Much as I'm disliking the Hitlerian Russian government now, I can't believe a) anyone wouldn't have reported it (the pilot) or b) not talked about it loudly for 25+ years.
It doesn't add up.
It does if you know anything about Finnish history. Pissing off the Soviets was may have been an American national sport during the cold war period but for the Finns it was not at the top of their agenda. Finland spent the cold war balancing on a razor's edge they were bound by post WWII treaties to have a military of a fixed (and rather small) size and of course to remain neutral. For this reason the Finns painstakingly split their military procurement exactly down the middle. Half the air force jets, half the army's tanks and half the navy's ships were bought in the Soviet bloc and the other half in the West and it was a very successful strategy (which is why its now being suggested as a solution to the Ukraine crisis). The Finns may have wiped the floor with the Soviet army during the Winter War but it was still not an experience the Finns cared to repeat in the nuclear era. Since the aircraft wasn't actually harmed no purpose would have been served by deliberately embarrassing the bad tempered 16 foot tall, 3000 pound grizzly bear sitting on their eastern border by advertising the ineptitude of the Soviet air defenses so the sensible strategy was just to play it down.
The significance of your list assumes that Country = Country's Government. That might be more or less the case for most Western countries with a democratically government. But what about the Arab states. We have no way of knowing if the masses of those countries are actually sympathetic to IS cause (sympathetic until they actually have the chance to live other it). So while a certain Arab government might condemn IS, their support for any US military action might be just that, fighting words without any bite. Who knows if this will turn out to be a coalition of one backed up by a peanut gallery of nations unwilling to contribute a single soldier or even let their territory be used as an operations base.
I've got a better match for you. Here are just some of the entities that the Islamic State has made enemies of: - Iraq - 65% Shia so mostly against. - Syria - 72% Sunni but currently at war with them and partly living the reality of ISIS rule, so against. - Jordan - 92% Sunni, relatively secular country, no history of widespread ISIS support but possibly in doubt. - Hezbollah - Shia militia currently fighting against ISIS in Syria so against. - Free Syria Army - Relatively secular, moderate and currently at war with ISIS so against. - United States - Definitely Against. - Britain - Definitely against. - Iran - Shia country efinitely against. - Saudi Arabia - In doubt. - Russia (maybe) - Scared shitless of this kind of movement spreading to Russias moslem regions so against. - al-Qaeda - Threatened by ISIS so, against.
There are also some other entities involved in this the original list left out. - The Kurds - Mostly Sunni but largely secular and at war with ISIS so against. - The Kurdish Yazidis - Currently watching their women being sold as slaves to ISIS fighter so definitely against. - The EU nations - Definitely against. - The Non EU Nato nations - (chief among them Turkey) Definitely against.
USA has received a shitload of Soviet designed weapons - and I don't mean just small arms, I mean tanks, helicopters, airplanes - starting 1989. From Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary.
The USA has been buying Soviet made equipment on the black market since the 1980s at least and in large quantities. So if anybody ever wondered where the Soviet weapons came from that the CIA gave to the Afghans to shoot at the Soviets with now you know...
It's not 2003 any more. Iraq has a democratically elected government, and has for about 10 years now. The Iraqi army was rebuilt and rearmed with large amounts of weaponry. ISIS is mainly coming from Syria, not Iraq. You've got this pretty much wrong.
Bullshit, you can't just reduce this to Weapons. Weapons are only as good as the people who operate them and they are only as good as those who lead them. Everything that has happened in Iraq since 2003 has been influenced by American meddling. Ibrahim al-Jaafari was replaced as Prime Minister of Iraq after the Bush White House became displeased with him due to his inability to curb the insurgency (which was not surprising in view of the fact that the army had been disbanded and some of the best troops had joined the insurgency). Iraq may have had democratic elections but the selection of parties and candidates available for election was carefully engineered by the USA and the same goes when it came to choosing which people occupied key government posts. Eye witness accounts of the search for a successor to al-Jaafari reminded me of the Praetorian's hunt for a new Roman emperor after the demise of Caligula. Having no idea who to replace Caligula with they finally found Claudius hiding behind a curtain and made him emperor and the US had given no more thought to who would replace al-Jaafari than the Pretorians had done when they disposed of Caligula. Finally the White House just chose Nouri al-Maliki, next best guy they could find without having any idea of how capable he was or whether he'd be an inclusive leader or a divisive one. The White House knew so little about al-Maliki that they mispronounced his name until he personally corrected them. Al-Maliki was so inexperienced he had to get weekly tutorial sessions from George W Bush Jr over video link (talk about dub leading dumber). It is this choice that is now coming back to bite the Obama administration along with it's own lack of interest in what is happening in Iraq. Yes the army was trained, yes the Sons of Iraq effort created a chance at reconciliation and yes It was al-Maliki, America's chosen man who de-Sunnified the government and civil service, it was he who fired all the US trained officers and replaced them with militarily inept cronies to coup-proof the army and it was his sectarian policies who sparked the campaign of repression that eventually led to the 'ISIS invasion' which in reality is a full blown Sunni revolt. Iraq today is very much America's mess and that is why the Europeans may be willing to join in the fight against ISIS by helping the Iraqi Kurds and possibly the YPG in Syria but they will remain unwilling to touch Iraq proper with a 16 foot pike. That's America's mess and it will have to be America who deals with it along with (irony abounds) Iran.
Disney has a "family friendly" image to lose. Joel doesn't. There is one side that can lose a lot of its fanbase for mudslinging. And another one that can gain a lot of cred for "sticking it to da man".
Having a ton of lawyers means jack in a battle that's not fought in court but in the PR room.
