Long ago at a previous job, our (female) Tech Support Manager had to take a (male) Systems Programmer aside and gently explain to him that bathing regularly would be appreciated.
This guy built a roll-your-own mainframe storage management system (this was before such products appeared) and did a good job. (In the military, he'd written some of the early Cruise Missile navigation software.) Some really talented coders sometimes misplace their social convention priorities.
In HS EE shop, I once got careless and touched the wrong wire on a 400V power supply I'd just built and was in the process of testing. Even though the current was mere mA, it snapped me back a couple feet... and left a row of very neat little holes in a forefinger. One quickly learns respect....
Microsoft has already taken over an ISP's (Qwest, somewhere) email service and promply imposed a Microsoft-only email client policy. Are you sure you want to be _forced_ to run Microsoft's proprietary software? I know I don't. This is scary and a Very Bad Thing(tm). We can't let it happen.
...that's naive! Especially when the US amry displays a fondness for hitting targets like a Red Cross warehouse.
I don't usually reply to AC's, but... _if_ that was an errant bomb (and not a vicious Taliban ruse) it was an error. These things happen, even including "friendly fire" casualties among one's own troops (as happened, unfortunately, in the Gulf War). It's a war. People die. They started it. Remember that.
as someone stated above, they dont move and you cant train them.... so they emulate real cats perfectly
I realize it's funny, but cats conserve their energy because when then move, they move fast, expending a lot of energy. They're also rather small, so it's a lot more energy for a cat to run full-tilt than it is for a human. I'm told that a cat playing expends 100 times more energy, relatively, than a person playing similarly. I have a few cats and it was amazing to watch them play in the yard, slide down railings, climb the tree up to 50 feet or more (and get down safely), and generally just be cats. They're indoors cats now, but they do play with each other and they all love it when I can play with them.
And it's not true that cat's aren't trained. They don't do "tricks" - I haven't gotten any to fetch back anything thrown yet (but I hope to). Rather, cats adapt to their owner(s) with the objectives of: (1) safety, (2) food, and (3) attention, with this last confirming the continuance of the first two. In this, they've got the basics of human relationships down pretty well (though this might sound cynical, it's true). Some cats are rather intelligent creatures.
The robot cats seem very... Japanese. No individual personality. They don't play. They don't follow one around. They don't crave attention. Who would want them, except perhaps as very expensive bookends or doorstops? Maybe in Japan where personal space is measured in square centimeters?
I'll keep my real cats. It's rather nice to be greeted each morning and evening by a bright and confident cat. Easier than people (yes, I have those too).
I'm one of the several hundred thousand Europeans protesting against USA-sponsored terrorism.
By writing that as your sig on Slashdot? Kewl, now there's a way to troll flamebait online without ever having to think up anything cogent or even rise from your keyboard. You must be one of those over-privileged '1337 Eurotrash kids who reads comics instead history, smug in your nanny continent that the USA wrenched from tyranny and then rebuilt and protected from another vile menace for decades, not too long ago. You don't have to be grateful for that (after all, most of it probably happened before you were born). But you do need to understand that when the United States is attacked by tyrants or terrorists, we will proceed to kick ass and take names, make no mistake about it! We won't be asking any permission for self-defense.
I passed through Europe on the way to Kuwait, six months before Iraq invaded to kick off the Gulf War. The Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am 103 was recent history. There were armored personnel carriers on the tarmac at Hamburg airport and very visible security guards in the terminal carrying automatic weapons. Luggage was matched to an individual passenger. Europe was cleaning up small cells of home-grown communist terrorists (Red Brigades, Bader Meinhof, etc.). (Switzerland was even tighter on the trip back - I had to go to an isolated corridor, identify my bags, and open them for search.) Acting out in that environment could have easily gotten you shot dead, official explanations later if ever. You are hopelessly naive.
...will these Transmeta chips follow the same 'faster, hotter, more expensive' trend that AMD is following?
AMD's latest CPUs use less power and generate less heat. When they get to 0.13 micron with silicon-on-insulator and copper interconnects (Q1 next year), AMD chips will use 20% less power and run 20% cooler.
You're thinking of inexpensive ATA RAID, while they explicitly wanted a SCSI solution for speed. But SCSI RAID is _expensive_ - it's professional workstation class hardware, not within the budget for a personal machine (no matter that they say "cost is no object" - clearly there are limits here).
