At least now maybe we'll stop hearing about WMD's.
It's conclusive now boys and girls: THERE WERE NO WMD's!
It should have been obvious that night when the last U.N. inspectors lifted off from Baghdad that no WMD's were in country, but now any and all doubt has been dispelled.
Saddam Hussein was never in violation of U.N. resolutions prohibiting manufacture of WMD's.
George Bush lied so that we could invade Iraq.
George Bush is the war criminal, not Saddam Hussein.
On that note, is anybody else wondering why it is we took Saddam alive? Why, with all of our corrupt dealings with Iraq, we'd risk putting the man on trial?
Re:Yeah, like we haven't fucked up the planet enou
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 3, Funny
You're right. It's only acceptible as an adjective. For instance, I can call you a fucking asshole, and that's OK.
Thank you for that clarification.
Yeah, like we haven't fucked up the planet enough
on
The Year In Ideas
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Let's start melting holes in it!
And why? So somebody can get an 'A'!
Which reminds me of that great scene in Star Trek TNG Evolution where Guinan busts Wesley crawling around her 10-forward, and after mumbling something about Dr. Frankenstein, asks him about the grades he's getting.
He replies that he always gets an 'A'.
And she replies, "So did Dr. Frankenstein."
(and lest anybody think my using the word fuck in the subject is out of line, I refer you to none other than the FCC who says it isn't such a bad word afterall.)
Reading the study you linked to, it says that when the atomic excitation that makes this possible is converted back into light, the pulse can be propagated in either a forward or backward direction.
Which should mean that you could create a sort of time-delayed mirror, wouldn't it?
Hard to see how that would be useful, except perhaps as a gag of some sort.
and that that's the reason they won't sell him fuel, but damn, that's pretty inhospitable. Besides, subzero temperatures probably do a fair job of discouraging tourism anyways.
They should have sold him the gas, but for a high price.
Now what happens if he wants to stay with his plane and try to buy gas from the next shipment? If they act to prevent that, then I think they've crossed the line.
Yes, this entire thread *is* about spoilers. And if anyone has their viewing experience disturbed because of reading this thread, it's their own fault.
The editors clearly indicated what the subject matter was going to be when posting the story. It was easy to opt out.
What I'm talking about however is when I go to read about Linux kernel 2.5whateverthefuckitis.32, and when cruising through the message titles, I see something like Trinity Dies.
With a franchise like the Matrix, and when a movie like Matrix: Reloaded is about to come out, a spoiler like this can be effective in almost any forum or subject.
Now, let's pretend that Matrix: Reloaded was a good movie. Let's say, a great movie. But a movie that would have been less of an experience had the plot been revealed in advance. What kind of loss is that? How do you measure that? Is this going to evolve into a kind of spoiler-warfare between the studios, where each tries to diminish the experience of the movie-goer when he goes to see the competitor's films?
So, OK, let's say that Matrix: Reloaded was a good movie.
Does it help or hinder your viewing experience when some butt-munching ape of a human being logs on to/. and announces to the world that Trinity dies?
So there you are, saving your money up for the really good movies, only to have the experience screwed up by some mentally-retarded 14-year-old who karma whores so he can spoil peoples experience at the theater.
Maybe Matrix: Reloaded is a bad example...
What about Sixth Sense?
Can you imagine how different that movie would have been if some idiot on/. had posted, in the title, that the protaganist was dead?
It would destroy the whole presentation. There'd be no point in watching the movie.
And to be frank, the worst part about/.'s otherwise commendable policy of allowing every post to stand is that we have idiots who will come in here and post spoilers with the deliberate intention of ruining the movie for everybody else.
I remember when we were days away from Matrix: Reloaded, and some idiot posted with the title Trinity Dies. Of course, Trinity didn't die, but the suggestion that she might acted like a splinter in my mind--if I might borrow a phrase from Morpheus--during my viewing of the movie.
goatse.cx by comparison is relatively innocent, at least in my book.
WHY DO PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW HOW A MOVIE ENDS BEFORE THEY SEE IT?
This drives me crazy! I mean, I even get pissed off at these stupid DVD's that show you previews of the movie you're about to watch before they even let you at the fucking PLAY BUTTON.
And then there are idiots like MATT DRUDGE who will happily spoil a movie using his 48 point type headline if it somehow offends his laughable moral point-of-view.