I had no idea who this Deadmou5 guy was until today. I searched on his name, saw that logo and concluded the instant I saw it that the Disney company is retarded if they think that their Mickey Mouse trademark looks anything like his logo (which is what this is about, right? trademarks, not copyright). Even a five year old would not confuse them. Disney seem to be suing anybody whose logo or trade mark looks even remotely like Mickey Mouse just on the off chance they find a judge who is brain dead enough to rule in their favour. The US must have a surplus of such judges if Disney did the math and concluded that this is a workable legal strategy. What's next? Sue anybody whose trade mark contains three circles whose centrers are arranged in an Isosceles triangle and who partially overlap? From a court transcript: Why no your honor, Having gone to Harward Law School I am actually quite literate and I know the big circle has "Billy Bob's Auto Parts" written in it and I also noticed that the two smaller ones have a picture of a pick-up truck and a buxom red-neck girl in them but we at the Disney corporation still feel that due to the arrangement of the three circles in an Isosceles triangle and their overlapping nature, that this logo could easily be confused with an image of Mickey Mouse thus confusing consumers.
And I can totally imagine them coming home and their grandparents asking them "Where did you go this year?" in the most obnoxious wasy possible, like all grandparents do. Good luck explaining this one!
Well they'd be right to be obnoxious and I hope they give these geniuses hell. I watched that video and all I saw was two stupid idiots climbing into a Volcano doing a whole bunch of things you could also have done with a drone and probably better too. I know science sometimes requires risk taking but this was just a dumb stunt.
You cannot permanently defend technology with more technology, just add timesinks. If you create a killswitch, you add multiple attack vectors - either the people who control access to the killswitch themselves, the people who designed the killswitch, or the possibility of brute forcing or exploiting that killswitch.
Right, the best way to prevent sophisticated American weapons from ending up in the hands of ISIS would have been to not hand them over to an incompetent sectarian asshat like Nouri Al-Maliki, the proper way to prevent that from becoming the only option would have been to not start a stupid war in Iraq to boost Halliburton stock prices, this in turn brings us to the most workable way to prevent America from starting a stupid war in Iraq in the first place which would have been to not elect a cheerleader for president.
So this comes along just as Russia drops the word "Nuclear" to remind everyone that they have them.
Are you naive enough to believe the Russia would bother to show up to negotiate about this?
One also wonders what the people of Ukraine think about such a well timed suggestion.
Putin can and will rattle his Nuclear saber but he won't use it until the utmost end of need so at the moment those are empty threats. The Ukraine situation could have been solved following the downing of MH17 by making it clear that any move of Russian regulars into the Ukraine and any support for insurgents would be regarded as an act of war. Failing that the thing to do would have been to match Russian support of the Insurgents with direct aid to the Ukrainian military. The most extreme reaction and the most likely one to be understood by Putin is marching 150.000 troops up to the Polish-Romanian and Baltic borders with the Ukraine and Russia, sending Nato naval task forces into the Black Sea and North Atlantic. Follow this up by dispatching somebody to knock on the Kremlin doors to ask if Putin would like to come out and play and I'm pretty sure the answer would be NO. The I and especially the C his beloved BRICS group would sit on their hands in the event of a war knowing as they do that they can only benefit from not getting sucked into a war in Europe and that that benefit would come to a large extent at Russia's expense. Russia would be alone, utterly and completely alone in such a war. Putin is a schoolyard bully and the only thing a bully respects and understands is a naked fist. Obama on the other hand has decided to rule out the employment of American military force which is a bit like entering a Poker game and pledging not to bluff. I'm beginning to wonder if he caught the stupid disease from sitting in the same leather office chair as GWB.
There are too many things that an employer is looking for from a degree that has nothing to do with coding. Ability to follow through with a royally painful task, well rounded as in able to communicate clearly and plenty of other things.
Do colleges actually teach useful skills? I got the very basics out of my college and the rest I learned on an internship and on the job. I do think colleges could be improved but I'm not smart enough to say how.
That is true, but I take issue with the 'basic skills' thing. You don't just learn basic skills when completing a CS degree you learn to analyze code and the way it works and that set of skills is often mostly missing with many of the self taught coders. For example when you hire a guy with a CS degree you get somebody who is more likely to write, say, an O(n log n) algorithm when a guy who just taught himself to code might come up with an O(n^2) or O(n^3) algorithm. In fact you'd probably struggle to find a self taught coder who even knows what Big Oh notation is. Coding is not just about writing clean code, it's about having been taught to understand mathematically what code does and more importantly what it will do even before you write it. You are also fairly certain to get a guy who recognizes the benefits of using a parser generator like Yacc when parsing complex files rather than writing a more naive parser that will quickly run into trouble as the complexity of the text increases. Most self taught coders that I have run into don't even have the knowledge to understand what tools like Yacc & Lex (and others like it) do to in order to be able to use them. Of course there are no guarantees that a CS guy didn't have a rich daddy who bought him a degree or that your applicant didn't just scratch his way through school just barely passing all of his exams between keg-parties and Chlamydia shots and retained little of the knowledge; just like some self taught coders are really smart and have skills way above the average self taught guy. However, as long as he came from a proper school and has proper grades, with a CS graduate you will at least get somebody who has had all of this stuff pounded into his brain so the odds of getting a guy who will write decent code are somewhat greater.
lawyers for the federal government argued that provisions within the Patriot Act that legalize mass surveillance without warrants have already been carefully considered and approved by all three branches of government
Two of which are irrelevant for deciding constitutionally.
