I'm breaking about three years of/. silence to say, "SCO, you should get down on your knobby, Latter-Day knees every single day and thank your lucky stars that there isn't a just corporate God, for if there were, you and all your minions would be struck down with some corporate equivalent of advanced syphilis, except for your minions, who would get a real form of advanced syphilis, and a nasty case of herpes just for good measure."
First, let me state that a massive (relatively) object such as a comet or methany-type moon would be a better source for raw materials than a dispersed cloud. Asimov's old story "The Martian Way" (IIRC) illustrates the value of such a concentrated source of H2 and O2. So you're right that mining clouds is probably economically unfeasible.
That said, there are a lot more questions you can ask before dismissing this out-of-hand.
A quick web search indicates that some nebulae are about 4 orders of magnitude denser than average interstellar space, so you're closer to 0.1 kg
A magnetic funnel might sweep out 2 square km of space at 50% efficiency (effective cross section 1 square km) yeilding 100,000 kg of material. Mostly this will be CHON and helium, with some iron and other heavier elements.
If you happened to find such a cloud with a slow-moving massive object that might gravitationally concentrate the material you could do even better.
This doesn't even rise to the level of back-of-a-napkin physics, but its enough to defend the modding up of a lay person's at a non-technical site such as this. If this were on a more technical website (just being news for nerds and having a bunch of techies hanging around doesn't make it a technical site) this might be worthwhile criticism. Besides if it hadn't been modded up, you wouldn't have been able to make the very valid point that these things are likely far too dispersed to be valuable, which is a useful factoid. The modders did you a favor!:P
Hit & Run over at Reason magazine is pretty interesting. It is fundamentally a libertarian blog of various Reason contributors. This blog has the distinction of having contributors supporting three different candidates, and almost the full spectrum of opinion on the Iraq war.
I then try and read some of NRO's blogs and Daily Kos and Atrios just to make sure I keep up with what people are saying outside my own little echo chamber.
I can tell you that dormatories are not going to satisfy the criteria set forth in this rule, although from what else I have read it doesn't seem clear if these are truly dormatories or university owned apartments. I would bet it doesn't matter.
These are apartments, not dormitories. They are on land owned by the University, leased to a private company. They are pretty much identical to suburban apartments anywhere in the country.
"MT environments encompass venues such as hotels, conference and convention centers, airports, and colleges and universities. In particular, questions have arisen about the role of the Commission in addressing and resolving radio interference ("RFI") issues in these settings. In addition, questions have arisen about the ability of homeowners associations, landlords, and other third parties to prohibit customer use of small antennas when consumers install and operate them as unlicensed devices."
This paragraph leads me to believe that dormitories are in fact covered under this rule anyway.
In any event you made the statement that no court would disallow the WiFi prohibition. To that I refer you to this sentence: "Both the FCC and the federal courts have overturned attempts by third parties to regulate RFI matters in light of the FCC's exclusive authority in this area." The Waterview ban is on WiFi transmitters that do not use the Waterview Wireless Network, specifically out of interference concerns. Thus, courts would and do find these restrictions void. Neither the FCC nor I care what you put in your lease contract, you can't put a blanket prohibition on WiFi access points. If you don't like it, you can find another country to own property in, rather than your tenants finding a new apartment.
Obviously not all contractual restrictions are void, but your implication that a lease contract is sacrosanct is also falling into the 90% of Sturgeon's Law. There are restrictions to contract law in almost every state, county, or municipality in the country.
And yes I am refering to you specifically, when you stated elsewhere in the thread that you would happily blacklist anyone who took you to court to uphold their rights (in this case to operate a WiFi access point) under the law. You may be able to bully your tenants into shutting down their WiFi access points, but they are still within their rights to do so.
Unless you have grossly mistated your position, you were stating that you'd seek retribution (via blacklisting) against anyone who successfully sued to enforce their rights. If that is the case, you are a reprehensible creature.
From the second paragraph, "We also affirm that the rights that consumers have under our rules to install and operate customer antennas one meter or less in size apply to the operation of unlicensed equipment, such as Wi-Fi access points - just as they do to the use of equipment in connection with fixed wireless services licensed by the FCC."
If Waterview wants to provide exclusive service over their apartments, they are welcome to do so in FCC restricted bandwidth in accordance with FCC law. But they cannot legally prohibit operation of 802.11x transmitters.
