You guys do know there are other countries, right? Stuff happens in them all the time that could arguably be called "news" and doesn't involve America at all.
Yes, but for the most part...that news has virtually no effect on the common American's daily life...so we generally don't care that much what else is happening in the world.
And if only that were true in reverse.
Sadly, anyone living in the rest of the world has to become familiar with what is going on in the USA, not only because we import most of our entertainment media from the US, but also because the USA tends to export its policies aggressively, via military, diplomatic and economic channels. So that today's NYSE financial trivia or Washington soap opera tends to become tomorrow's drone strikes in Afghanistan or FBI extradition raid in Switzerland or New Zealand. This accelerated during the Dubya years, we took a deep breath when against all odds Obama got in, and now, with the US Presidential elections raising the odds of a Republican uber-Bush wanting to start more wars, we're all biting our nails and anxiously looking at the USA like we do Iran, Israel, North Korea, Putin's Russia, and China. Wondering just how the chips will fall, which of several hardline warmongering factions will gain control, and where the missiles will land next.
Slashdotters aside, I'm not sure many average Americans really actually understand this glass-fortress effect. It seems to me that there's still this strongly held folksy belief that America is somehow an isolated little farming town wanting nothing more than to stay blissfully uninvolved with the world, and that the world just "hates our freedoms" or "feels jealous". But the "city on the hill" is now more like a brightly lit Last Days of Nero's Rome themed Hell's Angels rock arena spectacular with real guns.
I really do wish middle America were the sleepy farm town so many of you folks seem to think it is. We wouldn't be nearly so scared of (and for) you.
"I kind of feel like a car salesman who realizes he no longer believes in the product he's been pitching. It's not that I don't find Linux worthy..."
If you find Linux worthy then why do you no longer believe in it?
For me, I've been falling out of love with Linux for the last two years, and there's one very simple reason: Ubuntu's Unity interface. That right there is what is wrong with Linux.
I'd upgrade to Linux Mint to make the suckage stop, but my main home desktop is dual-boot and I'm afraid the installer might melt my Windows 7 partition. And since Win7 knows about my HDMI TV and can run iTunes and Steam and my Ubuntu can't do any of those, that would hurt.
1. Write any sufficiently large piece of C++ code 2. Wait 3. Get rooted by the black hats 4. Find out which trivially-detectable-if-you'd-used-a-decent-language error the black hats found in your code and sell it to NATO 5. Profit!
the subject of children comes up.... as soon as I saw that scene I thought, "Holy shit! That's how society works. That's what the status quo holds over people's heads."
No, that's what life holds over people's heads.
The genetic imperative of carbon-based organisms to reproduce is not actually an invention of the marketing department of the Coca-Cola company. And having a family isn't some dark conspiracy to uphold the "social status quo" any more than constantly needing to breathe is.
The reality is that people tend to enjoy social stability because civil wars and revolutionary social upheavals are actually full of hurt and breakage and often don't change all that much in the long run.
Why does it cost billions in order to travel to Mars?
Easy:
$10,000 for the giant cannon $999,990,000 for the criminal-negligence lawsuits when your budget-price spacestronauts suddenly yet inevitably explode on liftoff
Now, if you wanted to actually get them there and back alive, it will cost a few more zeroes than that.
(IE, design and implement a space greenhouse - including a space compost-recycling toilet - that runs perfectly for 18 months. However, if you can succeed at building one of those, you can probably amortise the cost by selling a few million of them to Earth to colonise the Sahara desert, Antarctica, or Beverley Hills.)
I'm writing a new app that will revolutionize Dan Bricklin's life. It will randomly insert the word "killer" into every sentence he writes, thus cutting his workload in half!
I read that as "Dan Brown", and thought "but he does that already!"
The depraved ostrich killer watched the suave, wealthy professor of comparative killer whale anatomy with the killer smile sign hundreds of fainting fans' autograph books from behind the killer Retina screen of his killer iPad 3.
