I'm glad their promotional material used what Armstrong actually said, "One small step for *a* man..." rather than what people heard over the buggy comm-link that dropped the word "a".
Growing up, it always bothered me that "man" without an article and "mankind" meant the same thing, and I was so happy when that guy discovered the audio signal of the word "a" in that famous transmission, which Armstrong always insisted he had said.
China's vast army means little in the only scenario likely to pit the United States against China in the foreseeable future: a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. To win this war, China would need to maintain aerial and naval superiority over the Strait of Taiwan for long enough to ship a small fraction of their huge army onto the island. America has 10 aircraft carriers, 8 of which are afloat at a time. I think at least 3 or 4 are kept close enough to Taiwan to respond rapidly to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. China has zero aircraft carriers. While they will be building some, America could probably maintain their significant advantage here, enough to ensure that China cannot bring its huge army to bear on Taiwan. (as long as the Chinese don't use tactical nukes.... that's a pretty serious game though) My point is that in any situation other than an overland invasion, army size doesn't count for nearly as much as aircraft carrier strength, which America has in spades. America can respond to China's build-up by building more carriers and keeping them deployed close to the Strait of Taiwan, and as long as we keep spending more money on our military than the rest of the world combined, we could probably maintain local superiority over the Chinese in the Strait of Taiwan. At any rate, as long as Taiwan recognizes that having the full military backing of the world superpower is about the best deal any tiny state under threat by a huge totalitarian power ever got, they should keep quiet under the fuzzy "one state - two systems" doctrine. Also, America is important to the Chinese economy, and the Chinese leaders would be loathe to jeopardize social stability by cutting off their profitable, employment-generating trade with America. Your points about Bush's slide towards a police state are completely valid though. thank goodness his term ends fairly soon.
Re:This is actually my HOPE for the future
on
Censoring a Number
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· Score: 1
they hardly do themselves any favors when they decide not to support all these geeks' OS of choice, so that if they want the shiny new high-definition movies, and many of them do, they need to marshal all of those computer skills and idle time towards utterly destroying the "unbreakable" copy protection scheme that accompanies each generation of media.
Well now I just feel obliged to link to today's (technically yesterday's now, where I live) Penny Arcade that discusses just such a lighter peripheral for audience members http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/04/04
the olympics bs isn't just limited to host cities, either I used to play the card game "Legend of the Five Rings," and they actually had to redesign their card backs because the olympics claimed that any image of 5 interlocking rings infringed their copyright/trademark/whatever-the-fuck. the rings in question didn't even look *anything* like the olympics rings, they were all a metallic color and were arranged to form a circle, not the 2 rows of the multi-colored olympic rings. here's a look at an old back - http://l5rshop.com/var24.shtml
well, it's still offtopic, but since you decided to call me an asshole i figured i may as well respond, not that there will probably be any point. first of all, i was trying to say that compared to the people doing the survey, i know jack shit about statistics. that's what i meant by saying that i'd taken one class, not that my grain of experience counted significantly against their vast mound of it. i shouldn't have used the word probably. for the record, my only real problem is with the accuracy of the previous regime's death toll records that they use as the baseline. i accept the validity of their cluster sampling method. i was also at pains to mention that i do admit that americans are murdering iraqis, and i think that it's absolutely horrible. i'm not denying it. i'm not quibbling over numbers. i am granting that US actions have caused 600,000 deaths. it's absolutely fucking horrible. i don't know what you want me to say. i will admit that i am quibbling, but it's over terminology. i'm only saying that this survey includes many various and sundry causes of death, not all of which are what i would define as murder by US soldiers. I was at pains to include what many people call "collateral damage" as actual fucking murders. i agree that the tactics employed in the fallujah campaign were disgraceful. There have also been utterly horrific acts of individual violence like the ones you cite, caused by the vietnam-like stress of an unending war against an almost invisible enemy, with cities replacing jungles. it's all incredibly fucking terribly. If a US soldier shoots a weapon or orders a bombardment which kills civilians, it's murder. it's atrocious. if a sunni insurgent blows up a car bomb in a market full of shias, i don't think that this qualifies as US troops murdering people. We have killed far, far too many people. whatever the number of people murdered is, it's far too fucking many. feel free to flame me back. i guess that's what slashdot's really all about.
