Holy shit - heh heh. Here's an interesting question that I haven't heard anyone put forward before.
You remember all the old "anti-echelon" noise people would put in their e-mail messages and joke about all the time?
I wonder whether that contributed to a 9-11 intelligence failure.
*Seriously* - the recent British arrests of the people with a tonne of fertilizer was apparently started all by a sigint intercept. aka Echelon.
No one will ever be able to know, but certainly it's possible that there was a Al-Qaida e-mail that was ignored due to a large number of other anti-echelon crap on the wires at the same time... an e-mail that if intercepted might have broken the whole thing up.
> When are the processor companies goign to invest in the diamond wafers?
Oh, if only the big huge ultra-competition-paranoid hyper advanced ultra-tech companies full of PhD Phycisics and Electrical Engineers would adopt this ground-breaking technology that I a lowly luser know about!!!!! The fools!!! They're missing the boat!! Holding back progress!! How could they possibly be so stupid!!!?!??!?? It's it all so obvious!!!!
> MS has the habit of doing right things the wrong way
No argument there, the parent of my post made a general statement and mentioned all modern OSs including Win2K, and I was responding to that, albeit using Windows 2000 as the example.
I'm very impressed with how Linux avoids using disk cache except where really necessary (and impressed to hear that it's very user/admin configurable), although I haven't used it as a desktop system yet, just a bit of testing once where I had to work hard to force VM usage to go above zero.
> Why on earth would you need the inactive getty's in memory?
I wasn't arguing against all aspects of VM activity these days (as I'm not an architect with specialization in those areas).
But clearly some current VMs aren't doing a good job in figuring out that it doesn't need to load some mountains of crap in disk caches instead of continuing to hold a user application in RAM, or how to react or behave when a person has loads and loads of RAM and only 300 MB worth of user processes. There are other responses where other people note that even though they only have 300 MB of processes and 768 MB of RAM, they are having user applications swapped to disk.
The parent to my post stated "smart modern page caches are designed to speed their system. Linux, MacOS X, Win2K+, etc. all boast aggressive page caches that make loading applications from disk more efficient" - and clearly those smart modern page caches are doing the wrong thing in a lot of cases. I don't need 500 MB of RAM used as a disk cache for multimedia files.
> Without a swap file, the kernel has no place to > stick memory segments that are rarely used.
Anyone who runs Mozilla on Windows 2000 knows that if you minimize Mozilla for a half day, despite you having 756 MB RAM and not using more than 3-400 MB of it at any given time, bringing Mozilla back to the foreground takes anywhere from 2-6 seconds (depending on the speed of your disk), which is just idiotic on a 2 GHz home machine with that much RAM.
There is no reason what-so-ever that the OS should be swapping out a userland application when there's tons of RAM. Sure as hell not to make room to disk cache all these freaking multimedia files I'm moving around, I need them in the disk cache like I need a hole in my head. I can put up with a tenth of a second delay in starting to play my mp3, and using disk cache on a 100MB simpsons episode is just dumb. But I refuse to wait for a 30MB process to swap back in.
I've heard before that "you can NOT turn swap off on Windows 2000", but to hell with it, I think I'll try it when I get home tonight. I've got 756 MB of RAM, if the system crashes when I "hit the wall" so what, I don't think I will hit the wall. Any comments? Will Win2000 let me turn them all to zero min/max size? Anyone tried that before and know what the real actual implications are?
Hmmm, here's another idea, does anyone have a little FireFox extension whose job is to excercise the browser itself to prevent it from being swapped out?
I'm through and through Canadian, and I don't want you up here with us tarnishing our good name. Please f*ck off. Move to France or something.
PS to my American neighbours: Just as many raving idiots and trolls up here as anywhere else in the Western world, I apologize for their existence and promise to lart as many as possible in my lifetime.
