One of the biggest reasons for the father's enlistment and the "big change" was that one of the alien worlds under Earth attack had managed a couter strike that killed Rico's mother along with a large chunk of the world population.
Either you are hopelessly liberal or my memory of the book is horribly inaccurate. I remember nothing from the book that would suggest that the mean evil Earthlings had attacked the gentle, peace-loving aliens. I'll humbly concede if I'm wrong, but you'll have to prove it by digging up a copy of the book and quoting it.
Old men like Rico's father jumping onto rockets was portrayed even by Rico as a despiration measure.
I read it as patriotism. Thier way of life was under attack and they wanted to help defend it.
The idea seems to be that a military society had evolved which made all decisions and ultimately used all resources to further its own aims. That they did this without repressing free speech and taking other liberties is unlikely.
Can you quote some passages from the book to support this ascertain? If not then you should retract it.
We never get a good view of why the earth was at war with all other inteligent life forms and that is the root of the nightmare.
That's true. Perhaps it's because the book's intended audience is adolescents, who are less likely to ask such questions or to be interested in the answers. Perhaps it's because lengthy explanations of the reasons for the war would detract from the central point of the book - that right's have accompanying responsibilities. Perhaps it's because Hienlien assumed (wrongly) that the reader would believe the reasons to be just, even if those reasons weren't enumerated.
Methinks I detect a note of revisionist thinking here.
No argument here. IMHO, the difference between the two lies with the concept of ownership. There is no such thing as individual ownership under a pure communist system. Even simple things, like the pencil you have in your desk drawer do not belong to you. Under pure fascism the government takes control of only the means of production. Concepts like the individual and ownership are retained.
Socialism also retains the concept of individual ownership, but stipulates that the government has the first right to everything you produce. In other words, if you make $100, a socialist government has the right to take $100 from you. If they choose to take only $50, they are just being nice.
In the broader sense, these three forms of government differ only in the degree and manner of oppression.
note especially how Starship Troopers is about fifty-fifty 1 and 2
Fascism, according to dictionary.com is: "A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism." emphasis mine
I don't believe examples any of the words I highlighted can found in Starship Troopers. I'm throwing down the gauntlet. Provide proof by citing specific examples from the book or retract your assertion.
BTW, I'm not even going to attempt to defend Stranger in a Strange land, or Time Enough for Love. It's clear to me that Heinlein was a raving lunatic when he wrote those.
He even smiles when he sees his own father drafted.
His father was not drafted. The draft was illegal in that society. Instead, Rico's father understood his responsibility to society and enlisted. That's why Rico smiled. His father had come around to the same realization that Rico had.
BTW, Rico's dad was rich. He had profited from society all his life but was opposed to the idea of defending it - to giving something back. At the end of the book he changed his mind. He finally matured.
I think ST has a great message, though I generally agree with you about his female characters. In Heinlien's defense though, that was just the way books were written "back then" A.C. Clarke's early works have pretty dull female characters as well. Childhood's end comes to mind.
Could someone please explain why it took so long to analyze the data?
Probably because the researchers had a lot of projects to work on.
To answer the next logical question "Why weren;t the images released earlier?"
Telescope time is booked years in advance. A lot of work goes into preparing and submitting the proposals for the research that is to be conducted. As a result, when the images are taken, they are not released to the general public. The scientists that did all the work to take the images are allowed the courtesy of working on the images themselves.
So, these guys got a picture of an eruption. They did a lot of work analyzing it and are now (finally) ready to submit their findings to the scientific community. Hopefully, their findings are valid as well as valuable - that will be determined by peer review.
The alternative is this: The image could have been released to the general public in Feb 2001. It's a cool picture, and would have been in the news and discussed by armatures like us all over the world. Then, we would get tired of it. When the real research was completed, it wouldn't gain the same kind of notoriety.
Also, there would be a race among other scientists to submit analysis of the image. Undoubtedly, somebody with a lot of spare time would get a coherent analysis completed before these guys did. So, in a way, the hard work they put in to book the telescope etc. would have been wasted.
