The US military is a power unto itself, within the bounds laid out by Congress/President. They have the power to set up tribunals, make their own rules and have their own police force, prisons and detain people. If you are a soldier, or thought to be harboring a soldier, the Military Police can break down the door to your apartment and search it/arrrest you (if you're a soldier or thought to be a soldier) without having a civilian search warrant. They can issue drivers licenses which allow you to drive military vehicles on civilian roads.... aand that's within the USA.
... and failed dismally. MS knows that the desktop is limited and dying but they don't know how to get way from it.
They have tried Windows CE which still has a shrinking market share in phones, but attempts to leverage the desktop experience, so is doomed.
They've tried tablets... at least 4 times now... and these still get mindshare at MS because they are Billy-boy's pet PC format. Again, doomed because they try to make the tablet into a desktop-like device.
It is often said that excessive success brings about a downfall. For MS this is true. The desktop has been so successful for them that they are not able to see past it.
Yes, the military is a state within a state. There are military laws, military police, military prisons etc. There are even military driver's licenses (I have a tank driver's license even though I've never been in a tank - go figure). For example, there are crimes such as desertion which have no civilian parallel. This pretty much holds for all countries.
But Guatanemo is being used outside of normal military usage which is probably why they also need spin meisters to make their case.
"Not everyone is like you, or has the evolutionary pressures operating on them that you do. Humans have adapted to many different regions and are impacted differently depending on where they live."
How well aquainted are you with the facts? Have you ever lived in Africa etc, or is this just TV knowledge?
I lived in Africa for 30 years, mostly in rural or semi-rural areas and I could speak two African languages. I even helped out at mission hospitals a few times. Sure, there are still huge mortalities relative to first world countries, but there have been huge changes. Infant mortality has been reduced significantly and many diseases have been almost wiped out (relative to say 40 years ago). Even small mission hospitals are able to provide obstetric services (caesarian section & premature baby care). 50 years ago those babies would have died (and many of the mothers too). Now they live on to keep their genes going.
From an emotional/sentimental point of view I think it is great that we can be saving human lives, but genetically it is perhaps not the best practice.
I live in a rural sheep farming area. Keeping a flock of sheep is all about improving the genetics. If a ewe has a problem giving birth then the ewe and her lambs are marked for culling (ie not allowed to breed further, but get rendered to meat). This is done because the farmers know that the daughter of a problem ewe is likely to also have the same problems. Culling prevents passing on the gene to the rest of the flock.
At the natural level we are not really any different. When we interfere and artificially keep people alive and allow them to reproduce then we artificially introduce weaker genes to the human gene pool.
I'm not for a second suggesting some sort of forced human selection etc, but just raising the thought that medical technology does have a potential long-term genetic downside.
Is there any real need for Leopard vs Ubuntu debating unless it includes a Vista comparison too? Untimately what matters is what this means for breaking the Windows Monopoly in the long term.
Nature has spent a very long time honing the human gene pool (at least 6000 years by even the most limited world view). Medical science has only really been around for 50 or so years (on a wide enough basis to make any significant difference). Sure, we might have a wider gene pool (by keeping alive people that would not naturally be around) but quality is extremely important. The "selection" part of natural selection just is not happening any more.
Designing a commercial airframe that will survive these speeds and be commercially viable (ie. cheap enough to build and maintain) is a far greater challenge. That definitely won't take "a couple of years".
Natural selection tries to weed out a huge % of the population, but medical science overrides it.
Nature determines that weak and premature infants should die, yet they are kept alive and become adults. Nature determines that some adults should not be breeding, yet fertility drugs override this. Nature determines that various people should die by heart failure etc, but drugs keep them alive.
Sure, these are all good from the emotional point of view of keeping people alive and making childless couples happy etc, but does it really help the human gene pool? Perhaps Mother Nature had a good reason to kill off a weak child or prevent that infertile couple from breeding. The long term impacts can only be known in a few generations.
The theoretical benefit of capitalism is that competing companies are falling over each other trying to out do eachother by providing better service etc, thus capitalism is good for the customer.
The truth though is that in many companies are not customer focused, but competitor focused, expending more effort in body-slamming the competition than improving their goods/services. In these cases the customers are very definitely not advantaged.
As with most ideologies, captialism is not good or bad of itself. The goodness or badness comes from how the game is played.
All these people blurbing how computer savvy their kids are because they can wiggle a mouse and how these kids will be drawn into techie lives.. Well Duh! There are millions of manhours invested in improving UI to make it easy to use.
Inferring that these kids will become techie is like saying that every kid who eats a sandwich will become a blue ribbon baker.
For most people, playing games is hardly learning. Writing games.
the dog just gets skates! It still annoys you etc, just faster.
From MS financial perspective it is that bad. Real money counts for little. It is shareholder perception that counts. For the first time in MS history, Joe Shareholder will likely have the opinion that MS screwed up. The shareholders will be saying: "We paid $5bn and we got this suckware! Give us new management!"
