How are you going to kill Osama with beam weapons when you don't know where he is?
I didn't miss this point, I chose not to respond to it because it wasn't a part of the original discussion. That was, artemis67 claiming (rightly so) that had a beam weapon been available several years ago, Clinton would have killed Bin Laden. Instead, the time it took our cruise missiles to reach him gave him time to leave.
You missed this point when you said, "Second, do you really think the military would have had time to react, decide they were a real threat and not a "regular" hijack, and annihilate these airplanes before they reached their targets?" Nobody was talking about shooting down hijacked airplanes.
This side point that you brought up ("How are you going to kill Osama with beam weapons when you don't know where he is?") is a red herring and is counter to the discussion at hand. You're trying to discredit the idea of a space based laser weapon by bringing up a (false) lack of U.S. intelligence. The fact is we did know where Bin Laden was several years back, and occasionally know where he is even today, though we can't reach him before he moves again. A beam weapon that could hit it's target in minute instead of hours would solve this problem.
We've got a very different outlook on things than Europeans do, except for the radical left, which noone over here pays much attention to, except during election years.
Man, that's two cool people on Slashdot in one thread. +friend.
Surprise surprise, another empty-headed, America-hating particularist/.er.:shock:
Hey, I like you. You think like me. +friend.
Re:Administration hasn't done anything bad
on
Weapons in Space
·
· Score: 1
Holy shit. An insightful comment from a Coward! Maybe there is hope for the world after all...:)
Re:Administration hasn't done anything bad
on
Weapons in Space
·
· Score: 1
If you think the US had a "war" in Iraq during the Clinton administration, your tin foil hat is on a bit too tight.
I believe he meant Serbia.
Re:Administration hasn't done anything bad
on
Weapons in Space
·
· Score: 1
Clinton: Longest growth/expansion in US history Bush: Most job losses since great depression
Oh, for crying out loud! I am just as unhappy with some of Bush's choices as the next person, but anyone who believes a president has anything to do with the economy is delusional.
Clinton didn't give us the wealth and prosperity of the late nineties. The Dot Com bubble did that.
Bush didn't destroy the stock market, cause bankruptcies, or otherwise put the economy in it's current state of despair. The burst of the Dot Com bubble did that.
Honestly, you would think grown adults would understand simple economics by now. Are we still blaming Hoover for the depression? As if he had anything to do with the years of build-up and over-speculation that preceeded him?
Also interesting: The same clowns who blame Bush for the economic slide seem to have forgotten whose term it started under. If you're going to completely screw up your logic on who affects what in national economics, at least be honest about who fits into the blame box under your faulty model. Even our favorite chubby intern could figure this one out.
Re:The bad side of course...
on
Weapons in Space
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
is it could be the start of a new cold war
Is this so bad? We achieved a lot during the cold war technical wise. Had it continued, perhaps we'd have a nice base on the moon by now.
Second, do you really think the military would have had time to react, decide they were a real threat and not a "regular" hijack, and annihilate these airplanes before they reached their targets?
You missed the point:
The time it took for the missiles to travel to their destination gave Bin Laden ample time to escape. If we had had a low-orbital beam weapon like this, there would not have been a 9/11.
If the beam had been used to kill Bin Laden, there wouldn't have been a 9/11 because the man behind it would have been dead. Nobody suggested the beam could have been used to shoot down the airplanes after they were hijacked.
why should a young, healthy guy pay thousands of dollars a year for health insurance when, even if he gets sick, it will often have cost less to not have any insurance at all? I made this decision when I was in school
I tried this once. Switched jobs, and my new employer didn't kick in insurance benefits until I'd been there for 6 months. Previous employer offered coverage under COBRA for over $400/month. Simple math told me I'd be smart to just pay for anything that came up with cash. If nothing came up, I'd save myself $2400.
At least, it was a great idea until my wife had to have emergency gallbladder surgery 4 months later and we got a bill for fifteen grand. Oops. Spent 5 years paying that off.
The state has also tried comparing motor vehicle registration data with tax returns, looking for people who might be driving Rolls Royces or Jaguars but declaring only a small income
And what if the Jag was given to me by my parents or a rich friend? Or perhaps I bought it during the dot com bubble but am now flat broke, working at McDonalds, unable to bring myself to sell my beloved Rolls. I hope the people investigating this have the power to say, "Oops, sorry. You're legal. We'll leave you alone." These government projects tend to become hyped up witch hunts in short order. Let's be sure we're not burning any innocent people at the stake here.