I really do wish Bush hadn't focused on the WMD thing as the reason for going into Iraq, even if they had WMD, the UN thing (even if being run around and not effective in eliminating them), was containing them. We should have gone in there with the express #1 purpose of freeing Iraqi's from a cruel dictatorship, and with a much better well-thought-out plan for what to do after the regieme collapse. Oh well, shit happens.
But MAN, did you see all the out-and-out trolls come out of the woodwork when that one former-football player got killed in Afghanistan hunting for Osama? How could anyone so aggregiously slander another decent citizen for wanting to help find and capture Osama?
So many utterly retarded trolls. If they actually acted in real life in a manner consistent with their online personna, they'd get the shit beat out of them every single day of their life. And they would deserve it.
I read a small one paragraph article in a Toronto paper the other day. Canadian government lawyers presenting arguments in front of the International Criminal Court, which is being asked to consider prosecuting NATO countries, including Canada, for the whole bombing Kosovo/Serbia thing.
It's going to take a 100 years to sort out this idiotic shit.
But you're not obliged to tell them about the box you have buried in the woods.
And you're not obliged to tell them about the false panel above your bed.
And you're not obliged to give them information that exists solely in your neural pathways.
Somewhere in-between the box in the woods and the information in your brain is the dividing line. I don't think encrypted files should be on the side that some are suggesting it should be. You know someday those encrypted files are going to be on a chip IN my brain, or in an artificially enhanced set of neural pathways in my brain (artificial computing wetware).
Information is information, in my brain or not. As a suspect I shouldn't be obligated to give it to my accusers.
Re:Why were MP ever such a big deal?
on
Beyond Megapixels
·
· Score: 1
Beautiful shots.
No chance we can convince you to throw up some 1600x1200's for our desktops, or even higher res for people who want to print their own?
(Site a little slow, I've got a few torrents going near full speed and I won't be home to throttle them down for another 5 hours, sorry. Hmmm, looks like I also need to re-visit my table code, Mozilla doesn't resize it to fit within the browser. Guess I should check the entire site for Mozilla viewability:) Unless it's my ancient 0.7 version of FireBird that's not quite up to snuff.)
Not just that, but guess how susceptible the people in some of these countries will be to "pressure" to report favourably.
And guess how many differing complications in the base rates of other types of "problems" will affect the statistical results.
This is *so* bad.
They'll be testing the next thalidomide in Bhopal and then claim that "the human drug trials didn't reveal any statistically significant side effects"!!!!
I first discovered Stratovarius on p2p!!! Had never even heard their name once prior to that as long as they've existed, and probably never would have!
Music (and a lot of other things) should be global, but corporations like to play corporate "optimization games" with geographical "territories" and crap. The net is great for breaking through that shit.
If God himself (herself?) came down today and decreed that no more content be created, we'd have more than enough from the last 100 years to last us the rest of our lives.
Only if you're in a little tiny 1000-2000 ton tin can warship and you get hit by something 500lbs or bigger. And even then damage control lets you get more people off safer, it saves lives.
On bigger ships, it allows you to continue combat and/or get to port and fight another day.
If you want to convince us that damage control isn't worth anything, please go talk to the ventrans from the British ships that have been hit by Argentinian iron bombs and the like. (Lucky hits to ammunition stores with 5 minute sinkage doesn't count, not unless it's highly prevelant.)
does that mean that if you have a gun and a knife, and I have the opportunity to reasearch a defense against the gun, I shouldn't
Yes, when your development of your ten thousand dollar "anti-gun" technology would obviously spur me on to carrying $5 moltov cocktails.
Do you feel safer now that you've got your "anti-gun" device walking the streets filled with criminals carrying moltov cocktails?
True, but again, every decoy built into a MIRV is effectively a kill, as it replaces a warhead
Ahhhh, so it becomes an arms race of us building anti-missile weapons at $1 Billion dollars per unit against them building decoys at $10 Million dollars per. Oh well, since "each decoy they build" is obviously such a huge "win" for us......