Remember too that this comes in the same set as some other rogue waves: Zune, Xbox360 with no really good news in sight. All setting up for a perfect storm.
Sure earth might have toppled a few times, but if it was spinning on an axis then surely there would have been some sort of poles (perhaps where today's tropics are). Those poles are going to revceive less solar radiation and thus the earth's temperature would have not been "equitable".
Even if the angle was the same (eg end on), the same would still hold true.
Sure, it is easy to understand that Antarctica might have been closer to the equator and moved, but if the atmosphere etc was the same as todays (or similar) then surely the global climate would have been similar to todays and the polar bits (that have moved out of the way now) would have been frozen, as they are today.
So the big question: what is so different bad then that allows such sweeping statements to be made?
...they'll scramble the system if it does not make sense to them.
We have approx 3000 books in the house as well as two kids. Dewey-ish classification works fine for us, splitting the books into groups according to their Dewey hundreds (0-99.999, 100-1999.999,...). However we have had to break out some special sections. Robots, programming and electronics have a special area together (breaking Dewey boundaries). All the fishing related stuff goes together (including studies of aquatic instects etc). All the craft books go together (well Dewey does that anyway).
A generator is far less likely to get knocked out that power lines. Consider how many points of failure there are in grid-provided power.
24 hours is sufficent to cover for brief, minor outages. It is not enough to cover for anything close to a natural disaster where many sites lose power and there are not enough resources to fix them all in 24 hours.
Here in New Zealand, all our telecom has 24 hour battery backup but it is sized "just right". Last year we lost power for approx 40 hours due to a severe snow storm. The phones lasted for appeox 25 hours.
I used Microsoft's first C compiler ( a rebranded Lattice). It came on 2 single-sided single density floppies. Add Wordstar or similar and you could actually do edit/compile/link etc on a single floppy machine (though two floppies were infinitely better because you would not have to pause to load the linker disk). With that toolset you could do all the software development you'd ever need to do on that machine.
Sure, we might now have hundreds of GB hard disks, but the size of everything has blown out too.
One of the biggest problems is doing backups. In the 80s you could back up all your work on a single floppy (or maybe a few). Now it's a lot more complicated.
Of all the so-called sciences, paleontology has to be the most contrived.
Modern scorpions do not have a fixed claw-to-body ratio. Non-poisonous scorpions tend to have larger more powerful claws, sometimes by a factor of 3 or more. Using modern claw to body ratios would give a size of somewhere between approx 1.5 and 5 metres. Of course that assumes that claw-to-body ratios have been constant over time.
One just needs to look at the fiddler crab to see how stupid it is to make claw-to-body comparisons and such assumptions. The fiddler crab has two different size claws, one approximately the width of the crab and the smaller one approx 20% the width of the crab.
Still, the giant scorpion is far less contrived than many paneontological "discoveries". You often see beautifully detailed drawings and descriptions of animals with the only physical evidence being a tooth fragment.
Point out a glaring error in an article and you get moderated troll? Oh well, if that's "group knowledge" for you then Wikipedia is fscked! No wonder Doris Lessing and others have this to say http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2224159,00.html
Slashdot Mirror
The US military is a power unto itself, within the bounds laid out by Congress/President. They have the power to set up tribunals, make their own rules and have their own police force, prisons and detain people. If you are a soldier, or thought to be harboring a soldier, the Military Police can break down the door to your apartment and search it/arrrest you (if you're a soldier or thought to be a soldier) without having a civilian search warrant. They can issue drivers licenses which allow you to drive military vehicles on civilian roads.... aand that's within the USA.
They have tried Windows CE which still has a shrinking market share in phones, but attempts to leverage the desktop experience, so is doomed.
They've tried tablets... at least 4 times now... and these still get mindshare at MS because they are Billy-boy's pet PC format. Again, doomed because they try to make the tablet into a desktop-like device.
It is often said that excessive success brings about a downfall. For MS this is true. The desktop has been so successful for them that they are not able to see past it.
But Guatanemo is being used outside of normal military usage which is probably why they also need spin meisters to make their case.
a military prison has a spin-meister.
Surely proofs are more important than a lot of the crap in wikipedia. Do we really need entries like these: http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cameron,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spice_Girls
How well aquainted are you with the facts? Have you ever lived in Africa etc, or is this just TV knowledge?
I lived in Africa for 30 years, mostly in rural or semi-rural areas and I could speak two African languages. I even helped out at mission hospitals a few times. Sure, there are still huge mortalities relative to first world countries, but there have been huge changes. Infant mortality has been reduced significantly and many diseases have been almost wiped out (relative to say 40 years ago). Even small mission hospitals are able to provide obstetric services (caesarian section & premature baby care). 50 years ago those babies would have died (and many of the mothers too). Now they live on to keep their genes going.
From an emotional/sentimental point of view I think it is great that we can be saving human lives, but genetically it is perhaps not the best practice.
I live in a rural sheep farming area. Keeping a flock of sheep is all about improving the genetics. If a ewe has a problem giving birth then the ewe and her lambs are marked for culling (ie not allowed to breed further, but get rendered to meat). This is done because the farmers know that the daughter of a problem ewe is likely to also have the same problems. Culling prevents passing on the gene to the rest of the flock.