Unsurprisingly, Reeves came out strongly in defence of the PSP as its own product and not a Game Boy replacement. "It's not, as people have said, a new Game Boy," he said. "There are so many other features that you can add onto it, whether it's GPS or GPRS even."
I can't decide if this is cool or not. A GPS receiver and cellular phone attached to my portable gaming device? What for?
Now, if it had a touchscreen, Palm OS, and a secure way to copy my games onto the device so I don't have to carry them around with me everywhere... then we're talking.
You pay. Snail mail is subsidized by the government. Heavily.
Source?
The USPS is not federally funded; it has a federally granted monopoly, yes, but it operates from it's own revenues. Taxpayer dollars are not handed over to the USPS. So no, snail mail doesn't cost me a thing unless I'm the one mailing it.
Speaking of real-world, where are you living? All women will do that. Don't believe me?
No, I don't. My wife doesn't care about diamonds or other gems. We have gold wedding bands with no decorations. Cost less than $100 for the pair. If I had wasted money on diamonds, she probably wouldn't have married me.
As for iTunes, perhaps the customer wants music organized in a single location, with nifty features like Celebrity Playlists and a relatively sane browsing interface, without having to wade through whatever crap a random teenager thought would be great to share over P2P, regardless of actual sound/ripping quality, accuracy in labelling, musical quality, or server bandwidth. Or is that just me?
Hey, I agree with you. No argument here. iTunes is great for all of the reasons you describe and I'd be happy to use it if not for the whole "You can only do with your music what we say you can do" bullshit. I don't buy copy protected CDs for the same reason. Anyone who thinks they can sell me information and then further dictate how I use it can piss off. I'll simply get the information I want another way, legal or not. Shut down these other ways and I'll simply do without.
I'll tell you what I think is hilarious around here: This whole forum went from "DRM = NO SALE!" to lopping up iTunes like a thirsty dog at a water bowl. Who would have thought in a million years that someone would be moderated down on Slashdot for saying "DRM is crap and I'm not going to buy it."
Suffice it to say, my music listening works as follows:
1. Big stash of music on a mirrored array. 2. Accessed from a variety of computers in my house, running various operating systems. 2a. One Windows box sends music throughout a whole-house audio system. 2b. I also listen on my Linux workstation. 2c. My wife listens on her computer. 2d. I have networked hardware players that pull from the same collection (for instance, one streams to speakers in my garage). 2e. I listen on my iPod. 2f. I plug my iPod into my computer at work and play the tunes directly off the iPod with Winamp (much more convenient than the iPod's interface). 2g. When my kids are a little older, they'll have their own computers to listen to our music collection with.
See the problem yet? I can only authorize three devices to play my music - and Linux isn't one of them, and I doubt my hardware players are either. Sort of destroys the whole idea of having digital music for me. I like the fact that I can pull up a playlist from whatever device is convenient for me at that given point in time. I also like the fact that I can listen to my playlist while my wife listens to her's while the kids listen to their's and none of them interfere with the others. I'm not going to screw with authorizing/deauthorizing/calling Apple support all of the time. I shouldn't have to.
Then there's the whole point of treating a paying customer like a thief...
Nope, the best I can hope for is no restrictions at all. DRM = no sale.
I play my music on a variety of devices. Various computers with various operating systems, portable devices, standalone & networked MP3 players, etc. Fairplay makes the music worthless to me because I'm not going to be able to play it freely on some of these devices. Which means to actually enjoy the music I've legally purchased I have to burn and rerip every song.
Screw that. I'm not paying for the "privilege" of jumping through hoops like this - not to mention further degrading the quality of the music. Give it to me as a raw MP3 and I'll be happy to hand over my hard earned cash. Until then I'll buy CDs I like and download singles from any random P2P service.
Which brings me to another point: All of the music on iTunes is also freely available elsewhere. The fact that a customer purchases the music legally instead of just downloading it, doesn't that tell you something about that customer? Perhaps that he wants to do things the legal why? Why in the hell would you inconvenience him and treat him like a pirate by using DRM? He's proven his intention to not pirate music by actually buying it. What are they worried about? That he's going to put it up on P2P services? Too late, it's already there. That he's going to share it with a friend? Too late, the friend can download it anywhere else just the same. So what's the point? I always hear, "It keeps people honest." No, it doesn't: Those people were kept honest in the first place by purchasing the damn song when there was ample opportunity to pirate it.
