Also, I think you seem to have trouble differentiating between a lie and operating on false assumptions.
That's very much true. There is a problem though when you get your false assumptions by ignoring evidence that goes against your predrawn conclusions, and consider unreliable evidence most important because it agrees with them. Most of the whitehouse's intelligence on iraq was taken from chalabi, and the iraqi defectors he brought in to tell them what they wanted to hear. The CIA at that point had documented chalabi as a fraud, with clear evidence of a long campaign of lying and evidence of him cooperating with iran, but the bush administration ignored this and instead chose to believe someone known to be a fraud. At the same time they dismissed what the weapons inspectors were saying as bogus. Ignorance of the law is not a defense in a criminal court, and I think being ignorant of the facts on purpose should not be a defense in the court of public opinion.
But, hey, you want a clear lie from bush, here is one.
And that's just where it starts, do a little googling on "bush lies", and you'll turn up tons of lies he has personally told on a wide range of subjects.
Ofcourse, it is hard to catch him personally in a lie, because he always gets someone in his administration to do the lying for him. They call it plausible deniability, and for me it doesn't fly. He can't not be aware of the liars on his administration. That he not only tolerates them, but supports them, proves he approves of the lies.
WHY would Bush lie about WMD's?
I don't think he knowingly lied about that pre-invasion. I think he chose to believe the fabricated evidence that pointed to iraqi wmd's. Still, that just makes him incompetent instead of a liar. That's the problem, you can't look at reality and not go "either bush is incompetent, or he's a liar."
is design not a "useful art?" the positive response to a recent story would suggest otherwise. should i be allowed to make a complete rip-off of the iPod's design, just because "hey, buttons and dials have been around forever... prior art!" screw that- design is a lot of work, whether it's industrial design, typographic design, or interior design.
The argument is not whether design is a useful art, but whether the useful art progresses from being patentable. Are you arguing companies would stop designing their products if they couldn't patent the designs? The free market requires that you be at least as good as your competitors, and if possible better. It is all the incentive needed for innovation, and I see no evidence that the patent system somehow improves on that.
And yes, you could make that argument about all patents. Which is my point entirely. If you allow monopolies on one thing, whatever argument you made for that thing can be extended to other things, and so patent systems inevitably have patent creep until they cover everything. We've seen this happen in every patent system on the planet. How does that promote progress?
In sum, who needs another me-too piece of proprietary software?
rms, is that you?;)
Be honest here, do you honestly believe that existing open source software is always "acceptable" for any kind of job? There is a place for proprietary software in the world, and if there's a place within the desktop market for planmaker, we'll find out. Let the market decide, that's what I say.
The story submitter, martin-k, is also a moderator in the forums of the planmaker site, likely meaning he works for them. Still, I don't mind him pimping his stuff, and I don't mind slashdot enabling his pimping, because we can always use new entries in the desktop software market, even (and especially) if they are commercial.
I would take everything said in the story with a grain of salt though. And like the review said, planmaker has no macro support, so it's not perfectly compatible with excel.
it'll rise (at first) and probably go into an elliptical orbit.
What would make it stop rising? It's already going faster than escape velocity for the altitude, and there's nothing to slow it down. It seems to me it would just keep going.
These are the kind of problems that a bunch of money can solve. Instead of spending billions on a missile defense system that has never worked, maybe we should do something usefull.
In all fairness, the space elevator has never worked either.
I don't know if the star wars program is any more unrealistic than the space elevator. Hitting a moving target that fast is hard, but not impossible. On the other hand, if you're comparing launching a system that upsets the worldwide nuclear balance and doesn't have any practical uses other than global thermonuclear warfare (better known as the apocalypse), and launching a system that unlocks space for all of humanity, it seems to me the choice should be obvious.
there are even more if you ditch the "flat ribbon held with rollers" concept and go to a "mesh" design, which can be climbed with teeth from one side only and has better resiliancy
How would you do a "mesh" design that supports travel at 100kph, which is what the elevator should at least be able to do? I just don't see how you can keep the teeth from tearing themselves or the cable apart at those speeds.
Also, how are you so sure the flat ribbon isn't the strongest design for nanotubes? From what I've seen the ribbon is a latticework of bonded nanotubes. Punching holes in that would seem to reduce ribbon strength in my mind.
Currently they do one shuttle launch every 3 months, imagine being able to send up that every 3 to 4 days, just on a single elevator (and once you have one, more are really cheap to build). How is that not enough?
