Umm, why is it a job for the Air Force, as opposed to the Navy, Army or some other Governmental agency? Offensive cyber-warfare may be a role for the air force, as in blowing up the computers of our adversaries by dropping bombs on them.....
The parent was trying to troll, but the Air Force DID try to hog the "cyber warfare" mission, and SecDef Gates slapped them down for it. The Army and Navy protested, and they had a valid point: since all the services rely on computer networks, why should one service have a monopoly on "computer warfare"?
"They didn't claim the FSF is a terrorist organization (yet)> "
Not only are that not doing that, precisely what in this part of their filing is wrong?
The 9-page response (PDF) â" 4 pages longer than the document to which it was responding â" termed the FSF an organization 'dedicated to eliminating restrictions on copying, redistribution, and modifying computer programs', and accused the FSF of having an 'open and virulent bias against copyrights' and 'blatant bias' against the record companies. They called 'Recording Industry vs. The People' an 'anti-recording industry web site'
The FSF does want to do those things. They do have a bias against copyright (though not copyleft). I've heard Stallman say that copyright violation could be called "sharing with your neighbor". That blog they mentioned is an anti-industry website.
It's pretty silly to protest those things when, not only are they true, but their members and admirers are proud about it. It's like Che Guevarra protesting "But he called me a Commie, your honor!". Yeah, so? It's true, isn't it?
Why is anyone shocked that they're filing a response? Seriously?
For the last few years, guys with the slightest connection to anything even remotely connected to the climate and weather are being called "climate scientists" or "climate change expert." Huh?
Case in point: David Suzuki, a Canadian zoologist who has done all his professional work in genetics. Somehow, he became a climate scientist in the press. This is also the guy that said " climate change deniers", especially ones in politics, should be jailed for their "crimes".
Oh thank you god! Finally someone who actually agrees with me on what the purpose of education is. Teaching should be about stimulating the kids to want to learn, to want to find out the whys and hows!...and give them the tools to do so. Off course it is an other matter in higher education, but that is besides the point here as people seems to be talking about creating mindless drones belonging to one camp or the other.
Sorry to bust your bubble, but anywhere you go, you're going to find that a lot of learning isn't fun, self-fullfilling personal explorations of the mind. Much if it is dull, gritty, hard work. I agree with you to some extent, but you're not getting much of an education if it all involves things that only stimulate your interest. Math, in particular, can only be effectively taught via a great deal of repetition and memorization and grunt work. As math teachers say, "drill till it kills".
The notion that all schooling can be fun and interesting is a Utopian fantasy. There is no free lunch. Everything worth getting in the world takes a great deal of boring, repetitive work, to one extent or another. And that includes knowledge.
You strike me as the type of person who would become a doctor and then refuse to perform abortions because it was against your "morals". Try leaving decisions about right and wrong up to the supreme court and do your damn job.
I've always thought that obstetricians that perform abortions were doing exactly the opposite of their job... safely bringing babies into the world.
Assuming the "rich" software engineers you're referring to made less than $250K last year, they actually got a tax cut from Obama. Stop drinking the GOP Kool-Aid for a minute and think about where your interests really lie.
Does that include the bottom %50 percent that don't even pay income taxes? That wouldn't be a tax "cut" then, would it? Stopping drinking the Democrat Kool-Aid. My interests are in a government that won't take more money from someone just because someone else is jealous that he doesn't have it.
The "business as usual" thing is what got us all into this economic mess in the first place. I don't see what the problem is with a little more regulation of all things financial. Sure, it may suck for a little while, but it's the price we have to pay for 30+ years of financial shenanigans.
I keep seeing this silly meme... about how deregulation is the problem in finance. You are aware that finance is by far the most heavily regulated business sector in America, right? All those thousands and thousands of pages of regulations didn't stop this, so we need... more regulation?
Specifically, tell me what was de-regulated that caused the housing implosion? The repeal of Glass-Steagall? That simply let bank holding companies (that's regular banks, to most folks) buy and sell stocks and bonds... which is what they're doing now anyway, now that banks bought out all the big finance firms... with the blessing of both the Bush and Obama Administrations.
