"War therefore is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will"
This sort of takes for granted that you HAVE an opponent, which it why it mentions an opponent. I don't understand your comment, other than sarcasm viz. the fiasco (sorry war) on "terrorism". However if the definition of "terrorist" is "anyone we shoot", then the world is full of opponents.
What you describe is an occupation and counter-insurgency duty, not a war. In fact, if you look at war in an abstract manner as in Chapter 1 of Carl von Clausewitz's book "On War", war is VERY similar to a game with clear objectives for both parts: the attacker and the defender.
However the current situations which you describe and which seem to fit in with Iraq and Afghanistan stopped being wars a long time ago. Again from Clausewitz, BECAUSE the political objectives are unclear, the military is limited in its action. BECAUSE the military is limited, they are failing in their goal to force the population to submit. Therefore the population is allowed time to defer action until a time most favorable to them. What you describe is not a war - it's a military disaster.
Now if the political will existed to exterminate the opposition, and the military were given the job to start rounding people up and shooting them, the insurgency would be broken in short order as citizens betray their belligerent countrymen out of fear of being killed. However this amount of political will doesn't exist - we seem to have the delusion that we can fight "humane" warfare. The first rule of warfare is that it is an act of violence to subdue an opponent. If you're holding back on the violence, well, you're not going to win.
Good film cameras, films, lenses, and lightning are expensive,
Rubbish. The movie industry has inflated itself to death. Why would you feel sympathy for someone who has smoked 70 cigarettes a day, on receiving the news that he has cancer? Why worry about the 500 lb man who is dying of heart disease? It's not the price of the "film cameras, films, lenses (wait, you already charged me for the camera!) and lighting". The BIGGEST item on a movie's budget is MARKETING. All those commercials on TV and radio. All those mini "infomercials" about the "making of movie X" before the launch. They cost money. Then there's wages. Why the hell must an actor earn several MILLION dollars for performing? Then, WAY DOWN AT THE BOTTOM, there's the actual production cost for the carpenters, electricians, etc.
Just like the investment banks that started paying themselves multi million dollar bonuses, they've inflated their professions. Now no one wants to work for an investment bank for less, and they whine that they "HAVE TO" pay these huge bonuses to attract talent. For movies - idem. The marketing is a penis-stroking maneuver. Oh I need to spend $200 million in advertising to increase my box office revenue by...tadaa... $201 million. Oh and we HAVE to pay $10+ million dollars to get Whatshisname to play the lead role, because no other lesser human can make a decent movie (cough - what was the total production cost of Slumdog millionaire again? $250k?)... No, I feel no sympathy. And it ain't the cellulose film that costs $100 million.
Copyright infringement is in most countries a CIVIL offense, not a criminal one. Where it is a criminal offense, it has only been enforced in cases of mass replication for profit, not "casual downloading".
most people think of the blanket-carrying kid in Peanuts.
Perhaps anywhere else, but not here on slashdot. And a heads up: RMS usually refers to Richard Matthew Stallman, not Root Mean Square... even though most of us here know the uses of the latter.
Buy him an IBM PC XT, load up MS DOS 2 or so (I think it still came with MASM back then), give him a copy of colossal cave adventure, trek, and lots of soda. Eventually thrown in some BASICA and a few programs he can read the source from by doing Ctrl-C. When he burns in sunlight and/or has a body mass index of 30+, buy him a C compiler (preferably Borland Turbo C). Then confuse him by throwing both the Windows GUI, MFC AND OOP at him at the same time.
If he makes it to 20+ without a heart attack, you'll have a coder on your hands.
A fifth of a second is about the time it takes to blink. It's about 12 frames of a 720P HD video signal.
Or, a fifth of a second is also the built-in physiological delay between the beating of your heart's atria and it's ventricles. 0.2 seconds is the norm. lub dub, lub dub, lub dub.......
Science isn't about proving something doesn't happen, it's about proving something empirically happens.
So there's no scientific value in saying, for example, that 0% of lab rats survive being placed in 0 degree salt water for 2+ hours then? How about for 90 minutes? What about 45 minutes? When exactly DO they survive?
Of course science can prove negatives. It doesn't matter if you're demonstrating how something works, or CLEARLY demonstrating how it DOESN'T work (which usually leads to a rethink and experimental redesign to find an alternative hypothesis). Science is concerned with REPRODUCIBLE RESULTS. A hypothesis that is thrown out still has value - it prevents someone else from going down that path. If you think in absolutes, you are more likely than not to be suffering from distortions and perhaps "religion".