Not that I would expect this to bother you since in other posts you've shown that you really prefer not to respect the rights of your tenants.
landlords(sic) (like the university) routinely restrict all kinds of legal behavior.
Did you mean to say, "landlords (like the university) routinely illegally restrict all kinds of behavior"? You may be able to bully your tenants (if they actually exist and all this isn't just juvenile internet bravado) into compliance, but that doesn't make you right.
And the ruling expressly prohibited unreasonable restrictions.
You didn't qualify your little flamebait with the word 'reasonable' so this is irrelevant, unless you're going back and qualifying that statement.
And while the FCC rule is primarily aimed at patios and balconies, it also applies to interior spaces.
all sorts of restrictions on my tenants that would piss a character like you off to no end.
Intentionally, apparently, if your/. manner is any indication. If you really do own property then you either know, or have a lawyer who knows, what local restrictions there are on your property rights. Such restrictions are almost invariably state and local restrictions, so yours will be different from mine, but they exist. Anyway, if you do actually know jack shit about the law, then you're obscuring the fact nicely.
And likewise you also don't know jack shit about the law.
Have you ever written a lease agreement?
There are many sorts of behaviour that landlords are expressly prohibited from restricting.
While I do not know specifically about unlicensed transmitters in the 802.11 frequency, I do know that many other types of recievers and transmitters are protected by federal law. Landlords cannot prohibit satellite antenae less than one meter in diameter in any space under the sole control of the tenant.
Leases can prohibit some legal activities, but there are also specific limits to allowable lease terms.
The article really is a bit breathless (GOES weather imagery and LANDSAT are almost undoubtedly going to be unaffected, as they're typically not held until they get FOIA requests, but just released generally).
It is also worth noting that this simply exempts these documents from FOIA requests. Which means the government doesn't HAVE to release them, but they still often will.
I really am sick of the Bush admin's attitude toward FOIA requests, in general. They seem to be operating from a 'deny first, ask questions later' philosophy (indeed I seem to remember reading about a story where the DOJ issued guidelines like that). That and they're over-classifying things, and not declassifying at anything approaching a reasonable rate.
I don't even understand what they think all this secrecy is accomplishing, anyway. Thier dirty laundry is getting out anyway, and homeland security isn't served, since people can get much of this info through other sources.
The oil drilling in ANWAR or loggin in Yellowstone is a bit of a red herring. LandSat, which would be more than enough to identify such issues, is widely available, and is for sale by the USGS. Besides, who really believes that a disgruntled park ranger or refuge worker wouldn't report it. All it takes is a Cessna and a digital camera to spot either case. Sure they could abuse this law to prevent space imagery of such areas to get out, but they could also just classify such imagery. If they're willing to abuse the law to cover up other illegal government actions, they'll find a way.
You quoted too short. The full phrase was sounds like advocating genocide in the context of its association with insinuation of undue Jewish influence. And I was just saying be careful not to sound like a skinhead, because no one will take you seriously.
one of many much larger groups
Again, I would advocate not sounding like a skinhead. This is the exact phrasing used by the modern soft-sell Holocaust denialists. In France you'd be treading close to prohibited speech. If you're American you'll mostly just be ignored, except I think you may actually be trying to engage in sensible discussion (although you seem prone to tantrums) so I'm giving you some guidance on joining the civilized portion of the discussion. Lose the juvenile histrionics. You're using the language of racism, whether you mean to or not, and you're not going to be taken seriously till you can calm down and lose the insano hyperbole.
There's some balance that needs to be brought to US policy, but 'counterweight' is just another word for 'polarizing'. The truth is in the grey middle, and as long as you're spouting crazed conspiracies, you're just polarizing things.
Balkans are in the same boat, impoverished, brutalized by two-bit lordlings (aka the leaders of radical "free market", "shock therapy" reforms) and utterly humiliated by everyone.
I don't think that Shock Therapy reforms can really be blamed for Balkan strife. Outside of Slovenia, they were not particularly embraced, AFIAK. The places where shock therapy free marketism were most strongly embraced are also the most peaceful and successful (now) of the Central European nations - Poland (they didn't start murdering ethnic Russians and Germans), Czeckoslovakia (which peacefully became the Czeck Republic and Slovakia) and the Baltics (again no bloodbaths)
They were villified, bombed, humilliated and abused so that US could show who's the boss. Their war crimes (although were indeed commited) are but a fraction of the deaths in Iraq by US hands.