So, tell me which particular de-regulation did this again?
" we're going to be deeply screwed when it comes to producing something we've come to take for granted in the modern age - plastics."
I'm a capitalist, free market, generally right-wing kind of guy. That said, I'd love to see less plastic in the world. Not eliminated, mind you... just used a lot less. Yeah, plastic is cheap, and in fact is downright necessary for many things... I wouldn't want a glass shampoo bottle, for instance. But the abundance of plastics in our society has led to the "cheap disposable" mentality of modern economics... things are cheaper to buy up front, but don't last as long, and tend to end up in dumps and landfills more. You don't repair a TV or a radio anymore... you just buy a new one. I don't think its a coincidence that the more plastic there is in a product, the less it will last, which is ironic, since the plastic itself will be around for thousands of years in some cases.
Plastic = cheap and trashy, not just in the cost of the plastic itself, but in the mindset of the manufacturer whenever something has a lot of plastic in it.
Why mod the poster down? I support coal technologies, but at the present, Steven Chu himself has said that burning coal actually releases more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants. The parent poster was simply stating a fact, not trolling.
I'm pretty sure the breeze blocks used to build most houses in the UK are largely made out of fly ash.
Perhaps the very process of making concrete with it neutralizes the radiation hazard? Surely the UK wouldn't stand by while the entire country builds radioactive houses, schools, and commercial centers. If someone can elaborate on this, please do.
You don't like the fact *AA cronies now occupy the highest offices in the land? Instead of hitting iTunes and Netflix for your entertainment needs, close your wallet and head on over to The Pirate Bay. Change happens when people are pushed over the edge and many famous instances of civil disobedience proves it.
Going to the Pirate Bay isn't civil disobedience any more than robbing a store is civil disobedience. If you truly had the courage of your convictions, you'd simply abstain from copyrighted movies and music. What you're advocating is simply an excuse, a convenient cover to not pay for it. You're just a cheapskate using politics as a justification not to pay for those services.
"Honestly, I am much more worried about random errors and undirected worms in the computers running our infrastructure than I am about the Chinese military. I am much more worried about criminal hackers than I am about government hackers."
That's pretty damn shortsighted on his part, then. We should be worrying about criminal mischief, but it's simply stupid to ignore national security implications of things like infrastructure. If another major war between peer nations comes, it won't just be ordinance being dropped... attacking each other by non-conventional and "soft" means will be a part of it too.
"Please put your strawmen away before they get burned. The only side that seems to call obama the "chosen one" are republicans"
You're blind. Democrats are taking personal loyalty oaths to Barrack Obama. I thought the Right hero-worshipped Reagan, but they have nothing on the slobbering boy-band love that Democrats display for Obama. At least the Republicans waited until Reagan was out of office.
Canada is a country and recognising Quebec as somehow special is what created this mess in the first place.
Stuff like recognizing Quebec is precisely why Canada isn't the USA. Multiculturalism vs the Melting Pot and all that.
But there are plenty of American politicians that prefer the US drop the whole "melting-pot" concept altogether, and adopt multiculturalism as official policy. I'd say we're damn close to doing that anyway. I haven't heard "melting pot" in awhile, but I hear Congressmen, journalists, intellectuals, etc, droning on about the value of multiculturalism all the time. Unfortunately, the US is becoming as Balkanized as Canada and much of Europe.
"If you want to argue that giving a copy of a CD to 100,000 of your closest friends is not fair use, you must also argue that giving it to just one of your closest friends is not fair use either, because there is no set definition for what constitutes a "close friend", outside of whatever criteria an individual chooses to use.:)"
I choose to use established US case law. I don't know what you're using. Courts have ruled that small scale copying of files for personal use, including lending them to small numbers of people, is fair use. But they've ruled that doesn't justify large scale copying and distribution.
No matter the technology, whether it be P2P or physically burning a CD, giving a copyrighted file to one of your closest friends is fair use. Giving it to 100,000 of your closest friends isn't.