You either do RAID 0 Mirroring or RAID 1 Striping (with 2 ATA drives) or RAID 0+1 Mirroring and Striping (this takes 4 drives). Full striping plus Parity-Checking is RAID 5 but (someone correct me if I'm wrong) this isn't available for inexpensive ATA disk arrays. It would be nice if it were, but it would be slower than using a couple of SCSI disks and taking regular backup images of them. (What's best for backup is for yet another discussion.)
RAID 5 can be had for SCSI disks, at impressive prices, at which point you're better off with Gb Ethernet or Fibre Channel NAS or SAN storage. To do RAID 5 right, you need (some multiple of) at least 9 disks (8 for data, 1 for parity, with data and parity stripes randomly assigned across the array). The RAID 5 stuff gets rather complicated and expensive (have you priced SAN storage lately? I have, and it runs to 5 or 6 figures to just get started).
I like their approach for a high-end Linux machine for personal use. I'm using something similar as I write this (Tekram SCSI adapter with two 10K RPM Quantum 9GB non-mirrored disks). They're right to focus on I/O speed as more important than CPU power. Net bandwidth is the real limiter.
In this, they're just following what was learned long ago on mainframes: tune the I/O subsystem first because that's where you find large delays, then make sure you have enough memory (since Virtual Storage impacts Real/Expanded Storage, which impacts Auxiliary Storage - back to I/O), then tune CPU allocation and capacity last. It's well known that when you finally run out of CPU power (having tuned in this order) it's time for short-term triage (favoring "loved ones" at the expense of discretionary workloads) followed by an inevitable configuration upgrade. This is how it's done, folks.
I'd say a recommendation that includes a 20 year old keyboard can't be too pricy!;-)
That 20-year old keyboard probably cost a lot more than one of Fry's $12 specials. Its a steel cased, tactile-feedback (clickety click) IBM-PC model that probably cost about $100 when new. But if you do a lot of writing like Eric Raymond does, the moderate additional cost is undoubtedly worth it.
Actually, that's a civil case citation. Hint: in a criminal proceeding, the plaintiff (the State) is always listed first, e.g., "State of XX vs John Doe."
The government did something really fucking stupid!?
You're surprised? Look, here's how it works: the DoJ is charged with defending the Federal Government, especially including laws passed by Congress (whether they like them or not). The DMCA is a law passed by Congress (hopefully it will be ruled unconstitutional, but that hasn't happened yet). The United States is a named defendant in Prof. Felton's (et al) lawsuit; the action challenges the constitutionality of the DMCA.
Therefore, the DoJ is _obligated_ to present a government defense. This is just the normal operation of Constitutional Law proceedings and the functioning of necessarily adversarial litigation. The legal process grinds very slowly, but in the end, it grinds very fine. It mostly gets things right, eventually (but the process takes years, if not decades or even generations). Maybe once in each generation sits a really wise Supreme Court.
This motion in question is a mere skirmish in just one battle that is itself just a small part of a much larger war to retain the Liberty and associated freedoms intended by the framers of the Constitution, all in the face of concerted attacks by monied corporations working through soft-money wholesale bribery of politicians to subvert public rights for their own monopoly-seeking interests. It's not just illegal corruption (for that connotes unusual practices) but it is, rather, full-scale rotten-to-the-core corruption of the entire political system whereby politicians get financed to buy public offices and then pay off their well-healed "friends" (many are big media) that purchased the media time that bought their elections. So very cozy, isn't it? However, that's how it works here in the U.S. of A. lately, like it or not. It'll take real courage and perhaps bloodshed to change this.
Oh, okay... it's UltraSparc III. But there's not been very much "Ultra" about those for quite a while, and the (late arriving, slow) III hasn't fixed this.
Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik
Loosely, that's "State Office for Information Technology Security." It's not an especially long German bureaucratic name.
BTW, the WWII Nazi spycatcher agency was the SD, an acronym for "Sicherheits Dienst." Try saying that three times, fast.
The German security agencies are puckering up and paying more attention lately. It seems they weren't concerning themselves much with immigrant international terrorists, but were concentrating on homegrown neo-Nazis instead. They're scrambling to catch up now (and doing a fairly credible job).
