Snipers don't ride bikes. They drive Aston Martins.
I am not a sniper, so I may be completely off-beam here, but I thought the whole point of being a sniper was to be inconspicuous. Which would probably mean driving a Toyota Corolla...
9/11 finally brought some kind of perspective to the wars the US have started the last fifty years.
Way to make yourself unpopular here on Slashdot (as your current "-1: disagree" mod shows) but nevertheless you have a point. And in fact, this gives a useful contrast to the earlier point about separation of combatants: the guys who flew those planes into the WTC on 9/11 were not standing at a distance while their victims died. They were sitting at the front of their projectile, and first to die. It's easy to find perjorative names for them, but they were not cowards.
Attractive though the idea might be, banning arms exports now is sort of like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.
However, I agree with the GP about the disconnect between killer and killee.
Leaving aside crossbows or longbows, If we were limited to fighting each other with sharp-edged instruments, we would at least have to have personal contact with the results of our agression while our opponent's blood and guts spill out over the pavement or ourselves. In other words, if you want someone to die, you have to really mean it.
Sure, there will inevitably be those of us who don't care, but at least this would force a degree of honesty (of sorts) that is likely to be less common when all you have to to is stand at a distance and pull a trigger with your index finger.
"Infidel" simply means "without faith". In my case, that is literally true, but so-called Christians or Muslims throwing the term at each other has about as much meaning as calling them flobbalobs - except that the latter at least has enough of an echo of Monty Python to be funny.
Or maybe a citation to substantiate the allegation itself?
Slashdot is not, and does not pretend to be a peer-reviewed academic journal. If you really require a citation for such a trivial statement, Google should be more than sufficient if you have been living in a barrel for at least the last ten years.
I absolutely hate the wank that gets peddled about "trained" ears and whatnot.
I have three diplomas from the Royal College of Music, so I have at least a general idea of what my music is supposed to sound like.
However, age has not been entirely kind to me, and I have a formally diagnosed hearing loss in higher frequencies in both ears (enough for me to wear hearing aids to help with sibilant sounds in conversation less evident in the music I listen to). I get grumpy with the sound reproduction from my Rega Planar turntable, since the so-called "warm" characteristics favoured by many so-called "audiophiles" tend to round off the frequencies in which my hearing is deficient.
However, I need no training to recognise the difference between a recording of (my choice of) music at CD quality and an MP3 rendering of the same at 320 Kb/s VBR.
That doesn't mean I refuse to use compression: for my iPod, which is almost exclusively used where there is more than enough ambient noise for detail to become irrelevant, 192 Kb/s VBR is just fine. What saddens me, though, is the number of kids^Wpeople who have never actually heard proper recordings of their music, who go through life with a limited palette of audio experience.
Exactly. There are plenty of crappily-recorded CDs on sale here and there that highlight any deficiencies of the medium, but there are plenty of others (examples: just about anything from the ECM label) that are as near to perfect as the human ear can impartially judge without a lot of unnecessary shaving of palms.
[1] - I hesitate to call The Wasp Factory mainstream -- it is significantly farther detached from the real world than most SF, IMO.
Agreed. Many ascribe the term "literary fiction" to this genre of his work, and if one must pigeonhole it, the term probably serves better than most. Banks' work is never mainstream, which is pretty much what makes it worth reading.
I happen to be an unashamedly huge fan of his non-SF work (my personal favourites: The Crow Road and Complicity), but his writing is stupendous no matter where he turns his attention.
It is indeed a repost, but it goes further even than that. In TFA, which takes the form of an interview, the response to the first question begins:
Robert Guerra: Well, this project is actually the second report.
Sounds like someone might have been nobbled. But in any case, describing countries such as the US or Australia as "free" - when citizens are free to view whatever content they want so long as they have no objection to so-called "Intelligence" services spying on them and taking whatever action they see fit - seems a bit hollow to me.