Star Trek will always do well at the box office; there's enough die hard trekkies that will go & watch regardless of quality
Then why was Nemesis a total failure?
No, real Trek fans are feeling burned out too, and are tired of Paramount 'effing up the franchise with trash like Enterprise. And while the trailers look exciting in some regards, I have no hope that JJ Abrams will make a real Star Trek movie, just another "shiny box" movie with Star Trek characters.
"By that criteria, you can't take ANY site seriously."
Well, yes you can. You can have a site that has an ideological bent, but still has quality reporting and writing. National Review on the right, and The New Republic on the left are good examples here (and yes, with the exception of the Stephen Glass episode).
The HuffPuff, however, is a really horrible vehicle to attempt serious journalism. Its always been the Daily Kos with celebrities. That's great if what you want is ideological red meat (or blue meat here, if you will). But to me this is like Michael Savage or Janeane Garofalo announcing that they're going to become "serious journalists".
I don't care how "dated" the graphics look... if its anything like Return to Castle Wolfenstein (or Enemy Territory, which is still my primary game), then I'll snatch it up as soon as it's available.
Though I use multiple operating systems today, and like OS X and Linux the best, I gotta say, I miss Windows 95.
Yes, it was unstable. Yes, it was hyped to the clouds. Yes, it brought nothing new to computing that Mac OS and Amiga hadn't already done. But it was fun. Part of this is because Windows 95 coincided with the Internet really catching on with the public. Dial-up, and then cable, AOL (which, for all its criticisms, made the Internet available to the non-tech public), browsers, email, IRC... all of that was shiny and new back then, and Windows 95 carried it to most of the world. PC gaming really took off with Windows 95. Myst was a revolution. Doom II ate up a lot of my life. Who back then didn't spend many weekends staying up all night, to the breaking sun of dawn, playing games, "surfing the web", and chatting, in AOL rooms or IRC, with people far across the globe in real time? Who wasn't amazed and excited doing these things?
Guys, that was fun. And I miss those days. I still occasionally run Win 95 in VM just to play something like Hover. And when I do, I remember what it was like to actually enjoy the computer.
Modern personal computing was really built on what Windows 95 brought to the public. And now computing isn't fun anymore, anymore than, say, using a telephone is. It's ordinary, commonplace, and utilitarian now. Much like flying on a commercial airliner these days. Guys like Charles Lindbergh would be amazed if he could've seen what it was like to fly on a 777. But to us, eh, it's just a way to get from one place to another. And that pretty much sums up the feel of computing today.
One caviat here; I wasn't a Mac user back then, and I've since had a chance to play with Classic OS on an old iMac, and I gotta say, It was brilliant. It had it's own problems, but I have to admit that now I see what the big deal was. That was a special OS, and after playing with it for a weekend, I was actually overcome with a feeling of sadness at one point, because I realized that all throughout the nineties, I missed out on this. The classic Mac OS really was everything it's fans claimed.
Ah, yes. But the very fact that we obsess over being sex-saturated makes it worse. Think Victorian times - child prostitution and deviance went through the roof, due to the repression of something NORMAL.
"The president/CEO of Diebold promised to literally do everything in his power to "deliver" Ohio's electoral votes to GWB."
Wow, you just can't let go, can you? Bush is out of office and you're still obsessing over him.
The Diebold guy promising to "deliver" Ohio for Bush was speaking at a party event, in the capacity as a party fundraiser and organizer, not as part of your fevered fantasies of a "right-wing coup". Despite your paranoia, the same voting systems were used to swept Democrats into power in 2006 and 2008.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, why is it a job for the Air Force, as opposed to the Navy, Army or some other Governmental agency? Offensive cyber-warfare may be a role for the air force, as in blowing up the computers of our adversaries by dropping bombs on them.....
The parent was trying to troll, but the Air Force DID try to hog the "cyber warfare" mission, and SecDef Gates slapped them down for it. The Army and Navy protested, and they had a valid point: since all the services rely on computer networks, why should one service have a monopoly on "computer warfare"?
