So what else do those distributions serve except egocentrical purposes, especially since the majority consists from taking a large well-known distribution and only tweaking it slightly and, tada, Monkey Nutsack Linux is born. I'm very proud of Monkey Nutsack Linux, you big jerk! I mean, insensitive clod! And for your information, it is much more than "only tweaking [a large well-known distribution] slightly".
How about my suggestion at the very end? Does anything change for you if you substitute "zero-price" for "free"? Maybe the word "free" just has too many meanings and/or too much baggage. Zero-price is what I mean by it - do we still disagree?
Because it's not really "free" by any reasonable measure. I don't understand. You don't pay any money for it, as long as you sign a contract. The price of the contract isn't increased if you decide to get a phone, it's a fixed price. So the phone comes with the contract at no additional charge. How is that not free? For something to be free, must it be unconditional? That sounds more like free as in speech, and we're talking about free as in beer.
Of course, but it's still a misuse of the word to the extent of pointlessness. I'll sell you a "free" computer in exchange for £500, or somesuch nonsense. A ridiculous straw man. It's more like buy one get one free. As a condition for getting that free can of soup, you have to buy another one for regular price. But the second one really is free - you don't pay any money for it. If you don't want the second one, fine - you'll just pay regular price for one can. If you don't want the free phone, fine - you'll pay regular price for a cell phone contract.
*I* didn't claim thatWell yeah, you did. There's a free phone, and you're saying it's not free. You're saying the discount doesn't really exist.
Substitute "zero price" for "free" if that makes it more clear that we're talking about the price of an item and not anything else.
I hope you are actually serious, because what a cool project.:-) I believe that engine came from Yamaha, as did the later SHO V8, so should be a good one. My favorite sleeper project is from HK Motorsports (if I'm remembering the name right) in Canada. They take cars on the Golf platform (New Beetle, TT...) and put AWD, upgraded suspension and brakes, and a 450-500 hp twin-turbo V6 in em. I thought a 4-door Golf (Rabbit now I guess) with AWD and 500bhp would be a sweet ride.
I don't know about a V8, but there were people putting Taurus SHO V6s into Ford Festivas a while back. There was no room in the engine bay so they removed the stock drivetrain and back seats and installed the V6 in the back.
However, if in the US, carriers will not sign up a phone that doesn't have GPS support for e911; I don't know about any fine, but wireless e911 need not have anything to do with GPS, and generally does not.
Read it again. He said "free with a new contract". Free meaning zero price for the phone, with the clearly stated condition of signing a contract. How is that distorting anything? And how is the contract requirement hidden? These quoted prices always have an asterisk, and if you can read you can tell that it requires a contract. And if you have a brain you can probably tell that's what it means without even reading the footnote. I don't understand why people who don't like signing cell phone contracts claim that you don't really get a discount for doing it. I really did get something like $100 off my phone for signing a contract. Whether this is a good idea varies for different people, but I was planning to keep service with this company indefinitely anyway, so in effect it was $100 off for not doing anything different.
My AT&T/Cingular/AT&T phones have had a speed-dial preset for voicemail. Hold down 1 for a couple of seconds and you're there, without entering a PIN. I don't know if other carriers do something similar.
What if we could make it extremely difficult to cut off communications? I'm just speculating here, but it seems feasible. Before you deploy the drone strike force, fire some cruise missiles into the battlefield. These deploy dozens or hundreds of little transceivers that form a comm network to supplement and back up the satellite or other primary communications with the drones. In addition to that, fly a bunch of tiny comm drones into the area that just fly around in circles at high altitude, doing the same function. So now instead of knocking out one or two satellites or a radio tower or two, the enemy would have to destroy hundreds or thousands of transmitters, most of which are very small and some of which are flying around. In addition, the combat drones can use this network to filter out bogus commands inserted by the enemy, because if they get a signal from one place that says to stand down, but 80 other signals confirm the attack, they can ignore the outlier.
As for interference, it's over my head but I think military signals guys can probably come up with some kind of spread-spectrum or something that makes it hard to jam the transmissions. Besides which, I think emitting a jamming signal would by nature make the emitter show up loud and clear on whatever frequencies they're emitting, so you just need some missiles that home in on those type of emissions, and they'll find the strongest signals (which would be the jamming rather than the command-and-control signals) and blow them up. So then the enemy would need lots and lots of electronic jamming gear, which frankly doesn't sound like someone we're likely to do battle with. Not impossible, but (I hope) not likely.
