Once it became clear which way the wind was blowing, the US didn't have a whole lot of choice but support "Arab Spring". What was the alternative? Encourage a Syrian-style slaughter?
But the idea that somehow the whole process was fomented by the USA is just the height of idiocy. It doesn't just require a tin-foil hat, it requires hundreds of vacuum tubes, both inside & outside the brain.
Right. I'm sure that I believe this "turkish journalist" can explain why the US spent many billions of dollars to prop up Hosni Mubarak so Egypt would maintain the peace with Israel (another staunch US ally), while SIMULTANEOUSLY backing a Muslin extremist group to overthrow that government. Do you really think the new government is going to be more friendly to the USA than the old? The idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is somehow sponsored by the USA is just bizarre. I'm sure US intelligence is trying to infiltrate them to find out what they are up to, but you (and your girlfriend) have no idea what you are talking about.
arab spring seems to be a shitty operation by u.s. to topple unfriendly governments to install their own islamist supporters and to oblige the countries to financial system.
Right. Which explains why one of the first governments that was overthrown in the "Arab Spring" was Egypt... a staunch US ally that the US had poured many billions of dollars into. Congratulations. You managed to set a new record for cluelessness.
In other news, there are no "sure things" in this world. If Vladimir Putin goes nuts and unleashes Russia's nukes, clean water and non-radioactive food is going to be a worth a whole lot more than dollars, bitcoins, or gold. In the meantime, comparing Bitcoin losing half it's value in 2 days to the chance that you won't get your federally insured deposit money back is absurd.
The objects were observed during two days, which were between 600 and 8000 km removed from earth, between the sun and the earth, as they were seen passing in front of the sun. The escape velocity in that range is 10.7 to 7.4 km/s. As we didn't have an impact and haven't developed a ring or an extra satellite they must have had at least this speed relative to earth. The article doesn't mention at what exact times the observations were made, but according to this calculator there were 13 hours of daylight on those dates at that location, so to have those observations made on two days the objects kept passing within this distance interval during at least 14.5 hours (11 hours night time plus the 3.5 hours observation time mentioned in the article). At 7.4 km/s the objects were spread out over at least 390,000 km and traveled that distance relative to the earth, and yet they all managed to pass within a distance of 600-8000 km from the earth surface, and in front of the sun seen from one observatory and not from others.
How likely is that?
For some bizarre reason the parent post was modded down, so I'm quoting it, as it's one of the most clearly thought out posts in this entire thread.
The other issue I have with the story is that if it's disintegrated comet, it had clearly had plenty of time to spread out, as it was "observed" over 2 days. Is it reasonable that it would have spread out to that length (many thousands of kilometers), but still would have remained narrow enough that parallax could be a factor? Wouldn't it at least a thousand kilometer wide? And if so, wouldn't it be visible against the sun over a much wider latitude range?
And that aesthetic perfectly fit writing an operating system in a (relatively) high level language instead of assembler. It's worth pointing out that UNIX was widely ported and became popular partially because it was written in C. Up to that point (and I'm sure someone will have a counter example to this, but I'll say it anyway) O/S's were written largely in assembler. Porting them was a pain. The concept of making the O/S portable is something that Ritchie should get credit for.
It's not so much the C language, it's the philosophy of C and UNIX: keep it simple, do it right, build good tools that can be assembled to do useful stuff quickly. Really it's the invention of "agile" decades before agile became a buzzword. Sure, we'd be using something to do computing, but to pretend that all Ritchie is responsible for the is the exact syntax of C is missing the point.
There simply isn't any comparison between "shipping across the ocean" and "shipping across space". When Columbus sailed the ocean blue, he didn't need a new, expensive technology. Ships could be built fairly rapidly and manned by the criminals off the docks. Airplanes were originally flown by a couple of (very intelligent and persistent) guys as an amateur hobby. It's clear from the work private companies are doing today that even suborbital flight s many orders of magnitude more difficult than travel by ship or plane.
To think of it another way, the first humans went into space over 50 years ago. From 1903 to 1953, we went from cloth and wood biplanes to routine travel in jet planes. Despite massive investment from governments and now private industry, we simply haven't made that kind of progress in space flight... not because the people trying to do it are bunch of idiots, but because it is really, REALLY hard, and VERY expensive. Even if we discovered an asteroid made of solid gold, it wouldn't be worth it to go to it, unless, of course, we were menaced by Cybermen.