The great hope here is that some day we'll have the bandwidth so that when a movie is released, we'll have the opportunity to see it, live, before anybody gets to make their day spoiling it for the rest of us.
Spammer will just send email to himself to make sure relay works. The author claims that the defense against this is to allow the spammer limited access in the beginning, but there's no way to uniquely identify the spammer, and in any case, the spammer can just continue to include himself in the mailings, so he'll know when the relay has been configured to deny him access.
This system will only increase the number of open relays out there.
The story of the hare and the briar patch comes to mind. Is this the idea of a spammer who is pleading with us to please not create all these open rel..., er, um, spamholes?
It all depends on finding a terse and intuitive gesture mechanism through which the interface may be navigated. I think my preferred approach would be to present the nominal view of the user's desktop as though it were the interior of a hemisphere, wherein all of the various windows and widgets reside, as though they were affixed to the interior of this sphere. Then, a simple move of the mouse rotates the sphere along the X and Y axis, and when finally something of interest is in view, you either click or use the scroll wheel on the mouse to zoom in and make it the active window.
Kind of like a big virtual desktop, only you get to peek at what's over the horizon.
From the given picture, it doesn't appear that they're doing this though. It seems as though all of the objects have transformation matrices that are independent of one another, and without any common point of reference, which suggests an elaborate interface.
But as they say, it's a prototype.
We do need to do something about windows. It's been twenty years already. We should be better than this. Is the answer to display them at funky angles? I'm not sure. But it's nice to see that somebody somewhere is trying, even if the whole exercise is about nothing more than moving Sun's price on the market.
Seriously, if I decide that I only want to receive mail from people who have received a public key from me, I should get to do that.
What is the problem with having my mail server accept mail (or rather, relay to me mail) from senders who know the public key that matches the private key I've given the server?
I don't see what the clueless ficktwizzles have to do with any of this. They won't have the public key I've given to my server. Ergo, they won't be able to send me mail that makes it past my email server.
It might be nice to encourage people to use bittorrent to download porn. The bandwidth savings would be akin to quadrupling router capacity across the Net.
Or, maybe fix email by requiring everybody to send ciphered messages only. Require/encourage mail servers to permit a user to provide it a gateway public/private key through which all incoming email must satisfy (not the same as your personal public/private key.) Solve spam and nine-tenths of Echelon with one single kick in the balls.
Then, get over this self-inflicted trauma over raw sockets. Raw sockets are cool. Raw sockets + UDP can all but eliminate the nastier p2p problems, like how to work through firewalls, as well as how to send data anonymously. These are good things. Let good people do good things with good technology.
But we can do all of these things through education. We don't need the UN/Geneva/Britney Spears to tell us how this whole thing should work.
Rigging the voting machines is a really hard way to rig an election, you need a lot of people to be in on the fix.
Why would that be? It only takes one well-placed person can write the malicious code and hide it in the software. Indeed, you may not need to be well-placed at all.
But even assuming what you say is true, so what? Look at the stakes. Look at all the past examples of election tampering, many of which involve large groups of people.
It isn't paranoia to be concerned about these machines, for this one simple reason: any other flaw in our democracy can be addressed by our democracy, but not this. Once we lose the vote to these machines, we lose the capacity to remove the machines from the process. It's a one-way street, and once we're on it, the only recourse will be violence, a la 1776.
So we should take great care to make sure we don't take that road.
I have designed exactly zero aircraft. I had thought I made that point earlier on, but perhaps that was another thread.
However, I have spent a majority of my life designing software. Sometimes very complex software. One of the great things about designing software is that you get to see where your assumptions were wrong, and in fairly quick order. If you stay on a project long enough, you go through many successive cycles of designing something, seeing where it doesn't work, designing version 2, seeing what that doesn't work, and so on. Over time, you develop a sense about what is a good design ethic and what is not.
And from my point-of-view, the JSF project violates so many of these ethics as to give me confidence that the project is doomed, even though I know next-to-nothing about the specifics.
For instance, you point out that the Navy likes two-engined aircraft. From that I presume that the air force would prefer only one? Will this be a mod? Is this an example of what you were talking about when you said that from the wheels up each aircraft will be a dedicated example of each service's requirements?