Are these the same scientists that are willing to throw BILLIONS and TRILLIONS of dollars at the most esoteric pure-research programs detecting primal particles (SSSC) or gravity waves?
Mis-direction. What does that have to do with the Trillion dollars you want to spend on Anti-Missile defence? So their arguments are illogical SIMPLY because they are VAGUELY associated with something else you aren't intelligent enough to see the use for?
I mean, Quantum Mechanics, what the fuck is that good for???? We should have never wasted all that money between 1890 and 1950 figuring all that shit out. Imagine how much wealthier we would all be!!!
Ridiculous circular logic. Because I'm safer from them, they are more likely to attack me?
But your favorite "deterrance theory" is built on "circular logic" as well. "By building weapons to wipe life from the face of the earth, we are in fact safer from our enemy."
You can't have one without the other. By your "anti-circular-logic" reasoning, instead of building anti-missile technology we should in fact simply get rid of all our nuclear missiles, then there won't be any more "circular logic" stuff that you don't like, and voila we're safer!!
I mean, how could building weapons possibly make us safer?
a little chicanery to advance their politics
I'm sorry, some of the most prominent intelligent logical minds on the globe present a well reasoned series of arguments, you post a bunch of absolute utterly illogical tripe and then claim *they're* the ones using "chicanery"???
That's one tiny little two sentence snipped at the end of a super long article that makes it clear that the military uses of the stations was supersceded by the cancellation of the American "military space station" concepts, by chronic delays, and by being supersceded by the civilian program... then when they have problems and a lack of stations, they throw in the Almpaz station in order to make up for it all.
What I mean to say is it looks like the article is trying *real hard* to make it look like a hard core military space station. And then at the end in one tiny sentence they say "a 20 mm cannon was fired at a target at ranges of 500m to 3000m", this supposedly ONE DAY before the station was deorbited, while it was unmanned.
EVERY single report on the net is the EXACT SAME pair of two sentences, copied verbatim.
So where do those two sentences come from?
I want to see a more authoritative report from someone respected.
> "Generally accepted to be a Nudelmann 23MM AA gun"
Should read: commonly copied and pasted all across the net from some unknown source.
You know what? I think all of these wars would have happened anyways even if the two superpowers hadn't gotten themselves involved, and I can make arguments that they would have been even MORE bloody than they were under the umbrella of the cold war.
Look at Rwanda. Just what did anyone do to "create" that? Genocide is just as easy to do if you've got 10,000 hatchet wielding lunatics. In fact, it's a lot easier if that's all you've got, with no strong central government.
> Instead, it launched the first cold war, and cost the planet millions of lives...
Replace with:
And indeed, a massive global war between the two largest most militarized nations in the history of earth, never took place.
Furthermore dozens of regional conflicts that would have killed hundreds of millions of people were instead limited killing only a dozen
or so million lives, due to the fears by the two main superpowers that they would be dragged in against one another and global nuclear war would result.
Does anyone actually realize that the "5000 mph test flight" was accelerated to 5000 mph using a rocket, and that the scramjet only ran for 10 seconds?
They do *not* have anything close to a bird that takes off under it's own power, climbs and accelerates to mach 5, then accelerates some more using a scramjet for a non-negligible amount of time.
The "National Coffee Association" reminds me of "The Tobacco Institute".
Oddly enough, the current "Tobacco Institute" website is entirely geared towards "provide the public with access to documents produced by The Tobacco Institute in Attorney General reimbursement lawsuits and certain other specified civil actions"
I'm sure they just forgot to mention that you should only "drink immediately" in tiny little 5ml increments, and that conveying said large quantities of "scalding water" should only be undertaken in suitable spill containment systems.
I mean, anything else would be negligent.
Let alone actually KNOWING about a hundred critical incidents and doing absolutely nothing to mitigate the obvious statistical certainty that a hundred more critical incidents WILL occur should nothing change.