The even bigger problem with humans searching for life is the risk of contamination. It's very difficult to sterilize robotic probes to other planets. Sterilizing human-occupied spacecraft and spacesuits is just plain impossible. When we detect life on another world (and I do expect that at some point we will detect it) I'd like to be certain that it really is alien life, and not something we brought along.
I'm actually getting more into streaming. The selection isn't perfect, but I manage to keep finding interesting stuff to watch. I do watch on my computer (24" monitor) with a 3mb connection, and on that setup, the picture quality is fine. I have fairly lengthy queues of both DVDs and streaming that I want to get to, but I also don't watch that often. It can take me a week or more to get around to watching a DVD.
The rate hike is not a big deal. I was doing the 2 DVD plan and I switched to the one DVD at a time + instant, which kept my rate the same. Having to manage two separate queues would have been way more of a problem than the price increase. Clearly Netflix had some sort of "group think" going on if they didn't realize that raising rates and simultaneously making the service worse wouldn't be a problem. But given this change, I think Netflix still provides good service... very fast turnaround on DVDs, excellent streaming. I have no problem paying $15 / month for that.
Superficially, C++ & C# are similar. In practice, C++ suffers from the history of being C with lots of stuff grafted on to it. For example, C++ "references". They aren't references, they are syntactic sugar on top of pointers. Just try getting a reference to an element of an STL vector and then add elements to the vector until the vector is reallocated. Your "reference" now refers to crap. Any other language that I know of that has references, they aren't invalidated by underlying memory operations.
That's just one example. I use C++ day in and day out, and combined with STL it certainly is powerful, but it is WAY trickier and easier to have random aborts in than any managed language (Java, C#, VB.Net, etc).
Well, let's try thinking a little. More Americans died on in the Sept 11th attacks than died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. And certainly Japan wasn't an "existential" threat to the United States, they just wanted a free hand in Pacific, pretty much the same way Al Qaeda wants a free hand in the Middle East. So I guess we should have just ignored the Japanese attack, and the Japanese would have loved us.
And by the way, Al Qaeda seems to be pretty cozy with elements of Pakistan's military, a country which happens to have nuclear weapons. Losing an American city might not be an "existential threat" but it's not something you can ignore, either.
so by your argument its ok to launch a hellfire into the middle of times square to kill an SUV carrying a member of al quaeda ?
Of course it is. By your argument, it would not be ok to send in the army if al-Qaeda had 100,000 members marching through Times Square beheading all the immodestly dressed women and killing any Jews in sight. Be it 1 soldier or 100,000, they are an enemy power in a time of war and military force is acceptable. There are better ways of handling one single enemy soldier, but that does not speak to the unquestionable legality of using military force against the force of a foreign power operating on your own territory.
I disagree with the killing of a top Al Qaeda figure in a neutral 3rd country with no due process, yes.
al-Qaeda's presence rescinds Yemen's claim to neutrality. Read the Hague Conventions. Neutral countries are required to keep combatant forces and recruiters off their territory. The more complex reality is that al-Qaeda has invaded and conquered a chunk of Yemen, making it al-Qaeda territory that Yemen has a competing claim to.
As for due process, al-Qaeda declared war on the US in 1996.
Since this rather cogent argument was modded into oblivion and I don't have points to mod it up I'll just quote it.
So why aren't unpaid volunteers who do beta testing "employees" covered by FLSA? They are clearly doing work for the company, work that would otherwise need to be done by paid company employees. They may not be generating content, but that doesn't matter at all, an employee doesn't have to generate content to be doing work.
I don't see anyone complaining that software companies don't pay the beta testers, in fact "being in the beta" is considered a privilege. Why isn't it a similar privilege to help get your favorite software translated into your own language?
Slashdot Mirror
See the parent I was replying to.
I wonder what percentage of people are honest?
Once it became clear which way the wind was blowing, the US didn't have a whole lot of choice but support "Arab Spring". What was the alternative? Encourage a Syrian-style slaughter?