On the other hand, there is a good reason from the corporate pov to have a policy regarding what programming languages / scripting environments you can use. That way hiring a replacement becomes easier if you go rogue on them. Still, not allowing perl is pretty dumb, the hiring argument totally doesn't fly for that.
That's not my experience at all. I just look at my own 16yo sister. She has no problem using my linux desktop, using firefox and kopete, but on a windows system, instead of clicking the quicklaunch icon for firefox, which she knows very well, she digs deep into the start menu to look for IE (and if it's not there she'll complain and ask me to start it for her). When I ask her why on a windows system she feels a need to use IE over firefox, she just raises her shoulders in a helpless shoulder and mutters something about "feels better".
And that's not the only person I know like that. IE for a lot of people is an addiction. It hurts them, but they use it because they know it.
Very very few. I've got firefox installed on my family computer. Despite them getting infected with adware and spyware through IE, none of them want to use firefox. I've asked them many times, and even gone to the point of deleting IE, but their resillence to use anything else forced me to put it back on (amongst other reasons).
If you're cleaning up someone's system for free, and they use IE, have no good reason to stick with IE other than habit, then I think you're perfectly justified to say "if you want me to keep maintaining your computer, you've got to run firefox"
Imagine if someone maintained your garden for you, for free, and every time he was finished, you'd go out in the garden wearing spiked shoes and walk across the flowerbeds. That's the exact same thing. There's no good reason to do it, and it's pretty much a slap in the face of the people maintaining it for you.
Ofcourse, if you're getting paid to do it, by all means, make sure they don't switch from IE. At the very least it ensures you a steady income.
Does anybody else out there associate the word "fuel" with highly combustible? This whole idea of putting methanol inside my laptop and then firing the whole thing up makes me a little uncomfortable.
I know exactly what you mean. Each time I refill my zippo with fuel I pray that it won't end up in half a city block burnt to the ground. And don't get me started on the dangers of refilling your car. True deathtrap, that. How people think combining explosive engines and large volumes of highly flammable liquid is an acceptable idea is beyond me.
One problem: the ten base system of our numerical system has no real place in the natural world....plus you really can only divide 10 by 2 and 5 but with a 12 base system you can divide by 2 3 4 and 6 plus our angle system 360 degrees is 12 base. The only reason we use a ten base numerical system is we have 10 fingers...
It's about multiplying and dividing. You can express meters in kilometers simply by moving the decimal point a few spaces, you can't do the same with feet and miles. Since the system is entirely base 10, you know that a square decimeter is 10 x 10 = 100 square centimeters, and for a cubic decimeter, just move up the decimal point one more place so it becomes 1000 cubic centimeters, better known as 1 liter (because one cubic centimeter = 1 milliliter = 0.001 liter). Doing that kind of math in the imperial system is a lot more difficult, since you actually have to calculate things, instead of just being able to juggle with the decimal point to get things done more quickly.
Besides, every other part of human life uses either the base 10 or base 2 system, the only base 12 system in popular use is the imperial measurement system, making you remember a way of calculation that you can't apply to anything else.
Additionally, degrees are a major pain to work in, since any kind of higher order trigonometry is a LOT more counterintuitive in degrees than in radians. Admittedly radians are not part of the metric system.
Finally, nature doesn't seem to have a natural base (google doesn't immediately turn up anything useful anyway). It does have a natural ratio, known as the golden ratio (of 1.618 to 1), which defines the optimum relative ratio of different parts of a living entity (because of the geometric properties of that ratio, which makes the most efficient use of resources). In fact, we define beauty in humans not because measurements are all fitting to some kind of base system, but because they all match the golden ratio. See this site for more detail.
Do you have any sources for this? The way I understood it the timing on the shared channels was done in such a way that interference between gps and galileo was negligable.
Yes, the gps signal can be jammed locally, also, gps can be disabled or made less accurate for specific geographical regions.
Also, as far as missiles are concerned, that's a phantom threat. Terrorists are not going to build or buy missiles to fire at the us, it is just not an efficient way of going about things. Why spend millions of dollars of hardware to deliver a bomb from the other side of the planet, when you can just as well send one guy with a backpack to do the exact same thing? The palestinians don't need missiles to do attacks on the israeli's, and israel has MUCH tighter security than the us. So, no, jamming gps is not relevant to the war on terror.