Yeah yeah yeah, but give me this at least: the hearsay rule covers anecdotes the witness tells about anecdotes other people have told them, does it not?
"So this pulp novel staggers into a bar, and he's in a really bad way... cover half torn off, corners dog-eared, a big full-colour illustration of dripping blood right on the frontispiece. A real page-turner. And he lurches up to the barman and mutters, "Doc, doc... I've been stabbed... the blade was poisoned... I need an anecdote!"
"And the bartender looks back at him and says, "Son, first of all this ain't a hospital, it's the Shaggy Dog Bar. And second, you know I can't get involved in your sort of story. But I can pour you a punchline."
Name two significantly divergent possible interpretations of "impactful".
1. This gangsterizer was obviously killified by an impactful velocityness of steelish-jacketified leady stuff, thought Inspector Noun-Suffix, abstractly. 2. This dynamic corporate motivational seminar will be both uplifting and impactful. To ensure this, we have planted hydraulic rams under the front-row seats and have removed the carpet. Please bring a crash helmet.
My favourite newbizgovspeak is "administrate" - when I'm almost certain that what administrators used to do when they performed administration was administer. Somehow a perfectly good transtitive/nontransitive verb got forcefully detransitivised the hard way.
I am expectfully confidentised that soon we will see the growthed riseupping of "system administrationisers".
We can also send EMP messages by setting off nuclear bombs in patterns corresponding to e.g. Morse code. Does that mean that we should?
But... but nuclear bombs! We've got them just lying around. Be a shame not to use them. There's got to be some kind of science type thing we can do. Blow up the ionosphere, or put a crater in the moon maybe? Excavate a harbour in Alaska? It's the atomic science age! Gotta do atomic science to something!
In the article it mentions that it took two hours to send the message in 7-bit ascii.
Arguably you only need to send one bit * to submarine to say "Launch missiles now". That specific application is going to be a lot more efficient than any kind of cable and will probably automatically reserve a few trillion in DoD funding.
* Preferably with a few more bits for error correction and authentication, unless we decide we really really don't trust the Russians ^W Iraqis ^W Iranians ^W French this year...
2. Backpack full of inverter/conversion circuitry and rechargeable batteries. Alternative: potatoes.
I find your potato-based science ideas intriguing and would like you to consider developing them further at our state-of-the-art complex. Your employment application will be fast-tracked if you are a robot.
...ahh, you're one of those who buys into the "Enterprise false flag" conspiracy theories?
Bah, everyone knows it's the Reliant which is the real false flag.
What's actually going to happen is that Admiral Greenert is going to "borrow" the Enterprise so he can take it to Genesis Island to retrieve the body of Admiral Rickover and reunite it with his katra, which is temporarily stored within the mind of ex-President George W Bush.
Oppenheimer did NOT want to build the H-bomb! What was he thinking?
That frying millions of civilians alive, instead of merely hundreds of thousands, was maybe going a bit too far and that the USA should rethink the "eat flaming atomic death, evildoers!" foreign policy?
>To bring about change you must win the hearts and minds of the public.
Yeah. Like the heroes of the French Revolution. Madame La Guilloutine certainly had the heart and mind of every living citizen in her grasp, and the neck of everyone else in her mouth, c'est la Verite, non?
Perhaps that's why the first French Republic quickly turned into an Empire? The next couple of revolutions didn't involve quite so much beheading, if I have my history correct.
today's leftist 'ends-justifies-the-means' guy is tomorrows fascist.
Or yesterday's Stalinist, or today's Trotskyist.
I do wish people would stop saying "fascist" when they mean "authoritarian anti-democrat". Fascists and Communists fought like cats and dogs, but fascism was only one of many 20th century political movements that believed in mass mobilisation and a top-down command state. And a lot of hard-core union and Socialist Worker types today still basically think that Lenin was on the right track and what we really need to get society on the rails is a good purge of "class enemies" up against the walls.
