Re:The only thing war has ever done is...
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
Maybe you should point that out to all the countries in Eastern Europe who came out early and voiced their support for the US even though France threatened to keep several of them out of the EU in retaliation
I am a citizen of one of those Eastern European countries. Our people were actually quite outraged by our government's support to the US because polls show 80% of people opposing the war. In fact, common people consider USA and USSR to me much closer to each other (at least where foreign policies are concerned) than USSR and Iraq. The fact that so many Eastern European countries' governments have voiced their support is mostly because they are relatively poor and weak, making it much easier to bribe and pressure them. If you check the public opinion then there is only one country in the world where >50% of the population is for the war and it's the US.
Re:Not a troll: How many civilians died last time?
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 4, Insightful
13,000 civilians were killed directly by American and allied forces, and about 70,000 civilians died subsequently from war-related damage to medical facilities and supplies, the electric power grid, and the water system
Btw, note that the last war didn't involve any urban warfare at all, it was mostly in the desert. This time, it is probably going to be in city of 5 million, probably meaning 6-digit civilian casualties. This is very very hard to justify by any means, and not even counting all the people who are going to be disabled or lose their homes. Somehow, I am very doubtful about this war buying anything positive for America. You know, once your children have been killed by bombs, you really don't buy the arguments that it brought you "freedom" and was for your own good.
So we shouldn't have helped with World War II since it was not on our soil? Would shouldn't have stopped the genocide in Bosnia because it was not on our soil?
Well, there is a huge difference between ending a war and starting one. This is what separates justified and unjustified military action.
This sentence really says everything. As an American, you shouldn't really have any say over any war unless you've personally partcipated in one because your country has not seen a real war on its soil for a long time. My home country has suffered in quite a few wars, never willingly, and we've almost always lost because we are a small nation. We know the real meaning of war. We know that war is not about brave faces on a TV screen, not about hi-tech and shiny metal. War is about homes being destroyed, people crawling on the streets using only their arms because they have lost their legs, and children being burned alive. Are you saying you support all that? There is absolutely no justification for that as long as there are any alternatives. And the current American administration certainly didn't want to use any of these alternatives. Why the hell was there such a hurry to start this war?
It makes me really sad to see a bunch of Americans eat pizza, watch TV and joke over the war. And it makes me even sadder to see comments moderated as 'Funny' on this page. Folks, you have no idea what war is about. In fact, no American (unless he has been in war) should express their opinions on war at all since their country has not seen a real war on its soil for a long time. My home country has suffered in quite a few wars, never willingly, and we've almost always lost because we are a small nation. We know the real meaning of war. We know that war is not about brave faces on a TV screen, not about hi-tech and shiny metal. War is about homes being destroyed, people crawling on the streets using only their arms because they have lost their legs, and children being burned alive. And there is absolutely no justification for that as long as there are any alternatives. There will be many many crimes on the soul of American government tonight.
When I look at my dad's old math textbooks, they are usually much dryer and "harder" to read than most of today's textbooks, which are loaded with colorful pictures and silly examples to make them more "child-friendly" instead of being concise and to-the-point. As a result, it is very hard to find the point from all the fluff-talk, and next to impossible to create a good systematic understanding of the topic. With these books, children don't take science seriously, and the result is much worse. In the recent 50 years or so, there's a very visible trend where textbooks get prettier, topics get more lightweight, school gets to be more "fun" instead of education, and the result (people's knowledge of science) gets worse and worse. We need to finally understand that we can't teach more/better by making the books easier and easier.
Further more, i read a stat the other day on/. that the RIAA was complaining that sales are down 10% in the last five years. BooHoo. The economy as as a whole is down 37% +- in the last five years.
wtf? I guess you may be talking about the stock market being down but this is quite irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. If the economy (measured by GDP) was down that much, we would see riots and general strikes. A company's revenue is comparable with the GDP, not stock market. And GDP is UP in last five years. Revenue being down is actually the worst sign in business, much worse than profits or stock price (which may fluctuate quite wildly) being down, it is much harder to recover from. So any businessman would have quite a lot of reason to worry if their sales have fallen that much.
You can configure Windows to do the same. At my workplace the policy is rather strict, so it actually takes some effort to come up with a good password.