If Slashdotters had an ounce of integrity they'd shout down this kind of political dickering in scientific affairs.
Owing to a worldwide shortage, the SI-approved unit for integrity is now the yoctogram or yoctolitre (depending on whether you refer to ounces avoirdupois or fluid ounces).
The point is that (particularly with regard to units of length), the Imperial scales were well suited to a life without calculators. The mental arithmetic is easy for us, while present-day adolescents have no idea.
For instance, I was at a supermarket checkout a few weeks ago, and the person in front of me had a couple of cartons of soft drink in her trolley. I overheard an exchange between 3 of the checkout-chicks along the lines of:
"What's 6 x 9?"
"Uhh, 32?"
"45?"
"Oh, I thought it was 108..."
Until I intervened and told them the answer. I was gobsmacked until it occurred to me that kids are no longer required to learn multiplication tables as I was, and thus they are incapicatitated for participation in any kind of life without a calculator as a crutch. (Slide-rules don't count: they require you to use vast arrays of common sense.)
Mr. Fahrenheit probably wouldn't have agreed. Similarly, I work in an industry where it is useful (for me) to add some ingredients in UBHs (Unified BrokenHalo Handfuls) - obviously with the middle initial changed to protect the guilty.
Personally, I find the plethora of obscure units still provide a sort of anchor point. For instance, I know exactly what a shit-ton means, while none of us will have any problem visualising a Sydharb as a unit of capacity.
I suspect your parent post has not even done the most basic of research. After all. , while most telcos are happy to preload apps that eat up your bandwidth, preloading an app that diverts revenue away from regular timed phone calls would just be silly.
But I too have no problem using Skype over my WiFi connection, and I have never had a problem with upgrading it (which requires an uninstall of the previous version).
Indonesia is a scary case. It has both an ambitious nuclear plan and a long history of geological instability which shows no signs of abating. It is also a culture where corruption is rife and taken for granted, which does not bode well for the prospects of a safe nuclear implementation. Given this cocktail of factors, it's probably not unfair to say that Indonesia truly is "backward".
Well, astroturfing in this context is clearly the wrong term. However, those of us who are old enough will have seen the pattern:
The pro-nuclear lobby will win a degree of public acceptance while there is nothing nasty fresh in the public memory. But every now and then, poor implementations such as the Windscale/Sellafield and Cap de la Hague reprocessing plants, and major instances such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now Fukushima remind us that nuclear fusion power is only as safe as the engineers' (and accountants') margins allow it to be.
Given that many (i.e. most) large corporations are inherently untrustworthy when it comes to putting public safety ahead of their pecuniary interests, the current crash in uranium mining stocks comes as a timely reminder that the free lunch offered by nuclear fission is nothing of the sort.
Note that China is not going to halt nuclear power construction.
Of course, that is an advantage that a totalitarian regime will always hold over relatively "liberal" administrations: if they have a goal in mind, they can do whatever it takes to achieve it, and fuck anyone who happens to get in the way.
If that's really how this guy believes an enlightened government should behave, then I (for one) am glad that he is in a minority.
In an e-mail interview, Bgr R said he's a former employee who discovered a vulnerability in the company's Cisco security management software that he then used to hack into the SCADA systems
That just tripped my bullshitometer. Most Cisco systems (in my experience) are pretty robust, but an employee would have been in a good position to create an open door for himself to use later. So the "vulnerability" (if I'm right) would simply be his employer's misplaced trust in him.
Although I echo the sentiment, I'm not so sure that reference to a 1970s BBCTV show counts as "obligatory" here, however much we may have liked it at the time.
Slashdot Mirror
Snipers don't ride bikes. They drive Aston Martins.
I am not a sniper, so I may be completely off-beam here, but I thought the whole point of being a sniper was to be inconspicuous. Which would probably mean driving a Toyota Corolla...
9/11 finally brought some kind of perspective to the wars the US have started the last fifty years.
