The ease with which the USS Stark and HMS Sheffield were hit by comparably cheap missiles makes me think that if there ever was a big hot war in the ocean, that the US navy might be in for a rude shock. I'm no expert, but I would think that the obvious way to overcome point-defense weapons, like the phalanx or more modern anti-missile systems would be to simply oversaturate the target with missiles; a submarine or two 100 kms away from a carrier group could fire about two dozen or more cruise missiles before any chance of detection. If the opposing force were to combine submarine with aircaft based cruise-missile attacks, I think there might be a good chance that a large surface ship formation would be overwhelmed.
Times change and empires grow and then die. It has happened to every single empire since the beginning of time and I don't think America will be very different. England basically gave the Americans all their cash so they could get supplies to survive the Germans, thus the Uk was broke after WWII and the USA came out pretty well financially, something upon which they capitalised. Now the USA owes China a good chunk of all it owns, and while the USA is an incredibly resilient country and very innovative, it also will take some doing to remain ahead of the pack for the rest of this century, and the others don't have to spend as much on their militaries as the USA does to be able to deter USA force.
Jeezuz, what is it with you Microsoft drones? Do you think that if you act like vitimised kittens for long enough that people will either take pity on you or believe you? You creeps have been playing the poor, hurt, innocent victim card for so long that I think the only people who take you seriously are the other anal, Microsoft dipshits who post the same, childish, boring crap, no matter whether Microsoft has just released a free upgrade to Windows Explorer (yay) or screwed some partner or customer over again.
Well, I haven't seen either, and from the trailer I think I'll like moon, but I think saying one is better than the other is very subjective and a matter of taste.
oooh, clever, was that from debating 101, like your sig? If you want to counter him, your best bet is plain langue, not obscure debating team references.
All the TV interviews were real unscripted questions asked of real South Africans on illegal immigrants in South Africa. I quote from here: To give the short a realistic feel, Blomkamp interviewed real people about the influx of immigrants into real-life Johannesburg; their frank answers to questions about Zimbabweans and other refugees were transformed into documentary-style commentary on extraterrestrials unwanted by a fearful local population. (See Alive in Joburg below.)
Everyone harping on about how this is about Apartheid is wrong. It's about modern, everyday xenophobia, alive and kicking in place like South Africa and havens of moral rectitude like the US of fucking A where just as many people hate foreigners because they're, uhm, foreign as people anywhere else do.
But no, it's set in South Africa, so it must be about Aparthied, right? I mean nothing else ever happened there, right?
Ja, ek het eintlik van distrik 6 gehoor, en ek het dit ook gesien. Which is Afrikaans, the language of most of South Africa's whites and people of mixed race ("coloureds"). So much for establishing my bona fides as a South African white, now let me say what I said the first time I posted about the movie: The movie might be a better remake of Alien Nation, with far better integrated effects, a more realistic interpretation of xenophobia (all the TV interviews with people in the street in the movie were asking questions about illegal immigrants in South Africa from places like Zimbabwe) and better actors (sharlto copley is really, really good), but for me as a South African, apart from the obvious bit of (probably misplaced) pride that I feel because of the film's South African directors, scenario and cast, the main thing is that for once a good science fiction movie is not about self-obsessed Americans.
For me, it's really nice to have another perspective on a scifi movie, much like Pitch Black, the original Riddik movie also had that fresh feeling of an orginal cast, story and theater. The second Riddik movie had that typical overblown American Hollywood smoothy crap which suffocates any good story.
District 9 is good because it's fresh and untainted with Hollywood.District 9's sequel, bought out and slaughtered by soulless Hollywood ghouls will probably be terrible.
... Airbus is going to eat it on the over sized beast they bet on, and the 787 is likely to look like the right size going forward....
Then, when you've recovered from you fit of national penis size competition angst, I wonder what you'll have to come up up with when the A350 files?
Boeing was doing it right when they designed the 777, which is and has been a massive success (it killed the A340's market almost completely, two engines are cheaper than 4), but Boeing forgot that time marches on and that truly large planes like the 747 or the A380 will still be needed for the forseeable future as large hubs are going nowhere in a hurry. Boeing was lost with the whole Sonic Cruiser thing and wasted a lot of time before they came up with a new concept that wasn't so radical as to scare customers off (which the sonic cruiser almost certainly did).