"They didn't claim the FSF is a terrorist organization (yet)> "
Not only are that not doing that, precisely what in this part of their filing is wrong?
The 9-page response (PDF) â" 4 pages longer than the document to which it was responding â" termed the FSF an organization 'dedicated to eliminating restrictions on copying, redistribution, and modifying computer programs', and accused the FSF of having an 'open and virulent bias against copyrights' and 'blatant bias' against the record companies. They called 'Recording Industry vs. The People' an 'anti-recording industry web site'
The FSF does want to do those things. They do have a bias against copyright (though not copyleft). I've heard Stallman say that copyright violation could be called "sharing with your neighbor". That blog they mentioned is an anti-industry website.
It's pretty silly to protest those things when, not only are they true, but their members and admirers are proud about it. It's like Che Guevarra protesting "But he called me a Commie, your honor!". Yeah, so? It's true, isn't it?
Why is anyone shocked that they're filing a response? Seriously?
That's not a bad point.
For the last few years, guys with the slightest connection to anything even remotely connected to the climate and weather are being called "climate scientists" or "climate change expert." Huh?
Case in point: David Suzuki, a Canadian zoologist who has done all his professional work in genetics. Somehow, he became a climate scientist in the press. This is also the guy that said " climate change deniers", especially ones in politics, should be jailed for their "crimes".
Oh thank you god! Finally someone who actually agrees with me on what the purpose of education is. Teaching should be about stimulating the kids to want to learn, to want to find out the whys and hows!...and give them the tools to do so. Off course it is an other matter in higher education, but that is besides the point here as people seems to be talking about creating mindless drones belonging to one camp or the other.
Sorry to bust your bubble, but anywhere you go, you're going to find that a lot of learning isn't fun, self-fullfilling personal explorations of the mind. Much if it is dull, gritty, hard work. I agree with you to some extent, but you're not getting much of an education if it all involves things that only stimulate your interest. Math, in particular, can only be effectively taught via a great deal of repetition and memorization and grunt work. As math teachers say, "drill till it kills".
The notion that all schooling can be fun and interesting is a Utopian fantasy. There is no free lunch. Everything worth getting in the world takes a great deal of boring, repetitive work, to one extent or another. And that includes knowledge.
You strike me as the type of person who would become a doctor and then refuse to perform abortions because it was against your "morals". Try leaving decisions about right and wrong up to the supreme court and do your damn job.
I've always thought that obstetricians that perform abortions were doing exactly the opposite of their job... safely bringing babies into the world.
Assuming the "rich" software engineers you're referring to made less than $250K last year, they actually got a tax cut from Obama. Stop drinking the GOP Kool-Aid for a minute and think about where your interests really lie.
Does that include the bottom %50 percent that don't even pay income taxes? That wouldn't be a tax "cut" then, would it? Stopping drinking the Democrat Kool-Aid. My interests are in a government that won't take more money from someone just because someone else is jealous that he doesn't have it.
The "business as usual" thing is what got us all into this economic mess in the first place. I don't see what the problem is with a little more regulation of all things financial. Sure, it may suck for a little while, but it's the price we have to pay for 30+ years of financial shenanigans.
I keep seeing this silly meme... about how deregulation is the problem in finance. You are aware that finance is by far the most heavily regulated business sector in America, right? All those thousands and thousands of pages of regulations didn't stop this, so we need... more regulation?
Specifically, tell me what was de-regulated that caused the housing implosion? The repeal of Glass-Steagall? That simply let bank holding companies (that's regular banks, to most folks) buy and sell stocks and bonds... which is what they're doing now anyway, now that banks bought out all the big finance firms... with the blessing of both the Bush and Obama Administrations.
So, tell me which particular de-regulation did this again?
" we're going to be deeply screwed when it comes to producing something we've come to take for granted in the modern age - plastics."