Not that today's hard Right is much better, than today's hard Left, but let's use the correct political labels and stop trying to rewrite history. Otherwise we might dutifully avoid recreating German Fascism and end up creating something nearly indistinguishable with a different coloured flag. Whether that flag be red, black, or red, white and blue.
1) Person A commits a murder, for example. 2) Person A's friend, Person B, goes to the police to report person A, thus betraying him. 3) Somehow Person B is supposed to wind up in Hell?
I think the appropriate lesson to be drawn is that Dante Alighieri's Italy, in which he had been a political player, basically had the moral compass of today's Mafia (loyalty above morality), and Dante's screwed up worldview predictably appeared in his fiction. We know better today, or we ought to.
an Apache helicopter gunship slaughtering Iraqi reporters...,it's not evidence of illegal or unethical activity.
If shooting civilians who try to rescue the wounded is indeed neither illegal nor unethical, then I think we need to reevaluate our definitions of law and ethics.
And yes, this kind of messed-up stuff happens in wars, which is precisely why we shouldn't do wars.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but for the most part...that news has virtually no effect on the common American's daily life...so we generally don't care that much what else is happening in the world.
And if only that were true in reverse.
Sadly, anyone living in the rest of the world has to become familiar with what is going on in the USA, not only because we import most of our entertainment media from the US, but also because the USA tends to export its policies aggressively, via military, diplomatic and economic channels. So that today's NYSE financial trivia or Washington soap opera tends to become tomorrow's drone strikes in Afghanistan or FBI extradition raid in Switzerland or New Zealand. This accelerated during the Dubya years, we took a deep breath when against all odds Obama got in, and now, with the US Presidential elections raising the odds of a Republican uber-Bush wanting to start more wars, we're all biting our nails and anxiously looking at the USA like we do Iran, Israel, North Korea, Putin's Russia, and China. Wondering just how the chips will fall, which of several hardline warmongering factions will gain control, and where the missiles will land next.
Slashdotters aside, I'm not sure many average Americans really actually understand this glass-fortress effect. It seems to me that there's still this strongly held folksy belief that America is somehow an isolated little farming town wanting nothing more than to stay blissfully uninvolved with the world, and that the world just "hates our freedoms" or "feels jealous". But the "city on the hill" is now more like a brightly lit Last Days of Nero's Rome themed Hell's Angels rock arena spectacular with real guns.
I really do wish middle America were the sleepy farm town so many of you folks seem to think it is. We wouldn't be nearly so scared of (and for) you.
"I kind of feel like a car salesman who realizes he no longer believes in the product he's been pitching. It's not that I don't find Linux worthy..."
If you find Linux worthy then why do you no longer believe in it?
For me, I've been falling out of love with Linux for the last two years, and there's one very simple reason: Ubuntu's Unity interface. That right there is what is wrong with Linux.
I'd upgrade to Linux Mint to make the suckage stop, but my main home desktop is dual-boot and I'm afraid the installer might melt my Windows 7 partition. And since Win7 knows about my HDMI TV and can run iTunes and Steam and my Ubuntu can't do any of those, that would hurt.
The question is...how do "I" get into that??!?
1. Write any sufficiently large piece of C++ code
2. Wait
3. Get rooted by the black hats
4. Find out which trivially-detectable-if-you'd-used-a-decent-language error the black hats found in your code and sell it to NATO
5. Profit!
the subject of children comes up.... as soon as I saw that scene I thought, "Holy shit! That's how society works. That's what the status quo holds over people's heads."
No, that's what life holds over people's heads.
The genetic imperative of carbon-based organisms to reproduce is not actually an invention of the marketing department of the Coca-Cola company. And having a family isn't some dark conspiracy to uphold the "social status quo" any more than constantly needing to breathe is.
