"These are the same fuck-weasel types who question if it was legal to have the military assist in the search for the sniper. Don't know, maybe we should let him pop a cap in someone else while we debate."
Yes, let's throw away our laws and traditions whenever it's convenient. I questioned why the ACLU (of which I'm a member) would have a problem with the military stepping in to help with that investigation. Know what I did? I kept an open mind and read their position statement on the issue. After realizing that it is, in fact, illegal for the military to perform law enforcement and that there's a VERY good reason for this, I had to agree with them that the military had no place getting involved. Listen, we fight/invade/bomb countries who use their military for civilian law enforcement. Iran does it, the Taliban did it, the Israelies do it - the United States of America does NOT do this. There was no question about whether it was legal for the military to assist; it's flatly illegal. They were questioning the people who said, "oh, it's ok to do it just the once" because that's how every dictatorship/totalitarian regime/hellhole society gets going. Little by little you erode the rights of the citizenship and gain more and more control until no one can possibly challenge you. You know, we could have a crime-free society if we forced about 1/3 of all citizens to join the military and had inspections of every man, woman, and child along with all places public and private, and then simply killed anyone who did anything wrong. We'd eliminate drug abuse quite easily by just searching everyone and everything all the time, mandating daily drug testing for all citizens, and shooting anyone who disobeys also. Then we can put up cameras in every room of every building, as well as public places too. We'd eliminate crime within a year! The ends do NOT always justify the means. If you believe otherwise, how's this grab you: we could raise the average IQ in this country quite easily. Sounds great, right? How, you ask? By simply testing everyone's IQ and shooting everyone who tests below a certain level. Now, I don't agree with everything environmentalists say, not by a long shot, but I also think that just because something sounds great ( "hey, we can catch the sniper faster if we use the military!" ), doesn't mean we should jump right into it.
Think my examples are ridiculous? Tell that to the several million people who were murdered at the orders of a man who slowly rose to power in a country called Germany in the 30's and 40's. He started out small, "make the jews wear stars!", grew a little bolder, "make the jews live in ghettos!", and finally ended up killing millions. He didn't go from point A to point C in a day; he didn't do it in a year; he slowly made small changes over a period of more than 15 years which took a fairly normal (albeit poor) European society and transformed it into one of the most brutal and nightmarish places in the history of the world.
Please may God grant we never see that here in the States, or anywhere else ever again. We need to recognize immediately when someone's trying to take us from point A to point B, so we never get to B or (God forbid) C.
They won't ignore this one as there's not much to ignore. There's a lot of posts here on slashdot about how M$ has to do this and M$ has to do that, but when you read through, there's enough loopholes that three boyscouts and a high school drop-out could find a way around restrictions. For one thing, M$ is now in charge of its own compliance. Basically, she said "naughty naughty, don't let us catch you doing that again" and sent them on their way. I'm truly disappointed with her, as I was expecting something more along the lines of what we've seen before with the FISA court, where she came out publicly against the DoJ, FBI, Ashcroft, and a slew of others.
What happened, Colleen? Microsoft pay you off, or did Bush order you to do this? I can't imagine it was an M$ pay-off, so I'm guessing its the current administration. Would be nice to hear an explaination from her as to why on Earth this makes sense to her, and how she thinks this remedies past and present wrongdoing by M$, and how in the world this prevents them from doing it again in the future.
I have several friends who work for Autotote (as well as some who work for Amtote) and they're all laughing their asses off over this whole thing; especially the media coverage.
You're a bit confused I think. To describe something that people don't like, use the word "terrorist". The word "propaganda" is used to describe anything written or said which does not support your position. (not you, the previous poster, personally)
ex: "The terrorists terrorized the people who were terrorized by the terrorists. Everything the terrorists said to claim they weren't terrorists was just terrorist propaganda, because they are in fact terrorists." ( -- this was just an example, but it actually describes current US, Chinese, Russian, and Israeli foreign policy)
"Yes, but if they're going to be imprecise, they could at least fudge the numbers to where their multiplication works."