Way to make yourself unpopular here on Slashdot (as your current "-1: disagree" mod shows) but nevertheless you have a point. And in fact, this gives a useful contrast to the earlier point about separation of combatants: the guys who flew those planes into the WTC on 9/11 were not standing at a distance while their victims died. They were sitting at the front of their projectile, and first to die. It's easy to find perjorative names for them, but they were not cowards.
Attractive though the idea might be, banning arms exports now is sort of like closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.
However, I agree with the GP about the disconnect between killer and killee.
Leaving aside crossbows or longbows, If we were limited to fighting each other with sharp-edged instruments, we would at least have to have personal contact with the results of our agression while our opponent's blood and guts spill out over the pavement or ourselves. In other words, if you want someone to die, you have to really mean it.
Sure, there will inevitably be those of us who don't care, but at least this would force a degree of honesty (of sorts) that is likely to be less common when all you have to to is stand at a distance and pull a trigger with your index finger.
I hope you die painfully.
Agreed. Anyone who uses an apostrophe to form a plural deserves to be dropped into an ants' nest.
"Infidel" simply means "without faith". In my case, that is literally true, but so-called Christians or Muslims throwing the term at each other has about as much meaning as calling them flobbalobs - except that the latter at least has enough of an echo of Monty Python to be funny.
Tungsten sulfonyl hydride?
Or maybe a citation to substantiate the allegation itself?
Slashdot is not, and does not pretend to be a peer-reviewed academic journal. If you really require a citation for such a trivial statement, Google should be more than sufficient if you have been living in a barrel for at least the last ten years.
I absolutely hate the wank that gets peddled about "trained" ears and whatnot.
I have three diplomas from the Royal College of Music, so I have at least a general idea of what my music is supposed to sound like.
However, age has not been entirely kind to me, and I have a formally diagnosed hearing loss in higher frequencies in both ears (enough for me to wear hearing aids to help with sibilant sounds in conversation less evident in the music I listen to). I get grumpy with the sound reproduction from my Rega Planar turntable, since the so-called "warm" characteristics favoured by many so-called "audiophiles" tend to round off the frequencies in which my hearing is deficient.
However, I need no training to recognise the difference between a recording of (my choice of) music at CD quality and an MP3 rendering of the same at 320 Kb/s VBR.
That doesn't mean I refuse to use compression: for my iPod, which is almost exclusively used where there is more than enough ambient noise for detail to become irrelevant, 192 Kb/s VBR is just fine. What saddens me, though, is the number of kids^Wpeople who have never actually heard proper recordings of their music, who go through life with a limited palette of audio experience.
Exactly. There are plenty of crappily-recorded CDs on sale here and there that highlight any deficiencies of the medium, but there are plenty of others (examples: just about anything from the ECM label) that are as near to perfect as the human ear can impartially judge without a lot of unnecessary shaving of palms.
Hey, I (for one) like tits.
[1] - I hesitate to call The Wasp Factory mainstream -- it is significantly farther detached from the real world than most SF, IMO.
Agreed. Many ascribe the term "literary fiction" to this genre of his work, and if one must pigeonhole it, the term probably serves better than most. Banks' work is never mainstream, which is pretty much what makes it worth reading.
I happen to be an unashamedly huge fan of his non-SF work (my personal favourites: The Crow Road and Complicity), but his writing is stupendous no matter where he turns his attention.
It is indeed a repost, but it goes further even than that. In TFA, which takes the form of an interview, the response to the first question begins:
Robert Guerra: Well, this project is actually the second report.
Sounds like someone might have been nobbled. But in any case, describing countries such as the US or Australia as "free" - when citizens are free to view whatever content they want so long as they have no objection to so-called "Intelligence" services spying on them and taking whatever action they see fit - seems a bit hollow to me.
If Slashdotters had an ounce of integrity they'd shout down this kind of political dickering in scientific affairs.
Owing to a worldwide shortage, the SI-approved unit for integrity is now the yoctogram or yoctolitre (depending on whether you refer to ounces avoirdupois or fluid ounces).