Honestly, I'm not sure the guy should appear personally in court for the offence. He was a member of the military on active duty. The whole premise of a military is that you're accountable to the chain of command.
The problem is that the military (almost any military, especially the US military) is utterly horrible at being "fair and impartial", and are much more likely to give their men "get out of jail free" cards, and/or to dump the blame on some junior grunt instead of blaming and fixing "the system" that caused the problem.
It's like having a local police force arrest and try their own damn members, with the chief of police acting as judge. No sane western civilian jurisdiction allows that, they always get an independent jurisdiction and judges are always highly independent of the other sections of the criminal system. But that doesn't happen in the Military. You get military police investigating and arresting military personnel who are tried by other military personnel.
The military's current system made sense 150 years ago when courts were not as impartial as they are these days, and certainly makes sense on the battlefield or in a far away place. But it doesn't really make sense in the middle of populated built up areas.
I was reading lots of stuff about the Iran/Iraq war over the weekend.
After the initial year or two where Iran managed to push the Iraqi's out of Iran, they kept fighting for another 6-7 with the WHOLE ENTIRE INTENT to spread their "Islamic State" across all of the middle east, and to eventually annihilate Israel.
If we hadn't supported Saddam then, Iran would have attempted to conquer most of the middle east.
150,000 Iraqi's died to prevent that, and the Iranian Islamic government sent 350,000 Iranians to their death in their attempts to carry out their aims (most died *AFTER* Saddam was willing to sue for peace, when the Iranian goverment kept the war going in hopes of spreading "their Islamic state" by force).
Almost everyone playing back-seat driver can't possibly imagine all the equally or even more horrible repercussions of changing any one set of things in the past.
The world is a very complicated place. If you could go back in time and undo a few things, I can just as easily expect that *even worse* things would have happened.
Just look at North Korea. The entire world has been "shunning" them for how many years now? Exactly as most peaceniks would have us do with any "rogue" state. How many North Koreans have starved to death or been put to death in camps? Look at the following, the "mid" estimate for "Domestic Democide" by the North Koreans, it stands at two million and is estimated to increase by 100,000 per year. http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB10.1.GIF
ANYONE could make a fairly solid argument that we should have bitten the bullet and conquered all three countries (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea) 20 years ago, and the net loss of life and "overall injustice" would be an order of magnitude smaller.
I give good odds that no matter what happens or how you slice it, Iraq will fall into Islamic Hard Line hands, and we'll get at least one more BIG war between various mid-east states, killing hundreds of thousands. And there's not much we can do about it, short of undermining their very *culture*.
The network's usefulness does not depend on people sharing thousands of files. It depends on the aggregate bandwidth being made available.
With 4,000,000 users, if each user only shared one single file but allowed uploading - the bandwidth available and your download speeds would EXPLODE. And yet the RIAA would not be able to do anything other than file 4,000,000 lawsuits against users for sharing "one file".
My example above is extreme, but it *would* work. (Hell, it'd reduce the load on the search-nodes with the reduced duplication of sources to index).
Don't disable file sharing, just share less and leave your bandwidth "moderately on".
If you fly below their radar, you can't be intercepted.;-)
The worker was installing them head up/nut down contrary to the instructions because "that is the way bolts are supposed to be installed"... he killed 6 people because of his ignorance
ANY system where the right side up/down of a single fucking nut put on by one single guy that does not have any kind of independent quality control/inspection/etc process, any system at all that allows a bolt put on backwards by one single guy to kill 6 people...
Slashdot Mirror
*If* it's true, then it means that lots of big companies were getting money for something that's worth a lot less than they were charging.
This is *exactly* how competition in a free market should work.
It also means that their "IP" wasn't really worth much at all to begin with!!!!
Clearly giving someone an artificial monopoly when dozens of other people can come up with the same thing, is worth NOTHING to society.