I didn't say anything about fuel cells, though that is one possibility. We can also make hydrogen-burning internal combustion engines now. And as for replacing the infrastructure, if my plan comes to fruition that could consist of an electrolysis station and hydrogen tank in your basement, with a refueling hose in the garage. I might pay a few thousand dollars to never have to go to a gas station again.:-)
Do you really expect that I'm going to be driving around with nothing to do but type "roast beef" into some sort of device?
A while back I was driving (driving to somewhere in particular, not really "around") and asked the guy in the back seat with the GPS and cellular on his laptop to tell us about the restaurants in Hot Springs, South Dakota. We settled on the local Chinese place and he directed me there turn by turn. So how big a deal is this whole location thing? The only difference is instead of typing in Hot Springs SD he could have just pressed a "here" button or whatever. So if you know where you are (not necessarily just what town you're in but can find yourself quickly on a map) it doesn't matter, but if you're lost or aren't good at translating between map and real world, it could be fairly useful. Not revolutionary, but useful. Ubiquitous cheap mobile broadband would be a much much bigger deal. And by ubiquitous I don't mean most places in the biggest cities, I mean everywhere there are any people.
It seems like just recently I'm seeing a lot of people here write "tyme" instead of "time". Or maybe it's just Falcon over and over again, I don't know (no offense Falcon). Is this the new "loose"?
You also fail to mention any way that nuclear power would actually work as a motor vehicle fuel. I can mention one, then. If the electricity is cheap enough, it becomes feasible to electrolyze water to produce hydrogen for vehicles. Yes, this process would end up using more energy. But if we can solve the waste problems of fission, or better yet figure out fusion, then it would be worth it because you end up with almost no pollution of any kind, end-to-end (except for whatever is produced by the power plant, which I stipulated that we figured out how to deal with). Fission would have us still relying on imported fuel since I don't think we have enough in the US, but it would be better than importing oil since at least Australia has a bunch of it. And of course fusion would be a means to energy independence.
OK, so now we can get back to the original question of how successful the US military would be at countering a domestic insurgency. I think the evidence indicates it would be a nearly complete failure. And the resistance might not have to achieve a decisive battlefield victory to "win". It's hard to picture exactly what would happen, but it's possible a meaningful coup could take place without the military ever being defeated.
You seem to be defining terms in order to make it so reality aligns with your viewpoint. Even President Bush doesn't claim that we've acheived victory in Iraq, and "the end of major combat operations" is a running joke. If what we have in Iraq right now is victory, what would you consider defeat or a draw?
I'm not certain but I once heard someone say that languages like Lisp are used in nuclear facilities because they are quick, stable and can be analyzed mathematically to be proved 'correct.' The garbage collector causes Java to be none of these. I don't know enough about mathematical proofs of software to comment on that, but I don't believe the GC causes Java to be either unstable or slow. What it does is cause it to be unpredictable - execution could pause at any time for GC to take place.
I didn't say googling for the answer doesn't work. I said that in a corporate environment it is frequently not an acceptable technical support program. I didn't say why, I said that's how it is. And I stand by my assertion that if you don't believe that, you're sticking your head in the sand.
The worst case scenario is pretty much what you describe - spam would change. In order to make it worthwhile, the spammer would have to get a much much higher response rate, which means he would have to do a lot more research to target the messages, which would add even more to the cost. The result would be far fewer messages in total, far fewer that you're not interested in, and more that you are interested in. That last isn't saying much since one spam email you're interested in would be more than you're getting now, but overall that would be the result. Which would be an improvement. I'm sure it wouldn't totally eliminate spam - I'm not sure that's possible. But it might drastically cut down on the volume, while increasing the "quality" and the percentage of messages that are actually useful to the recipient. I think we'll get a micropayment plan in place anyway for other purposes eventually, and this seems like an obvious way to apply it - but it might require migrating off of SMTP. As I said, only a couple of gaping holes.
