban did in Afghanistan. But, somehow, when we want to go to war with the Taliban, we use their human rights record as partial justification, playing up the morality angle as much as possible, whilst somehow failing to castigate Saudi Arabia and Pakistan for the very same things.
I'm able to recognise the hypocrisy of this situation - which is what I was pointing out to you - and condemn it accordingly: why can't you do the same?
Once you start the "country X is evil because of Y" (as you did when you brought up the human rights issue) it's hard to stop because, frankly, there's barely a nation on this planet (including the US and its allies) that isn't guilty of some heinous crime or another.
Let's make no mistake about it. America is the preeminent power in the world and has increasingly shown the world that it is now afraid to flex its muscles. Russia and China know this all too well. A nuclear war is no their interest because they have too much to lose.
And the US doesn't? Sorry, I missed the bit where Americans and America became immune to the effects of nuclear weapons.
China is the world's darling because they sell $30 DVD players. I still remember them brutalizing the Tibetans, running their own people over with tanks for daring to protest.
Yeah, I remember that too. Pity your government doesn't. That's why China has the "most favoured trading nation" status, because you being able to buy a cheap DVD player is more important to your government and big business than pissing off a nuclear power that has the world's biggest army and the world's biggest air force by making an issue of its human rights abuses.
Frankly, as far as the US government is concerned, those human rights abuses don't matter. A bit like how the treatment of women and other human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan don't matter because those countries are allies in the "War On Terror".
Re:China, Russia and India
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Tell me, how do you think "the US will blow them [Russia and China] off the map if they're 'bad'", without getting blown off the map itself? And how do you think the US could force Russia or China to do what it wants, in space or elsewhere?
It's a bit hard pushing around a nuclear power. That's why the US is treating North Korea with kid gloves: they're shit scared that the madmen who run North Korea (leaders who let their own people starve are madmen) will nuke Seoul, thereby taking out South Korea's capital, a large chunk of its population and its economy and the 35-50,000 US troops permanently based there.
Perhaps you should pick up a history book sometime? Or take a geopolitics class? Who know, you might actually learn something about how the world works.
It's people like you that make people elsewhere look at Americans as arrogant assholes. Do yourself (and your countrymen) a favour: shut your mouth, educate yourself and try to look at other societies and cultures as something other than ICBM targets.
There are treaties and agreements, to which the US is a signatory, about the placement of weapons and military technology in space.
If the US breaks those treaties unilaterally, what right does it have to castigate others if at some point in the future they too decide that legally binding agreements don't matter to them either?
Shouldn't the US lead by example? Shouldn't it honour its agreements and stick to its word? How can you expect other nations to respect and trust the US if it doesn't reciprocate that respect and if it betrays that trust?
Oh, and of the three nations you chose to name, one's a US ally now and the other's more concerned with protecting its borders from its neighbours than it is with finding new enemies half way around the world.
That leaves China, which as I pointed out just recently, exports more good to the US than anywhere else, so why you think they'd try to threaten their biggest trading partner (and military counterpart) is beyond me.
Maglev seems to be all but dead in the United States - Is this just an extension where other countries are abandoning an aparently pointless technology?
Abandoning apparently pointless technologies? Like the US DoD's "Star Wars" programme?
What use is spending tens if not hundreds of billions researching pie-in-the-sky orbital missile defences in an era where the greatest threats come from "rogue" states that don't possess the capability to strike at the continental US?
Who is the Star Wars programme going to defend against? Russia, which is now an ally? China, which exports more goods to the US than anywhere else?
The only purpose the Star Wars research serves is providing jobs to defence contractors. If it's fruitless then it's wasted money. If it's fruitful then its a white elephant. So why carry on funding it?
Well, given that you've silenced your PSU, CPU fan, graphics card and motherboard, it's not surprising that you can hear the few remaining components that much more but it is surprising that the SpinPoints are making what you describe as "constant high freq[uency] noise".
That's not my experience of the drives; what model numbers are you using and how are they mounted to the chassis?
In other words, real science takes a back burner or is canned as a cost-cutting measure whilst more photogenic and "sexy" manned exploration is pumped full of cash.
Where do you draw the line between what's acceptable and what's not?
As an employee, it's not your job to draw the line, it's your responsibility to tow it. If the company policy on wallpaper images says "anything short of full nudity goes" then perhaps you might have had a point. But I bet in the contract and/or orientation literature that you were given when you signed up there was a section about the code of conduct that you were expected to follow, and that this sort of thing was covered in it.
Was your supervisor harsh in not giving you a warning first? Sure, especially given your working environment. But it's up to you to stick to the policies laid down, not for you to decide what they should be.