Holy shit - heh heh. Here's an interesting question that I haven't heard anyone put forward before.
You remember all the old "anti-echelon" noise people would put in their e-mail messages and joke about all the time?
I wonder whether that contributed to a 9-11 intelligence failure.
*Seriously* - the recent British arrests of the people with a tonne of fertilizer was apparently started all by a sigint intercept. aka Echelon.
No one will ever be able to know, but certainly it's possible that there was a Al-Qaida e-mail that was ignored due to a large number of other anti-echelon crap on the wires at the same time... an e-mail that if intercepted might have broken the whole thing up.
> When are the processor companies goign to invest in the diamond wafers?
Oh, if only the big huge ultra-competition-paranoid hyper advanced ultra-tech companies full of PhD Phycisics and Electrical Engineers would adopt this ground-breaking technology that I a lowly luser know about!!!!! The fools!!! They're missing the boat!! Holding back progress!! How could they possibly be so stupid!!!?!??!?? It's it all so obvious!!!!
> MS has the habit of doing right things the wrong way
No argument there, the parent of my post made a general statement and mentioned all modern OSs including Win2K, and I was responding to that, albeit using Windows 2000 as the example.
I'm very impressed with how Linux avoids using disk cache except where really necessary (and impressed to hear that it's very user/admin configurable), although I haven't used it as a desktop system yet, just a bit of testing once where I had to work hard to force VM usage to go above zero.
I think 0x0d0a's on to something with the idea of a learning/intelligent/configurable/adaptive VM.
> Why on earth would you need the inactive getty's in memory?
I wasn't arguing against all aspects of VM activity these days (as I'm not an architect with specialization in those areas).
But clearly some current VMs aren't doing a good job in figuring out that it doesn't need to load some mountains of crap in disk caches instead of continuing to hold a user application in RAM, or how to react or behave when a person has loads and loads of RAM and only 300 MB worth of user processes. There are other responses where other people note that even though they only have 300 MB of processes and 768 MB of RAM, they are having user applications swapped to disk.
The parent to my post stated "smart modern page caches are designed to speed their system. Linux, MacOS X, Win2K+, etc. all boast aggressive page caches that make loading applications from disk more efficient" - and clearly those smart modern page caches are doing the wrong thing in a lot of cases. I don't need 500 MB of RAM used as a disk cache for multimedia files.
> Without a swap file, the kernel has no place to
> stick memory segments that are rarely used.
Anyone who runs Mozilla on Windows 2000 knows that if you minimize Mozilla for a half day, despite you having 756 MB RAM and not using more than 3-400 MB of it at any given time, bringing Mozilla back to the foreground takes anywhere from 2-6 seconds (depending on the speed of your disk), which is just idiotic on a 2 GHz home machine with that much RAM.
There is no reason what-so-ever that the OS should be swapping out a userland application when there's tons of RAM. Sure as hell not to make room to disk cache all these freaking multimedia files I'm moving around, I need them in the disk cache like I need a hole in my head. I can put up with a tenth of a second delay in starting to play my mp3, and using disk cache on a 100MB simpsons episode is just dumb. But I refuse to wait for a 30MB process to swap back in.
I've heard before that "you can NOT turn swap off on Windows 2000", but to hell with it, I think I'll try it when I get home tonight. I've got 756 MB of RAM, if the system crashes when I "hit the wall" so what, I don't think I will hit the wall. Any comments? Will Win2000 let me turn them all to zero min/max size? Anyone tried that before and know what the real actual implications are?
Hmmm, here's another idea, does anyone have a little FireFox extension whose job is to excercise the browser itself to prevent it from being swapped out?
There is one possible downside.
What if someone discovered how to harness the phonon/fusion reaction just so and create some kind of supercritical event?
Table top hydrogen bombs.
Oh joy, Oh joy.
I'm through and through Canadian, and I don't want you up here with us tarnishing our good name. Please f*ck off. Move to France or something.
