I see that line of thinking as somewhat skewed. We went to the moon, what was left to do? Mars? Not with 1975 tech. I just don't see that being feasible. Sure, we sidetracked ourselves in terms of long distance exploration with the Shuttle, but does the communications revolution that has taken place since the mid 70's happen without NASA trucking up the school-bus sized satellites of the late 70s and early 80's? Sure you can throw those up with rockets, but the shuttle doesn't do a *bad* job of moving big-ass cargo into space.
What's left to do? Here's some short-term ideas, many cribbed from The High Frontier.
1. Build a proper big dumb booster, something that can throw a ridiculous amount of cargo into space. Don't care whether or not its reusable, just make it cheap. We can send the crew on a separate vehicle since man-rating rockets is so expensive.
2. Lunar colony for science and resource extraction. We can get a lot of usable construction material from the moon and thus reduce the amount of mass that needs to be sent up from the Earth for anything complicated we're building.
3. Asteroid capture mission for resources we can't find easily on the Moon. Plenty of apollo object asteroids to prospect.
4. Orbital habitats in L4 and L5, built with material mined on the moon.
5. Orbital power sats, constructed at the lagrange habitats. The technology originally talked about would use large mirrors to concentrate solar energy on a turbine system. Fluid is heated, expands, flows through turbine where the energy is extracted mechanically, cools on the back side of the sat, repeat. The turbines generate electricity and that's beamed down to earth as microwaves, collected by rectennas on the ground.
6. Beanstalks!
Looking out further in the future, we could move most of our heavy industry out into space and just drop the resulting goods back down to Earth in recyclable containers. No more polluted environment, just a nice clean garden down here filled with contented people. And with all of that infrastructure in space, all that cheap access, the cost of scientific exploration with robotic probes would be peanuts.
I'm a big space geek, don't get me wrong. I'm all for space stuff. But I'm horrified when I look at the price tags on these projects. Should they really cost this much? Are we sure that there isn't a lot of contractor pocket-lining going on? It seems to me like we're using a lawn sprinkler to fill up a dixie cup. Yeah, it'll get the job done but it'll take about ten gallons of water to put five ounces in the cup.
If I seem disappointed and ungrateful it's just that putting rinky dink modular stations in orbit is 1970's technology. We should have moon colonies right now using mass drivers to fire off raw materials to the lagrange points where we'd be building giant wheel and cylinder habitats.
Looking at our space program, it's like going back home and seeing the people you went to school with who peaked in high school and are hanging around the old haunts just looking underachieving and pathetic. I mean yeah, it's cool to point and laugh if these were the people you hated in high school but if they were your friends, it's just very sad. NASA peaked as Apollo and has been underachieving ever since.
Wow. Despite being careful to select a gender-neutral nickname, now you've gone and pointed out to slashdotters that you're actually female... BIG MISTAKE! Heck, I'm even tempted to hit on you myself!;-)
Broken femdar there, buddy.:)
I did the b-school route and those classes were a 50/50 split on gender and we didn't have many foreign students. I work in non-profit now and the gender split is 30/70 in favor of women.
There have been wars fought between nuclear powers without the use of nuclear weapons (read: Pakistan and India). Everyone knows the use of nuclear weapons is an immediate death sentence from the rest of the world.
The question would be how threatened one side feels. We already had threats to use nukes in the Arab-Israeli wars. The Sampson Option calls for the employment of every nuke in the arsenal against Arab targets if the existence of Israel is on the line. The reference is to Sampson pulling down the Philistine temple on his own head, suicide vengeance. I forget if it was the Six-Day War or the Yom Kippur war but during one of them phone calls were made to ensure the US would rush anti-tank weapons in at discount prices.
To compare the war in Iraq in it's current form to hypothetical war against China is impossible. A war with China would play into the strengths of the US military, seeing as it would be a war the US has been building for since the Cold War days.