Galileo used frequencies which were interleaved with the US military use of gps, meaning that the US couldn't jam galileo without jamming gps for their military at the same time. The US was adamant that this was unacceptable, that they wouldn't be able to disable galileo whenever they wanted, so the EU backed down, and promised to use frequencies which are more easily jammed.
Seems pretty bad. But the good thing is that at least in this case, scumball like that gun crazy idiot got humiliated, not some normal sane joe blow.:-)
And when they come for you, how will be left to defend you? Just because you disagree with someone doesn't make it right that that person is treated in a way you wouldn't want to be.
Um, all the series had women. Voyager was the only one with a woman in charge, maybe that has something to do with it?
That's the entire point. Star trek has always been male geek jerkoff fantasy. The women were submissive, dressed in scant outfits, and didn't really matter (and when they went against the men, they were either ignored, overruled or proven wrong), which definitely was the way I liked my women when I was 16 years old.
DS9 made a first attempt at making women count as more than playtoys, but didn't really succeed all that well since all the positions of power were still men, and the strongest, most mentally-balanced, female character, dax, actually had the mind of a man. Then voyager came around and had two strong female characters who were in positions of power, could not be overruled by men (being cut off from the male admiralty), and rarely dressed to show off their body. That made it more adult, but at the same time, less suitable jerk-off material. They tried to remedy it with adding insecure, voluptuous and powerless seven of nine, but the damage was already done. Even making seven fall in love with the most powerful man on the ship couldn't fix the image voyager gathered in the first season.
At least the original series was shameless about its deferential treatment of women, to the point where it became a running gag, which made it a lot less harmful. But TNG was a lot more sneaky about the misogynistic undertones, and it really started bothering me when I grew up and realised women were individual human beings who actually had thoughts of their own.
I know, I know, it's just fiction, but it influences the way people perceive the world anyway, so it does matter.
Acknowledging that a thing should not be done at all, and then stepping back from that and considering how to minimize the negative imapct when it is inevitably done, can be a difficult feat of mental gynmastics, but in the coming centuries I think it it something peopole of conscience are absolutely going to have to do - in parallel with efforts to stop the more monstrous excesses from being perpetrated at all.
Use of soft drugs is an excellent current real life example to see the effectiveness of strategies. It's interesting how different countries have responded to drugs. It does seem like going after every instance of use is ineffective. Like you said, people will use it. Better to legalize lightweight, relatively harmless, use, and then to punish those who do real damage with it.
Half a decade ago I bought a pci hauppauge wintv bt878-based card, and I'm still using it to this day. The windows apps that came with it sucked, and the upgrades to them sucked even worse, with UI's that seemed to be designed to be illogical on purpose, and channel switching that took more than a second. But in a linux machine, with tvtime (which uses dscaler in its backend), it's an awesome card. Super-smooth image, near-instantaneous channel switching, teletext (using alevt) and lirc-supported ir remote. Everyone who sees tvtime playing full screen for the first time comments on the great picture quality. My impression is that if you're going to buy a tv-card, better make sure it has a bt848/878 chipset.
- no licensing costs (fixed costs like this investment you can make up for in volume, but per product licensing costs are a constant drag on profit) - no need to wait for a port from the browser maker, you can do it yourself, or have the user community do it for you (very few phones have opera ports currently) - tied into that, user community assistance in general browser development - the pda opera is not a full browser, minimo is (by full I mean complete css, dom and js support) - open source (though from a corporate pov this is a tiny benefit) - better/easier customization than a proprietary product could hope to deliver - minimo picks up improvements to the mozilla trunk automatically, opera's ports need actual porting effort for updated features (afaik) - and in the future: possibility of running xul apps remotely on the phone, making developing/offering/selling new features for old phones a doable proposition
Ofcourse, maybe nokia just wants competition in the pda browser market, and opera's steadily climbing marketshare worries them.
Either way, al Quaeda doesn't want us in Saudi Arabia (never mind that we are there with the permission of the Saudi government, and that we would have to leave whenever they tell us to).
1) Saudi-arabia is a dictatorship. Not even a very benevolent one. Torture and random assassination of political enemies is commonplace there. 2) A LOT of saudis hate the american presence there. Putting soldiers on someone else's holy land is not a smart move politically. 3) You've just admitted al qaeda is blowback. Shouldn't that make you more critical of current US policies in Iraq and the middle east in general, given that they are creating a fresh generation of terrorists hellbent on attacking america?