PS to my American neighbours: Just as many raving idiots and trolls up here as anywhere else in the Western world, I apologize for their existence and promise to lart as many as possible in my lifetime.
I really do wish Bush hadn't focused on the WMD thing as the reason for going into Iraq, even if they had WMD, the UN thing (even if being run around and not effective in eliminating them), was containing them. We should have gone in there with the express #1 purpose of freeing Iraqi's from a cruel dictatorship, and with a much better well-thought-out plan for what to do after the regieme collapse. Oh well, shit happens.
But MAN, did you see all the out-and-out trolls come out of the woodwork when that one former-football player got killed in Afghanistan hunting for Osama? How could anyone so aggregiously slander another decent citizen for wanting to help find and capture Osama?
So many utterly retarded trolls. If they actually acted in real life in a manner consistent with their online personna, they'd get the shit beat out of them every single day of their life. And they would deserve it.
Hee hee.
I read a small one paragraph article in a Toronto paper the other day. Canadian government lawyers presenting arguments in front of the International Criminal Court, which is being asked to consider prosecuting NATO countries, including Canada, for the whole bombing Kosovo/Serbia thing.
It's going to take a 100 years to sort out this idiotic shit.
Bah! My bad.
obliged --> obligated.
.
But you're not obliged to tell them about the box you have buried in the woods.
And you're not obliged to tell them about the false panel above your bed.
And you're not obliged to give them information that exists solely in your neural pathways.
Somewhere in-between the box in the woods and the information in your brain is the dividing line. I don't think encrypted files should be on the side that some are suggesting it should be. You know someday those encrypted files are going to be on a chip IN my brain, or in an artificially enhanced set of neural pathways in my brain (artificial computing wetware).
Information is information, in my brain or not. As a suspect I shouldn't be obligated to give it to my accusers.
Beautiful shots.
n dex.html
:) Unless it's my ancient 0.7 version of FireBird that's not quite up to snuff.)
No chance we can convince you to throw up some 1600x1200's for our desktops, or even higher res for people who want to print their own?
Quid pro quo - http://blacktower.dyndns.org/images/backgrounds/i
(Site a little slow, I've got a few torrents going near full speed and I won't be home to throttle them down for another 5 hours, sorry. Hmmm, looks like I also need to re-visit my table code, Mozilla doesn't resize it to fit within the browser. Guess I should check the entire site for Mozilla viewability
Not just that, but guess how susceptible the people in some of these countries will be to "pressure" to report favourably.
And guess how many differing complications in the base rates of other types of "problems" will affect the statistical results.
This is *so* bad.
They'll be testing the next thalidomide in Bhopal and then claim that "the human drug trials didn't reveal any statistically significant side effects"!!!!
I first discovered Stratovarius on p2p!!! Had never even heard their name once prior to that as long as they've existed, and probably never would have!
Music (and a lot of other things) should be global, but corporations like to play corporate "optimization games" with geographical "territories" and crap. The net is great for breaking through that shit.
If God himself (herself?) came down today and decreed that no more content be created, we'd have more than enough from the last 100 years to last us the rest of our lives.
Ahh, yes, both good points in fact.
Only if you're in a little tiny 1000-2000 ton tin can warship and you get hit by something 500lbs or bigger. And even then damage control lets you get more people off safer, it saves lives.
On bigger ships, it allows you to continue combat and/or get to port and fight another day.
If you want to convince us that damage control isn't worth anything, please go talk to the ventrans from the British ships that have been hit by Argentinian iron bombs and the like. (Lucky hits to ammunition stores with 5 minute sinkage doesn't count, not unless it's highly prevelant.)
does that mean that if you have a gun and a knife, and I have the opportunity to reasearch a defense against the gun, I shouldn't
Yes, when your development of your ten thousand dollar "anti-gun" technology would obviously spur me on to carrying $5 moltov cocktails.