The system is set up to allow the people that make the initial investment in getting the images some of the notoriety for the research done on them. The system therefore necessarily requires a delay before the image is released.
The right to be treated with dignity and courtesy by all government employees engaged in the screening process.
One passenger ombudsman to be made available at all airport screening stations to mediate disputes between federal screeners and agents.
No passenger will be separated from his baggage during the screening process. All screening of passenger carry-on items shall be handled in the full view of the passenger.
All passengers traveling with family members shall have the right to have one adult family member present during all aspects of the screening process.
Baggage screeners shall take extraordinary care to repack all items in passenger's luggage neatly and carefully.
Seating shall be provided for all passengers who are required to remove their shoes in the screening process.
Screeners shall be responsible for all damage to passenger's property during the search process.
Screeners will not be permitted to search the contents of a wallet or other item carrying passenger's cash or credit cards without a supervisor present.
All passengers who have personal items confiscated at the screening stations shall be provided with mailing envelopes for use in mailing seized items to passenger's home address. The passenger shall be permitted to place the item in the envelope, seal the envelope, and place the item in the U.S. mail at the screening station.
The right to the immediate intervention and assistance of a local law enforcement officer in the event passenger suspects that a screener has stolen property of the passenger of if the screener has touched or groped the passenger in an inappropriate way.
All screening stations shall be under constant video and audio surveillance and tapes of said surveillance shall be available to local law enforcement officers in the event of a dispute between passengers and screeners.
What a lovely troll. China is a communist nation. You must have posted because you think this is somehow a bad thing. Yet from you comment I assume (please correct me if I'm wrong) that you are a democrat. Now, who do you think is more like the communists, the Democrats or the Republicans?
Campaign Finance Reform: Limits free speech close to an election (John McCain is a Democrat btw)
We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society." Hillary Clinton
Although it seems clear to me that all politicians seek power through control and subjugation of the populace, the Democrats are obviously (to me) the worse of the two. I challange anyone to rebut this by posting similar quotes by Bush or Ashcroft.
The bottom line is, I'll gladly take 10 years of Ashcroft as Attorney General than 4 years of pretty much any democrate as president.
The reason I ask this ridiculous question is that by accepting the bonds of IP control, you accept the possibility that a studio may, for whatever reason, restrict your viewing even further. In the future, they may well decree that you can only watch a given movie on Tuesday, or that you may only watch it while sitting in a particular chair. Use your imagination and come up with something that you would object to. The problem is, it will be much more difficult to stand up to them then than it is now.
To put it another way, since you refuse to support people who object to the studios today, there will be nobody to support you when you decide to stand against them tomorrow.
I could just re-ghost my drive and be done with it.
Yep, that's exactly what I do. It's worked for me for over 3 years now.
Every computer I own has (at least) two partitions. One is for OS. The other is for data and programs I install. I use Powerquest Drive Image to copy the OS partition to the other one. It's a surprisingly small file since I'm pretty well disciplined about keeping installed programs off the first partition. I burn the images onto CDRs and keep a baseline image of a fresh install and as many other backups as I care to file away.
I use other means to keep my data backed up, because I want that to be done incrementally.
I started a new job a few months ago and the computer I have at work isn't all that fast. I will not have unnecessary programs (like virus scanners) running! I don't mind installing them so I can scan files on demand, but I don't want them running in the background. One day someone from the IT department comes in with some kind of a scanner tool. I was more than happy to let him install it. I was more than happy to let him uninstall the virus scanner I had and install NAV 2000 corporate (which wont let me turn it off btw).
When he left I just restored the backup I had made only a few days ago.
The key is to not argue with people - instead just do things the right way.
It's more likely than you might think. It has to do with conservation of angular momentum and it's the planets and even the moons in our solar system are all within a few degrees of the same plane.
Sure there are exceptions, but the chances of seeing a solar system on edge is considerably better than whatever it would be if they were just randomly distributed.
Everything I worked on in the Army was encrypted up to 3 different times before it was transmitted to the satellite.