If all email was taxed, then all people who don't pay could either be blocked altogether or relegated to the questionable mail box. If blocked, there would still be troubles--first, it would immediately fail because email should be free and everyone agrees with this. Second, some spammers would just pay. If non-paid mail was sent to the questionable mail box, everyone would be checking that box all the time because of the emails they get from real people who don't pay (and opening more spam than ever this way). I don't think email should be free. If we could come up with a universal micropayment system that worked well, we could solve the problem. Each email costs a small amount of money (perhaps 1 cent), payable to the recipient before the message can be delivered. If the recipient has the sender whitelisted (this could mean it's someone in their address book) the payment is refunded or not required. The recipient also has the option of refunding the payment manually. Spam as we know it now wouldn't be feasible, because a million emails would cost $10,000 to send out, which ruins the economics of it. Newsletters could require confirmation of whitelisting before sending an email to an address, or maybe a prepayment of the first email fee to insure against costs incurred.
This plan only has a couple of gaping holes, which makes it better than most.:-) But I think something like it will be possible and maybe even likely sometime in the next 10 or 20 years.
I'm not fantasizing anything. I'm saying that the insurgency in Iraq has gone up against the US military and prevented them from winning. In other words, the US military is unable to achieve victory in arms against the Iraqi insurgency. I don't see why an insurgency in the US would be less effective. You seemed to imply that the US military would be able to crush any domestic uprising, but I don't believe that's the case. The best they could do would be to produce a long, bloody civil war, which would probably get harder and harder for the military to fight as time went on, and easier and easier for the resistance. Assuming of course there is sufficient resistance. Keep in mind also that the Civil War wasn't a clash between an organized military and an insurgency like we see in Iraq. It was geographically distinct regions with their own armed forces in "conventional" combat, which is pretty much what our armed forces are still designed for. That would probably not be the case again.
It sounds like you're saying, "it's OK for political dissidents to be harassed, because if they really believe in their cause they will put up with it". I hope you're saying something different.
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I hate when I have to suppress my giggles at work. This may be the funniest thing I've ever seen on this site - beautifully done!
Well good luck, and feel free to email me at schererna at yahoo if you'd like someone to go ooh and aah. :-)
How about my suggestion at the very end? Does anything change for you if you substitute "zero-price" for "free"? Maybe the word "free" just has too many meanings and/or too much baggage. Zero-price is what I mean by it - do we still disagree?
Substitute "zero price" for "free" if that makes it more clear that we're talking about the price of an item and not anything else.
I hope you are actually serious, because what a cool project. :-) I believe that engine came from Yamaha, as did the later SHO V8, so should be a good one. My favorite sleeper project is from HK Motorsports (if I'm remembering the name right) in Canada. They take cars on the Golf platform (New Beetle, TT...) and put AWD, upgraded suspension and brakes, and a 450-500 hp twin-turbo V6 in em. I thought a 4-door Golf (Rabbit now I guess) with AWD and 500bhp would be a sweet ride.
I don't know about a V8, but there were people putting Taurus SHO V6s into Ford Festivas a while back. There was no room in the engine bay so they removed the stock drivetrain and back seats and installed the V6 in the back.
Read it again. He said "free with a new contract". Free meaning zero price for the phone, with the clearly stated condition of signing a contract. How is that distorting anything? And how is the contract requirement hidden? These quoted prices always have an asterisk, and if you can read you can tell that it requires a contract. And if you have a brain you can probably tell that's what it means without even reading the footnote. I don't understand why people who don't like signing cell phone contracts claim that you don't really get a discount for doing it. I really did get something like $100 off my phone for signing a contract. Whether this is a good idea varies for different people, but I was planning to keep service with this company indefinitely anyway, so in effect it was $100 off for not doing anything different.
My AT&T/Cingular/AT&T phones have had a speed-dial preset for voicemail. Hold down 1 for a couple of seconds and you're there, without entering a PIN. I don't know if other carriers do something similar.