Do you feel safer now that you've got your "anti-gun" device walking the streets filled with criminals carrying moltov cocktails?
True, but again, every decoy built into a MIRV is effectively a kill, as it replaces a warhead
Ahhhh, so it becomes an arms race of us building anti-missile weapons at $1 Billion dollars per unit against them building decoys at $10 Million dollars per. Oh well, since "each decoy they build" is obviously such a huge "win" for us......
Are these the same scientists that are willing to throw BILLIONS and TRILLIONS of dollars at the most esoteric pure-research programs detecting primal particles (SSSC) or gravity waves?
Mis-direction. What does that have to do with the Trillion dollars you want to spend on Anti-Missile defence? So their arguments are illogical SIMPLY because they are VAGUELY associated with something else you aren't intelligent enough to see the use for?
I mean, Quantum Mechanics, what the fuck is that good for???? We should have never wasted all that money between 1890 and 1950 figuring all that shit out. Imagine how much wealthier we would all be!!!
Ridiculous circular logic. Because I'm safer from them, they are more likely to attack me?
But your favorite "deterrance theory" is built on "circular logic" as well. "By building weapons to wipe life from the face of the earth, we are in fact safer from our enemy."
You can't have one without the other. By your "anti-circular-logic" reasoning, instead of building anti-missile technology we should in fact simply get rid of all our nuclear missiles, then there won't be any more "circular logic" stuff that you don't like, and voila we're safer!!
I mean, how could building weapons possibly make us safer?
a little chicanery to advance their politics
I'm sorry, some of the most prominent intelligent logical minds on the globe present a well reasoned series of arguments, you post a bunch of absolute utterly illogical tripe and then claim *they're* the ones using "chicanery"???
FUCKING TROLLS.
That's one tiny little two sentence snipped at the end of a super long article that makes it clear that the military uses of the stations was supersceded by the cancellation of the American "military space station" concepts, by chronic delays, and by being supersceded by the civilian program... then when they have problems and a lack of stations, they throw in the Almpaz station in order to make up for it all.
What I mean to say is it looks like the article is trying *real hard* to make it look like a hard core military space station. And then at the end in one tiny sentence they say "a 20 mm cannon was fired at a target at ranges of 500m to 3000m", this supposedly ONE DAY before the station was deorbited, while it was unmanned.
EVERY single report on the net is the EXACT SAME pair of two sentences, copied verbatim.
So where do those two sentences come from?
I want to see a more authoritative report from someone respected.
> "Generally accepted to be a Nudelmann 23MM AA gun"
Should read: commonly copied and pasted all across the net from some unknown source.
You know what? I think all of these wars would have happened anyways even if the two superpowers hadn't gotten themselves involved, and I can make arguments that they would have been even MORE bloody than they were under the umbrella of the cold war.
Look at Rwanda. Just what did anyone do to "create" that? Genocide is just as easy to do if you've got 10,000 hatchet wielding lunatics. In fact, it's a lot easier if that's all you've got, with no strong central government.
> Instead, it launched the first cold war, and cost the planet millions of lives...
Replace with:
And indeed, a massive global war between the
two largest most militarized nations in the
history of earth, never took place.
Furthermore dozens of regional conflicts
that would have killed hundreds of millions of
people were instead limited killing only a dozen
or so million lives, due to the fears by the
two main superpowers that they would be
dragged in against one another and global
nuclear war would result.
Does anyone actually realize that the "5000 mph
test flight" was accelerated to 5000 mph using a
rocket, and that the scramjet only ran for 10
seconds?
They do *not* have anything close to a bird that
takes off under it's own power, climbs and
accelerates to mach 5, then accelerates some more
using a scramjet for a non-negligible amount of
time.
The "National Coffee Association" reminds me of "The Tobacco Institute".