Could Iranian sleeper agents be infiltrating NASA? We'll explore classified documents that show a government cover up of a plot to fly the next space shuttle into DOWNTOWN NEW YORK. Millions of people will be killed, and the government doesn't want you to know. STAY TUNED...
Well, if you actually READ what you sent me, you'd find:
"and the modern medical assessment is that it is more likely to have resulted from uremia.[15]
As a physician I fail to see how voluntarily avoiding fecal evacuation can lead to (in Brahe's case) kidney failure. While there are some pathological conditions of both the colon and the bladder that can be caused or exacerbated by chronically "holding it in", none of them are immediately fatal. There are also conditions that result in intestinal/urethral obstruction which can be fatal, however none of these are considered "voluntary" retention of excreta.
4. You die as your body kinda breaks something important inside.
Don't worry - even though it feels like you're going to die, you can't "break something inside" by refusing to evacuate your bowels. The worst that can happen, after a lot of pain, is #3 in your list...
This has been proven already by reporters and countless checks of the security measures by independent agencies. There is also a suspicious lack of persons being arrested for attempting to bring "real" explosive devices on board (although there are plenty of arrests of irate travelers, and cases of harassment by the TSA over such things as milk bottles or t-shirt graphics). The TSA fails repeatedly at the very job it claims to do. Nothing was proven by this incident. We already knew.
The most logical step - reinforcing and closing the damned cockpit door - has already been taken. By doing this, planes can no longer be hijacked - all that's left is to try to blow them up or otherwise harm other passengers. The NEXT logical step would simply be to have everyone sniffed by dogs before boarding - yet for some reason it's more convenient to have endless lines and scoff at people's dignity as they struggle with belts, shoes, earrings, laptops and watches.
however it's pissing me off in a major way that a lot of people seem to think this is a big deal. It's not!
Come on. Until this happened, the media was trying to stir up sympathy for the tsunami that happened five years ago. NOW they have a "story" to scare grandmothers with! Boo.
"Panasonic has announced plans to create 'home batteries."
That is, the batteries don't exist yet.
BUT:
Also, you can buy energy when it is cheapest [only there's nowhere to store it at the moment], and don't need to worry about power outages anymore [well actually you still have to worry, because they haven't actually invented the battery yet].
Who wrote this? I see a brilliant future for you writing prospectuses for investment bank companies. This is just hype. I for one will not be buying the $150k batteries that need special zoning permissions and need to be replaced every 3 years.
I'd like to know how one would go about wiring these tiny solar cells up.
I agree that wiring is often the big problem when dealing with brittle, fragile solar cells. However it would be interesting if these small chips could be woven into a flexible, layered fabric. Then installation could be as simple as stretching/gluing the fabric over a surface, and inserting the electrodes in the appropriate layer. Now THAT would be a leap forward!
Behavioral science has understood this for decades, but business isn't listening.
That's because strategic decisions are usually made higher up the corporate ladder. However your place ON the corporate ladder is determined by how good you are at office politics - NOT cognitive ability. This is why in mature corporations you usually end up with a clueless senior management who all got the job because they're buddy buddy with whats-her-name, dictating insane directives and getting in the way of the actual work being done, to the detriment of the company.
Hmm let's see. If I was Comcast I could invest in a) a whole army of staff and hardware to collect data on users who were using bit torrent, edonkey, etc, then risk being sued by giving that data to a 3rd party, or b) I could get the LAWYERS for the plaintiff to collect that data for me, and hand it over to a 3rd party without ANY risk of legal fallout (after all, the exact terms of the settlement are confidential). Hmmmmmm, I dunno - which is better? Brains hurt.
Oh wait, but you know everything. Surely you thought of THAT.
As part of the settlement, does Comcast get to hand over names and addresses of all the claimants to the MPAA/RIAA for a nice tidy sum, say, $16 million?
There's nothing stopping you from going out and buying your own "multifunction device" and putting whatever you want on it. However the device you ARE using doesn't belong to you, it belongs to your employer. Whine all you want, and it still won't change the fact that it cost you absolutely nothing, and is meant to be used ONLY for what your employer wants you to use it for.
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Let me quote literally from Clausewitz:
"War therefore is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will"
This sort of takes for granted that you HAVE an opponent, which it why it mentions an opponent. I don't understand your comment, other than sarcasm viz. the fiasco (sorry war) on "terrorism". However if the definition of "terrorist" is "anyone we shoot", then the world is full of opponents.
War is not fun. War does not make a good game.
What you describe is an occupation and counter-insurgency duty, not a war. In fact, if you look at war in an abstract manner as in Chapter 1 of Carl von Clausewitz's book "On War", war is VERY similar to a game with clear objectives for both parts: the attacker and the defender.