It looks like it was encrypted on the way to the US, but unencrypted when sent back to NATO in Europe. I think the problem is that the recipients in England (or wherever) don't have TEDs that use DES, so rather than try to get them one, someone in the US made the decision to just transmit in the clear.
Running everything on the server-side... needs lots of servers with fat pipes to work.
I'm not sure I agree with that ascertain. In a traditional network-game setup, the server sends all the info to the clients who them make a decision as to what can or cannot be seen. In the setup you're describing, the server only sends the client the information he could possibly know - which logically must be some subset of everything that exists in the game.
In other words, I think that more server-side processing would actually mean less network overhead.
The problem is that the server load increases linearly as each new client connects.
Furthermore, even this doesn't stop aimbots or firebots and those are, imho even worse.
Instead, they try to roll it up into a ball of mud and sling it at ya.
Try not to get upset over it. It's just part of the culture. This is how geeks establish pecking order etc. I'd rather be part of a group where the one-upmanship games involve intelligence than a group where they involve traditional yet far less redeeming pursuits.
My suggestion to you is to respond with something like: "You will learn my young apprentice" Everyone else will laugh and you'll find that eventually it will shut them up.
But the question we as a country need to ask ourselves is if we really want or need a Congress that passes hundreds of new laws every year, with a net result only of making more people into criminals.
Damn right!! Well said. Did you know the constitution says congress must meet at least *once* a year? The idea of career politicians whose sole purpose in life is manufacturing crisis in order to induce an imbecilic public into crying for help is utterly absurd. They should spend the next few years repealing the bad laws already on the books, then go home - we'll call them if we need them.
It will prevent Microsoft from completely dictating web standards, from creating a world where only Windows can browse the web.
I agree with you principle, but the problem I see is that so many web sites that I (unfortunately) have to use seem to have been designed in such a was as to only render properly on IE.
For example, webmail where I work is done through exchange and therefore requires active X. My bank (bank of America) uses an online banking systems that doesn't work with Opera (haven't tried mozzila yet) and the online college courses I'm taking make heavy use of powerpoint slides saved as HTML that only renders properly in IE.
No amount of complaining on my part is going to change any of these sites. On the other hand, most users (my wife for example) hit one site that doesn't work in Opera and decide to go back to IE forever. My big fear is that cluelessness like thiswill continue to allow IE to dominate the browser market. I think that.NET is only going to make this worse.
But I agree with the other posters who've recommended strategy games. I suppose since this is a school you should try and set a good example - that is, use the facilities for education purposes. Strategy games are educational in a lot of different ways.
I'm partial to anything involving sci-fi so my recommendations are: Stars! - this is even play-by-email meaning the players wouldn't even need to be in the lab at the same time. Master of Orion II - it's old so you should be able to find it on the cheap.
Btw, though not multiplayer, Orbiter is a great game that could be very education since after all it's based on realistic physics.
report any 'piracy' they've seen in the government
I was never once in a unit that had licenses for all its software. Once I was the information management officer for an entire battalion. I keep all the software licenses in a big binder and for any software that didn't have licenses, I wrote official requests for the funds to purchase them and kept those in the binder too. That was me covering my own ass.
There's actually a funny story here. I was short several licenses of Win95 but nobody sold those anymore. I called Microsoft and told them I wanted X Win95 licenses. They offered to sell me WinME or Win2K but these machines didn't have the horsepower. Finally, they offered to sell me licenses for windows 98 at, get this *higher prices* than ME because "they no longer supported it." So I paid *several* *hundred* *dollars* more of *your* *tax* *money* than I should have and what did I actually receive in the mail? I single piece of paper from MS with the words "authorized to use X copies of Windows 98" written on it.
I gave MS money to print me a sheet of paper. It didn't even have the laser hologram on it!
Ah those were the days.
At least I was able to keep licenses from machines that we threw away. As I was leaving, we were buying new machines that came with Win2K and had the license on a sticker on the box. No more binders! Now when you throw away the machine you throw away the license too.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the biggest reasons for the father's enlistment and the "big change" was that one of the alien worlds under Earth attack had managed a couter strike that killed Rico's mother along with a large chunk of the world population.