NATO intervention started long (years) after their Very Bloody Wars got into full swing. Their problems are not NATO's or America's doing. They went out and manufactured them locally, and in a way that none of their neighbors chose to do, despite similar economic conditions.
As to Israel being sacrificial goat. That sounds like they dont deserve it.
I know this is slashdot and nobody posts carefully, but seriously, you might consider not leaving sentences lying around that sound like advocating genocide right after several long sentences about a vast Jewish conspiracy controlling the US government.
Actually the only president who's handled Isreal well was Bush the Elder, although Bush the Lesser was technically first to call for a separate palestinian state. He actually threatened to cut of Israeli aid if they didn't cut out whichever bit of bullsizzle they were engaged in at the time.
The bit with the American religious right is a pretty fringe bit among the really hard-core nutcases (Robertson et al) that believe promoting Israeli power in the middle east will accelerate the Second Coming. No shit. They believe that crap. But your run-of-the-mill prayer-in-the-classroom right-to-life types of Catholics and mainstream Protestants don't buy into that much of the nut-job stuff. If there's any religious element to the pro-Israel camp in the US, its that too many Americans see Jews as 'not-other', and have mostly shed our anti-semitism, but we still see Muslims as 'other' and so there's less empathy for their plight.
A shift towards accountability in our Israel policy is long overdue, but since we aren't about to let them be slaughtered wholesale, we won't see an end to Islamist terrorism for at least 100 years, although a sane Israel policy will get it down to the level of an OKC bombing (only local to the mideast, not the great plains) every decade or so, rather than the constant crap we're dealing with now.
If Arab nations do not suffer under opressive US-sponsored regimes and are humiliated daily by Israeli beligerence
A relatively small number of them live under US sponsored repressive regimes. The rest are under homegrown despots. There are also a couple of French-sponsored regimes.
Germany would certainly support a war against any country openly supporting terrorism
I'm not saying the Iraq war was a good idea, but Iraq was an open supporter of terrorism (although never, to the best of our knowledge, of Al Qaeda). Iraq was openly funding Palestinian terrorism. Abu Nidal was living the good life there (On a side note, I've never been sure if his death wasn't caused by Mossad, Hussein's secret police, or just some fellow terrorists that Nidal pissed off, or possibly all three).
Note also that the sanctions which were required to keep Iraq WMD free were killing (at a conservative estimate) 20,000 children under age 5 every year. I have not seen reliable (ie not overinflated to decry American imperialism) statistics on the total numbers of deaths, but it's reasonable to guestimate half again as many, the status quo would presumeably have cost 60,000 lives between 2003 and 2005. Add to that French and Russian pressure to end the embargo so that they could resume thier oil contracts, which would have effectively ended the restraint on Ba'athist imperialism and pursuit of WMDs.
The case against war isn't as cut-and-dried as we'd like to think. Still probably wouldn't have done it myself, but I have to recognize that there would have been consequenses to that course of action, too.
For that reason I totally oppose these assholes trying to DDoS a political website. A good 40% of Americans are GOP or vote that way consistently, and another 15% or more vote that way often enough that the GOP can be said to speak for them on at least some issues. So these guys are trying to silence or partially the voice of some 55% of Americans. (note that the same calculus leads to both the GOP and Democrats speaking for 55% of America, given about 10% overlap in 'swing voters')
The only reason Rodenberry isn't spinning in his grave is that his ashes are in orbit.
So he's revolving in his grave.
I'll split the diff on whether beginning/end of DS9 is the death. The bullet cut the artery when The Dominion entered the scene. They were a lame 'We miss the black-and-white no-moral-quandriness of the Klingons.' The Cardassian conflict was an interesting cold war allegory. Dominion was boring. You knew they'd lose in the end.
I certainly didn't think it could happen so fast, either. That's the great thing about private spaceflight, though. 99.99% of the world can be preoccupied with wars or greed or Survivor, and it only takes a few guys (fortunately one of whom was greedy enough to bankroll the venture) to get it done. You don't need a whole government to do it.
That's actually why I'm always a bit optimistic about this sort of thing. As long as the government doesn't get in the way, it only takes a handful of dreamers to get it going.
Now that's not to say that government plays no role in spaceflight. Rutan & Co stood on the shoulders of giants to make this work. Without the advances made by US, Soviet, German, and European (and many others, too) governmental & military organizations, we wouldn't be where we are today.