That's the problem with hypotheticals, the whole dynamic changes on the particulars of what you're speculating over. What would the war be over? Where would we be fighting? What constitutes a win? The only scenario I can think of is an invasion of Taiwan. The western experts feel that China doesn't have the sealift capacity to make a real go of it. What sealift they do have would be extremely vulnerable to Taiwanese ships, subs, and aircraft. Sure, China can barrage the hell out of them with rockets but that doesn't put troops onshore. If the US decided to intervene, that plays directly to our strengths. The Chinese would have a very hard time putting ships across the straights without getting them blown up. The same goes for any sort of power projection scenario that involves the high seas. If we were talking about a land invasion of a neighboring country, then things get more complicated. We're the ones having to use sealift to get troops in and the Chinese have lots and lots of guided missiles. They don't have to hit us on the high seas, they could strike from land and we saw how bad the UK had it with the Falklands war.
I just don't honestly see a near-future scenario where we'd be at war with the Chinese. Now as the poster above mentioned, a second world war seemed far off in 1920. But really, it was far off. I'd say it wasn't until maybe '34 or '35 that Hitler had enough clout and was making enough noise for people to start getting worried. Nobody on September 10th, 2001 would have imagined us at war in Afghanistan and the next day nobody could see how we wouldn't.
Just to be clear, by near-future I mean within a decade. Obviously, you start making predictions too far out and you're just about certain to get it wrong.
The Gulf War pitted the #1 US military, versus the then-ranked #4 Iraqi military, numbering some 1.2 million ground troops and nearly 6,000 tanks. We *did* fight a ground war against an 'entrenched' opponent. Better training and vastly superior weaponry were the differences. As much as some people would like to compare China and the US in terms of military might, the reality is that the difference between those two powers is much greater than the difference between the US and Iraq pre-Gulf War.
We didn't fight them in the cities in GW1, that's the difference. Quoting directly from the military leaders at the time, fighting the Iraqis in the open desert was like going after the Japanese on the high seas in 1944, nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. But when it came time to dig the Japanese army out of the fortified islands, that's when we started paying a steep price in blood, superior forces and equipment or not. The fear in GW1 was that city fighting would prove to be a meat-grinder. No matter that Iraq was no longer able to project force beyond its borders, no matter that we rule the skies over that country. You put tanks in an urban setting, they're RPG magnets. There's too many places for enemies to hide, there's the civilian population to consider. To fight in cities, armored forces give up its primary advantages of speed and mobility. And it's no fun for the infantry, either.
Also, don't forget if we're talking China vs. the US, they have nukes. They may not have as many as we do and they may not have the same kind of ICBM's and SLBM's we do but they certainly have enough to fuck up our day.
As the great philosopher Barbie once said, "Math is hard!"
No, but seriously, before my karma is ruined, it's all a matter of differing interests. When I got into computers, they were still a seriously nerdcore hobby. It was rare to even encounter another girl at school who had a computer at home, even less likely for her to know how to use it. My sister looked at my computering, laughed, and went back to her interests.
Kind of without me realizing it, computers became a bigger and bigger thing in the lives of non-geeks. The internet is what really did it. When my sister finally asked me to help her find a computer, this was a watershed moment. And the social aspects made possible by the internet was what really sucked her in. I enjoyed the bulletin boards in my pre-internet days but IRC and ICQ were the killer apps that really sucked her in, that and the web in general. And more and more of her friends ended up having computers, and the social elements online weren't about computers but were simply facilitated by computers. == This, I think, is key. She has become as big of a computer geek as me now but she's using it as a tool, not as an end unto itself. She uses Photoshop and Illustrator for her art, uses different programs as a designer at her job, does her personal writing on there, keeps up with friends, etc. But it's not just geeking out on computers for the sake of geeking out. She's not installing all sorts of upgrades for games, she sticks with consoles for that sort of thing.
Since Slashdot is all about car analogies, I'd say most women are using computers the way they use a car, as a tool that they find very useful but they don't care about what's going on under the hood. Getting into CS is like becoming a gearhead. Most car users, male or female, aren't really gearheads. And from the stats I'm hearing from people I know in academia, Americans as a whole, male and female, aren't really into the hard sciences. There's just no money there.
I can already predict that some snarky asshole is going to come along and say "long, protracted wars like Iraq." The answer is no. Try the sort of wars where both parties are actually on a generally equal footing, where hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of soldiers end up dead. One of the reasons that governments like the Chinese government don't risk war with us is that they know that with our currently superior equipped and trained military, we can inflict devastating and likely very disproportionate casualties on them. If they are successful at industrial espionage, they close the gap there between our respective militaries and can come much closer to going toe-to-toe with our troops any day of the week.