Hell, if I ran a space company I would probably work out some deal either with Russians or Chinese.
Hell, if I were an investor, I would listen to the hype with a seasoned skeptical ear:
(From TFS:) Elon Musk told the Wall Street Journal Saturday. "We're going all the way to Mars, I think...
I, for one, would hope they weren't planning on driving halfway there before running out of petrol.
The point is that (particularly with regard to units of length), the Imperial scales were well suited to a life without calculators. The mental arithmetic is easy for us, while present-day adolescents have no idea.
For instance, I was at a supermarket checkout a few weeks ago, and the person in front of me had a couple of cartons of soft drink in her trolley. I overheard an exchange between 3 of the checkout-chicks along the lines of:
"What's 6 x 9?"
"Uhh, 32?"
"45?"
"Oh, I thought it was 108..."
Until I intervened and told them the answer. I was gobsmacked until it occurred to me that kids are no longer required to learn multiplication tables as I was, and thus they are incapicatitated for participation in any kind of life without a calculator as a crutch. (Slide-rules don't count: they require you to use vast arrays of common sense.)
Mr. Fahrenheit probably wouldn't have agreed. Similarly, I work in an industry where it is useful (for me) to add some ingredients in UBHs (Unified BrokenHalo Handfuls) - obviously with the middle initial changed to protect the guilty.
Personally, I find the plethora of obscure units still provide a sort of anchor point. For instance, I know exactly what a shit-ton means, while none of us will have any problem visualising a Sydharb as a unit of capacity.
Heh. My screen was sold as a 0.004545 furlong model.
Thou shalt not feed the trolls.
I suspect your parent post has not even done the most basic of research. After all. , while most telcos are happy to preload apps that eat up your bandwidth, preloading an app that diverts revenue away from regular timed phone calls would just be silly.
But I too have no problem using Skype over my WiFi connection, and I have never had a problem with upgrading it (which requires an uninstall of the previous version).
Well, if you really want to know, I haven't found any kind of pearl in my bottom.
Indonesia is a scary case. It has both an ambitious nuclear plan and a long history of geological instability which shows no signs of abating. It is also a culture where corruption is rife and taken for granted, which does not bode well for the prospects of a safe nuclear implementation. Given this cocktail of factors, it's probably not unfair to say that Indonesia truly is "backward".
Well, astroturfing in this context is clearly the wrong term. However, those of us who are old enough will have seen the pattern:
The pro-nuclear lobby will win a degree of public acceptance while there is nothing nasty fresh in the public memory. But every now and then, poor implementations such as the Windscale/Sellafield and Cap de la Hague reprocessing plants, and major instances such as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now Fukushima remind us that nuclear fusion power is only as safe as the engineers' (and accountants') margins allow it to be.
Given that many (i.e. most) large corporations are inherently untrustworthy when it comes to putting public safety ahead of their pecuniary interests, the current crash in uranium mining stocks comes as a timely reminder that the free lunch offered by nuclear fission is nothing of the sort.
Note that China is not going to halt nuclear power construction.
Of course, that is an advantage that a totalitarian regime will always hold over relatively "liberal" administrations: if they have a goal in mind, they can do whatever it takes to achieve it, and fuck anyone who happens to get in the way.
If that's really how this guy believes an enlightened government should behave, then I (for one) am glad that he is in a minority.
In an e-mail interview, Bgr R said he's a former employee who discovered a vulnerability in the company's Cisco security management software that he then used to hack into the SCADA systems
That just tripped my bullshitometer. Most Cisco systems (in my experience) are pretty robust, but an employee would have been in a good position to create an open door for himself to use later. So the "vulnerability" (if I'm right) would simply be his employer's misplaced trust in him.
Yes.
Although I echo the sentiment, I'm not so sure that reference to a 1970s BBCTV show counts as "obligatory" here, however much we may have liked it at the time.