I recently did some consulting work at the State's Teale Data Center in Sacramento (that's where California keeps _some_ of it's computers). One day, driving my client back from lunch, I asked about the antennas on the roof and learned that some State employee hams maintain an Emergency Communications System in the building. Sure enough, in one of the corridors was a door marked "Emergency Communications - Restricted Access."
I live in Orange County, CA and can see the County's Emergency Operations Center a few miles up in the hills with line-of-sight to the government buildings in Santa Ana. I'll bet there are a few ham band antennas on that bunker, too. I believe such ham systems exist almost everywhere in the US.
Well, there's IBM's Power4 architecture, Sun's Sparc3, AMD's Hammer line due RSN. I don't think the FTC has much to be concerned about with regard to IA64. In fact, Intel and HP are the ones who should be worried - Power4 passes Sparc3 and PA8700, but it blows the doors off IA64. AMD's Hammer chips will match or beat IA64 at lower cost, so Intel/HP are going to be hard pressed.
Sure, science welfare pork barrel dollars are somehow worth more than a canal, a dam, a highway, some Federal facility? It's arguable that many of those other projects have real utility, as opposed to the billions poured into not-much-to-show "science" garbage. My point was that we shouldn't be funding wildly, outrageously expensive welfare projects for politically connected grant-mavens chasing a holy grail that's provably out of reach with our current understanding of more basic science. We need to do the more basic science first, rather than chase pie-in-the-sky home runs that never happen.
Make that, for about 50 years, fusion has been 10 to 50 years away, depending upon who's asked. It's the perpetual funding machine of "big science." At least the quantum physics people actually keep finding new things. All these fusion idiots find are more hairbrained schemes and funding shortfalls.
Let's teach 'em all Pashtun and send them off into Afghanistan to find terrorists - they might succeed at that, whereas they surely haven't with fusion. If they fail, well... there's several hundred millions of dollars we're not wasting on "fusion research" i.e., welfare for well connected politico-physicists.
Why try to put the Sun in a bottle when we've got a good one already up in the sky? Use that energy instead of trying to capture the genie in some lab. We should be putting research into solar generating satellites with microwave power links to the surface, surface solar power, geothermal, ocean tidal and wave power, wind power, etc. Instead, we're wasting billions on fusion research welfare for a few academics who spend entire careers doing it, and retire handsomely with no useful results! Gee, I hope they all enjoy their pensions earned by achieving nothing of any use to anyone: thanks a lot!
It's not like we don't have a few billion years to figure it out, leave Sol for a younger star. Defund this fusion crap - do something worthwhile instead!
(there is, to the best of my knowledge, even though IAMAL, a legal difference between a misdemeanor and a crime).
I'll give you a break and mention that the acronym is IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer). If you _are_ a lawyer, well...
The proper distinction is misdemeanor versus felony - both are "crime" in the sense that people who commit them can be prosecuted, found guilty, etc. However, misdemeanor (literally, mistaken behavior) is much less serious than felony (a heinous act): a misdemeanor usually won't disqualify you from getting a job, depending of course on the nature of the conviction and the job, whereas a felony often makes subsequent employment more problematic, especially in a capacity more responsible than low paid hourly work. And felons are prohibited from owning guns and voting (though in many states they can apply to have their voting rights reinstated after serving their time). Overall though, you _don't_ want to have a felony record.
Many offenses - especially white-collar ones such as this case - can be resolved either as misdemeanors or felonies. Typically, if the situation is marginal, or intent was lacking, and no harm was actually done, etc., the prosecution can be persuaded to offer a plea to a misdemeanor "in the interests of justice" (i.e., this clears the case quickly without requiring an expensive jury trial). That's what happened here - the proverbial slap on the wrist.
This guy committed theft and hoped to profit by it. He's lucky to be getting off with a misdemeanor. If he'd simply reported the hole, he'd be in the clear.
Yes, the Chechens are bandits. They've been bandits for decades, if not centuries. But lately they've tried to expand their influence outside their borders - they've become expansionist bandits.
What the US objected to was the Russians descending to the level of their unscrupulous opponents in that policing operation. Although it was an extremely strenuous and brutal exercise, they didn't need to torture captives or brutalize civilians. But they did, and the US objected to those practices.
Why are you posting as an AC? Are you ashamed of what you are saying here? Yes, that must be it.