I don't think you RedTFA. You say, "Scrapping the FCC would lead to complete anarchy which would in turn result in very bad things for consumers...." McCullagh's article foresees this argument and looks at the historical context in which the FCC is created. "...[C]ourts were already undertaking the slow but careful common-law method of crafting a set of rules for the new medium. An Illinois state court decided in 1926, for instance, that Chicago broadcaster WGN had the right to a disputed slice of spectrum, because 'priority of time creates a superiority in right.'" He goes on to say, "Abolishing the FCC does not mean airwave anarchy."
Abolishing the FCC does not mean eliminating government oversight of spectrum. It means eliminating a huge regulatory body that can be argued to dominate spectrum rather than simply oversee and resolve disputes.
Seriously, leave the poor strawman alone - he can't defend himself. McCullagh, on the other hand, deserves a reading, as he's got some interesting ideas given the current state of flux that telecoms find themselves in.
Yeah, while I was in grad school, most of the folks from my lab would go out for lunch together most days. Whenever we hit the Chinese buffet places, the anglo-types would ask for chopsticks, but our Chinese collegue would stick with the fork. One day he got exasperated and asked us, "Why do you always ask for chopsticks? The fork is better! Look, you can do anything with a fork. You can cut with it, you can scoop things up with it, you can stab things with it - you can do anything! Chopsticks just grab things, thats all."
We all kinda looked at each other, and finally one of us says, "Well, yeah, but its just kinda cool to eat with chopsticks sometimes." Its just a matter of perspective, I suppose.
Uh, yeah, I know the Shinkansen is in Japan. The wacky writing and tori gates were a give-away.:P
I was just giving examples that I'd actually seen. Never seen the high-speed trains in Belgium or Germany.
I actually think that Texas - of all places - could support a high-speed rail line or two. A Dallas-Waco-Austin-SanAntonio route might just work. It would have to compete with both cars and Southwest Airlines. Untill 11-Mar I'd have said the lower security risks would have made it a good alternative to air-lines, but a little less-so now. The problem is getting around once you get there, and the car's always going to have an advantage there.
Not sure that you're 100% right on the 'least railed' nation. It's true that we've got one of the lowest rates of passenger rail ridership in the free world, but we're not really that poorly served by rail freight.
I'm no expert, but I do recall a couple of discussions with a British trainspotter who contradicted me when I denigrated America's freight system along with her passenger system. Apparently (and again I'm no expert and am almost 100% quoting a trainspotter) America's transporting a fairly high percentage of its freight by rail, compared to Europe. Almost 100% of US track-miles are owned by railfreight companies, whereas most European rail is devoted to passenger traffic.
The one anecdote that I can add to that that approaches first-hand experience was hearing said Brit trainspotter proclaim, following a road-trip from Denver to Dallas, that the mile-plus-long trains he'd seen rumbling along beside US 287 between Amarillo and Dallas were unlike anything he'd seen in Europe.
Of course its equally important to point out that the Shinkansen and Eurostar, and even the more modest Swiss and Finnish passenger trains beat the hell out of the old Silver Meteor I once took from South Carolina to Florida. I don't even know if that line still runs.
Still, a lot of Europeans are finding that for the a lot of long-distance travel, air is vastly prefferable to rail. Especially now that Europe has allowed discount airlines to begin operating, ditching the protected national carriers.
And I, for one, welcome our new CompuBrain overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground nutrient caves.
Google records all its search queries and serves up those statistics. Most people think that's cool. But as long as the database doesn't store any customer-identifiable info, it shouldn't be a big deal. Google logs could track your search habits, which is a much more dangerous bit of information, but we're not worried about it.
Although I did have a momentary, "Holy crap! They can track in THAT much detail?" shock, it doesn't really raise my bloodpressure.
Nah, they're actually related to weasels, which are the same order as dogs and bears and racoons and so forth. Order Carnivora, I think. Rodents are order Rodentia. Beavers are rodents, with the buck-teeth.
Not only is this offensive to rats, its inaccurate too. While SCO may indeed have rabies, it is not possible for rats or other rodents to carry this particular disease. Opossums would be the closest critter that can handle the rabies requirement.
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And best of luck in your future endeavors.
You should try to become an astronaut. That'd be cool.
I'm breaking about three years of /. silence to say, "SCO, you should get down on your knobby, Latter-Day knees every single day and thank your lucky stars that there isn't a just corporate God, for if there were, you and all your minions would be struck down with some corporate equivalent of advanced syphilis, except for your minions, who would get a real form of advanced syphilis, and a nasty case of herpes just for good measure."