They were accurate, but imprecise, and one person complained. Now you're asking them to be inaccurate and imprecise, just to make the math look better. Do you work for a news agency or something?;)
" While the All-Red Route was an impressive achievement, the first transatlantic cable laid in the 1860's was a much more impressive and historically important achievement, given that it was the first time a transocean telegraph cable was attempted and it took several tries to successfully lay the cable between Ireland and Newfoundland."
Problems with the satellites? Sunspots? Or were they just adding redundancy? I don't understand...:(
" 100 years ago, you could call all over the British Empire. Today, you can't call next door because your phone company hosed your bill and you didn't pay them the $23,412 they think you owe."
I agree with you entirely, and invite you to check out my previous comment on the subject.
Especially relevant for telecoms:
19. Satisfaction is not guaranteed 55. Always exaggerate your estimates. 78. When the going gets tough, the tough change the Rules. 87. Learn the customer's weaknesses so you can better take advantage of him. 103. Fill a desparate need with your most expensive product, then mark it up 500% 111. Treat people in your debt like family--exploit them [ruthlessly]. 189. Let others keep their reputation. You keep their money. 266. When in doubt, lie.
Fine. Eliptical, sometimes eratic orbits, spacial anomalies, momentum, velocity, and gravitational pull from the outter planets (which do, in fact, affect many things).
You can simplify the equation and get high precision, but your accuracy will be horrible, and someone will complain about it. Space.com is taking the conservative approah here, and I don't blame them.
"Loki, I think you picked the wrong god to use for a nick. Judging by your excitement over the possible use of antimatter in weapons of mass destruction, perhaps Shiva would have been more appropriate."
Not at all true.;)
Loki would have loved to get his hands on something like this, if for no other reason than to scare the shit out of the other gods (explode a dozen simultaneously while the gods were asleep). Actually, getting more towards Ragnarok, he'd have gladly used these to blast his fellow gods into oblivion. I liked him more when he was a simple trickster.
You're looking at average distances between objects moving faster than you (or I) can imagine, being pushed/pulled by 4 different forces eminating from an unimaginable number of masses.
In other words, give them a break.
(For those wondering - and this is off the top of my head... Nuclear strong, Nuclear weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational)
Actually, the anal-retentive attention to detail and religious adherence to science-theory is one of the reasons so many people were turned off by the previous Star Trek series. Enterprise appears a bit looser on these topics. As a matter of point, many things invented for Star Trek were adapted for use in the real world. Case in point, remember the hypospray used in The Next Generation? Well, someone (I think it was the World Health Organization) took the concept (and a stage prop) and created a vaccination tool. Now, instead of doctors using needles and vaccinating a few hundred people in a 3rd world country, virtually anyone can easily and quickly be trained to use the device, and thousands can be vaccinated in a single day by a small team.
Star Trek is probably the closest thing to real that the Sci-Fi world has ever had even remote interest in.
That's funny, I was under the asumption that until I denounced my faith or was excummunicated, I was still a Catholic. I was, after all, Baptized and Confirmed in the Catholic Church. Just because I disagree with my church doesn't change what I know, nor does it change my beliefs. Another thing I was always taught was that if you can object to a teaching/belief/doctrine of the Catholic Church and be correct/go to heaven. Why? Because the Catholic Church is an institution created by men, and is therefore both imperfect and subject to mistakes, corruption, etc. (See: Middle Ages, church extortion - See Also: Present day, pedophile priests and bishop/cardinal/Vatican cover-ups)
"God is all powerful, and omniscient.. and the bible is supposed to be the word of God.. So, why does it need to be edited? Did God make mistakes when he wrote it? Or do the editors feel that they know more than God does? As a friend of mine used to say, "the bible is a great work - if you like fiction.""
Actually, the Bibles is supposed to be the word of God as interpreted by the human beings who wrote it. While writing the text, they were supposedly guided by the Holy Spirit so as to not completely fudge the thing, I suppose. This means that all the little mistakes that imperfect beings make found their way into the text making it sometimes ambiguous at best; outright incorrect at worst. The problem in this process is free will. Those doing the writing had the free will to eggagerate, draw conclusions when none were given, and skew the content to their own perspective. There are many other problems as well. Genesis, for example, tells not one creation story, but somewhere between 2 - 4 different and seemingly contradictory stories. This is why anyone who takes the Bible's word literally (gotta love the Bible quote-spewing folks) can't possibly understand the messages within.