"It's been the user community that had been pushing to keep Hubble going..."
The user community. Ie, the scientists that use Hubble.
In other words, the work of those scientists, who have produced some of the best cosmology and astrophysics of the last century, and significantly enhanced our knowledge of the universe, has taken a back-burner to the Bush family's perennial re-election year plans.
In many respects, delaying Hubble's successor is a good thing. For starters, it means that it will be able to incorporate even more technological advances and thereby be a more reliable and an even better scientific tool for the thousands of scientists that use its data.
This is just a gimmick to sell stuff. If you're serious about getting (and staying) fit, put down the controller for half an hour a day (or every other day) and do a physical activity.
You don't have to go to the gym and work out - you could do a sports activity or even just jog down to the shops and back to get some milk - but it'll be ten times better for you than twiddling your already overdeveloped thumbs.
Oh, and while you're at it, replace every other can of Coke/Mountain Dew/whatever with a glass of water. Your body will thank you for it.
Seriously though, it's good to see that Windows 98 support has been extended. I shudder to think how many compromised Windows 98 systems there are out there now, let alone imagine how many there would be in 6-12 months time once vulnerabilities that hadn't been patched before support was dropped began to be exploited in earnest.
OK, so the apostrophe and the "their" were mistakes but "realise" is how the word is spelt (yes, "spelt", not "spelled") virtually everywhere around the world.
Besides, it's 7.40am now, I posted that at 7.07am and I've had all of 30 minutes sleep in the last 24 hours. I'm not a robot, so sleep deprevation does have its effects.
You do realise that the US Doctor Who fan club dwarfs it's British, Canadian, Australian, etc counterparts by an order of magnitude?
There far more extreme hard-core US science fiction nerds who watch Doctor Who than British ones. I doubt their watching re-runs, buying books, videos and DVDs to look "cool". Believe me, as sci-fi goes, Doctor Who is as far from "cool" as you can get. Doctor Who's appeal was never "cool", it was a focus on storylines that deviated from the "Captain kisses alien girl, crewmember in red uniform dies" variety.
21in. Diamondtron (ie, Trinitron but not made by Sony).
This monitor is the definition of a workhorse. It's used seven days a week, often upwards of 12 hours a day, and I've had it since early 1998. And the picture quality is (and always has been) superb. Definitely the best hardware investment I've ever made.
One day, I'll buy a 20in. or bigger TFT display but even then I doubt I'll throw my VMP500 out. This monitor is just too good to toss out/give away.
Should I be worried that you actually think that the reason why your original post was funny is because you used "site" when you should have used "sight"?
Slashdot Mirror
Why do Red and Blue have to be up against one another? Can't they just get along? I bet if they worked together they could make a lovely shade of purple.
You talk about other people being fascists, but you're one of the most fascist people I've seen on this site. Examples of posts you've made relating to other stories:
2 174
2 186
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=93243&cid=801
I particularly love the line "I just hope the US starts nuking nations. We'd kill a lot more efficiently that way."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=93243&cid=801
Similarly, the line "Arabs and Muslism [sic] in general are filth and should be exterminated. I long for a war of civilizations, particularly a nuclear war because we'd have a great opportunity to cleanse those maggots from the earth."
Are you still denying that you're xenophobic? Or are those post the imagination of my "leftwing pablum"?
China is not a threat to the US at this moment. But we certainly don't know what their intentions are in teh future as they become more powerful. It's prudent on the part of the US to make sure that it has the ability to check a belligerent China.
How about this then:
The Vatican City is not a threat to the US at this moment. But we certainly don't know what their intentions are in teh future as they become more powerful. It's prudent on the part of the US to make sure that it has the ability to check a belligerent Vatican City.
The problem with your simplistic viewpoint of the world is that you see everyone as a potential enemy. You started this whole thread by positioning China, Russia and India as the bad guys (for which your were moderated as flamebait; rightly so IMHO), and then you carried on labelling those countries as completely untrustworthy threats, and talking about how the US could kick their asses no sweat, without even stopping to acknowledge that that scenario ends with nuclear winter for everyone.
So China, Russia and India are possible bad guys because they can launch stuff into space? Why stop there? Why not include the EU and Japan? They've both got independent launch capability. Surely they're just as dangerous?
Frankly, your arguments are both xenophobic and flawed.
You talk about the US blowing countries "off the map if they are 'bad'", yet you talk about how "only the Americans can be trusted not to abuse the power".
You denigrate Russia because they've "shown no compunction about killing millions of their own people", thereby ascribing all Russians with the homicidal tendencies shown by Stalin, yet you conveniently forget that the US was built by the destruction of a range of cultures (native American peoples) and through the subjugation of another (imported African slaves).