And if a higher court has already agreed that what they are using the Patriot Act to justify is constitutional, they need merely cite the case. Otherwise they're just trying to blow smoke up the judges' asses. Or arguing that Appeals Courts' opinions don't matter.
(I wouldn't think either was a good strategy for an argument in an Appeals Court, but maybe they think Appeals Courts' judges are stupid.)
It would surprise me if they ruled against the government in this matter. This turd is going to get handed on all the way up to the supreme court. Major players and two presidents from both the Republican and Democratic party have stood behind this mass surveillance, one by setting up the operation and the other by doing nothing to dismantle it but rather making the same liberal use of the mass surveillance data as his predecessor. Ruling against the government in this matter is a career ending move for anybody involved in the decision unless they are have reached the peak of the promotion ladder and are unfireable like the supreme court judges are. What is interesting is will the supreme court choose to hear this case, or bail out the government by refusing to hear it? Apparently they hear no more than 100 cases a year. It all boils down to whether or not the judges (2nd Circuit or Supreme Court) have the balls to flip a bird at the White House and the entire Republican and Democratic establishments or not.
There is a lot of scientific reasons to doubt the Solutrean hypothesis, and very little scientific reason to back it. For instance, the lack of DNA or linguistic similarities. As of now, it is a theory mostly supported by the Discovery channel and such.
40 thousand years of contact, with no evidence to show for it? It seems very unlikely. There's been pretty good written records in Europe for more than 2,000 years, surely if there was constant contact with the New World there would have been some kind of record.
Leaving the Solutrean hypothesis aside for a minute some of these 'crazy' ideas that our ancestors were more mobile than we give them credit for have been stigmatized by the great egos in the scientific community in the past to the point where putting serious effort into investigating them was the equivalent of professional suicide. Even so sometimes, not always, but sometimes, they deserve better than to be ignored. In fact there is a written record that goes back at least a thousand years about contact between Europe and N-America: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_Erik_the_Red These records have been well know for a long time but nevertheless until the discovery of L'Anse aux Meadows was rubbed in their faces some scientists thought accounts of Viking travel to the Americas were folk tales that should not be taken seriously. Since then Native American DNA has been found in Icelanders and that DNA is thought to be the result of pre-Columbian contact. Basically there is now genetic evidence that at least one Native American woman was brought to Iceland where she married a local man resulting in a group of living descendants: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/11/101123-native-american-indian-vikings-iceland-genetic-dna-science-europe/ This is not really so surprising if you think about it. If the Vikings, who count among the greatest navigators and seafarers in history, could find America. Why is it unthinkable that some Native Americans could not have gone back with them to Europe? There is no mention of this in the Sagas or contemporary annals but does that mean it didn't happen? The DNA seems to tell a different story. Another good example is that there is a growing body of evidence that Native Americans had pre Columbian contact with Polynesians which was considered laughable not so long ago. In retrospect it seems pretty ridiculous to think that scientists once considered it obvious a people who are arguably the greatest navigators on earth and who were capable of sailing for thousands of miles over open ocean between tiny islands with primitive technology would have missed what are by far the two biggest islands in the Pacific but that's sicentists for you. In the end they are only human and it takes a change of generations for the thinking to change.
The final point to remember with terrorism is one of motivation. Terror attacks only work to achieve the terrorists' aims if they are very carefully targetted and choreographed along with a political campaign, to make them look like attacks against a mutually-disliked foe. This is why the IRA in Eire and Northern Ireland are largely silent these days; they changed from being seen as freedom fighters to being thought of as a general blight upon the entire society. Islamic terrorists are already being cast as such a blight, and never really get the chance to put over their side of the argument.
The IRA in the Irish Republic largely achieve it's aims, independence from Britain and they are not exactly gone. They supported the IRA in N-Ireland operationally and logistically throughout the troubles. As for the IRA in N-Ireland they weren't exactly angels but then the UVF wasn't exactly a legion of boy scouts either (anybody remember the Shankill Butchers?). I'm not in favor of either organization but the IRA does have one good point: the Irish situation in its entirety is a witches broth cooked up by the British and they deserve no pity when they complain about it's foul taste. Whether intentionally or not, by stamping the IRA 'terrorists', you simplify the situation in Ireland and make it sound as if the IRA 'terrorists' unbalanced a previously peaceful British province where everybody lived in harmony and contentment. Britain built a society in Ireland where Catholics were second class people and it is not surprising that when the Catholic challenges of that social order during the 20th century caused the Protestant elite to feel threatened, the ongoing and centuries long project of brutal religious and ethnic reengineering of Ireland blew up in the Britain's face (yet again). That is the real root cause of the Irish troubles. Organizations like the IRA, UVF and for that matter ISIS, Hamas and the likes are just a symptom of some deeper problem.
The first Christian church in history was a festering den of socialism.
This tells me that a lot of "Christians" need to reconsider their politics, or at least their committment to cut-throat capitalism.
Precisesely and he was also a card carrying pacifist. The really funny part is that I still got modded down as "Overrated" for pointing this out his socialist tendencies. I suppose in the minds of Slashdot modpoint wielding christian conservatives, Jesus Christ must have been a militaristic advocate of predatory corporate capitalism....
Socialism is simply about people cooperating with one another to work for the public good, which might be via the government, but can equally be in voluntary groups - the cooperative movement, for example, is considered socialist by virtually everyone, be they rabid anti-socialist or red hippie alike, yet has nothing to do with government. And let's not get started on unions... Robert Owen, considered by most the "Father of Socialism", had no government role at all in what he was working on, he'd be admired by many libertarians if it wasn't for that damned dirty S word blinkering
I always figured Jesus Christ predated Owen as a socialist thinker which, incidentally, also causes me to be amused over how so many socialist hating conservatives also claim to be devout Christians.