1. Our military is over-extended already. It's unlikely we even have enough spare troops to invade Guam again at this point. 2. There's no possible scenario I can think of that would see us facing down China in a ground battle. 3. Economic warfare seems to be a far smarter arena to be engaged in than direct military conflict. And they have us over the barrel in that regard. 4. There's a difference between a bombing campaign and a ground invasion of given territory. All the high tech in the world doesn't count for much if you are fighting against an entrenched enemy on home turf. Witness how easily we smoked the standing Iraqi army in both Gulf wars versus the trouble we're facing trying to police cities filled with guerrillas.
The struggle we're looking at right now is over access to markets and resources. Granted, the future is always in flux but the prospects for a large-scale industrial war the likes of WWII are extremely remote. 4th generation guerrilla wars seem to be the likely scenario for as far into the future as we can reasonably gaze.
This is the problem with not properly promoting scientific education within American schools. If you can't get good scientists internally then you are putting your secure projects at risk.
It's a mixed bag. For every foreign-born turncoat you can find, I can find you one who is loyal to the US because he has a huge beef with whoever is running the show back home. Likewise, for every loyal native-born son of liberty I can show you a homegrown turncoat. Look at all the moles in the CIA, corn-fed Americans.
The moral of the story is that there's no rule of thumb to go by on who you can trust, you need to suspect everyone and not make theft any easier than it has to be. Most of these cases, nobody's sitting there giving the spy props because he pulled off some sort of James Bond stunt, it's usually hands slapped against faces as we realize the doors were left wide open, the only mystery is why even more secrets didn't walk out of there.
I can't claim any personal experience with counter-intelligence but everything I've read on the matter makes the feebs out to be completely incompetent jackasses. Potential intelligence assets will walk in the front door and the FBI and CIA couldn't manage to recognize them for what they were. It seems like the operative rules are along the lines of:
1. First, don't fuck up. 2. Doing things increases the chances of fucking up; the less you do, the less likely you fuck up, unless your fuck up was not doing anything. 3. Your primary enemy is other intelligence services competing for your budget and turf. Cut those bastards off at the knees. 4. In your spare time, see if any foreign agents might be up to something.
German defectors walk right up to the FBI and the G-men had to be beaten over the head before they realized something was up. And Hoover, ugh, don't even get me started on that bastard. The Brits couldn't stand working with that transvestite media whore in WWII. No sooner would a German agent be sniffed out and the FBI would roll him up and bring in the pressmen so German intel could find out their operation was blown and there would be enough details blabbed to the press so the Germans would know how they were sniffed out. The Brit approach was to figure out who the agents were, then keep a close eye on who they associated with so they could discover the larger spy network. They would also use these agents to unwittingly feed bogus intel back into German hands. That that was all too subtle for the swinging dick approach favored by American intel.
Comics encompass as broad a world as other forms of fiction and literature, it's not just all superheroes and science fiction. As far as Hollywood adaptations are concerned, the problem isn't so much a lack of originality -- although there is some truth to that claim -- it's that producers are risk averse.
I'm not knocking comics, there's much potential with the medium, even though the mainstream is all about superheroes in tights and impossible titties. I know there's potential there, even though most mainstream properties don't bother. But when Hollywood does an adaptation, it generally sucks.
You'd have to be a Jedi to use one of these things because any average Joe is likely to cut off his own foot. A light saber represents the awesome mutilating ability of power tools combined with a form factor that's even more prone to mischief. No weight in the blade, will cause major damage with fleeting contact. They're cool but you'll be losing fingers and limbs.
Just shows how there's not an original bone left in that town. The comics are like elaborate storyboards anyway so let's do one but be sure to cut out anything involving taste and quality so as not to alienate our prime market of drooling mouth-breathers. And in twenty years we'll remake 'em all! Can't you just taste that money? Fuck, yeah.
The sub-moronic demiurge. The theory? Dipshit design. My proof? Just look around and see how everything cries out to having been dipshittily designed. The hand of the sub-moronic demiurge is everywhere.