I have no doubt that the engineers will solve many of the problems they encounter. In this respect though, it's rather like the Space Shuttle. It is less a testament to the design of the shuttle than the girth of our economy that the thing keeps on flying (when it does.) If it were a matter of national pride, I'm sure we could put a school bus into orbit by slapping on a couple of rockets, if we really had to. Our engineers will make almost anything work.
The thing is, so will the engineers employed by our future adversaries. What happens if their designers don't have a bunch of GS-9 accountants looking over their shoulders as they put their pencils to the board?
I don't consider those things to be "radical modifications." For purposes of this discussion, that should be restricted to mods like take a plane that is designed to do one thing and make it do something completely different, a la, 707->AWACS, or DC-10->tanker, 747->"fly the blooming Space Shuttle* from one coast to the other."
My point is that you are very limited in what you can do with these fighter craft once the paint goes on. It's akin to writing a program in a language like Python vs. hand-crafting it in optimized assembler language. You necessarily sacrifice versatility in the pursuit of performance.
All but one of those aircraft are not fighter aircraft though. Surely you can appreciate the enormous difference in roles good design plays between something like an F-15 and a C-130.
And what exactly is the radical modification that the F-16 has undergone?
What happens if I'm right, and an unforeseen problem occurs in this design, and the rest of our aircraft have aged into obsolescence?
The F-4 as I recall wasn't everything everyone hoped it to be, but it still proved useful because there were other craft to supplement it, to assume those missions the F-4 proved ill-equipped to handle. I think the F-111 is another candidate there.
That the latest generation of aircraft, planes like the F-15, have proven themselves to the degree in which they have is encouraging. But to now assume that we've made fighter aircraft design and construction an exact science, where every possible contigency can be predicted in advance? No, I don't believe it.
It's a kind of complacency borne of arrogance. And from a purely military point-of-view, nothing is so dangerous as over-estimating your abilities, and underestimating those of your opponent's.
Slashdot Mirror
At least now maybe we'll stop hearing about WMD's.
It's conclusive now boys and girls: THERE WERE NO WMD's!
It should have been obvious that night when the last U.N. inspectors lifted off from Baghdad that no WMD's were in country, but now any and all doubt has been dispelled.
Saddam Hussein was never in violation of U.N. resolutions prohibiting manufacture of WMD's.
George Bush lied so that we could invade Iraq.
George Bush is the war criminal, not Saddam Hussein.
On that note, is anybody else wondering why it is we took Saddam alive? Why, with all of our corrupt dealings with Iraq, we'd risk putting the man on trial?
It's because we've just established a precedent for controlling what the people get to see and hear from testimony given in war crimes tribunals.
You're right. It's only acceptible as an adjective. For instance, I can call you a fucking asshole, and that's OK.
Thank you for that clarification.
Let's start melting holes in it!
And why? So somebody can get an 'A'!
Which reminds me of that great scene in Star Trek TNG Evolution where Guinan busts Wesley crawling around her 10-forward, and after mumbling something about Dr. Frankenstein, asks him about the grades he's getting.
He replies that he always gets an 'A'.
And she replies, "So did Dr. Frankenstein."
(and lest anybody think my using the word fuck in the subject is out of line, I refer you to none other than the FCC who says it isn't such a bad word afterall.)
I notice that Jon Johansen's blog has been down for a number of days.
This is, of course, the QTFairUse guy.
Here.
Reading the study you linked to, it says that when the atomic excitation that makes this possible is converted back into light, the pulse can be propagated in either a forward or backward direction.
Which should mean that you could create a sort of time-delayed mirror, wouldn't it?
Hard to see how that would be useful, except perhaps as a gag of some sort.
(Ha! Hard to see! Get it?)
and that that's the reason they won't sell him fuel, but damn, that's pretty inhospitable. Besides, subzero temperatures probably do a fair job of discouraging tourism anyways.
They should have sold him the gas, but for a high price.
Now what happens if he wants to stay with his plane and try to buy gas from the next shipment? If they act to prevent that, then I think they've crossed the line.
Who says that Antartica is theirs anyways?
Not the same thing at all.
Excellent point.
I don't read him regularly anymore, that's for sure.
Yes, this entire thread *is* about spoilers. And if anyone has their viewing experience disturbed because of reading this thread, it's their own fault.
The editors clearly indicated what the subject matter was going to be when posting the story. It was easy to opt out.
What I'm talking about however is when I go to read about Linux kernel 2.5whateverthefuckitis.32, and when cruising through the message titles, I see something like Trinity Dies.