Check your facts, friend. bin Laden has been linked directly with the bombing of the US embassies in the African continent (Kenya and Tanzania) in 1998, and there may be connections with the bombing of the USS Cole in 2001.
I've got news for you: there is no such thing as pure evil. Every terrorist group has their own agenda. Sometimes those agenda's coincide, sometimes they don't. In the case of Iraq, it has been demonstrated that Bin Laden tried to get Saddam on board, and Saddam just never got back to him. After all, what could Bin Laden offer Saddam? It's not like Saddam ever showed any intention of wanting to kill americans just because they're americans. If you're curious about Bin Laden's agenda, read this. Bin Laden goes into quite some detail (a little too much even), explaining his reasons for hating america, and explaining what his political aims with al qaeda are (the answer to question 2). So, no, before Gulf War II there was no credible indication of cooperation between Saddam and Bin Laden. If there was, they would have found it already.
I have a good friend of mine that re-enlisted in the National Guard this past January, knowing full-well that he might get called to go. He's been in "an undisclosed location" (aka Baghdad) for about a month now. He believes he's there to help the Iraqi people, and I think he is, too.
Nobody here is claiming the people who enlist here go over there with the intention of doing evil. The reality though is that Iraq is a mess, and the US presence on the ground is really not helping matters. I don't blame the soldiers and contractors in Iraq, they're only doing their job. I blame the bush administration for lack of planning and lack of insight into Iraq. They screwed it up, they should pay the price, not the people on the ground giving their lives trying to help people.
To see the way that these al Quaeda zealots work against people who are trying to help others is completely disgusting. They have no respect for human life whatsoever, and to perform their tricks in the name of their god is (i think) an insult to Muslims the world over.
Like the way Bush uses God to excuse his policies is an insult to christians the world over?
By dehumanizing al qaeda you make it ok to treat whoever you believe to be a part of it as non-human or sub-human. We've seen the pictures of what that kind of attitude leads to. If you want the moral high ground, you've got to stick to the facts, and not let your emotions and hate get in the way.
That's a pretty impressive show of completely ignoring the facts in order to make your point. Neato.
Look, numbers don't lie. Plain facts don't lie. Last December, the story broke that the homicide rate in Baghdad had fallen to below the largest American cities. If you took the military casualties out of the equation, the Baghdad murder rate was lower than any American city.
So, your point is then that Baghdad natives are safer than NYC natives? How does that relate at all to this discussion?
The parent was merely pointing out that you can't look at the total murder rate in baghdad if you want to know how likely you are to die if you went over there as a contractor. That would be lying with statistics.
Mozilla's crucial mistake early on was deciding it needed to be a platform. If this had just meant developing a cross-platform gui and tools, or just developing a whole application suite, it might not have been a problem. But they decided to do both. It cost them, and it continues to cost them.
That mozilla IS a platform is the very reason that development on firefox and thunderbird went this fast. Firefox and thunderbird share all of their backend code with the full suite. Only the actual UI is not shared. That kind of freedom allows quickly creating entirely new applications on top of the mozilla framework. It also means that development on the backend benefits all mozilla project apps.
I'd like you to show quotes from an actual mozilla developer (and not one who quit before mozilla really got going, like jwz) who agrees with your point of view. Creating the platform is what saved the mozilla project.
Besides, the only way to compete effectively with microsoft is to offer an alternative vision to developers. The platform is key in that. Mozilla, without becoming a platform, would be like opera: forever irrelevant.
But continuing to devote resources to Seamonkey is just a bad idea. Not only is it a distraction from making the small, focused apps better; but keeping around Mozilla as an Emacs-style do-everything suite does IMHO damage to the brand name.
The seamonkey suite is not a distraction, because like I explained, most of the code is shared among all the mozilla projects. The only thing the suite has for itself is the UI, and that is only getting maintenance development. It's really not true that firefox and thunderbird compete for developer resources with the app suite.
Now, I will agree that it does some damage to the brand to have so many products. But on the other hand, the suite still has a lot of users who find things of use in there they don't find in the separate apps. Cutting them off would not be nice, and would make corporate users less likely to ever use a mozilla product again.
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Also, I think you seem to have trouble differentiating between a lie and operating on false assumptions.