Everyone hates X, so lets compare this thing I don't like to X. Even thought its obviously very different from X.
A few loud-mouths hate X. Most people who use X don't even know it exists. Those who use X the way it was designed (i.e. network transparency) can't understand why the loudmouths want to throw that away to build something like Windows, when Windows is dying.
I mostly hate X11 because I have to program for it... It's like eating a cactus and washing it down with a whole bottle of Carolina Reaper Chili Sauce.
"Because an institution of higher learning prefers its workers to be dumb and uninformed"
No...because an employer pays for their employee's Internet access so they can do the employer's business. It's not like there aren't multiple ways to access the Internet.
In other words people will switch to using smartphones and tablets to access Facebook, Wikipedia, politically correct websites, etc... and nothing really changes. Censorship is a game of Whac-A-Mole that the censors will always loose.
How do these bridges safeguard the airline traffic in Europe again?
The summary mentioned disruptions to air travel AND flooding and as card carrying nerds some of us are interested in the subject of flood proofing infrastructures. This event has the potential to cause a monstrous flood and it would make a unique case study, so go troll somebody else.
Before "Jaws", there wasn't much of a market for shark meat. Then demand picked up. Now, the shark population has dropped so much that sharks are facing extinction.
Isn't it mostly the fins that are taken? The rest is of the shark is mostly worthless and gets dumped in the ocean... free market capitalism at it's finest. It is a pity that most sharks aren't as toxic to humans as the Greenland shark is. Greenland Shark can be eaten but the treatment required to make it edible makes it stink to high heaven.
The first one is run by TÜV in Germany (Technischer Überwachungs-Verein, Technical Inspection Association). The ratings are based on 500 car defect reports each, any less and a model does not make the list. The other site is run by Warranty Direct, a British insurance company that sells direct consumer warranties. This site breaks down the faults by components.The sites mostly concentrate on European brands but Ford and Chevrolet are included.
I'll take a meritocracy over a completely egaitarean society any time and I suppose that makes me in favor of inequality but I also reject the kind of society the USA has become where a few have risen to the top and roll boulders down on anybody else trying to rise by his own merit. Now feel free to color me radcal but any meritocracy will eventually become a plutocracy which is why bloody revolutions (pandemics like the black death also work wonders) are necessary at regular intervals to level the playing field. I'm not sure that's quite what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" but it's close.
I know this is heresy but I liked B5 better than most of the Star Wars and Start Trek stuff.
I officially sanction your position. It is not heresy, it's truth. There is certainly Star Trek which is better than anything in B5, but "most" of Star Trek is far inferior.
What I liked about the B5 series was mostly the fact that it had Maciavellian politics and space battles where the fighters didn't fly like aircraft even though they were located in deep space. They made an honest attempt to respect Newtonian physics. I went off the Star Wars series after the "Battle of the Teddy Bears" in Return of the Jedi although I rather like the animated "Clone Wars" series. I never really watched much of the original Star Trek and the Star Trek NG series just bored me out of my scull. The Star Trek shows I watched the most of was Deep Space 9 and Voyager which I rather enjoyed and which is probably even more heretical than saying B5 is better than ST.
I heard they wanted to do a reboot of Star Trek, which I guess could be interesting... I mean, it's been 12 years since a Star Trek movie was last released.
I know this is heresy but I liked B5 better than most of the Star Wars and Start Trek stuff.
If it's the case that the Russians and Chinese now have radar systems that remove that radar superiority, the F-35 now looks like even more of a gigantic waste of money
The F-35 was designed to be stealthy, not stealth. It doesn't need to be undetectable, as it's not a strategic bomber, it just needs to be able to get missile lock on it's foes before they get missile lock on the F-35. That doesn't seem like to change any time soon.
While any new military project whatsoever will be ridiculed as a colossal waste of money by the left ("it doesn't cost anything to just be nice to everyone!"), the main problem with the cost of most of the recent programs is a large R&D cost that isn't spread across enough planes/ships/whatever. I'm not the biggest fan of the F-35, but at least the idea of having one plane that will be used for many roles and by many allies keeps the per-unit cost from being insanely high - it's a wise procurement approach in a time of quickly falling defense budget.
It's no longer all about whether the F-35 can detect a Su-35, J-10, etc. with it's onboard radar first or not. Sure, being able to see the opponent on your onboard radar first is an advantage the F-35 has and it is an important one but modern fighters that operate in an integrated and networked air defense system, situational awareness can flow from many different sources these days other than just your fighter's onboard radar. The Su-35, J-10 (or whatever) can give the F-35 a very hard time if it carries IRTS, is connected to a battlefield networking system, backed by AWACS, ground radars and other sensors capable of seeing F-35s and is protected by modern SAMs. The resiliance of such a system is even greater if the missiles fired by the Su-35 can receive mid-course updates from systems other than the launcing aircraft. The Russians already have air to air missiles whose guidance can be handed over to a nother aircraft or a ground or air based sensor system which can be a long band radar since you only need to get the missile close enough to detect an F-35 with the missile's onboard sensor which is what the article is talking about, combining long band radar for situational awareness with short band radars and other sensors for terminal guidance.
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Much as I'm disliking the Hitlerian Russian government now, I can't believe a) anyone wouldn't have reported it (the pilot) or b) not talked about it loudly for 25+ years.
It doesn't add up.