With a franchise like the Matrix, and when a movie like Matrix: Reloaded is about to come out, a spoiler like this can be effective in almost any forum or subject.
Now, let's pretend that Matrix: Reloaded was a good movie. Let's say, a great movie. But a movie that would have been less of an experience had the plot been revealed in advance. What kind of loss is that? How do you measure that? Is this going to evolve into a kind of spoiler-warfare between the studios, where each tries to diminish the experience of the movie-goer when he goes to see the competitor's films?
I think this is really tragic.
So, OK, let's say that Matrix: Reloaded was a good movie.
/. and announces to the world that Trinity dies?
/. had posted, in the title, that the protaganist was dead?
Does it help or hinder your viewing experience when some butt-munching ape of a human being logs on to
So there you are, saving your money up for the really good movies, only to have the experience screwed up by some mentally-retarded 14-year-old who karma whores so he can spoil peoples experience at the theater.
Maybe Matrix: Reloaded is a bad example...
What about Sixth Sense?
Can you imagine how different that movie would have been if some idiot on
It would destroy the whole presentation. There'd be no point in watching the movie.
And to be frank, the worst part about /.'s otherwise commendable policy of allowing every post to stand is that we have idiots who will come in here and post spoilers with the deliberate intention of ruining the movie for everybody else.
I remember when we were days away from Matrix: Reloaded, and some idiot posted with the title Trinity Dies. Of course, Trinity didn't die, but the suggestion that she might acted like a splinter in my mind--if I might borrow a phrase from Morpheus--during my viewing of the movie.
goatse.cx by comparison is relatively innocent, at least in my book.
WHY DO PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW HOW A MOVIE ENDS BEFORE THEY SEE IT?
This drives me crazy! I mean, I even get pissed off at these stupid DVD's that show you previews of the movie you're about to watch before they even let you at the fucking PLAY BUTTON.
And then there are idiots like MATT DRUDGE who will happily spoil a movie using his 48 point type headline if it somehow offends his laughable moral point-of-view.
The great hope here is that some day we'll have the bandwidth so that when a movie is released, we'll have the opportunity to see it, live, before anybody gets to make their day spoiling it for the rest of us.
Thank you for sitting through this diatribe
Had to be said, what with a 2010 liftoff date (actually 2011 if you read the article.)
The ship even looks quite a bit like Discovery.
And I bet the NSA lies to this onboard computer too.
Spammer will just send email to himself to make sure relay works. The author claims that the defense against this is to allow the spammer limited access in the beginning, but there's no way to uniquely identify the spammer, and in any case, the spammer can just continue to include himself in the mailings, so he'll know when the relay has been configured to deny him access.
This system will only increase the number of open relays out there.
The story of the hare and the briar patch comes to mind. Is this the idea of a spammer who is pleading with us to please not create all these open rel..., er, um, spamholes?
It all depends on finding a terse and intuitive gesture mechanism through which the interface may be navigated. I think my preferred approach would be to present the nominal view of the user's desktop as though it were the interior of a hemisphere, wherein all of the various windows and widgets reside, as though they were affixed to the interior of this sphere. Then, a simple move of the mouse rotates the sphere along the X and Y axis, and when finally something of interest is in view, you either click or use the scroll wheel on the mouse to zoom in and make it the active window.
Kind of like a big virtual desktop, only you get to peek at what's over the horizon.
From the given picture, it doesn't appear that they're doing this though. It seems as though all of the objects have transformation matrices that are independent of one another, and without any common point of reference, which suggests an elaborate interface.
But as they say, it's a prototype.
We do need to do something about windows. It's been twenty years already. We should be better than this. Is the answer to display them at funky angles? I'm not sure. But it's nice to see that somebody somewhere is trying, even if the whole exercise is about nothing more than moving Sun's price on the market.
I see this is your first time.
Was it good?
Don't you have better things to do?
Seriously, if I decide that I only want to receive mail from people who have received a public key from me, I should get to do that.
What is the problem with having my mail server accept mail (or rather, relay to me mail) from senders who know the public key that matches the private key I've given the server?
I don't see what the clueless ficktwizzles have to do with any of this. They won't have the public key I've given to my server. Ergo, they won't be able to send me mail that makes it past my email server.
Yes?
If you're a Total Wimp, then why don't you just shut the fuck up?
Where are the fucking AC's when you need them?