It was hosted by a local IT shop looking to introduce new technologies to potential clients. There was a Microsoft guy there talking about Server 08. He used one of the talking points that really annoys me: "Yeah, I used to work in open source, played with Linux and stuff. But then I decided I actually wanted to make money." Huh? Ok, that argument might have held water years and years back but it doesn't even make sense these days. Yes, Vista was a failure but Microsoft is still here and even the most pessimistic of realistic assessments doesn't have them going away anytime soon. They may be the 600lb gorilla instead of the 800lb gorilla but that's still a whole lotta gorilla. But to dismiss open source so, well, dismissively?
If watching the tech industry has taught me anything it's that nobody's indomitable and it pays not to get cocky. And the bigger a company gets, the more entrenched the bureaucracy, the more potent the kool-aid, the less likely it becomes to pull out of a tailspin. A company becomes functionally incapable of not fucking up. There's no way to turn the company around apart from firing every manager and starting over but those managers are exactly the ones who will fire everyone else in the company until they are the last ones left in the bunker. We're seeing this play out with the American automotive manufacturers right now, the Japanese are proving it's possible to make cars and make money at the same time while the Americans are busy proving it can't be done. Hell, our whole country is going through this same kind of dysfunctional malaise right now.
My prediction is that Microsoft will, over the next fifteen years, shrink in preeminence until it is a 400lb gorilla, dominant in certain niches but more comparable in size and power to the other big name IT companies rather than the world-shaker it was at its prime.
Slashdot Mirror
roads that lead somewhere...hmmm...it wouldn't be much good for simulating Ireland, then.
There's a purpose for that, though. It confuses the snakes.
That would be startling. There aren't any Grizzly Bears in Europe.
Perhaps they migrated?
I see that line of thinking as somewhat skewed. We went to the moon, what was left to do? Mars? Not with 1975 tech. I just don't see that being feasible. Sure, we sidetracked ourselves in terms of long distance exploration with the Shuttle, but does the communications revolution that has taken place since the mid 70's happen without NASA trucking up the school-bus sized satellites of the late 70s and early 80's? Sure you can throw those up with rockets, but the shuttle doesn't do a *bad* job of moving big-ass cargo into space.
What's left to do? Here's some short-term ideas, many cribbed from The High Frontier.
1. Build a proper big dumb booster, something that can throw a ridiculous amount of cargo into space. Don't care whether or not its reusable, just make it cheap. We can send the crew on a separate vehicle since man-rating rockets is so expensive.
2. Lunar colony for science and resource extraction. We can get a lot of usable construction material from the moon and thus reduce the amount of mass that needs to be sent up from the Earth for anything complicated we're building.
3. Asteroid capture mission for resources we can't find easily on the Moon. Plenty of apollo object asteroids to prospect.
4. Orbital habitats in L4 and L5, built with material mined on the moon.
5. Orbital power sats, constructed at the lagrange habitats. The technology originally talked about would use large mirrors to concentrate solar energy on a turbine system. Fluid is heated, expands, flows through turbine where the energy is extracted mechanically, cools on the back side of the sat, repeat. The turbines generate electricity and that's beamed down to earth as microwaves, collected by rectennas on the ground.
6. Beanstalks!
Looking out further in the future, we could move most of our heavy industry out into space and just drop the resulting goods back down to Earth in recyclable containers. No more polluted environment, just a nice clean garden down here filled with contented people. And with all of that infrastructure in space, all that cheap access, the cost of scientific exploration with robotic probes would be peanuts.
I'm a big space geek, don't get me wrong. I'm all for space stuff. But I'm horrified when I look at the price tags on these projects. Should they really cost this much? Are we sure that there isn't a lot of contractor pocket-lining going on? It seems to me like we're using a lawn sprinkler to fill up a dixie cup. Yeah, it'll get the job done but it'll take about ten gallons of water to put five ounces in the cup.
If I seem disappointed and ungrateful it's just that putting rinky dink modular stations in orbit is 1970's technology. We should have moon colonies right now using mass drivers to fire off raw materials to the lagrange points where we'd be building giant wheel and cylinder habitats.
Looking at our space program, it's like going back home and seeing the people you went to school with who peaked in high school and are hanging around the old haunts just looking underachieving and pathetic. I mean yeah, it's cool to point and laugh if these were the people you hated in high school but if they were your friends, it's just very sad. NASA peaked as Apollo and has been underachieving ever since.