It does if you know anything about Finnish history. Pissing off the Soviets was may have been an American national sport during the cold war period but for the Finns it was not at the top of their agenda. Finland spent the cold war balancing on a razor's edge they were bound by post WWII treaties to have a military of a fixed (and rather small) size and of course to remain neutral. For this reason the Finns painstakingly split their military procurement exactly down the middle. Half the air force jets, half the army's tanks and half the navy's ships were bought in the Soviet bloc and the other half in the West and it was a very successful strategy (which is why its now being suggested as a solution to the Ukraine crisis). The Finns may have wiped the floor with the Soviet army during the Winter War but it was still not an experience the Finns cared to repeat in the nuclear era. Since the aircraft wasn't actually harmed no purpose would have been served by deliberately embarrassing the bad tempered 16 foot tall, 3000 pound grizzly bear sitting on their eastern border by advertising the ineptitude of the Soviet air defenses so the sensible strategy was just to play it down.
The significance of your list assumes that Country = Country's Government. That might be more or less the case for most Western countries with a democratically government. But what about the Arab states. We have no way of knowing if the masses of those countries are actually sympathetic to IS cause (sympathetic until they actually have the chance to live other it). So while a certain Arab government might condemn IS, their support for any US military action might be just that, fighting words without any bite. Who knows if this will turn out to be a coalition of one backed up by a peanut gallery of nations unwilling to contribute a single soldier or even let their territory be used as an operations base.
I've got a better match for you. Here are just some of the entities that the Islamic State has made enemies of:
- Iraq - 65% Shia so mostly against.
- Syria - 72% Sunni but currently at war with them and partly living the reality of ISIS rule, so against.
- Jordan - 92% Sunni, relatively secular country, no history of widespread ISIS support but possibly in doubt.
- Hezbollah - Shia militia currently fighting against ISIS in Syria so against.
- Free Syria Army - Relatively secular, moderate and currently at war with ISIS so against.
- United States - Definitely Against.
- Britain - Definitely against.
- Iran - Shia country efinitely against.
- Saudi Arabia - In doubt.
- Russia (maybe) - Scared shitless of this kind of movement spreading to Russias moslem regions so against.
- al-Qaeda - Threatened by ISIS so, against.
There are also some other entities involved in this the original list left out.
- The Kurds - Mostly Sunni but largely secular and at war with ISIS so against.
- The Kurdish Yazidis - Currently watching their women being sold as slaves to ISIS fighter so definitely against.
- The EU nations - Definitely against.
- The Non EU Nato nations - (chief among them Turkey) Definitely against.
I'd say his analysis is overwhelmingly correct.
Maybe he can't, but I can.
USA has received a shitload of Soviet designed weapons - and I don't mean just small arms, I mean tanks, helicopters, airplanes - starting 1989. From Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary.
The USA has been buying Soviet made equipment on the black market since the 1980s at least and in large quantities. So if anybody ever wondered where the Soviet weapons came from that the CIA gave to the Afghans to shoot at the Soviets with now you know...
It's not 2003 any more. Iraq has a democratically elected government, and has for about 10 years now. The Iraqi army was rebuilt and rearmed with large amounts of weaponry. ISIS is mainly coming from Syria, not Iraq. You've got this pretty much wrong.
Bullshit, you can't just reduce this to Weapons. Weapons are only as good as the people who operate them and they are only as good as those who lead them. Everything that has happened in Iraq since 2003 has been influenced by American meddling. Ibrahim al-Jaafari was replaced as Prime Minister of Iraq after the Bush White House became displeased with him due to his inability to curb the insurgency (which was not surprising in view of the fact that the army had been disbanded and some of the best troops had joined the insurgency). Iraq may have had democratic elections but the selection of parties and candidates available for election was carefully engineered by the USA and the same goes when it came to choosing which people occupied key government posts. Eye witness accounts of the search for a successor to al-Jaafari reminded me of the Praetorian's hunt for a new Roman emperor after the demise of Caligula. Having no idea who to replace Caligula with they finally found Claudius hiding behind a curtain and made him emperor and the US had given no more thought to who would replace al-Jaafari than the Pretorians had done when they disposed of Caligula. Finally the White House just chose Nouri al-Maliki, next best guy they could find without having any idea of how capable he was or whether he'd be an inclusive leader or a divisive one. The White House knew so little about al-Maliki that they mispronounced his name until he personally corrected them. Al-Maliki was so inexperienced he had to get weekly tutorial sessions from George W Bush Jr over video link (talk about dub leading dumber). It is this choice that is now coming back to bite the Obama administration along with it's own lack of interest in what is happening in Iraq. Yes the army was trained, yes the Sons of Iraq effort created a chance at reconciliation and yes It was al-Maliki, America's chosen man who de-Sunnified the government and civil service, it was he who fired all the US trained officers and replaced them with militarily inept cronies to coup-proof the army and it was his sectarian policies who sparked the campaign of repression that eventually led to the 'ISIS invasion' which in reality is a full blown Sunni revolt. Iraq today is very much America's mess and that is why the Europeans may be willing to join in the fight against ISIS by helping the Iraqi Kurds and possibly the YPG in Syria but they will remain unwilling to touch Iraq proper with a 16 foot pike. That's America's mess and it will have to be America who deals with it along with (irony abounds) Iran.
Disney has a "family friendly" image to lose. Joel doesn't. There is one side that can lose a lot of its fanbase for mudslinging. And another one that can gain a lot of cred for "sticking it to da man".
Having a ton of lawyers means jack in a battle that's not fought in court but in the PR room.