(sigh) i know i shouldn't feed the trolls, but people throw this number around all the time, and while the number may be accurate, i don't think that the study that created that number justifies the tone that many people attach to it (U.S. murdering people). go ahead and mod me OT if you want, but i take charges of murder against my country very seriously, and i don't think that this charge is accurate. i will grant that the US has murdered people in Iraq, not only through the actions of rogue soldiers, but also through inexcusable high-level decision-making, specifically the use of heavy ordnance against targets in populated areas and intolerably aggressive interrogation policies that often did not merely border on, but went fully into the realm of torture. With that said, let's move on to the number. i guess you didn't say specifically, but i assume that you're talking about iraq, and implying that the US has murdered roughly 600,000 people, the deathtoll from the johns hopkins statistical survey of iraqi deaths, right? i assume that if you didn't think america murdered them you wouldn't accuse people of not caring about their deaths, since everyone in america is uniformly revolted by Iraq's horrifying inter-necine violence, which is probably why support for the war has dropped precipitously lately. i'm not trying to be catty, i just want to establish firmly what we're talking about here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_mor tality_before_and_after_the_2003_invasion_of_Iraq all right, so that study (and the similar one done by Johns Hopkins two years earlier) compared the official death count in Iraq during the pre-war period with the current deathcount, the latter of which they arrived at through a household cluster survey of all of Iraq. It subtracts the pre-war death rate from the current one and says that roughly 600,000 more Iraqis have died since the war who would not have died under the conditions existing before the war. I know a little bit about statistics and i have some concerns about the methodology of the study, but i've only taken a college statistics class, and the people who made the study are fucking professionals, so i will go ahead and grant them that their number is probably accurate. My point is that 600,000 is an aggregate number of all people who have died in iraq of all sorts of probably war-related deaths. this includes people who have been killed in Iraq's vicious sectarian bloodletting, including not only the Sunni insurgency, who have been slaughtering scores of Shias for several years now, but since the study ran through June 2006, it also includes the wave of Shia death squad reprisals following the bombing of the Golden Mosque almost a year ago. It also includes people who have died because of the Sunni insurgents' targeting of critical water and electricity infrastructure. it also includes deaths caused more indirectly by the war, especially the general instability, lack of services and security, created by 4 years of urban, guerrilla warfare. (i know i said "it also includes" three times, but this is/. not comp class, and i've already spent too much time feeding this troll.) While i'll admit that blame for all of these deaths, particularly the last of those, could ultimately be laid upon America's doorstep, since we started the war that has unleashed these terrible forces, i don't believe that America has murdered 600,000 people. perhaps that's just a matter of semantics, but i don't think so.
I was amazed that square didn't make a bushido blade 3 for the ps2. with its array of selectable weapons and fairly realistic damage system (you can get wounded, but 1 good whack with a sword can easily kill you) i always thought that bushido blade was one of the most innovative fighting franchises around. i think it's certainly time now, especially if they made it for the Wii and decided to go all out and do a better job of capturing sword swings than current Wii games [at least from what i've heard.... i still haven't played the Wii:'( ]
i don't want to be rude, but really you shouldn't be throwing any batteries in the trash at all. while they're not all hazmats like Ni-Cd, they're all pretty nasty. i know it's a pain in the ass but most cities will have a couple of free battery disposal periods during the year or something (i think). as a matter of full disclosure i should probably state that i've never gotten up the gumption to actually take advantage of these things, but i also have various "dead battery depots" containing every battery i've used since childhood (i'm 22 now). it doesn't seem to be so bad so far, the bottom of the buckets haven't been corroded by battery acid, and i'm fairly sure that someday i will take advantage of a battery disposal period for the whole lot of them. at any rate, if anyone can even find those ridiculously shitty Ni-Cd batteries these days, they deserve some sort of medal, 'cause NiMh batteries are so much better in every way that i'm aware of. i think they also alleviate a fair number of the grandparent post's concerns. besides, for anything more battery hungry than a remote control, rechargables probably will save you money in the medium to long term. maybe just keep a set of good disposables for when you need backups for your camera or something.
thanks for mentioning it man, i forgot that that game was pretty fucking sweet. i may have to go buy it sometime, should be pretty cheap by now. i guess i'll also have to find my N64, whatever deep dark corner it's gotten into after all these years...