That's very much true. There is a problem though when you get your false assumptions by ignoring evidence that goes against your predrawn conclusions, and consider unreliable evidence most important because it agrees with them. Most of the whitehouse's intelligence on iraq was taken from chalabi, and the iraqi defectors he brought in to tell them what they wanted to hear. The CIA at that point had documented chalabi as a fraud, with clear evidence of a long campaign of lying and evidence of him cooperating with iran, but the bush administration ignored this and instead chose to believe someone known to be a fraud. At the same time they dismissed what the weapons inspectors were saying as bogus. Ignorance of the law is not a defense in a criminal court, and I think being ignorant of the facts on purpose should not be a defense in the court of public opinion.
But, hey, you want a clear lie from bush, here is one.
And that's just where it starts, do a little googling on "bush lies", and you'll turn up tons of lies he has personally told on a wide range of subjects.
Ofcourse, it is hard to catch him personally in a lie, because he always gets someone in his administration to do the lying for him. They call it plausible deniability, and for me it doesn't fly. He can't not be aware of the liars on his administration. That he not only tolerates them, but supports them, proves he approves of the lies.
WHY would Bush lie about WMD's?
I don't think he knowingly lied about that pre-invasion. I think he chose to believe the fabricated evidence that pointed to iraqi wmd's. Still, that just makes him incompetent instead of a liar. That's the problem, you can't look at reality and not go "either bush is incompetent, or he's a liar."
is design not a "useful art?" the positive response to a recent story would suggest otherwise. should i be allowed to make a complete rip-off of the iPod's design, just because "hey, buttons and dials have been around forever... prior art!" screw that- design is a lot of work, whether it's industrial design, typographic design, or interior design.
The argument is not whether design is a useful art, but whether the useful art progresses from being patentable. Are you arguing companies would stop designing their products if they couldn't patent the designs? The free market requires that you be at least as good as your competitors, and if possible better. It is all the incentive needed for innovation, and I see no evidence that the patent system somehow improves on that.
And yes, you could make that argument about all patents. Which is my point entirely. If you allow monopolies on one thing, whatever argument you made for that thing can be extended to other things, and so patent systems inevitably have patent creep until they cover everything. We've seen this happen in every patent system on the planet. How does that promote progress?
They're even moving in to Canada. Lately buying the New Yorker Theatre in Toronto.
And clearchannel is buying up advertisement space (as in the actual billboards) here in Belgium. I wonder what their plan is with that.
In sum, who needs another me-too piece of proprietary software?
;)
rms, is that you?
Be honest here, do you honestly believe that existing open source software is always "acceptable" for any kind of job? There is a place for proprietary software in the world, and if there's a place within the desktop market for planmaker, we'll find out. Let the market decide, that's what I say.
This is an advertisement masked as an article.
The story submitter, martin-k, is also a moderator in the forums of the planmaker site, likely meaning he works for them. Still, I don't mind him pimping his stuff, and I don't mind slashdot enabling his pimping, because we can always use new entries in the desktop software market, even (and especially) if they are commercial.
I would take everything said in the story with a grain of salt though. And like the review said, planmaker has no macro support, so it's not perfectly compatible with excel.
it'll rise (at first) and probably go into an elliptical orbit.
What would make it stop rising? It's already going faster than escape velocity for the altitude, and there's nothing to slow it down. It seems to me it would just keep going.
These are the kind of problems that a bunch of money can solve. Instead of spending billions on a missile defense system that has never worked, maybe we should do something usefull.
;)
In all fairness, the space elevator has never worked either.
I don't know if the star wars program is any more unrealistic than the space elevator. Hitting a moving target that fast is hard, but not impossible. On the other hand, if you're comparing launching a system that upsets the worldwide nuclear balance and doesn't have any practical uses other than global thermonuclear warfare (better known as the apocalypse), and launching a system that unlocks space for all of humanity, it seems to me the choice should be obvious.
Go star wars!
there are even more if you ditch the "flat ribbon held with rollers" concept and go to a "mesh" design, which can be climbed with teeth from one side only and has better resiliancy
How would you do a "mesh" design that supports travel at 100kph, which is what the elevator should at least be able to do? I just don't see how you can keep the teeth from tearing themselves or the cable apart at those speeds.
Also, how are you so sure the flat ribbon isn't the strongest design for nanotubes? From what I've seen the ribbon is a latticework of bonded nanotubes. Punching holes in that would seem to reduce ribbon strength in my mind.