Yeah, let's nuke Afghanistan. That'll teach them. Never mind that most of bin Ladin's operatives are in other countries far from there (Middle East, but also Germany, France, Switzerland, the UK, US, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America). Many aren't even Afghani, but from other Islamic countries (Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Sudan.).
Afghanistan is a very poor country with no infrastructure remaining to speak of, where 95% of the area is controlled by a fanatical organized banditry that comprises at best only 5% of the population. And you're willing to drop nuclear bombs on 100% of the country and people just to wipe out that 5%? Unbelievable. You still need five more stiff drinks to wanker off into babbling unconsiousness. Thank God they'll never let you anywhere near a US weapons system - you're far too unstable.
What sets us apart from the Islamic "fundamentalists" (i.e., lunatic fringe is more like it) that apparantly perpetrated these horrible cowardly attacks?
Might it be that we make a distinction between innocent civilians and combatants in time of war? That we seek out those individuals and groups actually responsible for such crimes, rather than blaming and oppressing entire ethnicities and countries full of innocents? Surely this is the case.
I understand your pain and outrage, but throwing our weight around while abandoning our civilized values will only play into bin Ladin's hands - that's what he wants! For us to overreact in an oppressive and bloodthirsty way. Then, we'll have the entire Islamic world rightly howling to dismantle our so-called civilzation and drink our blood. Congratulations - go have about six more drinks instead of posting more of your bloody jingoistic drunken ravings here to expose your lack of either strategic understanding or basic humanitarianism. Or better yet, just go sleep it off, you gargantuan fool!
The Taliban doesn't let anyone else go armed. Therefore, if they're in Southern Afghanistan and carrying weapons, they're Taliban. Simple and easy.
Recently, civilian Afghanis have reported wholesale armed robberies. As the conflict with the republican forces in the North incurred casualties, the Taliban have recruited anyone they could: "The Taliban have not become thieves, but thieves have become Taliban" according to one local Afghani.
Slashdot Mirror
Long ago at a previous job, our (female) Tech Support Manager had to take a (male) Systems Programmer aside and gently explain to him that bathing regularly would be appreciated.
This guy built a roll-your-own mainframe storage management system (this was before such products appeared) and did a good job. (In the military, he'd written some of the early Cruise Missile navigation software.) Some really talented coders sometimes misplace their social convention priorities.
In HS EE shop, I once got careless and touched the wrong wire on a 400V power supply I'd just built and was in the process of testing. Even though the current was mere mA, it snapped me back a couple feet... and left a row of very neat little holes in a forefinger. One quickly learns respect....
Microsoft has already taken over an ISP's (Qwest, somewhere) email service and promply imposed a Microsoft-only email client policy. Are you sure you want to be _forced_ to run Microsoft's proprietary software? I know I don't. This is scary and a Very Bad Thing(tm). We can't let it happen.
From the context, I think he meant "ubiquitous"...
No, he meant short-lived. The company (etoys.com) mentioned in the article is tits-up.
...that's naive! Especially when the US amry displays a fondness for hitting targets like a Red Cross warehouse.
I don't usually reply to AC's, but... _if_ that was an errant bomb (and not a vicious Taliban ruse) it was an error. These things happen, even including "friendly fire" casualties among one's own troops (as happened, unfortunately, in the Gulf War). It's a war. People die. They started it. Remember that.
as someone stated above, they dont move and you cant train them.... so they emulate real cats perfectly
I realize it's funny, but cats conserve their energy because when then move, they move fast, expending a lot of energy. They're also rather small, so it's a lot more energy for a cat to run full-tilt than it is for a human. I'm told that a cat playing expends 100 times more energy, relatively, than a person playing similarly. I have a few cats and it was amazing to watch them play in the yard, slide down railings, climb the tree up to 50 feet or more (and get down safely), and generally just be cats. They're indoors cats now, but they do play with each other and they all love it when I can play with them.
And it's not true that cat's aren't trained. They don't do "tricks" - I haven't gotten any to fetch back anything thrown yet (but I hope to). Rather, cats adapt to their owner(s) with the objectives of: (1) safety, (2) food, and (3) attention, with this last confirming the continuance of the first two. In this, they've got the basics of human relationships down pretty well (though this might sound cynical, it's true). Some cats are rather intelligent creatures.
The robot cats seem very... Japanese. No individual personality. They don't play. They don't follow one around. They don't crave attention. Who would want them, except perhaps as very expensive bookends or doorstops? Maybe in Japan where personal space is measured in square centimeters?