At least we are starting to know who are our enemies
Dude, this is not a religion. This is not an ideological war. This is business. Business is about profits, not friends and enemies. Companies change their attitude toward each other every day, it shouldn't be taken personally. If you start thinking about it in terms of "right" and "wrong" or "friends" and "enemies" then you end up like all these Linux companies who thought that as long as they are on the "right" religious side, profits don't matter. There is only one truth and one friend in business, and it is called money. Get used to it.
I think that people will add the books that they have read and enjoyed rather than just having a list of millions of titles, some of which are good, most of which are crap.
This idea would require a database of very specific books (e.g. SF). And there are already many sites (like sfsite.com) that do this. There are just too many books in the world in order to maintain a "list of only good books", without any constraints.
Amazon and other retailer sites are good, but a free, non-comercial one is better. Amazon won't bother having entries for books they don't sell, which excludes many old and obscure ones.
The original poster says that his project's goal is to become "the IMDB of books", but IMDB happens to be owned by Amazon now. So it doesn't really look like this project has your goals in mind.
If Amazon decides not to carry the book, *poof* it ceases to exist if we rely on it as a means of archiving records of books.
Actually, Amazon has hundreds of thousands of out of print titles in their database, complete with reviews and data. So your argument doesn't really hold. Also, I would be much more worried about some guy's week-end project going offline than the web's biggest retailer. So I would still need more convincing to believe that this is in any way a better archiving solution than Amazon or other online bookstores.
I would much rather research a book or series without being unindated with adds and guesses as to what I want, and sweaters randomly dropping down out of a Target tab
In order for this site to be taken seriously and comparable to Amazon, it needs millions of titles, much more features, and the ability to survive slashdot effect. This presumes a rather powerful database, quite a bit of storage and bandwidth. The current amateurish system would never survive this, it needs some serious full time staff to keep it running. And there is no way this would be free unless the original poster is a philantropic millionaire.
Hate to burst your bubble but:
on
An IMDb for Books
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· Score: 1, Redundant
1. It doesn't look like anything that online bookstores (e.g. Amazon) wouldn't have already. If I want to find out if a book is good or bad then I can usually already do it. 2. IMDB and other similar "serious" sites have paid full time staff that deals with submissions, fixing inaccuracies, and feeding out other problems. This site, however, looks somewhat amateurish. I have seen a few similar attempts (SF-specific though) that are quickly reduced to anarchy by duplicate submissions, inaccurate data etc. 3. As I mentioned in the previous point, there are many such attempts already, often having more features. How is this particular one any more special so that it should be advertised on/. front page? 4. It doesn't survice the/. effect. Enough said.
All this being said, I wish you luck. If you manage to keep the site growing, consistent and high quality (you need full time dedication for it!), it never hurts to have more information available.
I hope that Google can continue to maintain their lead.
If anybody else would provide better service, why should you want Google still have any lead if it becomes an inferior technology then? Just because they have pulled off some nifty stuff doesn't mean they should be a sacred cow.
Even if we don't get crunched, there are still too many inevitable things that current physics is predicting. Even if we somehow evade the heat death and all the other "short-term" worries, the matter itself as we know it will ultimately cease to exist because even the "stable" elemetary particles will ultimately decay (proton's halflife is about 1e31 years) and everything will turn into a soup of photons.
In Russia (present day, not Soviet) it is rather common for politicians in rural areas to buy votes for bottles of vodka or other goods. If we let people swap votes like this then we basically acknowledge that votes are like any other goods that can be bought and sold. The next step will probably be people selling votes on eBay, or wholesale discounts on votes, or something even worse. The principle would be the same. This, while being an interesting idea and somewhat justified in our wacky political system, will be dangerous to democracy in the long run, and will certainly not be the right way to cure the problem.
I happened to read some archived Slashdot articles from the time period immediately following 911. I find it highly ironic that they were full of nonsensical posts saying things like "Oh, they just hate us because we are so free!" Well, I guess we don't have to worry about that any more, do we?