I had no idea who this Deadmou5 guy was until today. I searched on his name, saw that logo and concluded the instant I saw it that the Disney company is retarded if they think that their Mickey Mouse trademark looks anything like his logo (which is what this is about, right? trademarks, not copyright). Even a five year old would not confuse them. Disney seem to be suing anybody whose logo or trade mark looks even remotely like Mickey Mouse just on the off chance they find a judge who is brain dead enough to rule in their favour. The US must have a surplus of such judges if Disney did the math and concluded that this is a workable legal strategy. What's next? Sue anybody whose trade mark contains three circles whose centrers are arranged in an Isosceles triangle and who partially overlap? From a court transcript: Why no your honor, Having gone to Harward Law School I am actually quite literate and I know the big circle has "Billy Bob's Auto Parts" written in it and I also noticed that the two smaller ones have a picture of a pick-up truck and a buxom red-neck girl in them but we at the Disney corporation still feel that due to the arrangement of the three circles in an Isosceles triangle and their overlapping nature, that this logo could easily be confused with an image of Mickey Mouse thus confusing consumers.
And I can totally imagine them coming home and their grandparents asking them "Where did you go this year?" in the most obnoxious wasy possible, like all grandparents do. Good luck explaining this one!
Well they'd be right to be obnoxious and I hope they give these geniuses hell. I watched that video and all I saw was two stupid idiots climbing into a Volcano doing a whole bunch of things you could also have done with a drone and probably better too. I know science sometimes requires risk taking but this was just a dumb stunt.
You cannot permanently defend technology with more technology, just add timesinks. If you create a killswitch, you add multiple attack vectors - either the people who control access to the killswitch themselves, the people who designed the killswitch, or the possibility of brute forcing or exploiting that killswitch.
Right, the best way to prevent sophisticated American weapons from ending up in the hands of ISIS would have been to not hand them over to an incompetent sectarian asshat like Nouri Al-Maliki, the proper way to prevent that from becoming the only option would have been to not start a stupid war in Iraq to boost Halliburton stock prices, this in turn brings us to the most workable way to prevent America from starting a stupid war in Iraq in the first place which would have been to not elect a cheerleader for president.
So this comes along just as Russia drops the word "Nuclear" to remind everyone that they have them.
Are you naive enough to believe the Russia would bother to show up to negotiate about this?
One also wonders what the people of Ukraine think about such a well timed suggestion.
Putin can and will rattle his Nuclear saber but he won't use it until the utmost end of need so at the moment those are empty threats. The Ukraine situation could have been solved following the downing of MH17 by making it clear that any move of Russian regulars into the Ukraine and any support for insurgents would be regarded as an act of war. Failing that the thing to do would have been to match Russian support of the Insurgents with direct aid to the Ukrainian military. The most extreme reaction and the most likely one to be understood by Putin is marching 150.000 troops up to the Polish-Romanian and Baltic borders with the Ukraine and Russia, sending Nato naval task forces into the Black Sea and North Atlantic. Follow this up by dispatching somebody to knock on the Kremlin doors to ask if Putin would like to come out and play and I'm pretty sure the answer would be NO. The I and especially the C his beloved BRICS group would sit on their hands in the event of a war knowing as they do that they can only benefit from not getting sucked into a war in Europe and that that benefit would come to a large extent at Russia's expense. Russia would be alone, utterly and completely alone in such a war. Putin is a schoolyard bully and the only thing a bully respects and understands is a naked fist. Obama on the other hand has decided to rule out the employment of American military force which is a bit like entering a Poker game and pledging not to bluff. I'm beginning to wonder if he caught the stupid disease from sitting in the same leather office chair as GWB.
There are too many things that an employer is looking for from a degree that has nothing to do with coding. Ability to follow through with a royally painful task, well rounded as in able to communicate clearly and plenty of other things.
Do colleges actually teach useful skills? I got the very basics out of my college and the rest I learned on an internship and on the job. I do think colleges could be improved but I'm not smart enough to say how.
That is true, but I take issue with the 'basic skills' thing. You don't just learn basic skills when completing a CS degree you learn to analyze code and the way it works and that set of skills is often mostly missing with many of the self taught coders. For example when you hire a guy with a CS degree you get somebody who is more likely to write, say, an O(n log n) algorithm when a guy who just taught himself to code might come up with an O(n^2) or O(n^3) algorithm. In fact you'd probably struggle to find a self taught coder who even knows what Big Oh notation is. Coding is not just about writing clean code, it's about having been taught to understand mathematically what code does and more importantly what it will do even before you write it. You are also fairly certain to get a guy who recognizes the benefits of using a parser generator like Yacc when parsing complex files rather than writing a more naive parser that will quickly run into trouble as the complexity of the text increases. Most self taught coders that I have run into don't even have the knowledge to understand what tools like Yacc & Lex (and others like it) do to in order to be able to use them. Of course there are no guarantees that a CS guy didn't have a rich daddy who bought him a degree or that your applicant didn't just scratch his way through school just barely passing all of his exams between keg-parties and Chlamydia shots and retained little of the knowledge; just like some self taught coders are really smart and have skills way above the average self taught guy. However, as long as he came from a proper school and has proper grades, with a CS graduate you will at least get somebody who has had all of this stuff pounded into his brain so the odds of getting a guy who will write decent code are somewhat greater.
lawyers for the federal government argued that provisions within the Patriot Act that legalize mass surveillance without warrants have already been carefully considered and approved by all three branches of government
Two of which are irrelevant for deciding constitutionally.
And if a higher court has already agreed that what they are using the Patriot Act to justify is constitutional, they need merely cite the case. Otherwise they're just trying to blow smoke up the judges' asses. Or arguing that Appeals Courts' opinions don't matter.