Reuters' original online article about this misidentified the queen bee as Queen Elizabeth, stating that Britain's monarch was capable of laying "up to 2,000 eggs a day" they've corrected it, but you can see the original article here: http://www.regrettheerror.com/2006/10/reuters_typo _te.html
This may be what you tried, but I just wanted to recommend the potent trifecta of the "pr1m45" Civ IV mini-image, which can be loaded into a virtual drive through Daemon Tools, and the program SD4hide, which masks the fact that you're running daemon tools
Good luck, I hope this allows you to play this fantastic game
It's possible that he doesn't want to be famous for having a humiliating video of him circulate the internet. "tonight, a very special episode of seventh heaven guest starring that silly Star Wars kid"
McDonald's coffee isn't necessarily sold to cause 3rd degree burns, but when it is company policy to sell coffee at 180-190 degrees Farenheit, as it was at the time of the lawsuit i assume you're referring to, a temperature that can easily cause 3rd degree burns, it can be criminally negligent (or something to that effect, IANAL), especially when it had been brought to their attention numerous times before http://www.centerjd.org/free/mythbusters-free/MB_m cdonalds.htm
a lot of things that we now know as being facts started out as theoretical answers to mathematical equations, like black holes
Jerry Bruckheimer oughta plan these things....
on
Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
maybe it's just me, but when i heard the 48 hour deadline, i was expecting that it would be some times square dropping the ball type shit. you know, the clock hits zero, Bush comes on and gives a stirring speech about war and freedom etc, and as soon as he's done you see the might of the american military unleashed in a brutal flurry of cruise missles and whatever. not this little whimper of a start of a war
i think perhaps a good dose of rtfa is in order. carbon nanotubes, the only proposed substance that could do this, is terribly expensive to make, and even that expensive stuff is only a fraction of the required strength. it'll be awhile till someone could reasonably say we're going to do this this decade
I'm all for mandating tolerance when it comes to what you can and can't do to people, but telling people basically what to think is where you have to draw the line. Learn all the lessons from the nazis, including that any restriction on ideas and public discussion is one of the slipperiest slopes of all.
i salute you, but i don't think that their time is over or done. and if it is, it probably won't be because of you and the other people who share your ethos. sadly, you and your ilk are very much in the minority, and i doubt that that will change anytime soon as long as there's money to be made off of impressionable adolescent girls swooning over boy bands (and there will always be those)
i don't see anyone advertising a lack of copy protection while they're in the RIAA, at least without whatever sort of fines or other ass fucking techniques they must have for companies that go against the grain
Slashdot Mirror
I'm glad their promotional material used what Armstrong actually said, "One small step for *a* man..." rather than what people heard over the buggy comm-link that dropped the word "a".
Growing up, it always bothered me that "man" without an article and "mankind" meant the same thing, and I was so happy when that guy discovered the audio signal of the word "a" in that famous transmission, which Armstrong always insisted he had said.
China's vast army means little in the only scenario likely to pit the United States against China in the foreseeable future: a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. To win this war, China would need to maintain aerial and naval superiority over the Strait of Taiwan for long enough to ship a small fraction of their huge army onto the island. America has 10 aircraft carriers, 8 of which are afloat at a time. I think at least 3 or 4 are kept close enough to Taiwan to respond rapidly to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. China has zero aircraft carriers. While they will be building some, America could probably maintain their significant advantage here, enough to ensure that China cannot bring its huge army to bear on Taiwan. (as long as the Chinese don't use tactical nukes.... that's a pretty serious game though)
My point is that in any situation other than an overland invasion, army size doesn't count for nearly as much as aircraft carrier strength, which America has in spades. America can respond to China's build-up by building more carriers and keeping them deployed close to the Strait of Taiwan, and as long as we keep spending more money on our military than the rest of the world combined, we could probably maintain local superiority over the Chinese in the Strait of Taiwan.
At any rate, as long as Taiwan recognizes that having the full military backing of the world superpower is about the best deal any tiny state under threat by a huge totalitarian power ever got, they should keep quiet under the fuzzy "one state - two systems" doctrine. Also, America is important to the Chinese economy, and the Chinese leaders would be loathe to jeopardize social stability by cutting off their profitable, employment-generating trade with America.
Your points about Bush's slide towards a police state are completely valid though. thank goodness his term ends fairly soon.
they hardly do themselves any favors when they decide not to support all these geeks' OS of choice, so that if they want the shiny new high-definition movies, and many of them do, they need to marshal all of those computer skills and idle time towards utterly destroying the "unbreakable" copy protection scheme that accompanies each generation of media.