I have never really heard a good explanation, why we need the ISS and Shuttle, and how exactly are they supposed to help us achieve bigger goals like spreading life elsewhere in the Universe or making spaceflight commercially viable. Going to the Moon was a good example of the opposite - we picked a real high target, of which we weren't really sure how to achieve it, and set it as a clear goal. And when working toward the goal, we made tremendous advances in science, creating many new practical technologies and materials. ISS, on the other hand, has never been a grand target, we have always played it safe, always known how it is would be achieved, so basically it is just an expensive toy, there is nothing fundamentally new to be discovered by building it. If we concentrated our efforts on something bigger, like flying to Mars or creating a Moon base then we might not get immediate gratification. But working towards these tough but clear goals would create a motivation for making all kinds of smaller advances that would all support the main goal, just like they did in the sixties. For example, we could solve the closed ecosphere problem, the technologies from this advance alone would have the potential to significantly improve everyday life. But instead no one is willing to take risks any more, and we are stuck with doing the same stuff over and over again, putting all sorts of junk in low Earth orbit, something that we have known how to do for ages, and trying to convince ourselves that we are making great progress while actually being stuck in an Escher house.
First, let me say that I'm a big fan of space exploration, and there's nothing in my life that I'd want to see more than mankind spreading out to other planets. I see some issues though. Throughout the ages, the main power behind any exploration has been greed. Columbus or Magellan would never have got any funding if their superiors wouldn't have been hoping to get enormous profits from these enterprises. In spite of huge losses (Magellan lost ~90% of his men), the profits were even bigger, and the cost to benefit ratio was very low. So it is important to observe that nothing significant will really happen unless there is profit involved, be it from mining or something else. Now, to put this into a perspective - what can we find on other planets that we couldn't find in Antarctica or Sahara with a fraction of the cost? These two are incredibly more hospitable than Mars or Venus and the cost/benefit ratio of acquiring either materials, energy or any other resources would be thousands of times better. But still nobody wants to create any permanent settlements or industry there. So why would anybody be interested in going to other planets if we don't even want to get to every corner of the Earth? Taking all this into account, I think that the only sensible thing we could do about space exploration is to research ways of terraforming other planets, bringing life to them, creating a more hospitable atmosphere etc. Without this the costs would always remain prohibitive. And of course, this would be something that the mankind could actually be proud of - turning a dead rock into a live garden would be much more noble and noteworthy than anything humans have done during their existence so far.
Microsoft is just keeping up with the times here. Implementing DRM stuff is a huge undertaking, taking several years to get into all the mainstream products, and costing the company immense amounts, without directly bringing in anything (not to mention customer ill will etc.) But if certain bills are passed and it should become illegal to produce or own anything that handles digital data and doesn't include copy protection then Microsoft would have a lead before other companies. The whole Palladium thing is just an insurance policy against such a case. However, it seems that all this is turning out to cost way too much, and Microsoft isn't terribly happy to be involved in this mess (lots of pain, little gain), so of course it is logical to seek a way out while keeping one's options open.
There used to be a time when Britain was THE leading industrial country. But people got comfortable with that, old industrial interests got entrenched, and as a result they had laws in the end of the 19th century that prohibited automobiles from driving faster than 4mph, and a pedestrian with a red flag had to walk in front of every vehicle. Now it doesn't take too much thinking to see that a country that passes such laws can never last as a leading technological power. I can just see the US going down the same road with its overregulation of everything.
Are we supposed to be impressed with a computer that can serve 8 hits and 4 pages per second?
Sounds kinda weak to me too. I am currently working on a web server application that's supposed to serve highly dynamic, personalized pages (perhaps comparable to slashdot). Our perf goal is 200 pages/sec. Of course, it would be on bigger hardware but I think we could easily beat the number mentioned in the article on a 500Mhz PC.
I wonder how much this costs, and I'm assumming its satalite so does that affect pings for online gaming? Fragging from 10,000feet..........
If it's anything like the phone service (really crappy line quality, >2 second delay) in most airplanes then you're lucky if you get something like 4800bauds from them. You'd better forget about gaming, porn etc. right away.