The reality is that people tend to enjoy social stability because civil wars and revolutionary social upheavals are actually full of hurt and breakage and often don't change all that much in the long run.
Why does it cost billions in order to travel to Mars?
Easy:
$10,000 for the giant cannon
$999,990,000 for the criminal-negligence lawsuits when your budget-price spacestronauts suddenly yet inevitably explode on liftoff
Now, if you wanted to actually get them there and back alive, it will cost a few more zeroes than that.
(IE, design and implement a space greenhouse - including a space compost-recycling toilet - that runs perfectly for 18 months. However, if you can succeed at building one of those, you can probably amortise the cost by selling a few million of them to Earth to colonise the Sahara desert, Antarctica, or Beverley Hills.)
"Qi" is one of the alternate spellings for the Asian word for the circulating life energy in all living things. Other spellings are "chi" and "ki".
Come on now, surely we all know that a Ki is a D'ni smartphone used in Uru.
What? You all remember Uru, don't you?
(crickets)
(cries)
I'm writing a new app that will revolutionize Dan Bricklin's life. It will randomly insert the word "killer" into every sentence he writes, thus cutting his workload in half!
I read that as "Dan Brown", and thought "but he does that already!"
The depraved ostrich killer watched the suave, wealthy professor of comparative killer whale anatomy with the killer smile sign hundreds of fainting fans' autograph books from behind the killer Retina screen of his killer iPad 3.
Tells you something about the state of the government when people say Nixon would think "things have gone a touch too much".
Putting things in perspective a little, it was I-actually-am-a-crook Nixon who decided that the Vietnam War had gone a touch too far and ended it.
So that says something about the state of the US Government even in the 1970s.
Yeah yeah yeah, but give me this at least: the hearsay rule covers anecdotes the witness tells about anecdotes other people have told them, does it not?
"So this pulp novel staggers into a bar, and he's in a really bad way... cover half torn off, corners dog-eared, a big full-colour illustration of dripping blood right on the frontispiece. A real page-turner. And he lurches up to the barman and mutters, "Doc, doc... I've been stabbed... the blade was poisoned... I need an anecdote!"
"And the bartender looks back at him and says, "Son, first of all this ain't a hospital, it's the Shaggy Dog Bar. And second, you know I can't get involved in your sort of story. But I can pour you a punchline."
Name two significantly divergent possible interpretations of "impactful".
1. This gangsterizer was obviously killified by an impactful velocityness of steelish-jacketified leady stuff, thought Inspector Noun-Suffix, abstractly.
2. This dynamic corporate motivational seminar will be both uplifting and impactful. To ensure this, we have planted hydraulic rams under the front-row seats and have removed the carpet. Please bring a crash helmet.
My favourite newbizgovspeak is "administrate" - when I'm almost certain that what administrators used to do when they performed administration was administer. Somehow a perfectly good transtitive/nontransitive verb got forcefully detransitivised the hard way.
I am expectfully confidentised that soon we will see the growthed riseupping of "system administrationisers".
We can also send EMP messages by setting off nuclear bombs in patterns corresponding to e.g. Morse code. Does that mean that we should?
But... but nuclear bombs! We've got them just lying around. Be a shame not to use them. There's got to be some kind of science type thing we can do. Blow up the ionosphere, or put a crater in the moon maybe? Excavate a harbour in Alaska? It's the atomic science age! Gotta do atomic science to something!
(big puppy eyes)
Nuclear bombs!
(The sound a swinging pendant makes)
As it dangles on the chest of a swinging pedant?
In the article it mentions that it took two hours to send the message in 7-bit ascii.
Arguably you only need to send one bit * to submarine to say "Launch missiles now". That specific application is going to be a lot more efficient than any kind of cable and will probably automatically reserve a few trillion in DoD funding.
* Preferably with a few more bits for error correction and authentication, unless we decide we really really don't trust the Russians ^W Iraqis ^W Iranians ^W French this year...