"he was referring to the claim that the Vatican would hide the records of such past sins. That claim was provided entirely without evidence, unless we're to believe that "that's just the sort of thing that those Catholics would do." To the extent that the original poster was implying that, I am rightly offended."
I think the poster was referring to what the Catholic Church tends to do; and I have to agree. Nobody likes to admit mistakes, and the Catholic Church is no different; they try to bury that which does not make the Church look good. Unless you're a Catholic Cardinal, I don't think you should be offended at all. Personally, as a Catholic myself, I'm offended by the way my Church has acted in the past and in the present. The Vatican has been ordering NDA's for settlements for years in abuse cases (despite calls for reconciliation by a number of bishops), and now one of the things the Vatican is fighting is reporting of molestation accusations to local authorities. That offends me greatly, as it should you and every other good and decent human being on this Earth. The poster wasn't Catholic-slamming, (s)he was Catholic Church-slamming; something I do every chance I get. Why? I'm Catholic, and I was taught that the stuff my church is doing is wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
"These are the same fuck-weasel types who question if it was legal to have the military assist in the search for the sniper. Don't know, maybe we should let him pop a cap in someone else while we debate."
Yes, let's throw away our laws and traditions whenever it's convenient. I questioned why the ACLU (of which I'm a member) would have a problem with the military stepping in to help with that investigation. Know what I did? I kept an open mind and read their position statement on the issue. After realizing that it is, in fact, illegal for the military to perform law enforcement and that there's a VERY good reason for this, I had to agree with them that the military had no place getting involved. Listen, we fight/invade/bomb countries who use their military for civilian law enforcement. Iran does it, the Taliban did it, the Israelies do it - the United States of America does NOT do this. There was no question about whether it was legal for the military to assist; it's flatly illegal. They were questioning the people who said, "oh, it's ok to do it just the once" because that's how every dictatorship/totalitarian regime/hellhole society gets going. Little by little you erode the rights of the citizenship and gain more and more control until no one can possibly challenge you. You know, we could have a crime-free society if we forced about 1/3 of all citizens to join the military and had inspections of every man, woman, and child along with all places public and private, and then simply killed anyone who did anything wrong. We'd eliminate drug abuse quite easily by just searching everyone and everything all the time, mandating daily drug testing for all citizens, and shooting anyone who disobeys also. Then we can put up cameras in every room of every building, as well as public places too. We'd eliminate crime within a year! The ends do NOT always justify the means. If you believe otherwise, how's this grab you: we could raise the average IQ in this country quite easily. Sounds great, right? How, you ask? By simply testing everyone's IQ and shooting everyone who tests below a certain level. Now, I don't agree with everything environmentalists say, not by a long shot, but I also think that just because something sounds great ( "hey, we can catch the sniper faster if we use the military!" ), doesn't mean we should jump right into it.
Think my examples are ridiculous? Tell that to the several million people who were murdered at the orders of a man who slowly rose to power in a country called Germany in the 30's and 40's. He started out small, "make the jews wear stars!", grew a little bolder, "make the jews live in ghettos!", and finally ended up killing millions. He didn't go from point A to point C in a day; he didn't do it in a year; he slowly made small changes over a period of more than 15 years which took a fairly normal (albeit poor) European society and transformed it into one of the most brutal and nightmarish places in the history of the world.
Please may God grant we never see that here in the States, or anywhere else ever again. We need to recognize immediately when someone's trying to take us from point A to point B, so we never get to B or (God forbid) C.