Either you are hopelessly liberal or my memory of the book is horribly inaccurate. I remember nothing from the book that would suggest that the mean evil Earthlings had attacked the gentle, peace-loving aliens. I'll humbly concede if I'm wrong, but you'll have to prove it by digging up a copy of the book and quoting it.
Old men like Rico's father jumping onto rockets was portrayed even by Rico as a despiration measure.
I read it as patriotism. Thier way of life was under attack and they wanted to help defend it.
The idea seems to be that a military society had evolved which made all decisions and ultimately used all resources to further its own aims. That they did this without repressing free speech and taking other liberties is unlikely.
Can you quote some passages from the book to support this ascertain? If not then you should retract it.
We never get a good view of why the earth was at war with all other inteligent life forms and that is the root of the nightmare.
That's true. Perhaps it's because the book's intended audience is adolescents, who are less likely to ask such questions or to be interested in the answers. Perhaps it's because lengthy explanations of the reasons for the war would detract from the central point of the book - that right's have accompanying responsibilities. Perhaps it's because Hienlien assumed (wrongly) that the reader would believe the reasons to be just, even if those reasons weren't enumerated.
Methinks I detect a note of revisionist thinking here.
No argument here. IMHO, the difference between the two lies with the concept of ownership. There is no such thing as individual ownership under a pure communist system. Even simple things, like the pencil you have in your desk drawer do not belong to you. Under pure fascism the government takes control of only the means of production. Concepts like the individual and ownership are retained.
Socialism also retains the concept of individual ownership, but stipulates that the government has the first right to everything you produce. In other words, if you make $100, a socialist government has the right to take $100 from you. If they choose to take only $50, they are just being nice.
In the broader sense, these three forms of government differ only in the degree and manner of oppression.
note especially how Starship Troopers is about fifty-fifty 1 and 2
Fascism, according to dictionary.com is:
"A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism." emphasis mine
I don't believe examples any of the words I highlighted can found in Starship Troopers. I'm throwing down the gauntlet. Provide proof by citing specific examples from the book or retract your assertion.
BTW, I'm not even going to attempt to defend Stranger in a Strange land, or Time Enough for Love. It's clear to me that Heinlein was a raving lunatic when he wrote those.
He even smiles when he sees his own father drafted.
His father was not drafted. The draft was illegal in that society. Instead, Rico's father understood his responsibility to society and enlisted. That's
why Rico smiled. His father had come around to the same realization that Rico had.
BTW, Rico's dad was rich. He had profited from society all his life but was opposed to the idea of defending it - to giving something back. At the end of the book he changed his mind. He finally matured.
I think ST has a great message, though I generally agree with you about his female characters. In Heinlien's defense though, that was just the way books were written "back then" A.C. Clarke's early works have pretty dull female characters as well. Childhood's end comes to mind.
Could someone please explain why it took so long to analyze the data?
Probably because the researchers had a lot of projects to work on.
To answer the next logical question "Why weren;t the images released earlier?"
Telescope time is booked years in advance. A lot of work goes into preparing and submitting the proposals for the research that is to be conducted. As a result, when the images are taken, they are not released to the general public. The scientists that did all the work to take the images are allowed the courtesy of working on the images themselves.
So, these guys got a picture of an eruption. They did a lot of work analyzing it and are now (finally) ready to submit their findings to the scientific community. Hopefully, their findings are valid as well as valuable - that will be determined by peer review.
The alternative is this: The image could have been released to the general public in Feb 2001. It's a cool picture, and would have been in the news and discussed by armatures like us all over the world. Then, we would get tired of it. When the real research was completed, it wouldn't gain the same kind of notoriety.
Also, there would be a race among other scientists to submit analysis of the image. Undoubtedly, somebody with a lot of spare time would get a coherent analysis completed before these guys did. So, in a way, the hard work they put in to book the telescope etc. would have been wasted.
The system is set up to allow the people that make the initial investment in getting the images some of the notoriety for the research done on them. The system therefore necessarily requires a delay before the image is released.
wow, basic.
nice
Oh, and will some kind chemist please put me out of my misery regarding the exact term that must have been used?