On Saturday I bought two albums solely because I encountered songs on Kazaa. Wouldn't have looked for them otherwise.
My running total for the past two weeks is now 24 new albums. I burned some "Best Of" mix CDs a friend had purchased and have been going on a buying spree of those artists (and others in the same style of music) ever since. What's really funny about this is the lettering on the mix CDs: "Thank you for buying this CD set. Please support artists: Do not illegally share this music with others."
Had he not "illegally" loaned me the CDs for the explicit purpose of ripping to my permanent collection, I might not have bought all of those CDs.
The Amiga failed because Commodore didn't understand marketing. It was a superior machine in every aspect. In '93 I was running a 7 line bulletin board system off of a used A3000 I picked up for $1500, and I could have hosted 20+ lines on the same box. By contrast, my $3500 top of the line 486 couldn't even run 2 lines without serious slowdowns, neither under Windows nor Desqview.
If Commodore would have had even the slightest marketing sense, we'd all be using Amigas today.
With all the uproar over file sharing, do you really think that the labels are going to allow non-DRM protected music to be sold?
Like Apple's DRM is worth a shit. It's as effective at protecting songs as my goldfish is at protecting my house. When anyone can defeat it by burning & reripping, what's the point? Really, why even bother? And who in their right mind would actually license this worthless technology? Would you pay for a team of officers to protect your house if anyone off the street could bribe them with doughnuts? "You saw nothing. Here, take this maple bar."
This stupidity is precisely why I have yet to sign up with iTunes. Sure, I can have my music the way I want it by jumping through a hoop, but I shouldn't have to.
Slashdot Mirror
How are you going to kill Osama with beam weapons when you don't know where he is?
I didn't miss this point, I chose not to respond to it because it wasn't a part of the original discussion. That was, artemis67 claiming (rightly so) that had a beam weapon been available several years ago, Clinton would have killed Bin Laden. Instead, the time it took our cruise missiles to reach him gave him time to leave.
You missed this point when you said, "Second, do you really think the military would have had time to react, decide they were a real threat and not a "regular" hijack, and annihilate these airplanes before they reached their targets?" Nobody was talking about shooting down hijacked airplanes.
This side point that you brought up ("How are you going to kill Osama with beam weapons when you don't know where he is?") is a red herring and is counter to the discussion at hand. You're trying to discredit the idea of a space based laser weapon by bringing up a (false) lack of U.S. intelligence. The fact is we did know where Bin Laden was several years back, and occasionally know where he is even today, though we can't reach him before he moves again. A beam weapon that could hit it's target in minute instead of hours would solve this problem.
We've got a very different outlook on things than Europeans do, except for the radical left, which noone over here pays much attention to, except during election years.
Man, that's two cool people on Slashdot in one thread. +friend.
Surprise surprise, another empty-headed, America-hating particularist /.er. :shock:
Hey, I like you. You think like me. +friend.
Holy shit. An insightful comment from a Coward! Maybe there is hope for the world after all... :)
If you think the US had a "war" in Iraq during the Clinton administration, your tin foil hat is on a bit too tight.
I believe he meant Serbia.
Clinton: Longest growth/expansion in US history
Bush: Most job losses since great depression
Oh, for crying out loud! I am just as unhappy with some of Bush's choices as the next person, but anyone who believes a president has anything to do with the economy is delusional.
Clinton didn't give us the wealth and prosperity of the late nineties. The Dot Com bubble did that.
Bush didn't destroy the stock market, cause bankruptcies, or otherwise put the economy in it's current state of despair. The burst of the Dot Com bubble did that.
Honestly, you would think grown adults would understand simple economics by now. Are we still blaming Hoover for the depression? As if he had anything to do with the years of build-up and over-speculation that preceeded him?
Also interesting: The same clowns who blame Bush for the economic slide seem to have forgotten whose term it started under. If you're going to completely screw up your logic on who affects what in national economics, at least be honest about who fits into the blame box under your faulty model. Even our favorite chubby intern could figure this one out.
is it could be the start of a new cold war
Is this so bad? We achieved a lot during the cold war technical wise. Had it continued, perhaps we'd have a nice base on the moon by now.