But the idea that somehow the whole process was fomented by the USA is just the height of idiocy. It doesn't just require a tin-foil hat, it requires hundreds of vacuum tubes, both inside & outside the brain.
Tell that to Mubarak, he might have a different opinion.
Right. I'm sure that I believe this "turkish journalist" can explain why the US spent many billions of dollars to prop up Hosni Mubarak so Egypt would maintain the peace with Israel (another staunch US ally), while SIMULTANEOUSLY backing a Muslin extremist group to overthrow that government. Do you really think the new government is going to be more friendly to the USA than the old? The idea that the Muslim Brotherhood is somehow sponsored by the USA is just bizarre. I'm sure US intelligence is trying to infiltrate them to find out what they are up to, but you (and your girlfriend) have no idea what you are talking about.
arab spring seems to be a shitty operation by u.s. to topple unfriendly governments to install their own islamist supporters and to oblige the countries to financial system.
Right. Which explains why one of the first governments that was overthrown in the "Arab Spring" was Egypt... a staunch US ally that the US had poured many billions of dollars into. Congratulations. You managed to set a new record for cluelessness.
There's more wacko conspiracy theory threads in these comments than in all three Deus Ex games put together.
It took a while but I finally spotted the fallacy in the assumption that all non-zero probabilities are equal.
In other news, there are no "sure things" in this world. If Vladimir Putin goes nuts and unleashes Russia's nukes, clean water and non-radioactive food is going to be a worth a whole lot more than dollars, bitcoins, or gold. In the meantime, comparing Bitcoin losing half it's value in 2 days to the chance that you won't get your federally insured deposit money back is absurd.
The objects were observed during two days, which were between 600 and 8000 km removed from earth, between the sun and the earth, as they were seen passing in front of the sun. The escape velocity in that range is 10.7 to 7.4 km/s. As we didn't have an impact and haven't developed a ring or an extra satellite they must have had at least this speed relative to earth. The article doesn't mention at what exact times the observations were made, but according to this calculator there were 13 hours of daylight on those dates at that location, so to have those observations made on two days the objects kept passing within this distance interval during at least 14.5 hours (11 hours night time plus the 3.5 hours observation time mentioned in the article). At 7.4 km/s the objects were spread out over at least 390,000 km and traveled that distance relative to the earth, and yet they all managed to pass within a distance of 600-8000 km from the earth surface, and in front of the sun seen from one observatory and not from others.
How likely is that?
For some bizarre reason the parent post was modded down, so I'm quoting it, as it's one of the most clearly thought out posts in this entire thread.
The other issue I have with the story is that if it's disintegrated comet, it had clearly had plenty of time to spread out, as it was "observed" over 2 days. Is it reasonable that it would have spread out to that length (many thousands of kilometers), but still would have remained narrow enough that parallax could be a factor? Wouldn't it at least a thousand kilometer wide? And if so, wouldn't it be visible against the sun over a much wider latitude range?
Well, as long as they have a clear cut action program, what could go wrong?
As I said...
And that aesthetic perfectly fit writing an operating system in a (relatively) high level language instead of assembler. It's worth pointing out that UNIX was widely ported and became popular partially because it was written in C. Up to that point (and I'm sure someone will have a counter example to this, but I'll say it anyway) O/S's were written largely in assembler. Porting them was a pain. The concept of making the O/S portable is something that Ritchie should get credit for.
It's not so much the C language, it's the philosophy of C and UNIX: keep it simple, do it right, build good tools that can be assembled to do useful stuff quickly. Really it's the invention of "agile" decades before agile became a buzzword. Sure, we'd be using something to do computing, but to pretend that all Ritchie is responsible for the is the exact syntax of C is missing the point.
There simply isn't any comparison between "shipping across the ocean" and "shipping across space". When Columbus sailed the ocean blue, he didn't need a new, expensive technology. Ships could be built fairly rapidly and manned by the criminals off the docks. Airplanes were originally flown by a couple of (very intelligent and persistent) guys as an amateur hobby. It's clear from the work private companies are doing today that even suborbital flight s many orders of magnitude more difficult than travel by ship or plane.