Wow. Despite being careful to select a gender-neutral nickname, now you've gone and pointed out to slashdotters that you're actually female... BIG MISTAKE! Heck, I'm even tempted to hit on you myself! ;-)
Broken femdar there, buddy. :)
I did the b-school route and those classes were a 50/50 split on gender and we didn't have many foreign students. I work in non-profit now and the gender split is 30/70 in favor of women.
There have been wars fought between nuclear powers without the use of nuclear weapons (read: Pakistan and India). Everyone knows the use of nuclear weapons is an immediate death sentence from the rest of the world.
The question would be how threatened one side feels. We already had threats to use nukes in the Arab-Israeli wars. The Sampson Option calls for the employment of every nuke in the arsenal against Arab targets if the existence of Israel is on the line. The reference is to Sampson pulling down the Philistine temple on his own head, suicide vengeance. I forget if it was the Six-Day War or the Yom Kippur war but during one of them phone calls were made to ensure the US would rush anti-tank weapons in at discount prices.
To compare the war in Iraq in it's current form to hypothetical war against China is impossible. A war with China would play into the strengths of the US military, seeing as it would be a war the US has been building for since the Cold War days.
That's the problem with hypotheticals, the whole dynamic changes on the particulars of what you're speculating over. What would the war be over? Where would we be fighting? What constitutes a win? The only scenario I can think of is an invasion of Taiwan. The western experts feel that China doesn't have the sealift capacity to make a real go of it. What sealift they do have would be extremely vulnerable to Taiwanese ships, subs, and aircraft. Sure, China can barrage the hell out of them with rockets but that doesn't put troops onshore. If the US decided to intervene, that plays directly to our strengths. The Chinese would have a very hard time putting ships across the straights without getting them blown up. The same goes for any sort of power projection scenario that involves the high seas. If we were talking about a land invasion of a neighboring country, then things get more complicated. We're the ones having to use sealift to get troops in and the Chinese have lots and lots of guided missiles. They don't have to hit us on the high seas, they could strike from land and we saw how bad the UK had it with the Falklands war.
I just don't honestly see a near-future scenario where we'd be at war with the Chinese. Now as the poster above mentioned, a second world war seemed far off in 1920. But really, it was far off. I'd say it wasn't until maybe '34 or '35 that Hitler had enough clout and was making enough noise for people to start getting worried. Nobody on September 10th, 2001 would have imagined us at war in Afghanistan and the next day nobody could see how we wouldn't.
Just to be clear, by near-future I mean within a decade. Obviously, you start making predictions too far out and you're just about certain to get it wrong.
The Gulf War pitted the #1 US military, versus the then-ranked #4 Iraqi military, numbering some 1.2 million ground troops and nearly 6,000 tanks. We *did* fight a ground war against an 'entrenched' opponent. Better training and vastly superior weaponry were the differences. As much as some people would like to compare China and the US in terms of military might, the reality is that the difference between those two powers is much greater than the difference between the US and Iraq pre-Gulf War.
We didn't fight them in the cities in GW1, that's the difference. Quoting directly from the military leaders at the time, fighting the Iraqis in the open desert was like going after the Japanese on the high seas in 1944, nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. But when it came time to dig the Japanese army out of the fortified islands, that's when we started paying a steep price in blood, superior forces and equipment or not. The fear in GW1 was that city fighting would prove to be a meat-grinder. No matter that Iraq was no longer able to project force beyond its borders, no matter that we rule the skies over that country. You put tanks in an urban setting, they're RPG magnets. There's too many places for enemies to hide, there's the civilian population to consider. To fight in cities, armored forces give up its primary advantages of speed and mobility. And it's no fun for the infantry, either.
Also, don't forget if we're talking China vs. the US, they have nukes. They may not have as many as we do and they may not have the same kind of ICBM's and SLBM's we do but they certainly have enough to fuck up our day.
As the great philosopher Barbie once said, "Math is hard!"
No, but seriously, before my karma is ruined, it's all a matter of differing interests. When I got into computers, they were still a seriously nerdcore hobby. It was rare to even encounter another girl at school who had a computer at home, even less likely for her to know how to use it. My sister looked at my computering, laughed, and went back to her interests.