I'm a capitalist, free market, generally right-wing kind of guy. That said, I'd love to see less plastic in the world. Not eliminated, mind you... just used a lot less. Yeah, plastic is cheap, and in fact is downright necessary for many things... I wouldn't want a glass shampoo bottle, for instance. But the abundance of plastics in our society has led to the "cheap disposable" mentality of modern economics... things are cheaper to buy up front, but don't last as long, and tend to end up in dumps and landfills more. You don't repair a TV or a radio anymore... you just buy a new one. I don't think its a coincidence that the more plastic there is in a product, the less it will last, which is ironic, since the plastic itself will be around for thousands of years in some cases.
Plastic = cheap and trashy, not just in the cost of the plastic itself, but in the mindset of the manufacturer whenever something has a lot of plastic in it.
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=coal+radioactive+emissions
Why mod the poster down? I support coal technologies, but at the present, Steven Chu himself has said that burning coal actually releases more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants. The parent poster was simply stating a fact, not trolling.
I'm pretty sure the breeze blocks used to build most houses in the UK are largely made out of fly ash.
Perhaps the very process of making concrete with it neutralizes the radiation hazard? Surely the UK wouldn't stand by while the entire country builds radioactive houses, schools, and commercial centers. If someone can elaborate on this, please do.
You don't like the fact *AA cronies now occupy the highest offices in the land? Instead of hitting iTunes and Netflix for your entertainment needs, close your wallet and head on over to The Pirate Bay. Change happens when people are pushed over the edge and many famous instances of civil disobedience proves it.
Going to the Pirate Bay isn't civil disobedience any more than robbing a store is civil disobedience. If you truly had the courage of your convictions, you'd simply abstain from copyrighted movies and music. What you're advocating is simply an excuse, a convenient cover to not pay for it. You're just a cheapskate using politics as a justification not to pay for those services.
"Honestly, I am much more worried about random errors and undirected worms in the computers running our infrastructure than I am about the Chinese military. I am much more worried about criminal hackers than I am about government hackers."
That's pretty damn shortsighted on his part, then. We should be worrying about criminal mischief, but it's simply stupid to ignore national security implications of things like infrastructure. If another major war between peer nations comes, it won't just be ordinance being dropped... attacking each other by non-conventional and "soft" means will be a part of it too.
His kangaroo trial was conducted by Vichy Iraqis at our urging.
So the Iraqis that hated Saddam... which was most of them, BTW... are traitors to Iraq? They'd be good Iraqis if they had supported Saddam Hussein?
WTF is wrong with you?
(I would provide a link, but TPB is blocked at work...)
try putting in your host file
83.140.176.200 thepiratebay.org
or setting you DNS server setting to 4.2.2.3
and then going to https://thepiratebay.org/
Yeah, have him violate his workplace policy so he can get to the Pirate Bay.
He deserves whatever he gets if he actually listens to you.
"Please put your strawmen away before they get burned. The only side that seems to call obama the "chosen one" are republicans"
You're blind. Democrats are taking personal loyalty oaths to Barrack Obama. I thought the Right hero-worshipped Reagan, but they have nothing on the slobbering boy-band love that Democrats display for Obama. At least the Republicans waited until Reagan was out of office.
Canada is a country and recognising Quebec as somehow special is what created this mess in the first place.
Stuff like recognizing Quebec is precisely why Canada isn't the USA. Multiculturalism vs the Melting Pot and all that.
But there are plenty of American politicians that prefer the US drop the whole "melting-pot" concept altogether, and adopt multiculturalism as official policy. I'd say we're damn close to doing that anyway. I haven't heard "melting pot" in awhile, but I hear Congressmen, journalists, intellectuals, etc, droning on about the value of multiculturalism all the time. Unfortunately, the US is becoming as Balkanized as Canada and much of Europe.
"If you want to argue that giving a copy of a CD to 100,000 of your closest friends is not fair use, you must also argue that giving it to just one of your closest friends is not fair use either, because there is no set definition for what constitutes a "close friend", outside of whatever criteria an individual chooses to use. :)"
I choose to use established US case law. I don't know what you're using. Courts have ruled that small scale copying of files for personal use, including lending them to small numbers of people, is fair use. But they've ruled that doesn't justify large scale copying and distribution.