Well now I just feel obliged to link to today's (technically yesterday's now, where I live) Penny Arcade that discusses just such a lighter peripheral for audience members
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/04/04
the olympics bs isn't just limited to host cities, either
I used to play the card game "Legend of the Five Rings," and they actually had to redesign their card backs because the olympics claimed that any image of 5 interlocking rings infringed their copyright/trademark/whatever-the-fuck. the rings in question didn't even look *anything* like the olympics rings, they were all a metallic color and were arranged to form a circle, not the 2 rows of the multi-colored olympic rings.
here's a look at an old back - http://l5rshop.com/var24.shtml
well, it's still offtopic, but since you decided to call me an asshole i figured i may as well respond, not that there will probably be any point.
first of all, i was trying to say that compared to the people doing the survey, i know jack shit about statistics. that's what i meant by saying that i'd taken one class, not that my grain of experience counted significantly against their vast mound of it. i shouldn't have used the word probably. for the record, my only real problem is with the accuracy of the previous regime's death toll records that they use as the baseline. i accept the validity of their cluster sampling method.
i was also at pains to mention that i do admit that americans are murdering iraqis, and i think that it's absolutely horrible. i'm not denying it. i'm not quibbling over numbers. i am granting that US actions have caused 600,000 deaths. it's absolutely fucking horrible. i don't know what you want me to say. i will admit that i am quibbling, but it's over terminology. i'm only saying that this survey includes many various and sundry causes of death, not all of which are what i would define as murder by US soldiers. I was at pains to include what many people call "collateral damage" as actual fucking murders. i agree that the tactics employed in the fallujah campaign were disgraceful. There have also been utterly horrific acts of individual violence like the ones you cite, caused by the vietnam-like stress of an unending war against an almost invisible enemy, with cities replacing jungles. it's all incredibly fucking terribly. If a US soldier shoots a weapon or orders a bombardment which kills civilians, it's murder. it's atrocious.
if a sunni insurgent blows up a car bomb in a market full of shias, i don't think that this qualifies as US troops murdering people.
We have killed far, far too many people. whatever the number of people murdered is, it's far too fucking many.
feel free to flame me back. i guess that's what slashdot's really all about.
(sigh) i know i shouldn't feed the trolls, but people throw this number around all the time, and while the number may be accurate, i don't think that the study that created that number justifies the tone that many people attach to it (U.S. murdering people). go ahead and mod me OT if you want, but i take charges of murder against my country very seriously, and i don't think that this charge is accurate. i will grant that the US has murdered people in Iraq, not only through the actions of rogue soldiers, but also through inexcusable high-level decision-making, specifically the use of heavy ordnance against targets in populated areas and intolerably aggressive interrogation policies that often did not merely border on, but went fully into the realm of torture.r tality_before_and_after_the_2003_invasion_of_Iraq /. not comp class, and i've already spent too much time feeding this troll.)
With that said, let's move on to the number. i guess you didn't say specifically, but i assume that you're talking about iraq, and implying that the US has murdered roughly 600,000 people, the deathtoll from the johns hopkins statistical survey of iraqi deaths, right? i assume that if you didn't think america murdered them you wouldn't accuse people of not caring about their deaths, since everyone in america is uniformly revolted by Iraq's horrifying inter-necine violence, which is probably why support for the war has dropped precipitously lately. i'm not trying to be catty, i just want to establish firmly what we're talking about here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_mo
all right, so that study (and the similar one done by Johns Hopkins two years earlier) compared the official death count in Iraq during the pre-war period with the current deathcount, the latter of which they arrived at through a household cluster survey of all of Iraq. It subtracts the pre-war death rate from the current one and says that roughly 600,000 more Iraqis have died since the war who would not have died under the conditions existing before the war. I know a little bit about statistics and i have some concerns about the methodology of the study, but i've only taken a college statistics class, and the people who made the study are fucking professionals, so i will go ahead and grant them that their number is probably accurate.
My point is that 600,000 is an aggregate number of all people who have died in iraq of all sorts of probably war-related deaths. this includes people who have been killed in Iraq's vicious sectarian bloodletting, including not only the Sunni insurgency, who have been slaughtering scores of Shias for several years now, but since the study ran through June 2006, it also includes the wave of Shia death squad reprisals following the bombing of the Golden Mosque almost a year ago. It also includes people who have died because of the Sunni insurgents' targeting of critical water and electricity infrastructure. it also includes deaths caused more indirectly by the war, especially the general instability, lack of services and security, created by 4 years of urban, guerrilla warfare. (i know i said "it also includes" three times, but this is
While i'll admit that blame for all of these deaths, particularly the last of those, could ultimately be laid upon America's doorstep, since we started the war that has unleashed these terrible forces, i don't believe that America has murdered 600,000 people. perhaps that's just a matter of semantics, but i don't think so.
pay no mind to any of these 11 death-bots or Wernstrom's kill-bots.....