It just needed to be said.
First, let me state that a massive (relatively) object such as a comet or methany-type moon would be a better source for raw materials than a dispersed cloud. Asimov's old story "The Martian Way" (IIRC) illustrates the value of such a concentrated source of H2 and O2. So you're right that mining clouds is probably economically unfeasible.
:P
That said, there are a lot more questions you can ask before dismissing this out-of-hand.
A quick web search indicates that some nebulae are about 4 orders of magnitude denser than average interstellar space, so you're closer to 0.1 kg
A magnetic funnel might sweep out 2 square km of space at 50% efficiency (effective cross section 1 square km) yeilding 100,000 kg of material. Mostly this will be CHON and helium, with some iron and other heavier elements.
If you happened to find such a cloud with a slow-moving massive object that might gravitationally concentrate the material you could do even better.
This doesn't even rise to the level of back-of-a-napkin physics, but its enough to defend the modding up of a lay person's at a non-technical site such as this. If this were on a more technical website (just being news for nerds and having a bunch of techies hanging around doesn't make it a technical site) this might be worthwhile criticism. Besides if it hadn't been modded up, you wouldn't have been able to make the very valid point that these things are likely far too dispersed to be valuable, which is a useful factoid. The modders did you a favor!
Hit & Run over at Reason magazine is pretty interesting. It is fundamentally a libertarian blog of various Reason contributors. This blog has the distinction of having contributors supporting three different candidates, and almost the full spectrum of opinion on the Iraq war.
Also like Virginia Postrel's Dynamist blog.
I then try and read some of NRO's blogs and Daily Kos and Atrios just to make sure I keep up with what people are saying outside my own little echo chamber.
I can tell you that dormatories are not going to satisfy the criteria set forth in this rule, although from what else I have read it doesn't seem clear if these are truly dormatories or university owned apartments. I would bet it doesn't matter.
These are apartments, not dormitories. They are on land owned by the University, leased to a private company. They are pretty much identical to suburban apartments anywhere in the country.
"MT environments encompass venues such as hotels, conference and convention centers, airports,
and colleges and universities. In particular, questions have arisen about the role of the
Commission in addressing and resolving radio interference ("RFI") issues in these settings. In
addition, questions have arisen about the ability of homeowners associations, landlords, and
other third parties to prohibit customer use of small antennas when consumers install and operate
them as unlicensed devices."
This paragraph leads me to believe that dormitories are in fact covered under this rule anyway.
In any event you made the statement that no court would disallow the WiFi prohibition. To that I refer you to this sentence: "Both the FCC and the federal courts have overturned attempts by third parties to regulate RFI matters in light of the FCC's exclusive authority in this area." The Waterview ban is on WiFi transmitters that do not use the Waterview Wireless Network, specifically out of interference concerns. Thus, courts would and do find these restrictions void. Neither the FCC nor I care what you put in your lease contract, you can't put a blanket prohibition on WiFi access points. If you don't like it, you can find another country to own property in, rather than your tenants finding a new apartment.
Obviously not all contractual restrictions are void, but your implication that a lease contract is sacrosanct is also falling into the 90% of Sturgeon's Law. There are restrictions to contract law in almost every state, county, or municipality in the country.
And yes I am refering to you specifically, when you stated elsewhere in the thread that you would happily blacklist anyone who took you to court to uphold their rights (in this case to operate a WiFi access point) under the law. You may be able to bully your tenants into shutting down their WiFi access points, but they are still within their rights to do so.
Unless you have grossly mistated your position, you were stating that you'd seek retribution (via blacklisting) against anyone who successfully sued to enforce their rights. If that is the case, you are a reprehensible creature.
There is absolutely no way any court in the country would find anything wrong with this regulation.
As I suspected, the FCC begs to differ.
From the second paragraph, "We also affirm that the rights that consumers have under our rules to install and operate customer antennas one meter or less in size apply to the operation of unlicensed equipment, such as Wi-Fi access points - just as they do to the use of equipment in connection with fixed wireless services licensed by the FCC."
If Waterview wants to provide exclusive service over their apartments, they are welcome to do so in FCC restricted bandwidth in accordance with FCC law. But they cannot legally prohibit operation of 802.11x transmitters.
Not that I would expect this to bother you since in other posts you've shown that you really prefer not to respect the rights of your tenants.
landlords(sic) (like the university) routinely restrict all kinds of legal behavior.