However the current situations which you describe and which seem to fit in with Iraq and Afghanistan stopped being wars a long time ago. Again from Clausewitz, BECAUSE the political objectives are unclear, the military is limited in its action. BECAUSE the military is limited, they are failing in their goal to force the population to submit. Therefore the population is allowed time to defer action until a time most favorable to them. What you describe is not a war - it's a military disaster.
Now if the political will existed to exterminate the opposition, and the military were given the job to start rounding people up and shooting them, the insurgency would be broken in short order as citizens betray their belligerent countrymen out of fear of being killed. However this amount of political will doesn't exist - we seem to have the delusion that we can fight "humane" warfare. The first rule of warfare is that it is an act of violence to subdue an opponent. If you're holding back on the violence, well, you're not going to win.
mixed with very short periods of combat where a lot happens but the winner of this short period of combat is rarely in doubt.
I guess they used the same philosophy to design voting machines then.
Good film cameras, films, lenses, and lightning are expensive,
Rubbish. The movie industry has inflated itself to death. Why would you feel sympathy for someone who has smoked 70 cigarettes a day, on receiving the news that he has cancer? Why worry about the 500 lb man who is dying of heart disease? It's not the price of the "film cameras, films, lenses (wait, you already charged me for the camera!) and lighting". The BIGGEST item on a movie's budget is MARKETING. All those commercials on TV and radio. All those mini "infomercials" about the "making of movie X" before the launch. They cost money. Then there's wages. Why the hell must an actor earn several MILLION dollars for performing? Then, WAY DOWN AT THE BOTTOM, there's the actual production cost for the carpenters, electricians, etc.
Just like the investment banks that started paying themselves multi million dollar bonuses, they've inflated their professions. Now no one wants to work for an investment bank for less, and they whine that they "HAVE TO" pay these huge bonuses to attract talent. For movies - idem. The marketing is a penis-stroking maneuver. Oh I need to spend $200 million in advertising to increase my box office revenue by ...tadaa... $201 million. Oh and we HAVE to pay $10+ million dollars to get Whatshisname to play the lead role, because no other lesser human can make a decent movie (cough - what was the total production cost of Slumdog millionaire again? $250k?)... No, I feel no sympathy. And it ain't the cellulose film that costs $100 million.
pay for the crimes of the public
Copyright infringement is in most countries a CIVIL offense, not a criminal one. Where it is a criminal offense, it has only been enforced in cases of mass replication for profit, not "casual downloading".
most people think of the blanket-carrying kid in Peanuts.
Perhaps anywhere else, but not here on slashdot. And a heads up: RMS usually refers to Richard Matthew Stallman, not Root Mean Square... even though most of us here know the uses of the latter.
Buy him an IBM PC XT, load up MS DOS 2 or so (I think it still came with MASM back then), give him a copy of colossal cave adventure, trek, and lots of soda. Eventually thrown in some BASICA and a few programs he can read the source from by doing Ctrl-C. When he burns in sunlight and/or has a body mass index of 30+, buy him a C compiler (preferably Borland Turbo C). Then confuse him by throwing both the Windows GUI, MFC AND OOP at him at the same time.
If he makes it to 20+ without a heart attack, you'll have a coder on your hands.
I guess it depends which medical school you studied at, and which text books you read.
However Google returns 65,300 hits for lub dup, and 11,200,000 hits for lub dub. So if google is any indication, I am "right" and you are "wrong"...
A fifth of a second is about the time it takes to blink. It's about 12 frames of a 720P HD video signal.
Or, a fifth of a second is also the built-in physiological delay between the beating of your heart's atria and it's ventricles. 0.2 seconds is the norm. lub dub, lub dub, lub dub.......
Science isn't about proving something doesn't happen, it's about proving something empirically happens.
So there's no scientific value in saying, for example, that 0% of lab rats survive being placed in 0 degree salt water for 2+ hours then? How about for 90 minutes? What about 45 minutes? When exactly DO they survive?
Of course science can prove negatives. It doesn't matter if you're demonstrating how something works, or CLEARLY demonstrating how it DOESN'T work (which usually leads to a rethink and experimental redesign to find an alternative hypothesis). Science is concerned with REPRODUCIBLE RESULTS. A hypothesis that is thrown out still has value - it prevents someone else from going down that path. If you think in absolutes, you are more likely than not to be suffering from distortions and perhaps "religion".
Just let Rupert and his team manage it...