(I wouldn't think either was a good strategy for an argument in an Appeals Court, but maybe they think Appeals Courts' judges are stupid.)
It would surprise me if they ruled against the government in this matter. This turd is going to get handed on all the way up to the supreme court. Major players and two presidents from both the Republican and Democratic party have stood behind this mass surveillance, one by setting up the operation and the other by doing nothing to dismantle it but rather making the same liberal use of the mass surveillance data as his predecessor. Ruling against the government in this matter is a career ending move for anybody involved in the decision unless they are have reached the peak of the promotion ladder and are unfireable like the supreme court judges are. What is interesting is will the supreme court choose to hear this case, or bail out the government by refusing to hear it? Apparently they hear no more than 100 cases a year. It all boils down to whether or not the judges (2nd Circuit or Supreme Court) have the balls to flip a bird at the White House and the entire Republican and Democratic establishments or not.
Just thought I'd express my opinion that Randall Munroe is a genius. The amount of work he puts into some of his comics really makes him unique.
Unrecognized command. Type "help" for assistance.
guest@xkcd:/$ help
That would be cheating!
Pure UNIX!
There is a lot of scientific reasons to doubt the Solutrean hypothesis, and very little scientific reason to back it. For instance, the lack of DNA or linguistic similarities. As of now, it is a theory mostly supported by the Discovery channel and such.
40 thousand years of contact, with no evidence to show for it? It seems very unlikely. There's been pretty good written records in Europe for more than 2,000 years, surely if there was constant contact with the New World there would have been some kind of record.
Leaving the Solutrean hypothesis aside for a minute some of these 'crazy' ideas that our ancestors were more mobile than we give them credit for have been stigmatized by the great egos in the scientific community in the past to the point where putting serious effort into investigating them was the equivalent of professional suicide. Even so sometimes, not always, but sometimes, they deserve better than to be ignored. In fact there is a written record that goes back at least a thousand years about contact between Europe and N-America:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_Erik_the_Red
These records have been well know for a long time but nevertheless until the discovery of L'Anse aux Meadows was rubbed in their faces some scientists thought accounts of Viking travel to the Americas were folk tales that should not be taken seriously. Since then Native American DNA has been found in Icelanders and that DNA is thought to be the result of pre-Columbian contact. Basically there is now genetic evidence that at least one Native American woman was brought to Iceland where she married a local man resulting in a group of living descendants:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/11/101123-native-american-indian-vikings-iceland-genetic-dna-science-europe/
This is not really so surprising if you think about it. If the Vikings, who count among the greatest navigators and seafarers in history, could find America. Why is it unthinkable that some Native Americans could not have gone back with them to Europe? There is no mention of this in the Sagas or contemporary annals but does that mean it didn't happen? The DNA seems to tell a different story. Another good example is that there is a growing body of evidence that Native Americans had pre Columbian contact with Polynesians which was considered laughable not so long ago. In retrospect it seems pretty ridiculous to think that scientists once considered it obvious a people who are arguably the greatest navigators on earth and who were capable of sailing for thousands of miles over open ocean between tiny islands with primitive technology would have missed what are by far the two biggest islands in the Pacific but that's sicentists for you. In the end they are only human and it takes a change of generations for the thinking to change.
The final point to remember with terrorism is one of motivation. Terror attacks only work to achieve the terrorists' aims if they are very carefully targetted and choreographed along with a political campaign, to make them look like attacks against a mutually-disliked foe. This is why the IRA in Eire and Northern Ireland are largely silent these days; they changed from being seen as freedom fighters to being thought of as a general blight upon the entire society. Islamic terrorists are already being cast as such a blight, and never really get the chance to put over their side of the argument.
The IRA in the Irish Republic largely achieve it's aims, independence from Britain and they are not exactly gone. They supported the IRA in N-Ireland operationally and logistically throughout the troubles. As for the IRA in N-Ireland they weren't exactly angels but then the UVF wasn't exactly a legion of boy scouts either (anybody remember the Shankill Butchers?). I'm not in favor of either organization but the IRA does have one good point: the Irish situation in its entirety is a witches broth cooked up by the British and they deserve no pity when they complain about it's foul taste. Whether intentionally or not, by stamping the IRA 'terrorists', you simplify the situation in Ireland and make it sound as if the IRA 'terrorists' unbalanced a previously peaceful British province where everybody lived in harmony and contentment. Britain built a society in Ireland where Catholics were second class people and it is not surprising that when the Catholic challenges of that social order during the 20th century caused the Protestant elite to feel threatened, the ongoing and centuries long project of brutal religious and ethnic reengineering of Ireland blew up in the Britain's face (yet again). That is the real root cause of the Irish troubles. Organizations like the IRA, UVF and for that matter ISIS, Hamas and the likes are just a symptom of some deeper problem.
The first Christian church in history was a festering den of socialism.
This tells me that a lot of "Christians" need to reconsider their politics, or at least their committment to cut-throat capitalism.
Precisesely and he was also a card carrying pacifist. The really funny part is that I still got modded down as "Overrated" for pointing this out his socialist tendencies. I suppose in the minds of Slashdot modpoint wielding christian conservatives, Jesus Christ must have been a militaristic advocate of predatory corporate capitalism....
Socialism is simply about people cooperating with one another to work for the public good, which might be via the government, but can equally be in voluntary groups - the cooperative movement, for example, is considered socialist by virtually everyone, be they rabid anti-socialist or red hippie alike, yet has nothing to do with government. And let's not get started on unions... Robert Owen, considered by most the "Father of Socialism", had no government role at all in what he was working on, he'd be admired by many libertarians if it wasn't for that damned dirty S word blinkering
I always figured Jesus Christ predated Owen as a socialist thinker which, incidentally, also causes me to be amused over how so many socialist hating conservatives also claim to be devout Christians.