I'll keep my real cats. It's rather nice to be greeted each morning and evening by a bright and confident cat. Easier than people (yes, I have those too).
I'm one of the several hundred thousand Europeans protesting against USA-sponsored terrorism.
By writing that as your sig on Slashdot? Kewl, now there's a way to troll flamebait online without ever having to think up anything cogent or even rise from your keyboard. You must be one of those over-privileged '1337 Eurotrash kids who reads comics instead history, smug in your nanny continent that the USA wrenched from tyranny and then rebuilt and protected from another vile menace for decades, not too long ago. You don't have to be grateful for that (after all, most of it probably happened before you were born). But you do need to understand that when the United States is attacked by tyrants or terrorists, we will proceed to kick ass and take names, make no mistake about it! We won't be asking any permission for self-defense.
I passed through Europe on the way to Kuwait, six months before Iraq invaded to kick off the Gulf War. The Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am 103 was recent history. There were armored personnel carriers on the tarmac at Hamburg airport and very visible security guards in the terminal carrying automatic weapons. Luggage was matched to an individual passenger. Europe was cleaning up small cells of home-grown communist terrorists (Red Brigades, Bader Meinhof, etc.). (Switzerland was even tighter on the trip back - I had to go to an isolated corridor, identify my bags, and open them for search.) Acting out in that environment could have easily gotten you shot dead, official explanations later if ever. You are hopelessly naive.
...will these Transmeta chips follow the same 'faster, hotter, more expensive' trend that AMD is following?
AMD's latest CPUs use less power and generate less heat. When they get to 0.13 micron with silicon-on-insulator and copper interconnects (Q1 next year), AMD chips will use 20% less power and run 20% cooler.
Personally, I preferred Zmodem.
You're thinking of inexpensive ATA RAID, while they explicitly wanted a SCSI solution for speed. But SCSI RAID is _expensive_ - it's professional workstation class hardware, not within the budget for a personal machine (no matter that they say "cost is no object" - clearly there are limits here).
You either do RAID 0 Mirroring or RAID 1 Striping (with 2 ATA drives) or RAID 0+1 Mirroring and Striping (this takes 4 drives). Full striping plus Parity-Checking is RAID 5 but (someone correct me if I'm wrong) this isn't available for inexpensive ATA disk arrays. It would be nice if it were, but it would be slower than using a couple of SCSI disks and taking regular backup images of them. (What's best for backup is for yet another discussion.)
RAID 5 can be had for SCSI disks, at impressive prices, at which point you're better off with Gb Ethernet or Fibre Channel NAS or SAN storage. To do RAID 5 right, you need (some multiple of) at least 9 disks (8 for data, 1 for parity, with data and parity stripes randomly assigned across the array). The RAID 5 stuff gets rather complicated and expensive (have you priced SAN storage lately? I have, and it runs to 5 or 6 figures to just get started).
I like their approach for a high-end Linux machine for personal use. I'm using something similar as I write this (Tekram SCSI adapter with two 10K RPM Quantum 9GB non-mirrored disks). They're right to focus on I/O speed as more important than CPU power. Net bandwidth is the real limiter.
In this, they're just following what was learned long ago on mainframes: tune the I/O subsystem first because that's where you find large delays, then make sure you have enough memory (since Virtual Storage impacts Real/Expanded Storage, which impacts Auxiliary Storage - back to I/O), then tune CPU allocation and capacity last. It's well known that when you finally run out of CPU power (having tuned in this order) it's time for short-term triage (favoring "loved ones" at the expense of discretionary workloads) followed by an inevitable configuration upgrade. This is how it's done, folks.
I'd say a recommendation that includes a 20 year old keyboard can't be too pricy! ;-)
That 20-year old keyboard probably cost a lot more than one of Fry's $12 specials. Its a steel cased, tactile-feedback (clickety click) IBM-PC model that probably cost about $100 when new. But if you do a lot of writing like Eric Raymond does, the moderate additional cost is undoubtedly worth it.
GigsVT v. State of VA
Actually, that's a civil case citation. Hint: in a criminal proceeding, the plaintiff (the State) is always listed first, e.g., "State of XX vs John Doe."
The government did something really fucking stupid!?