You're a pathetic little troll, with a serious "we're great and good, the rest of you all suck and are evil" complex. As I said before, do yourself (and your countrymen) a favour: shut your mouth, educate yourself and try to look at other societies and cultures as something other than ICBM targets.
Hey, it looks like those napkins are pretty useful for basic feasibility testing! Perhaps we should order a cargo container full and have them shipped to the White House!
Hey
And I imagine your government pulled out of the WTO too appeal China's inclusion. And they probably also pulled out of the UN because Taiwan was booted in place of China?
No, but I'm not the one suggesting that my country should nuke them if they so much as blink, am I? I'm the one simply pointing out to you that human rights abuses, such as those you mentioned, don't mean a thing when it comes to how nations regard their allies or trading partners.
And your government doesn't trade or cooperate with either nation [Saudi Arabia and Pakistan], right?
Again, my nation's relationship with those countries is little different to that of the US, but I'm not blind to the fact that these nations have almost identical stances to human rights as the Taliban did in Afghanistan. But, somehow, when we want to go to war with the Taliban, we use their human rights record as partial justification, playing up the morality angle as much as possible, whilst somehow failing to castigate Saudi Arabia and Pakistan for the very same things.
I'm able to recognise the hypocrisy of this situation - which is what I was pointing out to you - and condemn it accordingly: why can't you do the same?
Once you start the "country X is evil because of Y" (as you did when you brought up the human rights issue) it's hard to stop because, frankly, there's barely a nation on this planet (including the US and its allies) that isn't guilty of some heinous crime or another.
Not so. Perhaps you best look at some examples, such as the SALT treaties, The Treaty of Rome, etc.
More often than not, treaties are between equals, not between the haves and the have-nots, as you suggest.
Let's make no mistake about it. America is the preeminent power in the world and has increasingly shown the world that it is now afraid to flex its muscles. Russia and China know this all too well. A nuclear war is no their interest because they have too much to lose.
And the US doesn't? Sorry, I missed the bit where Americans and America became immune to the effects of nuclear weapons.
China is the world's darling because they sell $30 DVD players. I still remember them brutalizing the Tibetans, running their own people over with tanks for daring to protest.
Yeah, I remember that too. Pity your government doesn't. That's why China has the "most favoured trading nation" status, because you being able to buy a cheap DVD player is more important to your government and big business than pissing off a nuclear power that has the world's biggest army and the world's biggest air force by making an issue of its human rights abuses.
Frankly, as far as the US government is concerned, those human rights abuses don't matter. A bit like how the treatment of women and other human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan don't matter because those countries are allies in the "War On Terror".
Tell me, how do you think "the US will blow them [Russia and China] off the map if they're 'bad'", without getting blown off the map itself? And how do you think the US could force Russia or China to do what it wants, in space or elsewhere?
It's a bit hard pushing around a nuclear power. That's why the US is treating North Korea with kid gloves: they're shit scared that the madmen who run North Korea (leaders who let their own people starve are madmen) will nuke Seoul, thereby taking out South Korea's capital, a large chunk of its population and its economy and the 35-50,000 US troops permanently based there.
Perhaps you should pick up a history book sometime? Or take a geopolitics class? Who know, you might actually learn something about how the world works.
It's people like you that make people elsewhere look at Americans as arrogant assholes. Do yourself (and your countrymen) a favour: shut your mouth, educate yourself and try to look at other societies and cultures as something other than ICBM targets.
There are treaties and agreements, to which the US is a signatory, about the placement of weapons and military technology in space.
If the US breaks those treaties unilaterally, what right does it have to castigate others if at some point in the future they too decide that legally binding agreements don't matter to them either?
Shouldn't the US lead by example? Shouldn't it honour its agreements and stick to its word? How can you expect other nations to respect and trust the US if it doesn't reciprocate that respect and if it betrays that trust?
Oh, and of the three nations you chose to name, one's a US ally now and the other's more concerned with protecting its borders from its neighbours than it is with finding new enemies half way around the world.
That leaves China, which as I pointed out just recently, exports more good to the US than anywhere else, so why you think they'd try to threaten their biggest trading partner (and military counterpart) is beyond me.
Maglev is unproven on grand-order scales. Rail is seriously proven technology, and more to the point: standard.
Travel on horseback and by horseback carriage was once standard too. That didn't stop the advent and adoption of horseless transport though, did it?
Maglev seems to be all but dead in the United States - Is this just an extension where other countries are abandoning an aparently pointless technology?
Abandoning apparently pointless technologies? Like the US DoD's "Star Wars" programme?