Everyone hates X, so lets compare this thing I don't like to X. Even thought its obviously very different from X.
A few loud-mouths hate X. Most people who use X don't even know it exists. Those who use X the way it was designed (i.e. network transparency) can't understand why the loudmouths want to throw that away to build something like Windows, when Windows is dying.
I mostly hate X11 because I have to program for it... It's like eating a cactus and washing it down with a whole bottle of Carolina Reaper Chili Sauce.
I wonder if "returning" to roots means smarter shows though or just trimming the budget?
It think it means declining ratings.
"Because an institution of higher learning prefers its workers to be dumb and uninformed"
No...because an employer pays for their employee's Internet access so they can do the employer's business. It's not like there aren't multiple ways to access the Internet.
In other words people will switch to using smartphones and tablets to access Facebook, Wikipedia, politically correct websites, etc... and nothing really changes. Censorship is a game of Whac-A-Mole that the censors will always loose.
How do these bridges safeguard the airline traffic in Europe again?
The summary mentioned disruptions to air travel AND flooding and as card carrying nerds some of us are interested in the subject of flood proofing infrastructures. This event has the potential to cause a monstrous flood and it would make a unique case study, so go troll somebody else.
Before "Jaws", there wasn't much of a market for shark meat. Then demand picked up. Now, the shark population has dropped so much that sharks are facing extinction.
Isn't it mostly the fins that are taken? The rest is of the shark is mostly worthless and gets dumped in the ocean... free market capitalism at it's finest. It is a pity that most sharks aren't as toxic to humans as the Greenland shark is. Greenland Shark can be eaten but the treatment required to make it edible makes it stink to high heaven.
For reliability assessments I found the following sites useful the last time I went shopping for a car:
http://www.anusedcar.com/
http://www.reliabilityindex.co...
The first one is run by TÜV in Germany (Technischer Überwachungs-Verein, Technical Inspection Association). The ratings are based on 500 car defect reports each, any less and a model does not make the list. The other site is run by Warranty Direct, a British insurance company that sells direct consumer warranties. This site breaks down the faults by components.The sites mostly concentrate on European brands but Ford and Chevrolet are included.
I'll take a meritocracy over a completely egaitarean society any time and I suppose that makes me in favor of inequality but I also reject the kind of society the USA has become where a few have risen to the top and roll boulders down on anybody else trying to rise by his own merit. Now feel free to color me radcal but any meritocracy will eventually become a plutocracy which is why bloody revolutions (pandemics like the black death also work wonders) are necessary at regular intervals to level the playing field. I'm not sure that's quite what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" but it's close.
I know this is heresy but I liked B5 better than most of the Star Wars and Start Trek stuff.
I officially sanction your position. It is not heresy, it's truth. There is certainly Star Trek which is better than anything in B5, but "most" of Star Trek is far inferior.
What I liked about the B5 series was mostly the fact that it had Maciavellian politics and space battles where the fighters didn't fly like aircraft even though they were located in deep space. They made an honest attempt to respect Newtonian physics. I went off the Star Wars series after the "Battle of the Teddy Bears" in Return of the Jedi although I rather like the animated "Clone Wars" series. I never really watched much of the original Star Trek and the Star Trek NG series just bored me out of my scull. The Star Trek shows I watched the most of was Deep Space 9 and Voyager which I rather enjoyed and which is probably even more heretical than saying B5 is better than ST.
I heard they wanted to do a reboot of Star Trek, which I guess could be interesting ... I mean, it's been 12 years since a Star Trek movie was last released.
I know this is heresy but I liked B5 better than most of the Star Wars and Start Trek stuff.
If it's the case that the Russians and Chinese now have radar systems that remove that radar superiority, the F-35 now looks like even more of a gigantic waste of money
The F-35 was designed to be stealthy, not stealth. It doesn't need to be undetectable, as it's not a strategic bomber, it just needs to be able to get missile lock on it's foes before they get missile lock on the F-35. That doesn't seem like to change any time soon.
While any new military project whatsoever will be ridiculed as a colossal waste of money by the left ("it doesn't cost anything to just be nice to everyone!"), the main problem with the cost of most of the recent programs is a large R&D cost that isn't spread across enough planes/ships/whatever. I'm not the biggest fan of the F-35, but at least the idea of having one plane that will be used for many roles and by many allies keeps the per-unit cost from being insanely high - it's a wise procurement approach in a time of quickly falling defense budget.
It's no longer all about whether the F-35 can detect a Su-35, J-10, etc. with it's onboard radar first or not. Sure, being able to see the opponent on your onboard radar first is an advantage the F-35 has and it is an important one but modern fighters that operate in an integrated and networked air defense system, situational awareness can flow from many different sources these days other than just your fighter's onboard radar. The Su-35, J-10 (or whatever) can give the F-35 a very hard time if it carries IRTS, is connected to a battlefield networking system, backed by AWACS, ground radars and other sensors capable of seeing F-35s and is protected by modern SAMs. The resiliance of such a system is even greater if the missiles fired by the Su-35 can receive mid-course updates from systems other than the launcing aircraft. The Russians already have air to air missiles whose guidance can be handed over to a nother aircraft or a ground or air based sensor system which can be a long band radar since you only need to get the missile close enough to detect an F-35 with the missile's onboard sensor which is what the article is talking about, combining long band radar for situational awareness with short band radars and other sensors for terminal guidance.