No matter the technology, whether it be P2P or physically burning a CD, giving a copyrighted file to one of your closest friends is fair use. Giving it to 100,000 of your closest friends isn't.
Star Trek will always do well at the box office; there's enough die hard trekkies that will go & watch regardless of quality
Then why was Nemesis a total failure?
No, real Trek fans are feeling burned out too, and are tired of Paramount 'effing up the franchise with trash like Enterprise. And while the trailers look exciting in some regards, I have no hope that JJ Abrams will make a real Star Trek movie, just another "shiny box" movie with Star Trek characters.
"Fox news has investigative journalists."
Well, they do if "investigative journalists" means "people who make stuff up".
Can I see specific examples of this? And, pray tell, do you think the other major networks are "making stuff up" as well?
"By that criteria, you can't take ANY site seriously."
Well, yes you can. You can have a site that has an ideological bent, but still has quality reporting and writing. National Review on the right, and The New Republic on the left are good examples here (and yes, with the exception of the Stephen Glass episode).
The HuffPuff, however, is a really horrible vehicle to attempt serious journalism. Its always been the Daily Kos with celebrities. That's great if what you want is ideological red meat (or blue meat here, if you will). But to me this is like Michael Savage or Janeane Garofalo announcing that they're going to become "serious journalists".
I don't care how "dated" the graphics look... if its anything like Return to Castle Wolfenstein (or Enemy Territory, which is still my primary game), then I'll snatch it up as soon as it's available.
Though I use multiple operating systems today, and like OS X and Linux the best, I gotta say, I miss Windows 95.
Yes, it was unstable. Yes, it was hyped to the clouds. Yes, it brought nothing new to computing that Mac OS and Amiga hadn't already done. But it was fun. Part of this is because Windows 95 coincided with the Internet really catching on with the public. Dial-up, and then cable, AOL (which, for all its criticisms, made the Internet available to the non-tech public), browsers, email, IRC... all of that was shiny and new back then, and Windows 95 carried it to most of the world. PC gaming really took off with Windows 95. Myst was a revolution. Doom II ate up a lot of my life. Who back then didn't spend many weekends staying up all night, to the breaking sun of dawn, playing games, "surfing the web", and chatting, in AOL rooms or IRC, with people far across the globe in real time? Who wasn't amazed and excited doing these things?
Guys, that was fun. And I miss those days. I still occasionally run Win 95 in VM just to play something like Hover. And when I do, I remember what it was like to actually enjoy the computer.
Modern personal computing was really built on what Windows 95 brought to the public. And now computing isn't fun anymore, anymore than, say, using a telephone is. It's ordinary, commonplace, and utilitarian now. Much like flying on a commercial airliner these days. Guys like Charles Lindbergh would be amazed if he could've seen what it was like to fly on a 777. But to us, eh, it's just a way to get from one place to another. And that pretty much sums up the feel of computing today.
One caviat here; I wasn't a Mac user back then, and I've since had a chance to play with Classic OS on an old iMac, and I gotta say, It was brilliant. It had it's own problems, but I have to admit that now I see what the big deal was. That was a special OS, and after playing with it for a weekend, I was actually overcome with a feeling of sadness at one point, because I realized that all throughout the nineties, I missed out on this. The classic Mac OS really was everything it's fans claimed.
Ah, yes. But the very fact that we obsess over being sex-saturated makes it worse. Think Victorian times - child prostitution and deviance went through the roof, due to the repression of something NORMAL.
Sex isn't normal for children, though.
"The president/CEO of Diebold promised to literally do everything in his power to "deliver" Ohio's electoral votes to GWB."
Wow, you just can't let go, can you? Bush is out of office and you're still obsessing over him.
The Diebold guy promising to "deliver" Ohio for Bush was speaking at a party event, in the capacity as a party fundraiser and organizer, not as part of your fevered fantasies of a "right-wing coup". Despite your paranoia, the same voting systems were used to swept Democrats into power in 2006 and 2008.