Did you mean to say, "landlords (like the university) routinely illegally restrict all kinds of behavior"? You may be able to bully your tenants (if they actually exist and all this isn't just juvenile internet bravado) into compliance, but that doesn't make you right.
And the ruling expressly prohibited unreasonable restrictions.
/. manner is any indication. If you really do own property then you either know, or have a lawyer who knows, what local restrictions there are on your property rights. Such restrictions are almost invariably state and local restrictions, so yours will be different from mine, but they exist. Anyway, if you do actually know jack shit about the law, then you're obscuring the fact nicely.
You didn't qualify your little flamebait with the word 'reasonable' so this is irrelevant, unless you're going back and qualifying that statement.
And while the FCC rule is primarily aimed at patios and balconies, it also applies to interior spaces.
all sorts of restrictions on my tenants that would piss a character like you off to no end.
Intentionally, apparently, if your
And likewise you also don't know jack shit about the law.
Have you ever written a lease agreement?
There are many sorts of behaviour that landlords are expressly prohibited from restricting.
While I do not know specifically about unlicensed transmitters in the 802.11 frequency, I do know that many other types of recievers and transmitters are protected by federal law. Landlords cannot prohibit satellite antenae less than one meter in diameter in any space under the sole control of the tenant.
Leases can prohibit some legal activities, but there are also specific limits to allowable lease terms.
The article really is a bit breathless (GOES weather imagery and LANDSAT are almost undoubtedly going to be unaffected, as they're typically not held until they get FOIA requests, but just released generally).
It is also worth noting that this simply exempts these documents from FOIA requests. Which means the government doesn't HAVE to release them, but they still often will.
I really am sick of the Bush admin's attitude toward FOIA requests, in general. They seem to be operating from a 'deny first, ask questions later' philosophy (indeed I seem to remember reading about a story where the DOJ issued guidelines like that). That and they're over-classifying things, and not declassifying at anything approaching a reasonable rate.
I don't even understand what they think all this secrecy is accomplishing, anyway. Thier dirty laundry is getting out anyway, and homeland security isn't served, since people can get much of this info through other sources.
The oil drilling in ANWAR or loggin in Yellowstone is a bit of a red herring. LandSat, which would be more than enough to identify such issues, is widely available, and is for sale by the USGS. Besides, who really believes that a disgruntled park ranger or refuge worker wouldn't report it. All it takes is a Cessna and a digital camera to spot either case. Sure they could abuse this law to prevent space imagery of such areas to get out, but they could also just classify such imagery. If they're willing to abuse the law to cover up other illegal government actions, they'll find a way.
Did anybody else read the headline for this story and see visions of Gregory Peck starring in "To Kill a MicroWord"? ...
Just me, huh.
.. advocating genocide ..
You quoted too short. The full phrase was sounds like advocating genocide in the context of its association with insinuation of undue Jewish influence. And I was just saying be careful not to sound like a skinhead, because no one will take you seriously.
one of many much larger groups
Again, I would advocate not sounding like a skinhead. This is the exact phrasing used by the modern soft-sell Holocaust denialists. In France you'd be treading close to prohibited speech. If you're American you'll mostly just be ignored, except I think you may actually be trying to engage in sensible discussion (although you seem prone to tantrums) so I'm giving you some guidance on joining the civilized portion of the discussion. Lose the juvenile histrionics. You're using the language of racism, whether you mean to or not, and you're not going to be taken seriously till you can calm down and lose the insano hyperbole.
There's some balance that needs to be brought to US policy, but 'counterweight' is just another word for 'polarizing'. The truth is in the grey middle, and as long as you're spouting crazed conspiracies, you're just polarizing things.
Balkans are in the same boat, impoverished, brutalized by two-bit lordlings (aka the leaders of radical "free market", "shock therapy" reforms) and utterly humiliated by everyone.
I don't think that Shock Therapy reforms can really be blamed for Balkan strife. Outside of Slovenia, they were not particularly embraced, AFIAK. The places where shock therapy free marketism were most strongly embraced are also the most peaceful and successful (now) of the Central European nations - Poland (they didn't start murdering ethnic Russians and Germans), Czeckoslovakia (which peacefully became the Czeck Republic and Slovakia) and the Baltics (again no bloodbaths)
They were villified, bombed, humilliated and abused so that US could show who's the boss. Their war crimes (although were indeed commited) are but a fraction of the deaths in Iraq by US hands.