Wernstrom!
I was amazed that square didn't make a bushido blade 3 for the ps2. with its array of selectable weapons and fairly realistic damage system (you can get wounded, but 1 good whack with a sword can easily kill you) i always thought that bushido blade was one of the most innovative fighting franchises around. :'( ]
i think it's certainly time now, especially if they made it for the Wii and decided to go all out and do a better job of capturing sword swings than current Wii games [at least from what i've heard.... i still haven't played the Wii
i don't want to be rude, but really you shouldn't be throwing any batteries in the trash at all. while they're not all hazmats like Ni-Cd, they're all pretty nasty. i know it's a pain in the ass but most cities will have a couple of free battery disposal periods during the year or something (i think).
as a matter of full disclosure i should probably state that i've never gotten up the gumption to actually take advantage of these things, but i also have various "dead battery depots" containing every battery i've used since childhood (i'm 22 now). it doesn't seem to be so bad so far, the bottom of the buckets haven't been corroded by battery acid, and i'm fairly sure that someday i will take advantage of a battery disposal period for the whole lot of them.
at any rate, if anyone can even find those ridiculously shitty Ni-Cd batteries these days, they deserve some sort of medal, 'cause NiMh batteries are so much better in every way that i'm aware of. i think they also alleviate a fair number of the grandparent post's concerns. besides, for anything more battery hungry than a remote control, rechargables probably will save you money in the medium to long term. maybe just keep a set of good disposables for when you need backups for your camera or something.
thanks for mentioning it man, i forgot that that game was pretty fucking sweet. i may have to go buy it sometime, should be pretty cheap by now.
i guess i'll also have to find my N64, whatever deep dark corner it's gotten into after all these years...
I just hope they can keep this thing out of Serpentor's hands
in most of those countries, the wookie *always* wins. people don't really get to vote on much of anything other than feeble local councils, if that
Reuters' original online article about this misidentified the queen bee as Queen Elizabeth, stating that Britain's monarch was capable of laying "up to 2,000 eggs a day"o _te.html
they've corrected it, but you can see the original article here:
http://www.regrettheerror.com/2006/10/reuters_typ
This may be what you tried, but I just wanted to recommend the potent trifecta of the "pr1m45" Civ IV mini-image, which can be loaded into a virtual drive through Daemon Tools, and the program SD4hide, which masks the fact that you're running daemon tools
Good luck, I hope this allows you to play this fantastic game
It's possible that he doesn't want to be famous for having a humiliating video of him circulate the internet.
"tonight, a very special episode of seventh heaven guest starring that silly Star Wars kid"
McDonald's coffee isn't necessarily sold to cause 3rd degree burns, but when it is company policy to sell coffee at 180-190 degrees Farenheit, as it was at the time of the lawsuit i assume you're referring to, a temperature that can easily cause 3rd degree burns, it can be criminally negligent (or something to that effect, IANAL), especially when it had been brought to their attention numerous times beforem cdonalds.htm
http://www.centerjd.org/free/mythbusters-free/MB_
thanks buddy, nobody knew that.
j-o-k-e
a lot of things that we now know as being facts started out as theoretical answers to mathematical equations, like black holes
maybe it's just me, but when i heard the 48 hour deadline, i was expecting that it would be some times square dropping the ball type shit. you know, the clock hits zero, Bush comes on and gives a stirring speech about war and freedom etc, and as soon as he's done you see the might of the american military unleashed in a brutal flurry of cruise missles and whatever. not this little whimper of a start of a war
i think perhaps a good dose of rtfa is in order. carbon nanotubes, the only proposed substance that could do this, is terribly expensive to make, and even that expensive stuff is only a fraction of the required strength. it'll be awhile till someone could reasonably say we're going to do this this decade
hehe wow, a pun and a movie reference, all within a haiku. you should get some sort of triple crown thing :)
I'm all for mandating tolerance when it comes to what you can and can't do to people, but telling people basically what to think is where you have to draw the line. Learn all the lessons from the nazis, including that any restriction on ideas and public discussion is one of the slipperiest slopes of all.
i salute you, but i don't think that their time is over or done. and if it is, it probably won't be because of you and the other people who share your ethos. sadly, you and your ilk are very much in the minority, and i doubt that that will change anytime soon as long as there's money to be made off of impressionable adolescent girls swooning over boy bands (and there will always be those)
i don't see anyone advertising a lack of copy protection while they're in the RIAA, at least without whatever sort of fines or other ass fucking techniques they must have for companies that go against the grain