They won't ignore this one as there's not much to ignore. There's a lot of posts here on slashdot about how M$ has to do this and M$ has to do that, but when you read through, there's enough loopholes that three boyscouts and a high school drop-out could find a way around restrictions. For one thing, M$ is now in charge of its own compliance. Basically, she said "naughty naughty, don't let us catch you doing that again" and sent them on their way. I'm truly disappointed with her, as I was expecting something more along the lines of what we've seen before with the FISA court, where she came out publicly against the DoJ, FBI, Ashcroft, and a slew of others.
What happened, Colleen? Microsoft pay you off, or did Bush order you to do this? I can't imagine it was an M$ pay-off, so I'm guessing its the current administration. Would be nice to hear an explaination from her as to why on Earth this makes sense to her, and how she thinks this remedies past and present wrongdoing by M$, and how in the world this prevents them from doing it again in the future.
"Click "I agree" below to accept the terms of this Final Decree.
[I Agree] [I Do Not Agree]"
Should have made the I agree part link to the goatse guy.
I have several friends who work for Autotote (as well as some who work for Amtote) and they're all laughing their asses off over this whole thing; especially the media coverage.
Very little use? Are you kidding? I could get 40 trillion frames/sec on Jedi Knight II with this thing...
"Are you sure?"
Pretty sure.
You're a bit confused I think. To describe something that people don't like, use the word "terrorist". The word "propaganda" is used to describe anything written or said which does not support your position. (not you, the previous poster, personally)
ex: "The terrorists terrorized the people who were terrorized by the terrorists. Everything the terrorists said to claim they weren't terrorists was just terrorist propaganda, because they are in fact terrorists." ( -- this was just an example, but it actually describes current US, Chinese, Russian, and Israeli foreign policy)
Windows 2000 (all versions) are covered until 2005.
"If you want to be anal-retentive, do it the right way. It's exactly 299,792,158 meters per second. :)"
:P
Hmm... Exactly? No decimal?
"Yes, but if they're going to be imprecise, they could at least fudge the numbers to where their multiplication works."
;)
They were accurate, but imprecise, and one person complained. Now you're asking them to be inaccurate and imprecise, just to make the math look better. Do you work for a news agency or something?
" While the All-Red Route was an impressive achievement, the first transatlantic cable laid in the 1860's was a much more impressive and historically important achievement, given that it was the first time a transocean telegraph cable was attempted and it took several tries to successfully lay the cable between Ireland and Newfoundland."
:(
Problems with the satellites? Sunspots? Or were they just adding redundancy? I don't understand...
"Amazing that it hasn't been hit by a backhoe in 100 years."
See a lot of backhoes in the ocean, do you?
" 100 years ago, you could call all over the British Empire. Today, you can't call next door because your phone company hosed your bill and you didn't pay them the $23,412 they think you owe."
I agree with you entirely, and invite you to check out my previous comment on the subject.
Especially relevant for telecoms:
19. Satisfaction is not guaranteed
55. Always exaggerate your estimates.
78. When the going gets tough, the tough change the Rules.
87. Learn the customer's weaknesses so you can better take advantage of him.
103. Fill a desparate need with your most expensive product, then mark it up 500%
111. Treat people in your debt like family--exploit them [ruthlessly].
189. Let others keep their reputation. You keep their money.
266. When in doubt, lie.
Fine. Eliptical, sometimes eratic orbits, spacial anomalies, momentum, velocity, and gravitational pull from the outter planets (which do, in fact, affect many things).
You can simplify the equation and get high precision, but your accuracy will be horrible, and someone will complain about it. Space.com is taking the conservative approah here, and I don't blame them.
No matter? Tachyons? (yes, I know they're theoretical, but how the hell would you detect them?)
"Loki, I think you picked the wrong god to use for a nick. Judging by your excitement over the possible use of antimatter in weapons of mass destruction, perhaps Shiva would have been more appropriate."
;)
Not at all true.
Loki would have loved to get his hands on something like this, if for no other reason than to scare the shit out of the other gods (explode a dozen simultaneously while the gods were asleep). Actually, getting more towards Ragnarok, he'd have gladly used these to blast his fellow gods into oblivion. I liked him more when he was a simple trickster.
"Would it kill them to be a little more precise"
You're looking at average distances between objects moving faster than you (or I) can imagine, being pushed/pulled by 4 different forces eminating from an unimaginable number of masses.