Currently they do one shuttle launch every 3 months, imagine being able to send up that every 3 to 4 days, just on a single elevator (and once you have one, more are really cheap to build). How is that not enough?
On the other hand, there is a good reason from the corporate pov to have a policy regarding what programming languages / scripting environments you can use. That way hiring a replacement becomes easier if you go rogue on them. Still, not allowing perl is pretty dumb, the hiring argument totally doesn't fly for that.
That's not my experience at all. I just look at my own 16yo sister. She has no problem using my linux desktop, using firefox and kopete, but on a windows system, instead of clicking the quicklaunch icon for firefox, which she knows very well, she digs deep into the start menu to look for IE (and if it's not there she'll complain and ask me to start it for her). When I ask her why on a windows system she feels a need to use IE over firefox, she just raises her shoulders in a helpless shoulder and mutters something about "feels better".
And that's not the only person I know like that. IE for a lot of people is an addiction. It hurts them, but they use it because they know it.
Very very few. I've got firefox installed on my family computer. Despite them getting infected with adware and spyware through IE, none of them want to use firefox. I've asked them many times, and even gone to the point of deleting IE, but their resillence to use anything else forced me to put it back on (amongst other reasons).
If you're cleaning up someone's system for free, and they use IE, have no good reason to stick with IE other than habit, then I think you're perfectly justified to say "if you want me to keep maintaining your computer, you've got to run firefox"
Imagine if someone maintained your garden for you, for free, and every time he was finished, you'd go out in the garden wearing spiked shoes and walk across the flowerbeds. That's the exact same thing. There's no good reason to do it, and it's pretty much a slap in the face of the people maintaining it for you.
Ofcourse, if you're getting paid to do it, by all means, make sure they don't switch from IE. At the very least it ensures you a steady income.
They do after all emit co2. I wonder if you can smell them?
As long as they don't emit dihydrogen monoxide, I won't worry about it too much.
Does anybody else out there associate the word "fuel" with highly combustible? This whole idea of putting methanol inside my laptop and then firing the whole thing up makes me a little uncomfortable.
I know exactly what you mean. Each time I refill my zippo with fuel I pray that it won't end up in half a city block burnt to the ground. And don't get me started on the dangers of refilling your car. True deathtrap, that. How people think combining explosive engines and large volumes of highly flammable liquid is an acceptable idea is beyond me.
One problem: the ten base system of our numerical system has no real place in the natural world....plus you really can only divide 10 by 2 and 5 but with a 12 base system you can divide by 2 3 4 and 6 plus our angle system 360 degrees is 12 base. The only reason we use a ten base numerical system is we have 10 fingers...
It's about multiplying and dividing. You can express meters in kilometers simply by moving the decimal point a few spaces, you can't do the same with feet and miles. Since the system is entirely base 10, you know that a square decimeter is 10 x 10 = 100 square centimeters, and for a cubic decimeter, just move up the decimal point one more place so it becomes 1000 cubic centimeters, better known as 1 liter (because one cubic centimeter = 1 milliliter = 0.001 liter). Doing that kind of math in the imperial system is a lot more difficult, since you actually have to calculate things, instead of just being able to juggle with the decimal point to get things done more quickly.
Besides, every other part of human life uses either the base 10 or base 2 system, the only base 12 system in popular use is the imperial measurement system, making you remember a way of calculation that you can't apply to anything else.
Additionally, degrees are a major pain to work in, since any kind of higher order trigonometry is a LOT more counterintuitive in degrees than in radians. Admittedly radians are not part of the metric system.
Finally, nature doesn't seem to have a natural base (google doesn't immediately turn up anything useful anyway). It does have a natural ratio, known as the golden ratio (of 1.618 to 1), which defines the optimum relative ratio of different parts of a living entity (because of the geometric properties of that ratio, which makes the most efficient use of resources). In fact, we define beauty in humans not because measurements are all fitting to some kind of base system, but because they all match the golden ratio. See this site for more detail.
Do you have any sources for this? The way I understood it the timing on the shared channels was done in such a way that interference between gps and galileo was negligable.
Yes, the gps signal can be jammed locally, also, gps can be disabled or made less accurate for specific geographical regions.
Also, as far as missiles are concerned, that's a phantom threat. Terrorists are not going to build or buy missiles to fire at the us, it is just not an efficient way of going about things. Why spend millions of dollars of hardware to deliver a bomb from the other side of the planet, when you can just as well send one guy with a backpack to do the exact same thing? The palestinians don't need missiles to do attacks on the israeli's, and israel has MUCH tighter security than the us. So, no, jamming gps is not relevant to the war on terror.