Boeing's back-tracking to do the 747-8F when Airbus was flopping around with the A380 delays was a good concept in order to capitalise on the market need for large freighters (the A380F was cancelled after UPS and Fedex cancelled their orders), but it was something that was done in the spur of the moment and the passenger version, the 747-8 has been a major flop, and with only Lufthansa having ordered any there have been reports atht it will be cancelled. But the fact that Boeing did try to get back into the large passenger plane market shows that they themselves would have designed and built the A380 if they had know that there would be a market for it.
And national penis size competition guys like you would then be crowing about how the US was making the world's biggest passenger plane instead of engaging in envious relativsim because, in all honesty you don't give a shit about the 787 or how good or bad it is (economics etc), becuase you certainly didn't give a shit when you were buying and driving humungous cars that guzzle gas. No, you care about not having the biggest or the fastest.
You seen that flying wing concept that Boeing and others have been working on in recent years? That will be the next chance for the endless duel to duke it out again over who makes better (read bigger) planes, especially if they run on hydrogen and need huge space for the tanks.
I grew up in Apartheid South Africa, and anything controversial was banned and didn't appear on TV (damn, we only GOT TV in 1975). Guess whose shows ALL appeared on South African TV? Yes Glen A Larson, the master of superficial "family friendly" repetitive crap.
Most public comments and reviews found the reimagined series very good. However, no matter how good something is, that will always be a subjective opinion. That includes yours.
I think that Microsoft long thought that it could dominate the web, for the very reason you point out, that the sheer mass of numbers would force development in IEs direction, and I think Microsoft was mainly trying to, once again, undermine the web via XAML and silverlight, mainly aimed at Adobe. But the fact is that in spite of Microsoft's best efforts, standards compliant browsers are gaining marketshare over IE, and on top of this the promise of HTML5 is that propriety technologies like XAML, Silverlight and Flash will become obsolete. This is why Microsoft is joining the HTML5 standard; they want to undermine it.
Microsoft wants to do a "fillibuster" or delying tactic on the HTML5 spec in order to push the adoption of Silverlight and XAML, both of which are somewhat stillborn outside of strongly Microsoft shops.
This. Almost all short pools are 25m long. This article is just another "rant against the media/government/whatever" from someone whose attention span belongs to the tl;dr generation and couldn't be bothered to actually find out why they did it.
The dark spot on Jupiter is almost certainly a comet, asteroid or meteor. While I doubt that the higher tides on the US coast have anything to do with it, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the bright spot on Venus wasn't also due to an asteroidal collision. Venus has a very thick atmosphere and a large collision would probably leave a mark in the atmosphere due to kicked up dust etc that would be observable for a while until it dissipated in the atmosphere.
More importantly, the odds of two planets in the system getting hit by objects large enough to make large marks is pretty small, and that makes me worry if there isn't some local debris cloud from the Oort cloud or Kuiper belt that is passing through the system currently. Does anyone know?
Do you think that the rising temperatures in Greenland and Alaska and the shrinking north pole ice cover are lies? Come on, that's about as retarded and paranoid as the flat earthers. Just look at the pictures, man. They won't ALL be lying to you.
As for money to made with carbon credits, up until now it hasn't exactly worked very well, has it?
I'm not a racist. I honestly don't care what colour you are. I'll dislike you whether you're black or white. Makes no difference to me. But there is a real problem in South Africa of laying the blame for all current problems on the evils of the Apartheid system. Granted, Apartheid is responsible for much of South Africa's problems, but Apartheid is gone. Whites are now an even smaller minority than they were under Apartheid and have very little political say in what happens in South Africa. They no longer have that much say in who does what in South Africa.
Until South Africans (and the rest of the developing world, while I'm at it) take responsibility for their problems and stop trying to look for easy cop-outs nothing will change. The fact that SA is slowly improving despite the mess that the country is in, is a testament to the fact that somebody else has realised this fact as well.
Was there 2 years ago. Yes, it truly is looking better slowly. Used to live in Hillbrow, Yeoville and Braamfontein when I was at Wits in the 80s. Place went downhill totally, but it is looking much better these days.
I'm South African so yay for South Africans of all colours, shapes and broken accents, and yay for an SA director making a really interesting SF movie set in SA. It is really nice to see something that isn't shallow Hollywood crap. It might be shallow South African crap, but at least it's different and interesting shallow South African crap.