NATO intervention started long (years) after their Very Bloody Wars got into full swing. Their problems are not NATO's or America's doing. They went out and manufactured them locally, and in a way that none of their neighbors chose to do, despite similar economic conditions.
As to Israel being sacrificial goat. That sounds like they dont deserve it.
I know this is slashdot and nobody posts carefully, but seriously, you might consider not leaving sentences lying around that sound like advocating genocide right after several long sentences about a vast Jewish conspiracy controlling the US government.
Actually the only president who's handled Isreal well was Bush the Elder, although Bush the Lesser was technically first to call for a separate palestinian state. He actually threatened to cut of Israeli aid if they didn't cut out whichever bit of bullsizzle they were engaged in at the time.
The bit with the American religious right is a pretty fringe bit among the really hard-core nutcases (Robertson et al) that believe promoting Israeli power in the middle east will accelerate the Second Coming. No shit. They believe that crap. But your run-of-the-mill prayer-in-the-classroom right-to-life types of Catholics and mainstream Protestants don't buy into that much of the nut-job stuff. If there's any religious element to the pro-Israel camp in the US, its that too many Americans see Jews as 'not-other', and have mostly shed our anti-semitism, but we still see Muslims as 'other' and so there's less empathy for their plight.
A shift towards accountability in our Israel policy is long overdue, but since we aren't about to let them be slaughtered wholesale, we won't see an end to Islamist terrorism for at least 100 years, although a sane Israel policy will get it down to the level of an OKC bombing (only local to the mideast, not the great plains) every decade or so, rather than the constant crap we're dealing with now.
If Arab nations do not suffer under opressive US-sponsored regimes and are humiliated daily by Israeli beligerence
A relatively small number of them live under US sponsored repressive regimes. The rest are under homegrown despots. There are also a couple of French-sponsored regimes.
Germany would certainly support a war against any country openly supporting terrorism
I'm not saying the Iraq war was a good idea, but Iraq was an open supporter of terrorism (although never, to the best of our knowledge, of Al Qaeda). Iraq was openly funding Palestinian terrorism. Abu Nidal was living the good life there (On a side note, I've never been sure if his death wasn't caused by Mossad, Hussein's secret police, or just some fellow terrorists that Nidal pissed off, or possibly all three).
Note also that the sanctions which were required to keep Iraq WMD free were killing (at a conservative estimate) 20,000 children under age 5 every year. I have not seen reliable (ie not overinflated to decry American imperialism) statistics on the total numbers of deaths, but it's reasonable to guestimate half again as many, the status quo would presumeably have cost 60,000 lives between 2003 and 2005. Add to that French and Russian pressure to end the embargo so that they could resume thier oil contracts, which would have effectively ended the restraint on Ba'athist imperialism and pursuit of WMDs.
The case against war isn't as cut-and-dried as we'd like to think. Still probably wouldn't have done it myself, but I have to recognize that there would have been consequenses to that course of action, too.
For that reason I totally oppose these assholes trying to DDoS a political website. A good 40% of Americans are GOP or vote that way consistently, and another 15% or more vote that way often enough that the GOP can be said to speak for them on at least some issues. So these guys are trying to silence or partially the voice of some 55% of Americans. (note that the same calculus leads to both the GOP and Democrats speaking for 55% of America, given about 10% overlap in 'swing voters')
The only reason Rodenberry isn't spinning in his grave is that his ashes are in orbit.
So he's revolving in his grave.
I'll split the diff on whether beginning/end of DS9 is the death. The bullet cut the artery when The Dominion entered the scene. They were a lame 'We miss the black-and-white no-moral-quandriness of the Klingons.' The Cardassian conflict was an interesting cold war allegory. Dominion was boring. You knew they'd lose in the end.
Everything I subscribe to was on the list:
The Economist
Reason
Science News
But there are some really intriguing ones on that list. I was tempted.
I certainly didn't think it could happen so fast, either. That's the great thing about private spaceflight, though. 99.99% of the world can be preoccupied with wars or greed or Survivor, and it only takes a few guys (fortunately one of whom was greedy enough to bankroll the venture) to get it done. You don't need a whole government to do it.
That's actually why I'm always a bit optimistic about this sort of thing. As long as the government doesn't get in the way, it only takes a handful of dreamers to get it going.
Now that's not to say that government plays no role in spaceflight. Rutan & Co stood on the shoulders of giants to make this work. Without the advances made by US, Soviet, German, and European (and many others, too) governmental & military organizations, we wouldn't be where we are today.