Galileo used frequencies which were interleaved with the US military use of gps, meaning that the US couldn't jam galileo without jamming gps for their military at the same time. The US was adamant that this was unacceptable, that they wouldn't be able to disable galileo whenever they wanted, so the EU backed down, and promised to use frequencies which are more easily jammed.
Seems pretty bad. But the good thing is that at least in this case, scumball like that gun crazy idiot got humiliated, not some normal sane joe blow. :-)
And when they come for you, how will be left to defend you? Just because you disagree with someone doesn't make it right that that person is treated in a way you wouldn't want to be.
Um, all the series had women. Voyager was the only one with a woman in charge, maybe that has something to do with it?
That's the entire point. Star trek has always been male geek jerkoff fantasy. The women were submissive, dressed in scant outfits, and didn't really matter (and when they went against the men, they were either ignored, overruled or proven wrong), which definitely was the way I liked my women when I was 16 years old.
DS9 made a first attempt at making women count as more than playtoys, but didn't really succeed all that well since all the positions of power were still men, and the strongest, most mentally-balanced, female character, dax, actually had the mind of a man. Then voyager came around and had two strong female characters who were in positions of power, could not be overruled by men (being cut off from the male admiralty), and rarely dressed to show off their body. That made it more adult, but at the same time, less suitable jerk-off material. They tried to remedy it with adding insecure, voluptuous and powerless seven of nine, but the damage was already done. Even making seven fall in love with the most powerful man on the ship couldn't fix the image voyager gathered in the first season.
At least the original series was shameless about its deferential treatment of women, to the point where it became a running gag, which made it a lot less harmful. But TNG was a lot more sneaky about the misogynistic undertones, and it really started bothering me when I grew up and realised women were individual human beings who actually had thoughts of their own.
I know, I know, it's just fiction, but it influences the way people perceive the world anyway, so it does matter.
Acknowledging that a thing should not be done at all, and then stepping back from that and considering how to minimize the negative imapct when it is inevitably done, can be a difficult feat of mental gynmastics, but in the coming centuries I think it it something peopole of conscience are absolutely going to have to do - in parallel with efforts to stop the more monstrous excesses from being perpetrated at all.
Use of soft drugs is an excellent current real life example to see the effectiveness of strategies. It's interesting how different countries have responded to drugs. It does seem like going after every instance of use is ineffective. Like you said, people will use it. Better to legalize lightweight, relatively harmless, use, and then to punish those who do real damage with it.
Half a decade ago I bought a pci hauppauge wintv bt878-based card, and I'm still using it to this day. The windows apps that came with it sucked, and the upgrades to them sucked even worse, with UI's that seemed to be designed to be illogical on purpose, and channel switching that took more than a second. But in a linux machine, with tvtime (which uses dscaler in its backend), it's an awesome card. Super-smooth image, near-instantaneous channel switching, teletext (using alevt) and lirc-supported ir remote. Everyone who sees tvtime playing full screen for the first time comments on the great picture quality. My impression is that if you're going to buy a tv-card, better make sure it has a bt848/878 chipset.
This does make sense to me:
- no licensing costs (fixed costs like this investment you can make up for in volume, but per product licensing costs are a constant drag on profit)
- no need to wait for a port from the browser maker, you can do it yourself, or have the user community do it for you (very few phones have opera ports currently)
- tied into that, user community assistance in general browser development
- the pda opera is not a full browser, minimo is (by full I mean complete css, dom and js support)
- open source (though from a corporate pov this is a tiny benefit)
- better/easier customization than a proprietary product could hope to deliver
- minimo picks up improvements to the mozilla trunk automatically, opera's ports need actual porting effort for updated features (afaik)
- and in the future: possibility of running xul apps remotely on the phone, making developing/offering/selling new features for old phones a doable proposition
Ofcourse, maybe nokia just wants competition in the pda browser market, and opera's steadily climbing marketshare worries them.
Either way, al Quaeda doesn't want us in Saudi Arabia (never mind that we are there with the permission of the Saudi government, and that we would have to leave whenever they tell us to).
1) Saudi-arabia is a dictatorship. Not even a very benevolent one. Torture and random assassination of political enemies is commonplace there.