To think of it another way, the first humans went into space over 50 years ago. From 1903 to 1953, we went from cloth and wood biplanes to routine travel in jet planes. Despite massive investment from governments and now private industry, we simply haven't made that kind of progress in space flight... not because the people trying to do it are bunch of idiots, but because it is really, REALLY hard, and VERY expensive. Even if we discovered an asteroid made of solid gold, it wouldn't be worth it to go to it, unless, of course, we were menaced by Cybermen.
The even bigger problem with humans searching for life is the risk of contamination. It's very difficult to sterilize robotic probes to other planets. Sterilizing human-occupied spacecraft and spacesuits is just plain impossible. When we detect life on another world (and I do expect that at some point we will detect it) I'd like to be certain that it really is alien life, and not something we brought along.
I'm actually getting more into streaming. The selection isn't perfect, but I manage to keep finding interesting stuff to watch. I do watch on my computer (24" monitor) with a 3mb connection, and on that setup, the picture quality is fine. I have fairly lengthy queues of both DVDs and streaming that I want to get to, but I also don't watch that often. It can take me a week or more to get around to watching a DVD.
The rate hike is not a big deal. I was doing the 2 DVD plan and I switched to the one DVD at a time + instant, which kept my rate the same. Having to manage two separate queues would have been way more of a problem than the price increase. Clearly Netflix had some sort of "group think" going on if they didn't realize that raising rates and simultaneously making the service worse wouldn't be a problem. But given this change, I think Netflix still provides good service... very fast turnaround on DVDs, excellent streaming. I have no problem paying $15 / month for that.
Superficially, C++ & C# are similar. In practice, C++ suffers from the history of being C with lots of stuff grafted on to it. For example, C++ "references". They aren't references, they are syntactic sugar on top of pointers. Just try getting a reference to an element of an STL vector and then add elements to the vector until the vector is reallocated. Your "reference" now refers to crap. Any other language that I know of that has references, they aren't invalidated by underlying memory operations.
That's just one example. I use C++ day in and day out, and combined with STL it certainly is powerful, but it is WAY trickier and easier to have random aborts in than any managed language (Java, C#, VB.Net, etc).
Well, let's try thinking a little. More Americans died on in the Sept 11th attacks than died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. And certainly Japan wasn't an "existential" threat to the United States, they just wanted a free hand in Pacific, pretty much the same way Al Qaeda wants a free hand in the Middle East. So I guess we should have just ignored the Japanese attack, and the Japanese would have loved us.
And by the way, Al Qaeda seems to be pretty cozy with elements of Pakistan's military, a country which happens to have nuclear weapons. Losing an American city might not be an "existential threat" but it's not something you can ignore, either.
What part of "a country can't claim to be neutral when it's harboring a belligerent" is fantasy hypothetical?
so by your argument its ok to launch a hellfire into the middle of times square to kill an SUV carrying a member of al quaeda ?
Of course it is. By your argument, it would not be ok to send in the army if al-Qaeda had 100,000 members marching through Times Square beheading all the immodestly dressed women and killing any Jews in sight. Be it 1 soldier or 100,000, they are an enemy power in a time of war and military force is acceptable. There are better ways of handling one single enemy soldier, but that does not speak to the unquestionable legality of using military force against the force of a foreign power operating on your own territory.
I disagree with the killing of a top Al Qaeda figure in a neutral 3rd country with no due process, yes.
al-Qaeda's presence rescinds Yemen's claim to neutrality. Read the Hague Conventions. Neutral countries are required to keep combatant forces and recruiters off their territory. The more complex reality is that al-Qaeda has invaded and conquered a chunk of Yemen, making it al-Qaeda territory that Yemen has a competing claim to.
As for due process, al-Qaeda declared war on the US in 1996.
Since this rather cogent argument was modded into oblivion and I don't have points to mod it up I'll just quote it.
As you say, "in time of War or public danger"... any questions?
So why aren't unpaid volunteers who do beta testing "employees" covered by FLSA? They are clearly doing work for the company, work that would otherwise need to be done by paid company employees. They may not be generating content, but that doesn't matter at all, an employee doesn't have to generate content to be doing work.
I don't see anyone complaining that software companies don't pay the beta testers, in fact "being in the beta" is considered a privilege. Why isn't it a similar privilege to help get your favorite software translated into your own language?