Stay the fuck away from my Internet.
That said...
It might be nice to encourage people to use bittorrent to download porn. The bandwidth savings would be akin to quadrupling router capacity across the Net.
Or, maybe fix email by requiring everybody to send ciphered messages only. Require/encourage mail servers to permit a user to provide it a gateway public/private key through which all incoming email must satisfy (not the same as your personal public/private key.) Solve spam and nine-tenths of Echelon with one single kick in the balls.
Then, get over this self-inflicted trauma over raw sockets. Raw sockets are cool. Raw sockets + UDP can all but eliminate the nastier p2p problems, like how to work through firewalls, as well as how to send data anonymously. These are good things. Let good people do good things with good technology.
But we can do all of these things through education. We don't need the UN/Geneva/Britney Spears to tell us how this whole thing should work.
nt
Rigging the voting machines is a really hard way to rig an election, you need a lot of people to be in on the fix.
Why would that be? It only takes one well-placed person can write the malicious code and hide it in the software. Indeed, you may not need to be well-placed at all.
But even assuming what you say is true, so what? Look at the stakes. Look at all the past examples of election tampering, many of which involve large groups of people.
It isn't paranoia to be concerned about these machines, for this one simple reason: any other flaw in our democracy can be addressed by our democracy, but not this. Once we lose the vote to these machines, we lose the capacity to remove the machines from the process. It's a one-way street, and once we're on it, the only recourse will be violence, a la 1776.
So we should take great care to make sure we don't take that road.
A really good reply, one which deserves to stand as the last word.
G'night.
I have designed exactly zero aircraft. I had thought I made that point earlier on, but perhaps that was another thread.
However, I have spent a majority of my life designing software. Sometimes very complex software. One of the great things about designing software is that you get to see where your assumptions were wrong, and in fairly quick order. If you stay on a project long enough, you go through many successive cycles of designing something, seeing where it doesn't work, designing version 2, seeing what that doesn't work, and so on. Over time, you develop a sense about what is a good design ethic and what is not.
And from my point-of-view, the JSF project violates so many of these ethics as to give me confidence that the project is doomed, even though I know next-to-nothing about the specifics.
For instance, you point out that the Navy likes two-engined aircraft. From that I presume that the air force would prefer only one? Will this be a mod? Is this an example of what you were talking about when you said that from the wheels up each aircraft will be a dedicated example of each service's requirements?
I have no doubt that the engineers will solve many of the problems they encounter. In this respect though, it's rather like the Space Shuttle. It is less a testament to the design of the shuttle than the girth of our economy that the thing keeps on flying (when it does.) If it were a matter of national pride, I'm sure we could put a school bus into orbit by slapping on a couple of rockets, if we really had to. Our engineers will make almost anything work.
The thing is, so will the engineers employed by our future adversaries. What happens if their designers don't have a bunch of GS-9 accountants looking over their shoulders as they put their pencils to the board?
I don't consider those things to be "radical modifications." For purposes of this discussion, that should be restricted to mods like take a plane that is designed to do one thing and make it do something completely different, a la, 707->AWACS, or DC-10->tanker, 747->"fly the blooming Space Shuttle* from one coast to the other."
My point is that you are very limited in what you can do with these fighter craft once the paint goes on. It's akin to writing a program in a language like Python vs. hand-crafting it in optimized assembler language. You necessarily sacrifice versatility in the pursuit of performance.
(*I bet you like the Space Shuttle too.)
All but one of those aircraft are not fighter aircraft though. Surely you can appreciate the enormous difference in roles good design plays between something like an F-15 and a C-130.
And what exactly is the radical modification that the F-16 has undergone?
What happens if I'm right, and an unforeseen problem occurs in this design, and the rest of our aircraft have aged into obsolescence?
The F-4 as I recall wasn't everything everyone hoped it to be, but it still proved useful because there were other craft to supplement it, to assume those missions the F-4 proved ill-equipped to handle. I think the F-111 is another candidate there.
That the latest generation of aircraft, planes like the F-15, have proven themselves to the degree in which they have is encouraging. But to now assume that we've made fighter aircraft design and construction an exact science, where every possible contigency can be predicted in advance? No, I don't believe it.
It's a kind of complacency borne of arrogance. And from a purely military point-of-view, nothing is so dangerous as over-estimating your abilities, and underestimating those of your opponent's.