What use is spending tens if not hundreds of billions researching pie-in-the-sky orbital missile defences in an era where the greatest threats come from "rogue" states that don't possess the capability to strike at the continental US?
Who is the Star Wars programme going to defend against? Russia, which is now an ally? China, which exports more goods to the US than anywhere else?
The only purpose the Star Wars research serves is providing jobs to defence contractors. If it's fruitless then it's wasted money. If it's fruitful then its a white elephant. So why carry on funding it?
Wouldn't that money be better spent elsewhere? Like, say, airport security in Washington DC to stop people carrying live ammunition onto intercontinental flights?
Well, given that you've silenced your PSU, CPU fan, graphics card and motherboard, it's not surprising that you can hear the few remaining components that much more but it is surprising that the SpinPoints are making what you describe as "constant high freq[uency] noise".
That's not my experience of the drives; what model numbers are you using and how are they mounted to the chassis?
In other words, real science takes a back burner or is canned as a cost-cutting measure whilst more photogenic and "sexy" manned exploration is pumped full of cash.
...in three easy steps.
1. Antec Performance One P160 case.
2. Nexus PSU, fans and CPU heatsink and fan.
3. Samsung SpinPoint series of HDDs.
Zalman's products aren't bad but, IMHO, Nexus' are superior.
Oh, and either ditch the jet engine that masquerades as a graphics card with something quieter or replace its fan too.
In my SO's office, it's called bullshit bingo. A far more appropriate name, if you ask me.
Where do you draw the line between what's acceptable and what's not?
As an employee, it's not your job to draw the line, it's your responsibility to tow it. If the company policy on wallpaper images says "anything short of full nudity goes" then perhaps you might have had a point. But I bet in the contract and/or orientation literature that you were given when you signed up there was a section about the code of conduct that you were expected to follow, and that this sort of thing was covered in it.
Was your supervisor harsh in not giving you a warning first? Sure, especially given your working environment. But it's up to you to stick to the policies laid down, not for you to decide what they should be.
"It's been the user community that had been pushing to keep Hubble going..."
The user community. Ie, the scientists that use Hubble.
In other words, the work of those scientists, who have produced some of the best cosmology and astrophysics of the last century, and significantly enhanced our knowledge of the universe, has taken a back-burner to the Bush family's perennial re-election year plans.
In many respects, delaying Hubble's successor is a good thing. For starters, it means that it will be able to incorporate even more technological advances and thereby be a more reliable and an even better scientific tool for the thousands of scientists that use its data.
This is just a gimmick to sell stuff. If you're serious about getting (and staying) fit, put down the controller for half an hour a day (or every other day) and do a physical activity.
You don't have to go to the gym and work out - you could do a sports activity or even just jog down to the shops and back to get some milk - but it'll be ten times better for you than twiddling your already overdeveloped thumbs.
Oh, and while you're at it, replace every other can of Coke/Mountain Dew/whatever with a glass of water. Your body will thank you for it.
It's an oxymoron.
Seriously though, it's good to see that Windows 98 support has been extended. I shudder to think how many compromised Windows 98 systems there are out there now, let alone imagine how many there would be in 6-12 months time once vulnerabilities that hadn't been patched before support was dropped began to be exploited in earnest.
OK, so the apostrophe and the "their" were mistakes but "realise" is how the word is spelt (yes, "spelt", not "spelled") virtually everywhere around the world.
Besides, it's 7.40am now, I posted that at 7.07am and I've had all of 30 minutes sleep in the last 24 hours. I'm not a robot, so sleep deprevation does have its effects.
You do realise that the US Doctor Who fan club dwarfs it's British, Canadian, Australian, etc counterparts by an order of magnitude?
There far more extreme hard-core US science fiction nerds who watch Doctor Who than British ones. I doubt their watching re-runs, buying books, videos and DVDs to look "cool". Believe me, as sci-fi goes, Doctor Who is as far from "cool" as you can get. Doctor Who's appeal was never "cool", it was a focus on storylines that deviated from the "Captain kisses alien girl, crewmember in red uniform dies" variety.
21in. Diamondtron (ie, Trinitron but not made by Sony).
This monitor is the definition of a workhorse. It's used seven days a week, often upwards of 12 hours a day, and I've had it since early 1998. And the picture quality is (and always has been) superb. Definitely the best hardware investment I've ever made.
One day, I'll buy a 20in. or bigger TFT display but even then I doubt I'll throw my VMP500 out. This monitor is just too good to toss out/give away.
Should I be worried that you actually think that the reason why your original post was funny is because you used "site" when you should have used "sight"?