I'm pretty sure that a good percentage of people have read or heard about either Firefox or Chrome in the past year or so. Firefox has made the mainstream news in a number of papers. It will definitely be interesting to see which way people choose if they're given the choice. Here in Europe, there are countries where Firefox already is the majority browser (in Germany it's close, in Finnland I think it already is), and that is a good thing in a number of way, I think.
Back in 2001 there was really only IE6 as a working browser. Mozilla hadn't even come out of beta yet and IE6 was the de fact standard. There were very many sites on the net which only catered to IE6 and Microsoft, having achieved their goal of dominating the internet, had even closed down their IE development team. That's how cock-sure they were.
Fast forward to 2005, where Firefox's user share started climbing, Microsoft, never one to let a potential competitor rowm freely in any market, restarted IE development and firstly, we were presented with pop-up blockers in an IE6 update, then, as Microsoft realised that web-standards were not going to go away any time soon and were becoming a must-have for web developers, released IE7, then IE8, both non-complete in their implementation, but still incrementally better than the preceding version.
But even IE8 is slow and clunky on certain simple features (the blank page isn't blank for example, and takes a long time to load the unwanted information it presents), and the rumours on the web that Microsoft is contemplating dropping IE to adopt webkit aren't helping IE's user share. In very much the same way, Microsoft's opposition to HTML5 will only hurt them in the long run.
The main reason Microsoft drags its heels with IE so much is because Microsoft wanted to use the.Net WPF/XAML foundation to broadly lock users into a Microsoft platform, once again. This hasn't exactly met with success and even Microsoft's Silverlight, which is as good as and better in some respects than Flash, is basically dead in the water. The future is open standards. Google may make a royal mess of it, but their claim that computing is moving to the web is not far off, and I think that most customers/users don't really care either way as long as it's a)cheap, b)compatible c)convenient.
So, I don't think the future is quite as closed as you say.
Slashdot Mirror
The ease with which the USS Stark and HMS Sheffield were hit by comparably cheap missiles makes me think that if there ever was a big hot war in the ocean, that the US navy might be in for a rude shock. I'm no expert, but I would think that the obvious way to overcome point-defense weapons, like the phalanx or more modern anti-missile systems would be to simply oversaturate the target with missiles; a submarine or two 100 kms away from a carrier group could fire about two dozen or more cruise missiles before any chance of detection. If the opposing force were to combine submarine with aircaft based cruise-missile attacks, I think there might be a good chance that a large surface ship formation would be overwhelmed.
Times change and empires grow and then die. It has happened to every single empire since the beginning of time and I don't think America will be very different. England basically gave the Americans all their cash so they could get supplies to survive the Germans, thus the Uk was broke after WWII and the USA came out pretty well financially, something upon which they capitalised. Now the USA owes China a good chunk of all it owns, and while the USA is an incredibly resilient country and very innovative, it also will take some doing to remain ahead of the pack for the rest of this century, and the others don't have to spend as much on their militaries as the USA does to be able to deter USA force.
Maybe their brand agency were hitting the bong when they came up with bing?
I think you just proved his point
Jeezuz, what is it with you Microsoft drones? Do you think that if you act like vitimised kittens for long enough that people will either take pity on you or believe you? You creeps have been playing the poor, hurt, innocent victim card for so long that I think the only people who take you seriously are the other anal, Microsoft dipshits who post the same, childish, boring crap, no matter whether Microsoft has just released a free upgrade to Windows Explorer (yay) or screwed some partner or customer over again.
We get it, now fuck off.
They're changing thedefault Gamma from 1.8 to 2.2???? Hell just froze over!!
Just ordered mine, FWIW.
Yes, I always thought Americans were dumbass retarded fucks, but then I discovered that some of them are actually human.
Well, I haven't seen either, and from the trailer I think I'll like moon, but I think saying one is better than the other is very subjective and a matter of taste.
oooh, clever, was that from debating 101, like your sig? If you want to counter him, your best bet is plain langue, not obscure debating team references.
All the TV interviews were real unscripted questions asked of real South Africans on illegal immigrants in South Africa. I quote from here: To give the short a realistic feel, Blomkamp interviewed real people about the influx of immigrants into real-life Johannesburg; their frank answers to questions about Zimbabweans and other refugees were transformed into documentary-style commentary on extraterrestrials unwanted by a fearful local population. (See Alive in Joburg below.)