You're surprised? Look, here's how it works: the DoJ is charged with defending the Federal Government, especially including laws passed by Congress (whether they like them or not). The DMCA is a law passed by Congress (hopefully it will be ruled unconstitutional, but that hasn't happened yet). The United States is a named defendant in Prof. Felton's (et al) lawsuit; the action challenges the constitutionality of the DMCA.
Therefore, the DoJ is _obligated_ to present a government defense. This is just the normal operation of Constitutional Law proceedings and the functioning of necessarily adversarial litigation. The legal process grinds very slowly, but in the end, it grinds very fine. It mostly gets things right, eventually (but the process takes years, if not decades or even generations). Maybe once in each generation sits a really wise Supreme Court.
This motion in question is a mere skirmish in just one battle that is itself just a small part of a much larger war to retain the Liberty and associated freedoms intended by the framers of the Constitution, all in the face of concerted attacks by monied corporations working through soft-money wholesale bribery of politicians to subvert public rights for their own monopoly-seeking interests. It's not just illegal corruption (for that connotes unusual practices) but it is, rather, full-scale rotten-to-the-core corruption of the entire political system whereby politicians get financed to buy public offices and then pay off their well-healed "friends" (many are big media) that purchased the media time that bought their elections. So very cozy, isn't it? However, that's how it works here in the U.S. of A. lately, like it or not. It'll take real courage and perhaps bloodshed to change this.
And what is "Sparc III"?
Oh, okay... it's UltraSparc III. But there's not been very much "Ultra" about those for quite a while, and the (late arriving, slow) III hasn't fixed this.
Emptied a dozen boxes of shells on the CD alone.
Hmmm, rifle shells are a buck or so apiece... So, congratulations - you managed to spend nearly as much to shoot the CD as Windows2000 cost you.
Using a microwave oven would have been less expensive.
Sparc3 = Sparc III. WTF, Sun thinks they're the Roman Empire or something?
Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik
Loosely, that's "State Office for Information Technology Security." It's not an especially long German bureaucratic name.
BTW, the WWII Nazi spycatcher agency was the SD, an acronym for "Sicherheits Dienst." Try saying that three times, fast.
The German security agencies are puckering up and paying more attention lately. It seems they weren't concerning themselves much with immigrant international terrorists, but were concentrating on homegrown neo-Nazis instead. They're scrambling to catch up now (and doing a fairly credible job).
I recently did some consulting work at the State's Teale Data Center in Sacramento (that's where California keeps _some_ of it's computers). One day, driving my client back from lunch, I asked about the antennas on the roof and learned that some State employee hams maintain an Emergency Communications System in the building. Sure enough, in one of the corridors was a door marked "Emergency Communications - Restricted Access."
I live in Orange County, CA and can see the County's Emergency Operations Center a few miles up in the hills with line-of-sight to the government buildings in Santa Ana. I'll bet there are a few ham band antennas on that bunker, too. I believe such ham systems exist almost everywhere in the US.
Well, there's IBM's Power4 architecture, Sun's Sparc3, AMD's Hammer line due RSN. I don't think the FTC has much to be concerned about with regard to IA64. In fact, Intel and HP are the ones who should be worried - Power4 passes Sparc3 and PA8700, but it blows the doors off IA64. AMD's Hammer chips will match or beat IA64 at lower cost, so Intel/HP are going to be hard pressed.
Just my opinions...
Sure, science welfare pork barrel dollars are somehow worth more than a canal, a dam, a highway, some Federal facility? It's arguable that many of those other projects have real utility, as opposed to the billions poured into not-much-to-show "science" garbage. My point was that we shouldn't be funding wildly, outrageously expensive welfare projects for politically connected grant-mavens chasing a holy grail that's provably out of reach with our current understanding of more basic science. We need to do the more basic science first, rather than chase pie-in-the-sky home runs that never happen.
For years, fusion has been 50 years away.
Make that, for about 50 years, fusion has been 10 to 50 years away, depending upon who's asked. It's the perpetual funding machine of "big science." At least the quantum physics people actually keep finding new things. All these fusion idiots find are more hairbrained schemes and funding shortfalls.
Let's teach 'em all Pashtun and send them off into Afghanistan to find terrorists - they might succeed at that, whereas they surely haven't with fusion. If they fail, well... there's several hundred millions of dollars we're not wasting on "fusion research" i.e., welfare for well connected politico-physicists.