Kind of without me realizing it, computers became a bigger and bigger thing in the lives of non-geeks. The internet is what really did it. When my sister finally asked me to help her find a computer, this was a watershed moment. And the social aspects made possible by the internet was what really sucked her in. I enjoyed the bulletin boards in my pre-internet days but IRC and ICQ were the killer apps that really sucked her in, that and the web in general. And more and more of her friends ended up having computers, and the social elements online weren't about computers but were simply facilitated by computers. == This, I think, is key. She has become as big of a computer geek as me now but she's using it as a tool, not as an end unto itself. She uses Photoshop and Illustrator for her art, uses different programs as a designer at her job, does her personal writing on there, keeps up with friends, etc. But it's not just geeking out on computers for the sake of geeking out. She's not installing all sorts of upgrades for games, she sticks with consoles for that sort of thing.
Since Slashdot is all about car analogies, I'd say most women are using computers the way they use a car, as a tool that they find very useful but they don't care about what's going on under the hood. Getting into CS is like becoming a gearhead. Most car users, male or female, aren't really gearheads. And from the stats I'm hearing from people I know in academia, Americans as a whole, male and female, aren't really into the hard sciences. There's just no money there.
I can already predict that some snarky asshole is going to come along and say "long, protracted wars like Iraq." The answer is no. Try the sort of wars where both parties are actually on a generally equal footing, where hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of soldiers end up dead. One of the reasons that governments like the Chinese government don't risk war with us is that they know that with our currently superior equipped and trained military, we can inflict devastating and likely very disproportionate casualties on them. If they are successful at industrial espionage, they close the gap there between our respective militaries and can come much closer to going toe-to-toe with our troops any day of the week.
1. Our military is over-extended already. It's unlikely we even have enough spare troops to invade Guam again at this point.
2. There's no possible scenario I can think of that would see us facing down China in a ground battle.
3. Economic warfare seems to be a far smarter arena to be engaged in than direct military conflict. And they have us over the barrel in that regard.
4. There's a difference between a bombing campaign and a ground invasion of given territory. All the high tech in the world doesn't count for much if you are fighting against an entrenched enemy on home turf. Witness how easily we smoked the standing Iraqi army in both Gulf wars versus the trouble we're facing trying to police cities filled with guerrillas.
The struggle we're looking at right now is over access to markets and resources. Granted, the future is always in flux but the prospects for a large-scale industrial war the likes of WWII are extremely remote. 4th generation guerrilla wars seem to be the likely scenario for as far into the future as we can reasonably gaze.
This is the problem with not properly promoting scientific education within American schools. If you can't get good scientists internally then you are putting your secure projects at risk.
It's a mixed bag. For every foreign-born turncoat you can find, I can find you one who is loyal to the US because he has a huge beef with whoever is running the show back home. Likewise, for every loyal native-born son of liberty I can show you a homegrown turncoat. Look at all the moles in the CIA, corn-fed Americans.
The moral of the story is that there's no rule of thumb to go by on who you can trust, you need to suspect everyone and not make theft any easier than it has to be. Most of these cases, nobody's sitting there giving the spy props because he pulled off some sort of James Bond stunt, it's usually hands slapped against faces as we realize the doors were left wide open, the only mystery is why even more secrets didn't walk out of there.
I can't claim any personal experience with counter-intelligence but everything I've read on the matter makes the feebs out to be completely incompetent jackasses. Potential intelligence assets will walk in the front door and the FBI and CIA couldn't manage to recognize them for what they were. It seems like the operative rules are along the lines of:
1. First, don't fuck up.
2. Doing things increases the chances of fucking up; the less you do, the less likely you fuck up, unless your fuck up was not doing anything.
3. Your primary enemy is other intelligence services competing for your budget and turf. Cut those bastards off at the knees.
4. In your spare time, see if any foreign agents might be up to something.
For a case in point, Operation Pastorius.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=949
German defectors walk right up to the FBI and the G-men had to be beaten over the head before they realized something was up. And Hoover, ugh, don't even get me started on that bastard. The Brits couldn't stand working with that transvestite media whore in WWII. No sooner would a German agent be sniffed out and the FBI would roll him up and bring in the pressmen so German intel could find out their operation was blown and there would be enough details blabbed to the press so the Germans would know how they were sniffed out. The Brit approach was to figure out who the agents were, then keep a close eye on who they associated with so they could discover the larger spy network. They would also use these agents to unwittingly feed bogus intel back into German hands. That that was all too subtle for the swinging dick approach favored by American intel.