I'm no chemist, but I'm found this on google:
dihydro-oxide
in a few months, EULA's will contain a provision that prohibits the posting of EULAs!
What a lovely troll.
China is a communist nation. You must have posted because you think this is somehow a bad thing. Yet from you comment I assume (please correct me if I'm wrong) that you are a democrat. Now, who do you think is more like the communists, the Democrats or the Republicans?
Campaign Finance Reform: Limits free speech close to an election (John McCain is a Democrat btw)
Fairness in Broadcasting Act: Limits speech on the radio.
Quotes:
"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans" - Bill Clinton
"You know the one thing that's wrong with this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say." - Bill Clinton
If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees. - Bill Clinton
We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society." Hillary Clinton
Although it seems clear to me that all politicians seek power through control and subjugation of the populace, the Democrats are obviously (to me) the worse of the two. I challange anyone to rebut this by posting similar quotes by Bush or Ashcroft.
The bottom line is, I'll gladly take 10 years of Ashcroft as Attorney General than 4 years of pretty much any democrate as president.
I like owning and watching high-quality movies;
Do you like watching them only on Tuesday?
The reason I ask this ridiculous question is that by accepting the bonds of IP control, you accept the possibility that a studio may, for whatever reason, restrict your viewing even further. In the future, they may well decree that you can only watch a given movie on Tuesday, or that you may only watch it while sitting in a particular chair. Use your imagination and come up with something that you would object to. The problem is, it will be much more difficult to stand up to them then than it is now.
To put it another way, since you refuse to support people who object to the studios today, there will be nobody to support you when you decide to stand against them tomorrow.
I could just re-ghost my drive and be done with it.
Yep, that's exactly what I do. It's worked for me for over 3 years now.
Every computer I own has (at least) two partitions. One is for OS. The other is for data and programs I install. I use Powerquest Drive Image to copy the OS partition to the other one. It's a surprisingly small file since I'm pretty well disciplined about keeping installed programs off the first partition. I burn the images onto CDRs and keep a baseline image of a fresh install and as many other backups as I care to file away.
I use other means to keep my data backed up, because I want that to be done incrementally.
I started a new job a few months ago and the computer I have at work isn't all that fast. I will not have unnecessary programs (like virus scanners) running! I don't mind installing them so I can scan files on demand, but I don't want them running in the background. One day someone from the IT department comes in with some kind of a scanner tool. I was more than happy to let him install it. I was more than happy to let him uninstall the virus scanner I had and install NAV 2000 corporate (which wont let me turn it off btw).
When he left I just restored the backup I had made only a few days ago.
The key is to not argue with people - instead just do things the right way.
How likely is that, for any given star?
It's more likely than you might think. It has to do with conservation of angular momentum and it's the planets and even the moons in our solar system are all within a few degrees of the same plane.
Sure there are exceptions, but the chances of seeing a solar system on edge is considerably better than whatever it would be if they were just randomly distributed.
Everything I worked on in the Army was encrypted up to 3 different times before it was transmitted to the satellite.
It looks like it was encrypted on the way to the US, but unencrypted when sent back to NATO in Europe. I think the problem is that the recipients in England (or wherever) don't have TEDs that use DES, so rather than try to get them one, someone in the US made the decision to just transmit in the clear.
Probably a civilian.
I'm Karma whoring here, but you're post reminded me of this: FreeBSD Girl
Running everything on the server-side ... needs lots of servers with fat pipes to work.
I'm not sure I agree with that ascertain. In a traditional network-game setup, the server sends all the info to the clients who them make a decision as to what can or cannot be seen. In the setup you're describing, the server only sends the client the information he could possibly know - which logically must be some subset of everything that exists in the game.
In other words, I think that more server-side processing would actually mean less network overhead.
The problem is that the server load increases linearly as each new client connects.
Furthermore, even this doesn't stop aimbots or firebots and those are, imho even worse.
Instead, they try to roll it up into a ball of mud and sling it at ya.