And it does make you wonder how many cars = one booster when it comes to total emissions produced... I'd say, a couple million, on top of all the heat waste you dump into the atmosphere
Yes but the rocket takes only a few minutes to leave the atmosphere, while the cars keep driving for hours and hours. So I wouldn't say it's too bad. Jet airplanes are a different problem though.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you should point that out to all the countries in Eastern Europe who came out early and voiced their support for the US even though France threatened to keep several of them out of the EU in retaliation
I am a citizen of one of those Eastern European countries. Our people were actually quite outraged by our government's support to the US because polls show 80% of people opposing the war. In fact, common people consider USA and USSR to me much closer to each other (at least where foreign policies are concerned) than USSR and Iraq. The fact that so many Eastern European countries' governments have voiced their support is mostly because they are relatively poor and weak, making it much easier to bribe and pressure them. If you check the public opinion then there is only one country in the world where >50% of the population is for the war and it's the US.
13,000 civilians were killed directly by American and allied forces, and about 70,000 civilians died subsequently from war-related damage to medical facilities and supplies, the electric power grid, and the water system
Btw, note that the last war didn't involve any urban warfare at all, it was mostly in the desert. This time, it is probably going to be in city of 5 million, probably meaning 6-digit civilian casualties. This is very very hard to justify by any means, and not even counting all the people who are going to be disabled or lose their homes.
Somehow, I am very doubtful about this war buying anything positive for America. You know, once your children have been killed by bombs, you really don't buy the arguments that it brought you "freedom" and was for your own good.
So we shouldn't have helped with World War II since it was not on our soil?
Would shouldn't have stopped the genocide in Bosnia because it was not on our soil?
Well, there is a huge difference between ending a war and starting one. This is what separates justified and unjustified military action.
Speaking as an American who supports this war
This sentence really says everything.
As an American, you shouldn't really have any say over any war unless you've personally partcipated in one because your country has not seen a real war on its soil for a long time. My home country has suffered in quite a few wars, never willingly, and we've almost always lost because we are a small nation. We know the real meaning of war.
We know that war is not about brave faces on a TV screen, not about hi-tech and shiny metal.
War is about homes being destroyed, people crawling on the streets using only their arms because they have lost their legs, and children being burned alive.
Are you saying you support all that?
There is absolutely no justification for that as long as there are any alternatives.
And the current American administration certainly didn't want to use any of these alternatives. Why the hell was there such a hurry to start this war?
It makes me really sad to see a bunch of Americans eat pizza, watch TV and joke over the war. And it makes me even sadder to see comments moderated as 'Funny' on this page. Folks, you have no idea what war is about.
In fact, no American (unless he has been in war) should express their opinions on war at all since their country has not seen a real war on its soil for a long time. My home country has suffered in quite a few wars, never willingly, and we've almost always lost because we are a small nation. We know the real meaning of war.
We know that war is not about brave faces on a TV screen, not about hi-tech and shiny metal.
War is about homes being destroyed, people crawling on the streets using only their arms because they have lost their legs, and children being burned alive.
And there is absolutely no justification for that as long as there are any alternatives.
There will be many many crimes on the soul of American government tonight.
When I look at my dad's old math textbooks, they are usually much dryer and "harder" to read than most of today's textbooks, which are loaded with colorful pictures and silly examples to make them more "child-friendly" instead of being concise and to-the-point.
As a result, it is very hard to find the point from all the fluff-talk, and next to impossible to create a good systematic understanding of the topic. With these books, children don't take science seriously, and the result is much worse.
In the recent 50 years or so, there's a very visible trend where textbooks get prettier, topics get more lightweight, school gets to be more "fun" instead of education, and the result (people's knowledge of science) gets worse and worse.
We need to finally understand that we can't teach more/better by making the books easier and easier.
Further more, i read a stat the other day on /. that the RIAA was complaining that sales are down 10% in the last five years. BooHoo. The economy as as a whole is down 37% +- in the last five years.
wtf? I guess you may be talking about the stock market being down but this is quite irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. If the economy (measured by GDP) was down that much, we would see riots and general strikes.
A company's revenue is comparable with the GDP, not stock market. And GDP is UP in last five years.
Revenue being down is actually the worst sign in business, much worse than profits or stock price (which may fluctuate quite wildly) being down, it is much harder to recover from. So any businessman would have quite a lot of reason to worry if their sales have fallen that much.
You can configure Windows to do the same. At my workplace the policy is rather strict, so it actually takes some effort to come up with a good password.
