"By this time, all info about the cyborg chips was to be destroyed"
You assume humans wouldn't be able to develop the chips on their own. It would appear that destroying the chips in the second movie just slowed down Skynet's development, not stopped it. After all, it was supposed to have been deployed by now.
"I'd like to see a mission before I believe any of it.. seems like China is just preparing for a cold war"
Then they've already lost. For example:
USA has a few thousand nuclear weapons China has a few dozen
Result: China loses
USA has a 3-ocean navy China barely has a 1-ocean navy
Result: China loses
USA has a permanent manned presence in space China hasn't sent anybody into space yet
Result: China loses
Part of winning the Cold War with the Soviets means having a 499-meter head start in the next 500-meter dash. Sure, it's possible for China to come out of nowhere and get ahead, but it's just as possible for my ass to quantum tunnel through my chair.
Except there hasn't been much peace in the Middle East since... well... ever. Even under the Ottoman rule the area wasn't all that peaceful.
I'm getting to the point where I think the best solution would to wall off the entire area (whether metaphoricly or literally) for a few centuries and wait for them to get tired of it. I can't be bothered to try to force peace on people who honestly don't seem to want it. If they nuke each other instead, well... that also solves the problem. And, yes, I'm including Israelis in there as well.
The only thing we can do to lessen the bloodshed is to hurry along practical fusion. Most of their economies are woefully lopsided, and they won't be able to afford the ammunition if nobody is buying their oil.
Bullets tend not to care whether they're being shot through the boards that control this softwall and the boards that control the fly-by-wire linkages. If they shoot up the cockpit, they're likely to crash a lot sooner than they intended.
Machines tend to only be able to translate properly formed and spelled sentences. Most of the people that send IMs to each other don't even know what the word "sentence" means.
You see, unlike certain private businesses, the USPS takes your privacy a little more seriously, if for no other reason than because they're required to by federal law. When you give them information, being that they are an arm of the federal government (more or less), there is a notice they are required to show you that explicitly spells out what they can and cannot do with your information, who they can and cannot give it to, and under what circumstances.
eBay will give out sellers' information to whomever, whenever. To find out who owns a PO box generally requires a subpoena.
"American society needs to get over this Cold War fascination with ever larger, more powerful, and more complex military technology."
Just because the Soviet Union has gone away doesn't mean we don't have dangerous enemies.
"The military is not the solution to every problem, they are just a last resort when we have no real solution."
Just because you don't like the solution doesn't mean it's not real.
"We need to expend more effort developing technologies that will really improve our lives"
One of the main reasons 9/11 happened is that we've focused almost exclusively on improving our own lives (or, at the very least, that is how we are perceived). We were attacked because our opponents believe that our selfish greed (their ideas, not mine) is the root of all evil. We are the greedy Americans that are stepping on other peoples' necks in order to make our own lives slightly more easier.
Is it true? All that matters right now is that there were 19 crazed zealots who believed this was so.
The ultimate solution to this problem is not to improve our own lives. Ignoring for a moment idealist arguments from EU-wannabes, we have it pretty good as it is. The big thing is to improve the lives of others outside our borders, and...
(I'm going to get so flamed for this...)
Advances in military technology are, like it or not, about the only real way we have to do that. Sure, we can shovel cash and wheat and whatever into the existing aid infrastructure, but that means next to nothing when you have to go through a foreign government's line of supply, one that may not actually be interested in aiding its own people. Look at what happened to aid efforts in Somalia. Look at what happend to Oil for Food. There are middle-men in the world that are more interested in lining their own pockets with "aid," and the only way to remove them is the way they got to where they are to begin with: By force.
Diplomacy doesn't always work, because diplomacy by definition means dealing with governments, not people. Diplomacy almost never works in situations when it's the government that's the problem. The UN's main fault is that it leaves the majority of the world's people unrepresented.
And even in those times when diplomacy is useful, it is only as useful as far as the words have meaning and weight, and it is often the threat of force that gives those words weight. Consider the utter failure of diplomacy in East Timor until Australia started to move its military around.
If we ever want to accomplish anything, beyond "Stop, or I'l say 'stop' again!" we need to make sure that the threat of force is kept viable.
1.) The Concorde was neither built by a US company nor operated by a US airline.
2.) Bombers tend to operate from airfields where the neighbors (if there are any) really don't mind sonic booms.