Oddly enough, the current "Tobacco Institute" website is entirely geared towards "provide the public with access to documents produced by The Tobacco Institute in Attorney General reimbursement lawsuits and certain other specified civil actions"
I'm sure they just forgot to mention that you should only "drink immediately" in tiny little 5ml increments, and that conveying said large quantities of "scalding water" should only be undertaken in suitable spill containment systems.
I mean, anything else would be negligent.
Let alone actually KNOWING about a hundred critical incidents and doing absolutely nothing to mitigate the obvious statistical certainty that a hundred more critical incidents WILL occur should nothing change.
Honestly, I'm not sure the guy should appear personally in court for the offence. He was a member of the military on active duty. The whole premise of a military is that you're accountable to the chain of command.
The problem is that the military (almost any military, especially the US military) is utterly horrible at being "fair and impartial", and are much more likely to give their men "get out of jail free" cards, and/or to dump the blame on some junior grunt instead of blaming and fixing "the system" that caused the problem.
It's like having a local police force arrest and try their own damn members, with the chief of police acting as judge. No sane western civilian jurisdiction allows that, they always get an independent jurisdiction and judges are always highly independent of the other sections of the criminal system. But that doesn't happen in the Military. You get military police investigating and arresting military personnel who are tried by other military personnel.
The military's current system made sense 150 years ago when courts were not as impartial as they are these days, and certainly makes sense on the battlefield or in a far away place. But it doesn't really make sense in the middle of populated built up areas.
I was reading lots of stuff about the Iran/Iraq war over the weekend.
After the initial year or two where Iran managed to push the Iraqi's out of Iran, they kept fighting for another 6-7 with the WHOLE ENTIRE INTENT to spread their "Islamic State" across all of the middle east, and to eventually annihilate Israel.
If we hadn't supported Saddam then, Iran would have attempted to conquer most of the middle east.
150,000 Iraqi's died to prevent that, and the Iranian Islamic government sent 350,000 Iranians to their death in their attempts to carry out their aims (most died *AFTER* Saddam was willing to sue for peace, when the Iranian goverment kept the war going in hopes of spreading "their Islamic state" by force).
Almost everyone playing back-seat driver can't possibly imagine all the equally or even more horrible repercussions of changing any one set of things in the past.
The world is a very complicated place. If you could go back in time and undo a few things, I can just as easily expect that *even worse* things would have happened.
Just look at North Korea. The entire world has been "shunning" them for how many years now? Exactly as most peaceniks would have us do with any "rogue" state. How many North Koreans have starved to death or been put to death in camps? Look at the following, the "mid" estimate for "Domestic Democide" by the North Koreans, it stands at two million and is estimated to increase by 100,000 per year. http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB10.1.GIF
ANYONE could make a fairly solid argument that we should have bitten the bullet and conquered all three countries (Iran, Iraq, and North Korea) 20 years ago, and the net loss of life and "overall injustice" would be an order of magnitude smaller.
I give good odds that no matter what happens or how you slice it, Iraq will fall into Islamic Hard Line hands, and we'll get at least one more BIG war between various mid-east states, killing hundreds of thousands. And there's not much we can do about it, short of undermining their very *culture*.
Here's another VERY significant tidbit.
The network's usefulness does not depend on people sharing thousands of files. It depends on the aggregate bandwidth being made available.
With 4,000,000 users, if each user only shared one single file but allowed uploading - the bandwidth available and your download speeds would EXPLODE. And yet the RIAA would not be able to do anything other than file 4,000,000 lawsuits against users for sharing "one file".
My example above is extreme, but it *would* work. (Hell, it'd reduce the load on the search-nodes with the reduced duplication of sources to index).
Don't disable file sharing, just share less and leave your bandwidth "moderately on".
If you fly below their radar, you can't be intercepted.
ANY system where the right side up/down of a single fucking nut put on by one single guy that does not have any kind of independent quality control/inspection/etc process, any system at all that allows a bolt put on backwards by one single guy to kill 6 people...
It's a systemic fault.