With your signature I would have assumed it to be Duncan Idaho and his metal eyes.
Duncan never took his eye out of his head and put it in someone's bedchamber. "Did I tell you about the bluetooth?"
Hi, my name is Barack Hussein Obongo [obongo08.com] and I approve of this message
Congratulations on your purchase of a brand new nigger! If handled properly, your apeman will give years of valuable, if reluctant, service.
Wow, I had no idea so many celebrities posted on Slashdot. First we get Wesley Crusher, now Rush Limbaugh!
Yeah, kinda peaked at Speaker for the Dead, went downhill since. Cue XKFD comic but I'll let someone else whore for that karma.
Sorry, I just can't read this article without thinking about G'Kar and what he spies with his little eye.
Comics encompass as broad a world as other forms of fiction and literature, it's not just all superheroes and science fiction. As far as Hollywood adaptations are concerned, the problem isn't so much a lack of originality -- although there is some truth to that claim -- it's that producers are risk averse.
I'm not knocking comics, there's much potential with the medium, even though the mainstream is all about superheroes in tights and impossible titties. I know there's potential there, even though most mainstream properties don't bother. But when Hollywood does an adaptation, it generally sucks.
You'd have to be a Jedi to use one of these things because any average Joe is likely to cut off his own foot. A light saber represents the awesome mutilating ability of power tools combined with a form factor that's even more prone to mischief. No weight in the blade, will cause major damage with fleeting contact. They're cool but you'll be losing fingers and limbs.
Just shows how there's not an original bone left in that town. The comics are like elaborate storyboards anyway so let's do one but be sure to cut out anything involving taste and quality so as not to alienate our prime market of drooling mouth-breathers. And in twenty years we'll remake 'em all! Can't you just taste that money? Fuck, yeah.
The sub-moronic demiurge. The theory? Dipshit design. My proof? Just look around and see how everything cries out to having been dipshittily designed. The hand of the sub-moronic demiurge is everywhere.
Am I going to be the only one who asks the obvious? Why should he be allowed to record the movie?
I saw the Bond movie in the theater today and this story makes me regret that ticket.
Be kind of awkward sitting in your manager's office explaining that you weren't surfing pr0n, just telling your phone to fuck off.
Old age.
You mean McCain will no longer have to be standing in front of a green screen for us to make him exciting?
Yeah, you can mark me flamebait all you want, but that shit was funny.
McCain Voguing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G9jA-FGGd8
You mean McCain will no longer have to be standing in front of a green screen for us to make him exciting?
It was hosted by a local IT shop looking to introduce new technologies to potential clients. There was a Microsoft guy there talking about Server 08. He used one of the talking points that really annoys me: "Yeah, I used to work in open source, played with Linux and stuff. But then I decided I actually wanted to make money." Huh? Ok, that argument might have held water years and years back but it doesn't even make sense these days. Yes, Vista was a failure but Microsoft is still here and even the most pessimistic of realistic assessments doesn't have them going away anytime soon. They may be the 600lb gorilla instead of the 800lb gorilla but that's still a whole lotta gorilla. But to dismiss open source so, well, dismissively?
If watching the tech industry has taught me anything it's that nobody's indomitable and it pays not to get cocky. And the bigger a company gets, the more entrenched the bureaucracy, the more potent the kool-aid, the less likely it becomes to pull out of a tailspin. A company becomes functionally incapable of not fucking up. There's no way to turn the company around apart from firing every manager and starting over but those managers are exactly the ones who will fire everyone else in the company until they are the last ones left in the bunker. We're seeing this play out with the American automotive manufacturers right now, the Japanese are proving it's possible to make cars and make money at the same time while the Americans are busy proving it can't be done. Hell, our whole country is going through this same kind of dysfunctional malaise right now.
My prediction is that Microsoft will, over the next fifteen years, shrink in preeminence until it is a 400lb gorilla, dominant in certain niches but more comparable in size and power to the other big name IT companies rather than the world-shaker it was at its prime.