2) A LOT of saudis hate the american presence there. Putting soldiers on someone else's holy land is not a smart move politically.
3) You've just admitted al qaeda is blowback. Shouldn't that make you more critical of current US policies in Iraq and the middle east in general, given that they are creating a fresh generation of terrorists hellbent on attacking america?
Check your facts, friend. bin Laden has been linked directly with the bombing of the US embassies in the African continent (Kenya and Tanzania) in 1998, and there may be connections with the bombing of the USS Cole in 2001.
I've got news for you: there is no such thing as pure evil. Every terrorist group has their own agenda. Sometimes those agenda's coincide, sometimes they don't. In the case of Iraq, it has been demonstrated that Bin Laden tried to get Saddam on board, and Saddam just never got back to him. After all, what could Bin Laden offer Saddam? It's not like Saddam ever showed any intention of wanting to kill americans just because they're americans. If you're curious about Bin Laden's agenda, read this. Bin Laden goes into quite some detail (a little too much even), explaining his reasons for hating america, and explaining what his political aims with al qaeda are (the answer to question 2). So, no, before Gulf War II there was no credible indication of cooperation between Saddam and Bin Laden. If there was, they would have found it already.
I have a good friend of mine that re-enlisted in the National Guard this past January, knowing full-well that he might get called to go. He's been in "an undisclosed location" (aka Baghdad) for about a month now. He believes he's there to help the Iraqi people, and I think he is, too.
Nobody here is claiming the people who enlist here go over there with the intention of doing evil. The reality though is that Iraq is a mess, and the US presence on the ground is really not helping matters. I don't blame the soldiers and contractors in Iraq, they're only doing their job. I blame the bush administration for lack of planning and lack of insight into Iraq. They screwed it up, they should pay the price, not the people on the ground giving their lives trying to help people.
To see the way that these al Quaeda zealots work against people who are trying to help others is completely disgusting. They have no respect for human life whatsoever, and to perform their tricks in the name of their god is (i think) an insult to Muslims the world over.
Like the way Bush uses God to excuse his policies is an insult to christians the world over?
By dehumanizing al qaeda you make it ok to treat whoever you believe to be a part of it as non-human or sub-human. We've seen the pictures of what that kind of attitude leads to. If you want the moral high ground, you've got to stick to the facts, and not let your emotions and hate get in the way.
That's a pretty impressive show of completely ignoring the facts in order to make your point. Neato.
Look, numbers don't lie. Plain facts don't lie. Last December, the story broke that the homicide rate in Baghdad had fallen to below the largest American cities. If you took the military casualties out of the equation, the Baghdad murder rate was lower than any American city.
So, your point is then that Baghdad natives are safer than NYC natives? How does that relate at all to this discussion?
The parent was merely pointing out that you can't look at the total murder rate in baghdad if you want to know how likely you are to die if you went over there as a contractor. That would be lying with statistics.
Mozilla's crucial mistake early on was deciding it needed to be a platform. If this had just meant developing a cross-platform gui and tools, or just developing a whole application suite, it might not have been a problem. But they decided to do both. It cost them, and it continues to cost them.
That mozilla IS a platform is the very reason that development on firefox and thunderbird went this fast. Firefox and thunderbird share all of their backend code with the full suite. Only the actual UI is not shared. That kind of freedom allows quickly creating entirely new applications on top of the mozilla framework. It also means that development on the backend benefits all mozilla project apps.
I'd like you to show quotes from an actual mozilla developer (and not one who quit before mozilla really got going, like jwz) who agrees with your point of view. Creating the platform is what saved the mozilla project.
Besides, the only way to compete effectively with microsoft is to offer an alternative vision to developers. The platform is key in that. Mozilla, without becoming a platform, would be like opera: forever irrelevant.
But continuing to devote resources to Seamonkey is just a bad idea. Not only is it a distraction from making the small, focused apps better; but keeping around Mozilla as an Emacs-style do-everything suite does IMHO damage to the brand name.
The seamonkey suite is not a distraction, because like I explained, most of the code is shared among all the mozilla projects. The only thing the suite has for itself is the UI, and that is only getting maintenance development. It's really not true that firefox and thunderbird compete for developer resources with the app suite.
Now, I will agree that it does some damage to the brand to have so many products. But on the other hand, the suite still has a lot of users who find things of use in there they don't find in the separate apps. Cutting them off would not be nice, and would make corporate users less likely to ever use a mozilla product again.