At the natural level we are not really any different. When we interfere and artificially keep people alive and allow them to reproduce then we artificially introduce weaker genes to the human gene pool.
I'm not for a second suggesting some sort of forced human selection etc, but just raising the thought that medical technology does have a potential long-term genetic downside.
Isn't that communist or something?
Is there any real need for Leopard vs Ubuntu debating unless it includes a Vista comparison too? Untimately what matters is what this means for breaking the Windows Monopoly in the long term.
Nature has spent a very long time honing the human gene pool (at least 6000 years by even the most limited world view). Medical science has only really been around for 50 or so years (on a wide enough basis to make any significant difference). Sure, we might have a wider gene pool (by keeping alive people that would not naturally be around) but quality is extremely important. The "selection" part of natural selection just is not happening any more.
Designing a commercial airframe that will survive these speeds and be commercially viable (ie. cheap enough to build and maintain) is a far greater challenge. That definitely won't take "a couple of years".
Nature determines that weak and premature infants should die, yet they are kept alive and become adults. Nature determines that some adults should not be breeding, yet fertility drugs override this. Nature determines that various people should die by heart failure etc, but drugs keep them alive.
Sure, these are all good from the emotional point of view of keeping people alive and making childless couples happy etc, but does it really help the human gene pool? Perhaps Mother Nature had a good reason to kill off a weak child or prevent that infertile couple from breeding. The long term impacts can only be known in a few generations.
The truth though is that in many companies are not customer focused, but competitor focused, expending more effort in body-slamming the competition than improving their goods/services. In these cases the customers are very definitely not advantaged.
As with most ideologies, captialism is not good or bad of itself. The goodness or badness comes from how the game is played.
It has helped us identify a few fruitcakes in society.
Inferring that these kids will become techie is like saying that every kid who eats a sandwich will become a blue ribbon baker.
For most people, playing games is hardly learning. Writing games.
This is old news... We've known for how-long now that mammoths had shotguns!
You can bet your arm/leg/appendage of choice that this will be resisted at many levels.
Yes, I know that GDP is far from beling a good health indicator, but that's the number that gets measured.
From MS financial perspective it is that bad. Real money counts for little. It is shareholder perception that counts. For the first time in MS history, Joe Shareholder will likely have the opinion that MS screwed up. The shareholders will be saying: "We paid $5bn and we got this suckware! Give us new management!"
Remember too that this comes in the same set as some other rogue waves: Zune, Xbox360 with no really good news in sight. All setting up for a perfect storm.
Even if the angle was the same (eg end on), the same would still hold true.
Sure, it is easy to understand that Antarctica might have been closer to the equator and moved, but if the atmosphere etc was the same as todays (or similar) then surely the global climate would have been similar to todays and the polar bits (that have moved out of the way now) would have been frozen, as they are today.
So the big question: what is so different bad then that allows such sweeping statements to be made?
We have approx 3000 books in the house as well as two kids. Dewey-ish classification works fine for us, splitting the books into groups according to their Dewey hundreds (0-99.999, 100-1999.999,...). However we have had to break out some special sections. Robots, programming and electronics have a special area together (breaking Dewey boundaries). All the fishing related stuff goes together (including studies of aquatic instects etc). All the craft books go together (well Dewey does that anyway).
No computer needed.
24 hours is sufficent to cover for brief, minor outages. It is not enough to cover for anything close to a natural disaster where many sites lose power and there are not enough resources to fix them all in 24 hours.
Here in New Zealand, all our telecom has 24 hour battery backup but it is sized "just right". Last year we lost power for approx 40 hours due to a severe snow storm. The phones lasted for appeox 25 hours.
Sure, we might now have hundreds of GB hard disks, but the size of everything has blown out too.
One of the biggest problems is doing backups. In the 80s you could back up all your work on a single floppy (or maybe a few). Now it's a lot more complicated.
Modern scorpions do not have a fixed claw-to-body ratio. Non-poisonous scorpions tend to have larger more powerful claws, sometimes by a factor of 3 or more. Using modern claw to body ratios would give a size of somewhere between approx 1.5 and 5 metres. Of course that assumes that claw-to-body ratios have been constant over time.
One just needs to look at the fiddler crab to see how stupid it is to make claw-to-body comparisons and such assumptions. The fiddler crab has two different size claws, one approximately the width of the crab and the smaller one approx 20% the width of the crab.
Still, the giant scorpion is far less contrived than many paneontological "discoveries". You often see beautifully detailed drawings and descriptions of animals with the only physical evidence being a tooth fragment.
Point out a glaring error in an article and you get moderated troll? Oh well, if that's "group knowledge" for you then Wikipedia is fscked! No wonder Doris Lessing and others have this to say http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2224159,00.html
Green kidneys and stuffed to the eyeballs with grass mulch? No wonder this guy is sick and needs implants. He's lucky he's not dead yet.