Second, do you really think the military would have had time to react, decide they were a real threat and not a "regular" hijack, and annihilate these airplanes before they reached their targets?
You missed the point:
The time it took for the missiles to travel to their destination gave Bin Laden ample time to escape. If we had had a low-orbital beam weapon like this, there would not have been a 9/11.
If the beam had been used to kill Bin Laden, there wouldn't have been a 9/11 because the man behind it would have been dead. Nobody suggested the beam could have been used to shoot down the airplanes after they were hijacked.
why should a young, healthy guy pay thousands of dollars a year for health insurance when, even if he gets sick, it will often have cost less to not have any insurance at all? I made this decision when I was in school
I tried this once. Switched jobs, and my new employer didn't kick in insurance benefits until I'd been there for 6 months. Previous employer offered coverage under COBRA for over $400/month. Simple math told me I'd be smart to just pay for anything that came up with cash. If nothing came up, I'd save myself $2400.
At least, it was a great idea until my wife had to have emergency gallbladder surgery 4 months later and we got a bill for fifteen grand. Oops. Spent 5 years paying that off.
The state has also tried comparing motor vehicle registration data with tax returns, looking for people who might be driving Rolls Royces or Jaguars but declaring only a small income
And what if the Jag was given to me by my parents or a rich friend? Or perhaps I bought it during the dot com bubble but am now flat broke, working at McDonalds, unable to bring myself to sell my beloved Rolls. I hope the people investigating this have the power to say, "Oops, sorry. You're legal. We'll leave you alone." These government projects tend to become hyped up witch hunts in short order. Let's be sure we're not burning any innocent people at the stake here.
Unsurprisingly, Reeves came out strongly in defence of the PSP as its own product and not a Game Boy replacement. "It's not, as people have said, a new Game Boy," he said. "There are so many other features that you can add onto it, whether it's GPS or GPRS even."
I can't decide if this is cool or not. A GPS receiver and cellular phone attached to my portable gaming device? What for?
Now, if it had a touchscreen, Palm OS, and a secure way to copy my games onto the device so I don't have to carry them around with me everywhere... then we're talking.
You pay. Snail mail is subsidized by the government. Heavily.
Source?
The USPS is not federally funded; it has a federally granted monopoly, yes, but it operates from it's own revenues. Taxpayer dollars are not handed over to the USPS. So no, snail mail doesn't cost me a thing unless I'm the one mailing it.
Deagol,
:)
Our wedding bands are made of silver. Grand total for both (with shipping): $100. 6.5 years of marriage, and going strong.
My wife and I will be 7 years this July. Gold bands, under $100 for the pair. It's good to be married to an intelligent woman.
Speaking of real-world, where are you living? All women will do that. Don't believe me?
No, I don't. My wife doesn't care about diamonds or other gems. We have gold wedding bands with no decorations. Cost less than $100 for the pair. If I had wasted money on diamonds, she probably wouldn't have married me.
As for iTunes, perhaps the customer wants music organized in a single location, with nifty features like Celebrity Playlists and a relatively sane browsing interface, without having to wade through whatever crap a random teenager thought would be great to share over P2P, regardless of actual sound/ripping quality, accuracy in labelling, musical quality, or server bandwidth. Or is that just me?
Hey, I agree with you. No argument here. iTunes is great for all of the reasons you describe and I'd be happy to use it if not for the whole "You can only do with your music what we say you can do" bullshit. I don't buy copy protected CDs for the same reason. Anyone who thinks they can sell me information and then further dictate how I use it can piss off. I'll simply get the information I want another way, legal or not. Shut down these other ways and I'll simply do without.
I'll tell you what I think is hilarious around here: This whole forum went from "DRM = NO SALE!" to lopping up iTunes like a thirsty dog at a water bowl. Who would have thought in a million years that someone would be moderated down on Slashdot for saying "DRM is crap and I'm not going to buy it."
so what exactly is your problem with iTunes?
I replied with further detail here.
Suffice it to say, my music listening works as follows:
1. Big stash of music on a mirrored array.
2. Accessed from a variety of computers in my house, running various operating systems.
2a. One Windows box sends music throughout a whole-house audio system.
2b. I also listen on my Linux workstation.
2c. My wife listens on her computer.
2d. I have networked hardware players that pull from the same collection (for instance, one streams to speakers in my garage).