Try not to get upset over it. It's just part of the culture. This is how geeks establish pecking order etc. I'd rather be part of a group where the one-upmanship games involve intelligence than a group where they involve traditional yet far less redeeming pursuits.
My suggestion to you is to respond with something like: "You will learn my young apprentice" Everyone else will laugh and you'll find that eventually it will shut them up.
Oh, I'm unimpressed.
For some reason geeks have a bad habit of criticizing everything. It goes with the culture. See definition 4 of this entry in the jargon file for more information.
My favorite example of this is: whenever I explain *anything* that I've done to a coworker, the first thing they always say is "Why don't you just..."
Yes, that's just the way geeks are. I'm waiting for Katz to pick up on this!
But the question we as a country need to ask ourselves is if we really want or need a Congress that passes hundreds of new laws every year, with a net result only of making more people into criminals.
Damn right!! Well said. Did you know the constitution says congress must meet at least *once* a year? The idea of career politicians whose sole purpose in life is manufacturing crisis in order to induce an imbecilic public into crying for help is utterly absurd. They should spend the next few years repealing the bad laws already on the books, then go home - we'll call them if we need them.
It will prevent Microsoft from completely dictating web standards, from creating a world where only Windows can browse the web.
.NET is only going to make this worse.
I agree with you principle, but the problem I see is that so many web sites that I (unfortunately) have to use seem to have been designed in such a was as to only render properly on IE.
For example, webmail where I work is done through exchange and therefore requires active X. My bank (bank of America) uses an online banking systems that doesn't work with Opera (haven't tried mozzila yet) and the online college courses I'm taking make heavy use of powerpoint slides saved as HTML that only renders properly in IE.
No amount of complaining on my part is going to change any of these sites. On the other hand, most users (my wife for example) hit one site that doesn't work in Opera and decide to go back to IE forever. My big fear is that cluelessness like thiswill continue to allow IE to dominate the browser market. I think that
The planes have independant navigational systems.
yeah, I was just gonna say I'm pretty sure terrorists are cleared for VFR.
not everything in schools needs to be of "educational value."
What??
Oh right.
Look, that wasn't bad as trolls go. I'd suggest that you capitalize a few words though. It also helps to use plenty of exclamation marks.
Most importantly though, a troll should make people mad. Yours is just funny. Keep practicing. You'll get it.
We never did this at my school unfortunately.
But I agree with the other posters who've recommended strategy games. I suppose since this is a school you should try and set a good example - that is, use the facilities for education purposes. Strategy games are educational in a lot of different ways.
I'm partial to anything involving sci-fi so my recommendations are:
Stars! - this is even play-by-email meaning the players wouldn't even need to be in the lab at the same time.
Master of Orion II - it's old so you should be able to find it on the cheap.
Btw, though not multiplayer, Orbiter is a great game that could be very education since after all it's based on realistic physics.
Depends on how you look at it.
7 of the last 10 carriers are named after presidents.
Submarines are named after states or cities.
It sounds to me like the original point stands, and your pathetic political statement is discarded.
report any 'piracy' they've seen in the government
I was never once in a unit that had licenses for all its software. Once I was the information management officer for an entire battalion. I keep all the software licenses in a big binder and for any software that didn't have licenses, I wrote official requests for the funds to purchase them and kept those in the binder too. That was me covering my own ass.
There's actually a funny story here. I was short several licenses of Win95 but nobody sold those anymore. I called Microsoft and told them I wanted X Win95 licenses. They offered to sell me WinME or Win2K but these machines didn't have the horsepower. Finally, they offered to sell me licenses for windows 98 at, get this *higher prices* than ME because "they no longer supported it." So I paid *several* *hundred* *dollars* more of *your* *tax* *money* than I should have and what did I actually receive in the mail? I single piece of paper from MS with the words "authorized to use X copies of Windows 98" written on it.
I gave MS money to print me a sheet of paper. It didn't even have the laser hologram on it!
Ah those were the days.
At least I was able to keep licenses from machines that we threw away. As I was leaving, we were buying new machines that came with Win2K and had the license on a sticker on the box. No more binders! Now when you throw away the machine you throw away the license too.