At least we are starting to know who are our enemies
Dude, this is not a religion. This is not an ideological war. This is business. Business is about profits, not friends and enemies. Companies change their attitude toward each other every day, it shouldn't be taken personally.
If you start thinking about it in terms of "right" and "wrong" or "friends" and "enemies" then you end up like all these Linux companies who thought that as long as they are on the "right" religious side, profits don't matter.
There is only one truth and one friend in business, and it is called money. Get used to it.
I think that people will add the books that they have read and enjoyed rather than just having a list of millions of titles, some of which are good, most of which are crap.
This idea would require a database of very specific books (e.g. SF). And there are already many sites (like sfsite.com) that do this.
There are just too many books in the world in order to maintain a "list of only good books", without any constraints.
Amazon and other retailer sites are good, but a free, non-comercial one is better. Amazon won't bother having entries for books they don't sell, which excludes many old and obscure ones.
The original poster says that his project's goal is to become "the IMDB of books", but IMDB happens to be owned by Amazon now. So it doesn't really look like this project has your goals in mind.
If Amazon decides not to carry the book, *poof* it ceases to exist if we rely on it as a means of archiving records of books.
Actually, Amazon has hundreds of thousands of out of print titles in their database, complete with reviews and data. So your argument doesn't really hold.
Also, I would be much more worried about some guy's week-end project going offline than the web's biggest retailer. So I would still need more convincing to believe that this is in any way a better archiving solution than Amazon or other online bookstores.
I would much rather research a book or series without being unindated with adds and guesses as to what I want, and sweaters randomly dropping down out of a Target tab
In order for this site to be taken seriously and comparable to Amazon, it needs millions of titles, much more features, and the ability to survive slashdot effect. This presumes a rather powerful database, quite a bit of storage and bandwidth. The current amateurish system would never survive this, it needs some serious full time staff to keep it running.
And there is no way this would be free unless the original poster is a philantropic millionaire.
1. It doesn't look like anything that online bookstores (e.g. Amazon) wouldn't have already. If I want to find out if a book is good or bad then I can usually already do it. /. front page? /. effect. Enough said.
2. IMDB and other similar "serious" sites have paid full time staff that deals with submissions, fixing inaccuracies, and feeding out other problems. This site, however, looks somewhat amateurish. I have seen a few similar attempts (SF-specific though) that are quickly reduced to anarchy by duplicate submissions, inaccurate data etc.
3. As I mentioned in the previous point, there are many such attempts already, often having more features. How is this particular one any more special so that it should be advertised on
4. It doesn't survice the
All this being said, I wish you luck. If you manage to keep the site growing, consistent and high quality (you need full time dedication for it!), it never hurts to have more information available.
I hope that Google can continue to maintain their lead.
If anybody else would provide better service, why should you want Google still have any lead if it becomes an inferior technology then?
Just because they have pulled off some nifty stuff doesn't mean they should be a sacred cow.
Even if we don't get crunched, there are still too many inevitable things that current physics is predicting. Even if we somehow evade the heat death and all the other "short-term" worries, the matter itself as we know it will ultimately cease to exist because even the "stable" elemetary particles will ultimately decay (proton's halflife is about 1e31 years) and everything will turn into a soup of photons.
In Russia (present day, not Soviet) it is rather common for politicians in rural areas to buy votes for bottles of vodka or other goods.
If we let people swap votes like this then we basically acknowledge that votes are like any other goods that can be bought and sold. The next step will probably be people selling votes on eBay, or wholesale discounts on votes, or something even worse. The principle would be the same. This, while being an interesting idea and somewhat justified in our wacky political system, will be dangerous to democracy in the long run, and will certainly not be the right way to cure the problem.
I happened to read some archived Slashdot articles from the time period immediately following 911.
I find it highly ironic that they were full of nonsensical posts saying things like "Oh, they just hate us because we are so free!" Well, I guess we don't have to worry about that any more, do we?
I have never really heard a good explanation, why we need the ISS and Shuttle, and how exactly are they supposed to help us achieve bigger goals like spreading life elsewhere in the Universe or making spaceflight commercially viable.