In other words, give them a break.
(For those wondering - and this is off the top of my head... Nuclear strong, Nuclear weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational)
" We'll see antimatter missles :(
.
:)"
:P
Sorry, I think you typed a '(' where you meant to type a ')'
" We'll see antimatter missles
I'm excited to!
Actually, the anal-retentive attention to detail and religious adherence to science-theory is one of the reasons so many people were turned off by the previous Star Trek series. Enterprise appears a bit looser on these topics. As a matter of point, many things invented for Star Trek were adapted for use in the real world. Case in point, remember the hypospray used in The Next Generation? Well, someone (I think it was the World Health Organization) took the concept (and a stage prop) and created a vaccination tool. Now, instead of doctors using needles and vaccinating a few hundred people in a 3rd world country, virtually anyone can easily and quickly be trained to use the device, and thousands can be vaccinated in a single day by a small team.
Star Trek is probably the closest thing to real that the Sci-Fi world has ever had even remote interest in.
" Light speed is 186,282 miles per second"
;)
(start anal-retentive nitpicking here)
I thought it was 186,284 miles per second
I suppose I could be wrong.. hehe
From my understanding of physics (limited as it may be), you cannot accelerate matter in a linear fashion beyond C (speed of light in a vacuum).
That's funny, I was under the asumption that until I denounced my faith or was excummunicated, I was still a Catholic. I was, after all, Baptized and Confirmed in the Catholic Church. Just because I disagree with my church doesn't change what I know, nor does it change my beliefs. Another thing I was always taught was that if you can object to a teaching/belief/doctrine of the Catholic Church and be correct/go to heaven. Why? Because the Catholic Church is an institution created by men, and is therefore both imperfect and subject to mistakes, corruption, etc. (See: Middle Ages, church extortion - See Also: Present day, pedophile priests and bishop/cardinal/Vatican cover-ups)
"Later on it also mentions that we can't produce a lot of antimatter efficiently yet."
We'd be able to produce tons of it by now if the frickin' Vulcans didn't hold us back!
"God is all powerful, and omniscient.. and the bible is supposed to be the word of God..
So, why does it need to be edited? Did God make mistakes when he wrote it? Or do the editors feel that they know more than God does?
As a friend of mine used to say, "the bible is a great work - if you like fiction.""
Actually, the Bibles is supposed to be the word of God as interpreted by the human beings who wrote it. While writing the text, they were supposedly guided by the Holy Spirit so as to not completely fudge the thing, I suppose. This means that all the little mistakes that imperfect beings make found their way into the text making it sometimes ambiguous at best; outright incorrect at worst. The problem in this process is free will. Those doing the writing had the free will to eggagerate, draw conclusions when none were given, and skew the content to their own perspective. There are many other problems as well. Genesis, for example, tells not one creation story, but somewhere between 2 - 4 different and seemingly contradictory stories. This is why anyone who takes the Bible's word literally (gotta love the Bible quote-spewing folks) can't possibly understand the messages within.
"he was referring to the claim that the Vatican would hide the records of such past sins. That claim was provided entirely without evidence, unless we're to believe that "that's just the sort of thing that those Catholics would do." To the extent that the original poster was implying that, I am rightly offended."
I think the poster was referring to what the Catholic Church tends to do; and I have to agree. Nobody likes to admit mistakes, and the Catholic Church is no different; they try to bury that which does not make the Church look good. Unless you're a Catholic Cardinal, I don't think you should be offended at all. Personally, as a Catholic myself, I'm offended by the way my Church has acted in the past and in the present. The Vatican has been ordering NDA's for settlements for years in abuse cases (despite calls for reconciliation by a number of bishops), and now one of the things the Vatican is fighting is reporting of molestation accusations to local authorities. That offends me greatly, as it should you and every other good and decent human being on this Earth. The poster wasn't Catholic-slamming, (s)he was Catholic Church-slamming; something I do every chance I get. Why? I'm Catholic, and I was taught that the stuff my church is doing is wrong.