Everyone harping on about how this is about Apartheid is wrong. It's about modern, everyday xenophobia, alive and kicking in place like South Africa and havens of moral rectitude like the US of fucking A where just as many people hate foreigners because they're, uhm, foreign as people anywhere else do.
But no, it's set in South Africa, so it must be about Aparthied, right? I mean nothing else ever happened there, right?
Ja, ek het eintlik van distrik 6 gehoor, en ek het dit ook gesien. Which is Afrikaans, the language of most of South Africa's whites and people of mixed race ("coloureds"). So much for establishing my bona fides as a South African white, now let me say what I said the first time I posted about the movie: The movie might be a better remake of Alien Nation, with far better integrated effects, a more realistic interpretation of xenophobia (all the TV interviews with people in the street in the movie were asking questions about illegal immigrants in South Africa from places like Zimbabwe) and better actors (sharlto copley is really, really good), but for me as a South African, apart from the obvious bit of (probably misplaced) pride that I feel because of the film's South African directors, scenario and cast, the main thing is that for once a good science fiction movie is not about self-obsessed Americans.
For me, it's really nice to have another perspective on a scifi movie, much like Pitch Black, the original Riddik movie also had that fresh feeling of an orginal cast, story and theater. The second Riddik movie had that typical overblown American Hollywood smoothy crap which suffocates any good story.
District 9 is good because it's fresh and untainted with Hollywood.District 9's sequel, bought out and slaughtered by soulless Hollywood ghouls will probably be terrible.
... Airbus is going to eat it on the over sized beast they bet on, and the 787 is likely to look like the right size going forward....
Then, when you've recovered from you fit of national penis size competition angst, I wonder what you'll have to come up up with when the A350 files?
Boeing was doing it right when they designed the 777, which is and has been a massive success (it killed the A340's market almost completely, two engines are cheaper than 4), but Boeing forgot that time marches on and that truly large planes like the 747 or the A380 will still be needed for the forseeable future as large hubs are going nowhere in a hurry. Boeing was lost with the whole Sonic Cruiser thing and wasted a lot of time before they came up with a new concept that wasn't so radical as to scare customers off (which the sonic cruiser almost certainly did).
Boeing's back-tracking to do the 747-8F when Airbus was flopping around with the A380 delays was a good concept in order to capitalise on the market need for large freighters (the A380F was cancelled after UPS and Fedex cancelled their orders), but it was something that was done in the spur of the moment and the passenger version, the 747-8 has been a major flop, and with only Lufthansa having ordered any there have been reports atht it will be cancelled. But the fact that Boeing did try to get back into the large passenger plane market shows that they themselves would have designed and built the A380 if they had know that there would be a market for it.
And national penis size competition guys like you would then be crowing about how the US was making the world's biggest passenger plane instead of engaging in envious relativsim because, in all honesty you don't give a shit about the 787 or how good or bad it is (economics etc), becuase you certainly didn't give a shit when you were buying and driving humungous cars that guzzle gas. No, you care about not having the biggest or the fastest.
You seen that flying wing concept that Boeing and others have been working on in recent years? That will be the next chance for the endless duel to duke it out again over who makes better (read bigger) planes, especially if they run on hydrogen and need huge space for the tanks.
I grew up in Apartheid South Africa, and anything controversial was banned and didn't appear on TV (damn, we only GOT TV in 1975). Guess whose shows ALL appeared on South African TV? Yes Glen A Larson, the master of superficial "family friendly" repetitive crap.
Then you can wipe the foam and spittle away from your chin when you've finsihed your rant.
Most public comments and reviews found the reimagined series very good. However, no matter how good something is, that will always be a subjective opinion. That includes yours.
I think that Microsoft long thought that it could dominate the web, for the very reason you point out, that the sheer mass of numbers would force development in IEs direction, and I think Microsoft was mainly trying to, once again, undermine the web via XAML and silverlight, mainly aimed at Adobe. But the fact is that in spite of Microsoft's best efforts, standards compliant browsers are gaining marketshare over IE, and on top of this the promise of HTML5 is that propriety technologies like XAML, Silverlight and Flash will become obsolete. This is why Microsoft is joining the HTML5 standard; they want to undermine it.