Going to the Moon was a good example of the opposite - we picked a real high target, of which we weren't really sure how to achieve it, and set it as a clear goal. And when working toward the goal, we made tremendous advances in science, creating many new practical technologies and materials.
ISS, on the other hand, has never been a grand target, we have always played it safe, always known how it is would be achieved, so basically it is just an expensive toy, there is nothing fundamentally new to be discovered by building it.
If we concentrated our efforts on something bigger, like flying to Mars or creating a Moon base then we might not get immediate gratification. But working towards these tough but clear goals would create a motivation for making all kinds of smaller advances that would all support the main goal, just like they did in the sixties. For example, we could solve the closed ecosphere problem, the technologies from this advance alone would have the potential to significantly improve everyday life.
But instead no one is willing to take risks any more, and we are stuck with doing the same stuff over and over again, putting all sorts of junk in low Earth orbit, something that we have known how to do for ages, and trying to convince ourselves that we are making great progress while actually being stuck in an Escher house.
First, let me say that I'm a big fan of space exploration, and there's nothing in my life that I'd want to see more than mankind spreading out to other planets.
I see some issues though.
Throughout the ages, the main power behind any exploration has been greed. Columbus or Magellan would never have got any funding if their superiors wouldn't have been hoping to get enormous profits from these enterprises. In spite of huge losses (Magellan lost ~90% of his men), the profits were even bigger, and the cost to benefit ratio was very low.
So it is important to observe that nothing significant will really happen unless there is profit involved, be it from mining or something else.
Now, to put this into a perspective - what can we find on other planets that we couldn't find in Antarctica or Sahara with a fraction of the cost? These two are incredibly more hospitable than Mars or Venus and the cost/benefit ratio of acquiring either materials, energy or any other resources would be thousands of times better.
But still nobody wants to create any permanent settlements or industry there.
So why would anybody be interested in going to other planets if we don't even want to get to every corner of the Earth?
Taking all this into account, I think that the only sensible thing we could do about space exploration is to research ways of terraforming other planets, bringing life to them, creating a more hospitable atmosphere etc. Without this the costs would always remain prohibitive.
And of course, this would be something that the mankind could actually be proud of - turning a dead rock into a live garden would be much more noble and noteworthy than anything humans have done during their existence so far.
Microsoft is just keeping up with the times here. Implementing DRM stuff is a huge undertaking, taking several years to get into all the mainstream products, and costing the company immense amounts, without directly bringing in anything (not to mention customer ill will etc.)
But if certain bills are passed and it should become illegal to produce or own anything that handles digital data and doesn't include copy protection then Microsoft would have a lead before other companies. The whole Palladium thing is just an insurance policy against such a case.
However, it seems that all this is turning out to cost way too much, and Microsoft isn't terribly happy to be involved in this mess (lots of pain, little gain), so of course it is logical to seek a way out while keeping one's options open.
There used to be a time when Britain was THE leading industrial country. But people got comfortable with that, old industrial interests got entrenched, and as a result they had laws in the end of the 19th century that prohibited automobiles from driving faster than 4mph, and a pedestrian with a red flag had to walk in front of every vehicle. Now it doesn't take too much thinking to see that a country that passes such laws can never last as a leading technological power.
I can just see the US going down the same road with its overregulation of everything.
Are we supposed to be impressed with a computer that can serve 8 hits and 4 pages per second?
Sounds kinda weak to me too. I am currently working on a web server application that's supposed to serve highly dynamic, personalized pages (perhaps comparable to slashdot). Our perf goal is 200 pages/sec. Of course, it would be on bigger hardware but I think we could easily beat the number mentioned in the article on a 500Mhz PC.
I wonder how much this costs, and I'm assumming its satalite so does that affect pings for online gaming? Fragging from 10,000feet..........
If it's anything like the phone service (really crappy line quality, >2 second delay) in most airplanes then you're lucky if you get something like 4800bauds from them. You'd better forget about gaming, porn etc. right away.
And it does make you wonder how many cars = one booster when it comes to total emissions produced... I'd say, a couple million, on top of all the heat waste you dump into the atmosphere
Yes but the rocket takes only a few minutes to leave the atmosphere, while the cars keep driving for hours and hours. So I wouldn't say it's too bad. Jet airplanes are a different problem though.