Slashdot has always been ugly and pedestrian
I've never understood the word "pedestrian" as an insult. What would critics prefer, art that looks "motorist"?
"Oh, this web 2.1 shopping interface is so gloriously divine, dahling... it's absolutely six-thirty rush-hour multi-vehicle pileup on the LA freeway!"
What the internet needs is an AI moderating system.
Good lord no. Let an AI learn about the human race from Web comments and we'd be nuked in a dozen microseconds.
2. Backpack full of inverter/conversion circuitry and rechargeable batteries. Alternative: potatoes.
I find your potato-based science ideas intriguing and would like you to consider developing them further at our state-of-the-art complex. Your employment application will be fast-tracked if you are a robot.
Sincerely, Cave Johnson.
Obviously the risk was that they lost their entire investment, and then that very thing materialized.
"Hold on a second! This installation has a substantial dollar value attached to it!"
Scarily enough, this was a case where even taking off and nuking the site from orbit wouldn't have helped.
Seriously, no-one thought of sandboxing the holodeck? Even after the first 10 times the ship got pwned by it?
In the 1980s, it seemed totally unbelievable that every passing alien ship could drive-by root their holodeck.
The sad thing is, the older I get and the more I experience real Internet security, the more depressingly probable that scenario seems.
...ahh, you're one of those who buys into the "Enterprise false flag" conspiracy theories?
Bah, everyone knows it's the Reliant which is the real false flag.
What's actually going to happen is that Admiral Greenert is going to "borrow" the Enterprise so he can take it to Genesis Island to retrieve the body of Admiral Rickover and reunite it with his katra, which is temporarily stored within the mind of ex-President George W Bush.
Oppenheimer did NOT want to build the H-bomb! What was he thinking?
That frying millions of civilians alive, instead of merely hundreds of thousands, was maybe going a bit too far and that the USA should rethink the "eat flaming atomic death, evildoers!" foreign policy?
Probably not, sadly.
>To bring about change you must win the hearts and minds of the public.
Yeah. Like the heroes of the French Revolution. Madame La Guilloutine certainly had the heart and mind of every living citizen in her grasp, and the neck of everyone else in her mouth, c'est la Verite, non?
Perhaps that's why the first French Republic quickly turned into an Empire? The next couple of revolutions didn't involve quite so much beheading, if I have my history correct.
today's leftist 'ends-justifies-the-means' guy is tomorrows fascist.
Or yesterday's Stalinist, or today's Trotskyist.
I do wish people would stop saying "fascist" when they mean "authoritarian anti-democrat". Fascists and Communists fought like cats and dogs, but fascism was only one of many 20th century political movements that believed in mass mobilisation and a top-down command state. And a lot of hard-core union and Socialist Worker types today still basically think that Lenin was on the right track and what we really need to get society on the rails is a good purge of "class enemies" up against the walls.
Not that today's hard Right is much better, than today's hard Left, but let's use the correct political labels and stop trying to rewrite history. Otherwise we might dutifully avoid recreating German Fascism and end up creating something nearly indistinguishable with a different coloured flag. Whether that flag be red, black, or red, white and blue.
1) Person A commits a murder, for example.
2) Person A's friend, Person B, goes to the police to report person A, thus betraying him.
3) Somehow Person B is supposed to wind up in Hell?
I think the appropriate lesson to be drawn is that Dante Alighieri's Italy, in which he had been a political player, basically had the moral compass of today's Mafia (loyalty above morality), and Dante's screwed up worldview predictably appeared in his fiction. We know better today, or we ought to.
an Apache helicopter gunship slaughtering Iraqi reporters...,it's not evidence of illegal or unethical activity.
If shooting civilians who try to rescue the wounded is indeed neither illegal nor unethical, then I think we need to reevaluate our definitions of law and ethics.
And yes, this kind of messed-up stuff happens in wars, which is precisely why we shouldn't do wars.