What if we could make it extremely difficult to cut off communications? I'm just speculating here, but it seems feasible. Before you deploy the drone strike force, fire some cruise missiles into the battlefield. These deploy dozens or hundreds of little transceivers that form a comm network to supplement and back up the satellite or other primary communications with the drones. In addition to that, fly a bunch of tiny comm drones into the area that just fly around in circles at high altitude, doing the same function. So now instead of knocking out one or two satellites or a radio tower or two, the enemy would have to destroy hundreds or thousands of transmitters, most of which are very small and some of which are flying around. In addition, the combat drones can use this network to filter out bogus commands inserted by the enemy, because if they get a signal from one place that says to stand down, but 80 other signals confirm the attack, they can ignore the outlier.
As for interference, it's over my head but I think military signals guys can probably come up with some kind of spread-spectrum or something that makes it hard to jam the transmissions. Besides which, I think emitting a jamming signal would by nature make the emitter show up loud and clear on whatever frequencies they're emitting, so you just need some missiles that home in on those type of emissions, and they'll find the strongest signals (which would be the jamming rather than the command-and-control signals) and blow them up. So then the enemy would need lots and lots of electronic jamming gear, which frankly doesn't sound like someone we're likely to do battle with. Not impossible, but (I hope) not likely.
I didn't say anything about fuel cells, though that is one possibility. We can also make hydrogen-burning internal combustion engines now. And as for replacing the infrastructure, if my plan comes to fruition that could consist of an electrolysis station and hydrogen tank in your basement, with a refueling hose in the garage. I might pay a few thousand dollars to never have to go to a gas station again. :-)
It seems like just recently I'm seeing a lot of people here write "tyme" instead of "time". Or maybe it's just Falcon over and over again, I don't know (no offense Falcon). Is this the new "loose"?
If you believe the Mythbusters, that doesn't work. Of course, that was a sample of only one dog, so who knows.
OK, so now we can get back to the original question of how successful the US military would be at countering a domestic insurgency. I think the evidence indicates it would be a nearly complete failure. And the resistance might not have to achieve a decisive battlefield victory to "win". It's hard to picture exactly what would happen, but it's possible a meaningful coup could take place without the military ever being defeated.
You seem to be defining terms in order to make it so reality aligns with your viewpoint. Even President Bush doesn't claim that we've acheived victory in Iraq, and "the end of major combat operations" is a running joke. If what we have in Iraq right now is victory, what would you consider defeat or a draw?
I didn't say googling for the answer doesn't work. I said that in a corporate environment it is frequently not an acceptable technical support program. I didn't say why, I said that's how it is. And I stand by my assertion that if you don't believe that, you're sticking your head in the sand.
If you don't see that "googling for the answer" is not always an acceptable support plan, you're Not Getting It.
The worst case scenario is pretty much what you describe - spam would change. In order to make it worthwhile, the spammer would have to get a much much higher response rate, which means he would have to do a lot more research to target the messages, which would add even more to the cost. The result would be far fewer messages in total, far fewer that you're not interested in, and more that you are interested in. That last isn't saying much since one spam email you're interested in would be more than you're getting now, but overall that would be the result. Which would be an improvement. I'm sure it wouldn't totally eliminate spam - I'm not sure that's possible. But it might drastically cut down on the volume, while increasing the "quality" and the percentage of messages that are actually useful to the recipient. I think we'll get a micropayment plan in place anyway for other purposes eventually, and this seems like an obvious way to apply it - but it might require migrating off of SMTP. As I said, only a couple of gaping holes.
This plan only has a couple of gaping holes, which makes it better than most.
I'm not fantasizing anything. I'm saying that the insurgency in Iraq has gone up against the US military and prevented them from winning. In other words, the US military is unable to achieve victory in arms against the Iraqi insurgency. I don't see why an insurgency in the US would be less effective. You seemed to imply that the US military would be able to crush any domestic uprising, but I don't believe that's the case. The best they could do would be to produce a long, bloody civil war, which would probably get harder and harder for the military to fight as time went on, and easier and easier for the resistance. Assuming of course there is sufficient resistance. Keep in mind also that the Civil War wasn't a clash between an organized military and an insurgency like we see in Iraq. It was geographically distinct regions with their own armed forces in "conventional" combat, which is pretty much what our armed forces are still designed for. That would probably not be the case again.
It sounds like you're saying, "it's OK for political dissidents to be harassed, because if they really believe in their cause they will put up with it". I hope you're saying something different.