Why try to put the Sun in a bottle when we've got a good one already up in the sky? Use that energy instead of trying to capture the genie in some lab. We should be putting research into solar generating satellites with microwave power links to the surface, surface solar power, geothermal, ocean tidal and wave power, wind power, etc. Instead, we're wasting billions on fusion research welfare for a few academics who spend entire careers doing it, and retire handsomely with no useful results! Gee, I hope they all enjoy their pensions earned by achieving nothing of any use to anyone: thanks a lot!
It's not like we don't have a few billion years to figure it out, leave Sol for a younger star. Defund this fusion crap - do something worthwhile instead!
(there is, to the best of my knowledge, even though IAMAL, a legal difference between a misdemeanor and a crime).
I'll give you a break and mention that the acronym is IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer). If you _are_ a lawyer, well...
The proper distinction is misdemeanor versus felony - both are "crime" in the sense that people who commit them can be prosecuted, found guilty, etc. However, misdemeanor (literally, mistaken behavior) is much less serious than felony (a heinous act): a misdemeanor usually won't disqualify you from getting a job, depending of course on the nature of the conviction and the job, whereas a felony often makes subsequent employment more problematic, especially in a capacity more responsible than low paid hourly work. And felons are prohibited from owning guns and voting (though in many states they can apply to have their voting rights reinstated after serving their time). Overall though, you _don't_ want to have a felony record.
Many offenses - especially white-collar ones such as this case - can be resolved either as misdemeanors or felonies. Typically, if the situation is marginal, or intent was lacking, and no harm was actually done, etc., the prosecution can be persuaded to offer a plea to a misdemeanor "in the interests of justice" (i.e., this clears the case quickly without requiring an expensive jury trial). That's what happened here - the proverbial slap on the wrist.
This guy committed theft and hoped to profit by it. He's lucky to be getting off with a misdemeanor. If he'd simply reported the hole, he'd be in the clear.
Yes, the Chechens are bandits. They've been bandits for decades, if not centuries. But lately they've tried to expand their influence outside their borders - they've become expansionist bandits.
What the US objected to was the Russians descending to the level of their unscrupulous opponents in that policing operation. Although it was an extremely strenuous and brutal exercise, they didn't need to torture captives or brutalize civilians. But they did, and the US objected to those practices.
Now, what was your point again?
Why are you posting as an AC? Are you ashamed of what you are saying here? Yes, that must be it.
Yeah, let's nuke Afghanistan. That'll teach them. Never mind that most of bin Ladin's operatives are in other countries far from there (Middle East, but also Germany, France, Switzerland, the UK, US, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America). Many aren't even Afghani, but from other Islamic countries (Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Sudan.).
Afghanistan is a very poor country with no infrastructure remaining to speak of, where 95% of the area is controlled by a fanatical organized banditry that comprises at best only 5% of the population. And you're willing to drop nuclear bombs on 100% of the country and people just to wipe out that 5%? Unbelievable. You still need five more stiff drinks to wanker off into babbling unconsiousness. Thank God they'll never let you anywhere near a US weapons system - you're far too unstable.
to be thinking so fuzzily about such matters.
What sets us apart from the Islamic "fundamentalists" (i.e., lunatic fringe is more like it) that apparantly perpetrated these horrible cowardly attacks?
Might it be that we make a distinction between innocent civilians and combatants in time of war? That we seek out those individuals and groups actually responsible for such crimes, rather than blaming and oppressing entire ethnicities and countries full of innocents? Surely this is the case.
I understand your pain and outrage, but throwing our weight around while abandoning our civilized values will only play into bin Ladin's hands - that's what he wants! For us to overreact in an oppressive and bloodthirsty way. Then, we'll have the entire Islamic world rightly howling to dismantle our so-called civilzation and drink our blood. Congratulations - go have about six more drinks instead of posting more of your bloody jingoistic drunken ravings here to expose your lack of either strategic understanding or basic humanitarianism. Or better yet, just go sleep it off, you gargantuan fool!
The Taliban doesn't let anyone else go armed. Therefore, if they're in Southern Afghanistan and carrying weapons, they're Taliban. Simple and easy.
Recently, civilian Afghanis have reported wholesale armed robberies. As the conflict with the republican forces in the North incurred casualties, the Taliban have recruited anyone they could: "The Taliban have not become thieves, but thieves have become Taliban" according to one local Afghani.