Microsoft wants to do a "fillibuster" or delying tactic on the HTML5 spec in order to push the adoption of Silverlight and XAML, both of which are somewhat stillborn outside of strongly Microsoft shops.
This. Almost all short pools are 25m long. This article is just another "rant against the media/government/whatever" from someone whose attention span belongs to the tl;dr generation and couldn't be bothered to actually find out why they did it.
The dark spot on Jupiter is almost certainly a comet, asteroid or meteor. While I doubt that the higher tides on the US coast have anything to do with it, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the bright spot on Venus wasn't also due to an asteroidal collision. Venus has a very thick atmosphere and a large collision would probably leave a mark in the atmosphere due to kicked up dust etc that would be observable for a while until it dissipated in the atmosphere.
More importantly, the odds of two planets in the system getting hit by objects large enough to make large marks is pretty small, and that makes me worry if there isn't some local debris cloud from the Oort cloud or Kuiper belt that is passing through the system currently. Does anyone know?
Do you think that the rising temperatures in Greenland and Alaska and the shrinking north pole ice cover are lies? Come on, that's about as retarded and paranoid as the flat earthers. Just look at the pictures, man. They won't ALL be lying to you.
As for money to made with carbon credits, up until now it hasn't exactly worked very well, has it?
I'm not a racist. I honestly don't care what colour you are. I'll dislike you whether you're black or white. Makes no difference to me. But there is a real problem in South Africa of laying the blame for all current problems on the evils of the Apartheid system. Granted, Apartheid is responsible for much of South Africa's problems, but Apartheid is gone. Whites are now an even smaller minority than they were under Apartheid and have very little political say in what happens in South Africa. They no longer have that much say in who does what in South Africa.
Until South Africans (and the rest of the developing world, while I'm at it) take responsibility for their problems and stop trying to look for easy cop-outs nothing will change. The fact that SA is slowly improving despite the mess that the country is in, is a testament to the fact that somebody else has realised this fact as well.
Was there 2 years ago. Yes, it truly is looking better slowly. Used to live in Hillbrow, Yeoville and Braamfontein when I was at Wits in the 80s. Place went downhill totally, but it is looking much better these days.
Back at ya, : http://forum.mg.co.za/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=1802091422&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&fpart=7&vc=1
I'm South African so yay for South Africans of all colours, shapes and broken accents, and yay for an SA director making a really interesting SF movie set in SA. It is really nice to see something that isn't shallow Hollywood crap. It might be shallow South African crap, but at least it's different and interesting shallow South African crap.
I'm pretty sure that a good percentage of people have read or heard about either Firefox or Chrome in the past year or so. Firefox has made the mainstream news in a number of papers. It will definitely be interesting to see which way people choose if they're given the choice. Here in Europe, there are countries where Firefox already is the majority browser (in Germany it's close, in Finnland I think it already is), and that is a good thing in a number of way, I think.
Back in 2001 there was really only IE6 as a working browser. Mozilla hadn't even come out of beta yet and IE6 was the de fact standard. There were very many sites on the net which only catered to IE6 and Microsoft, having achieved their goal of dominating the internet, had even closed down their IE development team. That's how cock-sure they were.
Fast forward to 2005, where Firefox's user share started climbing, Microsoft, never one to let a potential competitor rowm freely in any market, restarted IE development and firstly, we were presented with pop-up blockers in an IE6 update, then, as Microsoft realised that web-standards were not going to go away any time soon and were becoming a must-have for web developers, released IE7, then IE8, both non-complete in their implementation, but still incrementally better than the preceding version.
But even IE8 is slow and clunky on certain simple features (the blank page isn't blank for example, and takes a long time to load the unwanted information it presents), and the rumours on the web that Microsoft is contemplating dropping IE to adopt webkit aren't helping IE's user share. In very much the same way, Microsoft's opposition to HTML5 will only hurt them in the long run.
The main reason Microsoft drags its heels with IE so much is because Microsoft wanted to use the .Net WPF/XAML foundation to broadly lock users into a Microsoft platform, once again. This hasn't exactly met with success and even Microsoft's Silverlight, which is as good as and better in some respects than Flash, is basically dead in the water. The future is open standards. Google may make a royal mess of it, but their claim that computing is moving to the web is not far off, and I think that most customers/users don't really care either way as long as it's a)cheap, b)compatible c)convenient.
So, I don't think the future is quite as closed as you say.