3.) After seeing how impotent the Concorde was, no commercial entity is crazy enough to try to build a supersonic transport again. Heck, they're avoiding even trans-sonic ides. The only ones willing to spend the money on the research for aircraft like these are the military. Sure, this will probably eventually pan out into civillian areas, but nobody else wants to pay the initial R&D.
Pipe dream. Even 100 years ago it was a pipe dream.
Think about it: "We don't want to talk to you or have anything else to do with you. But we still want to buy your stuff and sell our stuff to you."
"Eventually our empire, like all empires, falls"
Our what? Being an empire and being isolationist are mutually exclusive. You can't have both. If we adopt a foreign policy that resembles that of 18th cnetury Japan, then there is no "Pax Americana," because we don't give enough of a damn to try to impose our will on anybody else.
"The 'Take Lara To Work Day' initiative was devised following a recent report from the London School of Economics on how creating a happy working environment stimulates the workforce"
So what does a happy envrionment have to do with Tomb Raider again?
And is it just coincidence when this idea is on the same date that commemorates another spectacular British failure?:)
One should also remember that most people didn't want Prohibition to begin with. Our state legislators thought it was a good idea because of a small but loud minority.
"IANAL, but there's a chasm between commercial speech and noncommercial speech you could drive several dump trucks through."
But I'd rather have a law that will also block "political" spam as well. Lord knows my telephone rings off the hook every other November as it is, and I'd rather not see that continue on into my e-mail box as well.
I'm not happy with some speech being more free than others, either in theory or practice.
"Witness the national do-not-call list."
Witness the way neither state nor national DNC lists do jack and shit to stop political campaigns from calling you.
Slashdot Mirror
"By this time, all info about the cyborg chips was to be destroyed"
You assume humans wouldn't be able to develop the chips on their own. It would appear that destroying the chips in the second movie just slowed down Skynet's development, not stopped it. After all, it was supposed to have been deployed by now.
"George Lucas never touched it."
There's no doubt about who shot first here!
"I'd like to see a mission before I believe any of it.. seems like China is just preparing for a cold war"
Then they've already lost. For example:
USA has a few thousand nuclear weapons
China has a few dozen
Result: China loses
USA has a 3-ocean navy
China barely has a 1-ocean navy
Result: China loses
USA has a permanent manned presence in space
China hasn't sent anybody into space yet
Result: China loses
Part of winning the Cold War with the Soviets means having a 499-meter head start in the next 500-meter dash. Sure, it's possible for China to come out of nowhere and get ahead, but it's just as possible for my ass to quantum tunnel through my chair.
"Let's do a gedankenexperiment (thought experiment)."
I thought it was German for "can't get a research grant."
And we'd pull out, too, if Ryadh weren't so insistent we stay...
Except there hasn't been much peace in the Middle East since... well... ever. Even under the Ottoman rule the area wasn't all that peaceful.
I'm getting to the point where I think the best solution would to wall off the entire area (whether metaphoricly or literally) for a few centuries and wait for them to get tired of it. I can't be bothered to try to force peace on people who honestly don't seem to want it. If they nuke each other instead, well... that also solves the problem. And, yes, I'm including Israelis in there as well.
The only thing we can do to lessen the bloodshed is to hurry along practical fusion. Most of their economies are woefully lopsided, and they won't be able to afford the ammunition if nobody is buying their oil.
Bullets tend not to care whether they're being shot through the boards that control this softwall and the boards that control the fly-by-wire linkages. If they shoot up the cockpit, they're likely to crash a lot sooner than they intended.
"Most crashes are due to pilot error, but I'm not quite ready to hand the controls over to a computer. I think it would be a disaster."
You don't know many pilots, do you? I'm surprised some of the pilots I know are able to tie their shoes in the morning.
Machines tend to only be able to translate properly formed and spelled sentences. Most of the people that send IMs to each other don't even know what the word "sentence" means.
"The USPS could learn a thing or two about accuracy and error-prevention from Slashdot."
Damn straight! I keep on getting the same letter over and over again!
You see, unlike certain private businesses, the USPS takes your privacy a little more seriously, if for no other reason than because they're required to by federal law. When you give them information, being that they are an arm of the federal government (more or less), there is a notice they are required to show you that explicitly spells out what they can and cannot do with your information, who they can and cannot give it to, and under what circumstances.
eBay will give out sellers' information to whomever, whenever. To find out who owns a PO box generally requires a subpoena.
"American society needs to get over this Cold War fascination with ever larger, more powerful, and more complex military technology."
Just because the Soviet Union has gone away doesn't mean we don't have dangerous enemies.
"The military is not the solution to every problem, they are just a last resort when we have no real solution."