2e. I listen on my iPod.
2f. I plug my iPod into my computer at work and play the tunes directly off the iPod with Winamp (much more convenient than the iPod's interface).
2g. When my kids are a little older, they'll have their own computers to listen to our music collection with.
See the problem yet? I can only authorize three devices to play my music - and Linux isn't one of them, and I doubt my hardware players are either. Sort of destroys the whole idea of having digital music for me. I like the fact that I can pull up a playlist from whatever device is convenient for me at that given point in time. I also like the fact that I can listen to my playlist while my wife listens to her's while the kids listen to their's and none of them interfere with the others. I'm not going to screw with authorizing/deauthorizing/calling Apple support all of the time. I shouldn't have to.
Then there's the whole point of treating a paying customer like a thief...
Isn't that the best you can hope for?
Nope, the best I can hope for is no restrictions at all. DRM = no sale.
I play my music on a variety of devices. Various computers with various operating systems, portable devices, standalone & networked MP3 players, etc. Fairplay makes the music worthless to me because I'm not going to be able to play it freely on some of these devices. Which means to actually enjoy the music I've legally purchased I have to burn and rerip every song.
Screw that. I'm not paying for the "privilege" of jumping through hoops like this - not to mention further degrading the quality of the music. Give it to me as a raw MP3 and I'll be happy to hand over my hard earned cash. Until then I'll buy CDs I like and download singles from any random P2P service.
Which brings me to another point: All of the music on iTunes is also freely available elsewhere. The fact that a customer purchases the music legally instead of just downloading it, doesn't that tell you something about that customer? Perhaps that he wants to do things the legal why? Why in the hell would you inconvenience him and treat him like a pirate by using DRM? He's proven his intention to not pirate music by actually buying it. What are they worried about? That he's going to put it up on P2P services? Too late, it's already there. That he's going to share it with a friend? Too late, the friend can download it anywhere else just the same. So what's the point? I always hear, "It keeps people honest." No, it doesn't: Those people were kept honest in the first place by purchasing the damn song when there was ample opportunity to pirate it.
I can't rip the CD to my MP3 player. These are the two devices I use to listen to music.
So take it back to the store, demand your money back, and go download it.
You can be sued for anything. Winning is a different matter. In this case, the bars settled.
On Saturday I bought two albums solely because I encountered songs on Kazaa. Wouldn't have looked for them otherwise.
My running total for the past two weeks is now 24 new albums. I burned some "Best Of" mix CDs a friend had purchased and have been going on a buying spree of those artists (and others in the same style of music) ever since. What's really funny about this is the lettering on the mix CDs: "Thank you for buying this CD set. Please support artists: Do not illegally share this music with others."
Had he not "illegally" loaned me the CDs for the explicit purpose of ripping to my permanent collection, I might not have bought all of those CDs.
HMD
Head of Mass Destruction?
Then the problem isn't cost, but weight and bulk. How many of these 13" disposable aircraft do you expect a soldier to carry?
Just one. The key is to use lots of soldiers. Also an effective tactic against killbots, I'm told.
Putting a GPS receiver on it might be a bit of a challenge, as they will hardly lift anything...I imagine they could carry a grenade, too though.
I'd imagine if they can't carry a GPS receiver, a grenade might be out of the question. Or is it just me?
The Amiga failed because Commodore didn't understand marketing. It was a superior machine in every aspect. In '93 I was running a 7 line bulletin board system off of a used A3000 I picked up for $1500, and I could have hosted 20+ lines on the same box. By contrast, my $3500 top of the line 486 couldn't even run 2 lines without serious slowdowns, neither under Windows nor Desqview.
If Commodore would have had even the slightest marketing sense, we'd all be using Amigas today.
With all the uproar over file sharing, do you really think that the labels are going to allow non-DRM protected music to be sold?
Like Apple's DRM is worth a shit. It's as effective at protecting songs as my goldfish is at protecting my house. When anyone can defeat it by burning & reripping, what's the point? Really, why even bother? And who in their right mind would actually license this worthless technology? Would you pay for a team of officers to protect your house if anyone off the street could bribe them with doughnuts? "You saw nothing. Here, take this maple bar."
This stupidity is precisely why I have yet to sign up with iTunes. Sure, I can have my music the way I want it by jumping through a hoop, but I shouldn't have to.