I don't think you RedTFA. You say, "Scrapping the FCC would lead to complete anarchy which would in turn result in very bad things for consumers...." McCullagh's article foresees this argument and looks at the historical context in which the FCC is created. "...[C]ourts were already undertaking the slow but careful common-law method of crafting a set of rules for the new medium. An Illinois state court decided in 1926, for instance, that Chicago broadcaster WGN had the right to a disputed slice of spectrum, because 'priority of time creates a superiority in right.'" He goes on to say, "Abolishing the FCC does not mean airwave anarchy."
Abolishing the FCC does not mean eliminating government oversight of spectrum. It means eliminating a huge regulatory body that can be argued to dominate spectrum rather than simply oversee and resolve disputes.
Seriously, leave the poor strawman alone - he can't defend himself. McCullagh, on the other hand, deserves a reading, as he's got some interesting ideas given the current state of flux that telecoms find themselves in.
Yeah, while I was in grad school, most of the folks from my lab would go out for lunch together most days. Whenever we hit the Chinese buffet places, the anglo-types would ask for chopsticks, but our Chinese collegue would stick with the fork. One day he got exasperated and asked us, "Why do you always ask for chopsticks? The fork is better! Look, you can do anything with a fork. You can cut with it, you can scoop things up with it, you can stab things with it - you can do anything! Chopsticks just grab things, thats all."
We all kinda looked at each other, and finally one of us says, "Well, yeah, but its just kinda cool to eat with chopsticks sometimes." Its just a matter of perspective, I suppose.
Everything's bigger in Texas. Bigger Brother is just means we're being consistent.
But one question: Why is this under the Science category and not under Privacy?
Yeah, I think they were aiming for 'Your Rights Online' and missed by about 15 letters (not including whitespace).
Uh, yeah, I know the Shinkansen is in Japan. The wacky writing and tori gates were a give-away. :P
I was just giving examples that I'd actually seen. Never seen the high-speed trains in Belgium or Germany.
I actually think that Texas - of all places - could support a high-speed rail line or two. A Dallas-Waco-Austin-SanAntonio route might just work. It would have to compete with both cars and Southwest Airlines. Untill 11-Mar I'd have said the lower security risks would have made it a good alternative to air-lines, but a little less-so now. The problem is getting around once you get there, and the car's always going to have an advantage there.
Not sure that you're 100% right on the 'least railed' nation. It's true that we've got one of the lowest rates of passenger rail ridership in the free world, but we're not really that poorly served by rail freight.
I'm no expert, but I do recall a couple of discussions with a British trainspotter who contradicted me when I denigrated America's freight system along with her passenger system. Apparently (and again I'm no expert and am almost 100% quoting a trainspotter) America's transporting a fairly high percentage of its freight by rail, compared to Europe. Almost 100% of US track-miles are owned by railfreight companies, whereas most European rail is devoted to passenger traffic.
The one anecdote that I can add to that that approaches first-hand experience was hearing said Brit trainspotter proclaim, following a road-trip from Denver to Dallas, that the mile-plus-long trains he'd seen rumbling along beside US 287 between Amarillo and Dallas were unlike anything he'd seen in Europe.
Of course its equally important to point out that the Shinkansen and Eurostar, and even the more modest Swiss and Finnish passenger trains beat the hell out of the old Silver Meteor I once took from South Carolina to Florida. I don't even know if that line still runs.
Still, a lot of Europeans are finding that for the a lot of long-distance travel, air is vastly prefferable to rail. Especially now that Europe has allowed discount airlines to begin operating, ditching the protected national carriers.
And I, for one, welcome our new CompuBrain overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground nutrient caves.
Google records all its search queries and serves up those statistics. Most people think that's cool. But as long as the database doesn't store any customer-identifiable info, it shouldn't be a big deal. Google logs could track your search habits, which is a much more dangerous bit of information, but we're not worried about it.
Although I did have a momentary, "Holy crap! They can track in THAT much detail?" shock, it doesn't really raise my bloodpressure.
Nah, they're actually related to weasels, which are the same order as dogs and bears and racoons and so forth. Order Carnivora, I think. Rodents are order Rodentia. Beavers are rodents, with the buck-teeth.
Not only is this offensive to rats, its inaccurate too. While SCO may indeed have rabies, it is not possible for rats or other rodents to carry this particular disease. Opossums would be the closest critter that can handle the rabies requirement.