Just because you don't like the solution doesn't mean it's not real.
"We need to expend more effort developing technologies that will really improve our lives"
One of the main reasons 9/11 happened is that we've focused almost exclusively on improving our own lives (or, at the very least, that is how we are perceived). We were attacked because our opponents believe that our selfish greed (their ideas, not mine) is the root of all evil. We are the greedy Americans that are stepping on other peoples' necks in order to make our own lives slightly more easier.
Is it true? All that matters right now is that there were 19 crazed zealots who believed this was so.
The ultimate solution to this problem is not to improve our own lives. Ignoring for a moment idealist arguments from EU-wannabes, we have it pretty good as it is. The big thing is to improve the lives of others outside our borders, and...
(I'm going to get so flamed for this...)
Advances in military technology are, like it or not, about the only real way we have to do that. Sure, we can shovel cash and wheat and whatever into the existing aid infrastructure, but that means next to nothing when you have to go through a foreign government's line of supply, one that may not actually be interested in aiding its own people. Look at what happened to aid efforts in Somalia. Look at what happend to Oil for Food. There are middle-men in the world that are more interested in lining their own pockets with "aid," and the only way to remove them is the way they got to where they are to begin with: By force.
Diplomacy doesn't always work, because diplomacy by definition means dealing with governments, not people. Diplomacy almost never works in situations when it's the government that's the problem. The UN's main fault is that it leaves the majority of the world's people unrepresented.
And even in those times when diplomacy is useful, it is only as useful as far as the words have meaning and weight, and it is often the threat of force that gives those words weight. Consider the utter failure of diplomacy in East Timor until Australia started to move its military around.
If we ever want to accomplish anything, beyond "Stop, or I'l say 'stop' again!" we need to make sure that the threat of force is kept viable.
1.) The Concorde was neither built by a US company nor operated by a US airline.
2.) Bombers tend to operate from airfields where the neighbors (if there are any) really don't mind sonic booms.
3.) After seeing how impotent the Concorde was, no commercial entity is crazy enough to try to build a supersonic transport again. Heck, they're avoiding even trans-sonic ides. The only ones willing to spend the money on the research for aircraft like these are the military. Sure, this will probably eventually pan out into civillian areas, but nobody else wants to pay the initial R&D.
"We retire into a "fortress America"
Pipe dream. Even 100 years ago it was a pipe dream.
Think about it: "We don't want to talk to you or have anything else to do with you. But we still want to buy your stuff and sell our stuff to you."
"Eventually our empire, like all empires, falls"
Our what? Being an empire and being isolationist are mutually exclusive. You can't have both. If we adopt a foreign policy that resembles that of 18th cnetury Japan, then there is no "Pax Americana," because we don't give enough of a damn to try to impose our will on anybody else.
"The 'Take Lara To Work Day' initiative was devised following a recent report from the London School of Economics on how creating a happy working environment stimulates the workforce"
:)
So what does a happy envrionment have to do with Tomb Raider again?
And is it just coincidence when this idea is on the same date that commemorates another spectacular British failure?
That's easy: Boycott the one owned by an MPAA member.
One should also remember that most people didn't want Prohibition to begin with. Our state legislators thought it was a good idea because of a small but loud minority.
"Giving up free speech to fight spam would be a terrible long term trade-off."
Just because you have a right to "free" speech doesn't mean you have a right to force me to pay for your soapbox. It's not that kind of "free."
"IANAL, but there's a chasm between commercial speech and noncommercial speech you could drive several dump trucks through."
But I'd rather have a law that will also block "political" spam as well. Lord knows my telephone rings off the hook every other November as it is, and I'd rather not see that continue on into my e-mail box as well.
I'm not happy with some speech being more free than others, either in theory or practice.
"Witness the national do-not-call list."
Witness the way neither state nor national DNC lists do jack and shit to stop political campaigns from calling you.
"Years later in the fourth movie, Indy is replaced with a slightly (okay, an extremely) sexier version of himself as a woman,"
At least that will never happen to Battlestar Galactica!
Oh, wait...
Well, on the "bright" side, I don't see Michael J. Fox making a new BttF movie any time soon...
I meant Larry 3000, not Otto.
What, and take time off from being the Joker in the Batman cartoons and Otto in Time Squad?
"But seeing the series retired after Harrison Ford retires from acting would be the right thing to do... "
Yes, it is. But keep in mind we're talking about MPAA members here.
The main reason they're so cheap is that they're using R&D NASA has already paid for.