NEXT on FOX NASA - TERRORISTS IN SPACE
Could Iranian sleeper agents be infiltrating NASA? We'll explore classified documents that show a government cover up of a plot to fly the next space shuttle into DOWNTOWN NEW YORK. Millions of people will be killed, and the government doesn't want you to know. STAY TUNED...
Well, if you actually READ what you sent me, you'd find:
"and the modern medical assessment is that it is more likely to have resulted from uremia.[15]
As a physician I fail to see how voluntarily avoiding fecal evacuation can lead to (in Brahe's case) kidney failure. While there are some pathological conditions of both the colon and the bladder that can be caused or exacerbated by chronically "holding it in", none of them are immediately fatal. There are also conditions that result in intestinal/urethral obstruction which can be fatal, however none of these are considered "voluntary" retention of excreta.
4. You die as your body kinda breaks something important inside.
Don't worry - even though it feels like you're going to die, you can't "break something inside" by refusing to evacuate your bowels. The worst that can happen, after a lot of pain, is #3 in your list...
and proved to the world it was possible.
This has been proven already by reporters and countless checks of the security measures by independent agencies. There is also a suspicious lack of persons being arrested for attempting to bring "real" explosive devices on board (although there are plenty of arrests of irate travelers, and cases of harassment by the TSA over such things as milk bottles or t-shirt graphics). The TSA fails repeatedly at the very job it claims to do. Nothing was proven by this incident. We already knew.
The most logical step - reinforcing and closing the damned cockpit door - has already been taken. By doing this, planes can no longer be hijacked - all that's left is to try to blow them up or otherwise harm other passengers. The NEXT logical step would simply be to have everyone sniffed by dogs before boarding - yet for some reason it's more convenient to have endless lines and scoff at people's dignity as they struggle with belts, shoes, earrings, laptops and watches.
However, security theater serves a purpose
Yes. It keeps TSA people employed. But then again, breaking windows serves a purpose too. However that's not an EFFICIENT use of funds.
however it's pissing me off in a major way that a lot of people seem to think this is a big deal. It's not!
Come on. Until this happened, the media was trying to stir up sympathy for the tsunami that happened five years ago. NOW they have a "story" to scare grandmothers with! Boo.
I'm so glad sites like this and especially The Pirate Bay get shut down. Oh, wait...
We go from the future:
"Panasonic has announced plans to create 'home batteries."
That is, the batteries don't exist yet.
BUT:
Also, you can buy energy when it is cheapest [only there's nowhere to store it at the moment], and don't need to worry about power outages anymore [well actually you still have to worry, because they haven't actually invented the battery yet].
Who wrote this? I see a brilliant future for you writing prospectuses for investment bank companies. This is just hype. I for one will not be buying the $150k batteries that need special zoning permissions and need to be replaced every 3 years.
I'd like to know how one would go about wiring these tiny solar cells up.
I agree that wiring is often the big problem when dealing with brittle, fragile solar cells. However it would be interesting if these small chips could be woven into a flexible, layered fabric. Then installation could be as simple as stretching/gluing the fabric over a surface, and inserting the electrodes in the appropriate layer. Now THAT would be a leap forward!
Behavioral science has understood this for decades, but business isn't listening.
That's because strategic decisions are usually made higher up the corporate ladder. However your place ON the corporate ladder is determined by how good you are at office politics - NOT cognitive ability. This is why in mature corporations you usually end up with a clueless senior management who all got the job because they're buddy buddy with whats-her-name, dictating insane directives and getting in the way of the actual work being done, to the detriment of the company.
but use your fucking brains,
Hmm let's see. If I was Comcast I could invest in a) a whole army of staff and hardware to collect data on users who were using bit torrent, edonkey, etc, then risk being sued by giving that data to a 3rd party, or b) I could get the LAWYERS for the plaintiff to collect that data for me, and hand it over to a 3rd party without ANY risk of legal fallout (after all, the exact terms of the settlement are confidential). Hmmmmmm, I dunno - which is better? Brains hurt.
Oh wait, but you know everything. Surely you thought of THAT.
As part of the settlement, does Comcast get to hand over names and addresses of all the claimants to the MPAA/RIAA for a nice tidy sum, say, $16 million?
Slashdot has a libertarian leaning bias
Geeks, intelligence, porn, what did you expect?
which isn't exactly balanced reporting (if any of them are)
Nah. IMO, "balanced reporting" died when Walter Cronkite retired.
There's nothing stopping you from going out and buying your own "multifunction device" and putting whatever you want on it. However the device you ARE using doesn't belong to you, it belongs to your employer. Whine all you want, and it still won't change the fact that it cost you absolutely nothing, and is meant to be used ONLY for what your employer wants you to use it for.