To be perfectly honest, and this is just my opinion on the whole situation so don't take it as gospel or anything, but I think the only reason Bush got back in is because the person he was running against never stood a chance in the first place (Kerry was a complete jackass), and I believe that like in the 2000's elections, some unfair play might have taken place.
Ohio (the deciding state) had a lot of counties using electronic voting machines which disturbingly broke down or didn't report accurately, and no record was ever kept of these voting transactions, so this will be impossible to prove one way or another.
Worse, Gore actually won the popular vote in the nation, yet didn't make it to presidency. I feel this a failure of the Democratic process in favor of the Republic process, but that's something we have to live with being a republic. Even moreso, I keep feeling less and less the need for an actual president, and moreso all of its positions cabinet members, restoring the balance of power to the executive branch (in contrast to congress, which was segmented by our system of federalism in a most ideal way).
Our government has a lot of interesting pecularities like all of the above, and that's not to say it's perfect. Disasters happen just as they have been continuously these past 5 years (and it's interesting to see them both happen one year after Bush is confirmed, in the very same window of time.. almost as if God is punishing the nation for their foolishness or telling us the end is near or something;) (note: I'm agnostic->athiest)). I really don't feel the media has as much a play in the brainwashing as does the whole American climate; hardly anyone feels any interest in making their own country a better place, and is instead more worried about their daily chores and that taxes are too high.
Gore would have made an excellent president to follow Clinton, but Clinton may make an incredible president to follow Bush;). Wouldn't it be a coup.. maybe the American public would notice the disturbing trends in politics..
But who knows, this entire post is just a bunch of mind questions and personal conspiracy theories/speculations. (Moderators; if you mod this post you are glaringly retarded as this is entirely of opinion. If you agree, reply, or don't if you have already moderated elseware. Sorry for telling you how to do your jobs but this isn't insightful, funny, informative, and I certainly hope it isn't flamebait or troll as it is only my viewpoint of the system as a whole.)
I (as an American) am staunchly against what is happening in Guantanamo Bay; I think it's an absolute travesty, and I believe that the international community should not look at these past five years as an example of how the United States of America deals with a problem.
I would be entirely for economic sanctions against America until we released those people from that base. It's disgusting that we have that much of a lack of respect for the other countries on this planet. It's disgusting to think that our military personel are so entrenched in following orders that nobody would stand up to their superiors and say that what we are doing is just plain wrong.
Luckily, I live in a very liberal community where protesting is a right of passage more than civil disobediance, and I have personally wrote my congressman about this (along with a hundred different topics for different discussions here on Slashdot), but I'm afraid as a single human being my clout doesn't reach that far. The American People should have stood up in 2004 when they had a chance to put an end to this madness...
The problem is that this system, good intention or not, has such a large net of effectiveness that it is overwhelmingly a positive, and overwhelmingly a negative situation, all rolled into one convenient digital package.
This has honestly hit me like a load of bricks tonight. The societial rammifications this kind of system could have are absolutely mindboggling. I honestly didn't believe I would live to see the day that this kind of system made it to the real world, but here we are, and the floodgates are open and wrought with a flood of questions.
While one would hope the government will approach this system with a level of benevolence that the all-mighty Google would bow to, I have the overwhelming pit forming in my stomach that it might not be the case. The peacetime and wartime uses of this system for any political power are so far and beyond that of anything that exists today; one could argue that this is a more dangerous weapon than a nuclear arsenal.
The one pit in this program that really burns me is that these human beings are being borne into it. They have no choice to the matter of how this information is collected and generated about them. The system has no opt-in or opt-out features to allow anyone who doesn't agree with the government on how their information is collected to stand out. The system has very few failsafes mentioned on how it would deal with a breech in security, a data-retention policy wasn't discussed.. there are so many questions that a single post could not possibly deal with them all. I hope the government is ready to open up their phone lines and listen, and that the people won't smile and nod their way through what is easily the most important and scary decision of their child's future.
Nobody has attempted it yet because it is very shaky ground to step upon. What anyone could do with this kind of centralized information is nightmarish, and at the same time it seems like such an obvious idea.
Imagine if you would, a worse case scenario taking place where the Nazi's would have a municipal database pointing them to every Jew in their country. Do you think it would have been possible for any of them to escape? Or how about here in America; track every Mexican person that ever crossed a border to try to give their child citizenship and a good future, and deport the ones with "the worse history", be it based on criminal records or genetic profiling.
You would think in a civilized world, people wouldn't need to do any of these things, and yet, they still happen, even today. With terrorism being a hot-button issue, imagine what an anti-terrorist country could do with a database of every known terrorist, who they are related to, who they've come into contact to.. the murder and detention would be madness to think about.
With great power comes great responsibility. The Dutch obviously think that their politicial climate is primed for such responsibility, that their socioeconomic pressure is great enough for a need for this kind of system to be in place. While it could do great good for welfare systems, great good for making sure no young students "fall through the cracks", great good for those families who are broken apart by sex offenders, this same system has the overwhelming potential for the bad.
I wouldn't mind it as much if it were an opt-in system; if these files were created as the person came to age and had the ability to register what they were doing by entering into a database where anyone could know anything they needed to know with a few clicks. I wouldn't mind as much because Pedophiles couldn't abuse this. I wouldn't mind as much because people would have choice. But starting them at birth is like The Matrix or Gattica; no escape from the system unchanged.
1)Get national repository of everyones demographics, from birth to death, catalog everything.
2) Pay crackers to hack into the municipal database, target advertisements specifically to each individual based on their medical and criminal histories.
Even if I would step back and honestly believe that it's not a terrible invasion of privacy, which I'm willing to do for a post or two on slashdot, it will be incredibly telling to see how the government will use this new ability to crosslink and track people a lot more closely.
This is one of the few times where centralization makes sense in one light, but is completely blind in another. Police officers could track "potential offenders" by running a query on who's doing badly in school and who comes from more troubled areas in cities. Governments could decide more closely who gets benefits for college education based on what high schools they came from, what exactly their grades were in every subject, and on what their intended major in college was going to be.
These kinds of databases in America are not connected, and thus, everything's a mediated shot in the dark, but with the connections the Dutch will be making, well, anything's possible.
Sitting on the opening of a system like this, we can only speculate what it will mean for the dutch people. We'll have to wait at least another 20 years to see what's really becoming of the system, and then we will have an objective standpoint in which to base judgement. The government saying it will be benevolent now means nothing to me when in five years the whole regime is changed out for a new radical party with cross views on certain topics (hints abound what I'm talking about).
Personally I'd be more worried about what the Government would be doing with that wealth of information verses what the balls-to-the-wall, caffeine-hyped, advertising firm-paid cracker would do.
There are some crazy things a government could do with that kind of information; track genetic traits, mental defects, medical procedures, medicines taken.. This information is a combination of things that us Americans see as private and need things such as subpenas to see.. Now the police department can be granted access to rummage and look for "possible offenders" before they do anything wrong.
It has strong uses, but its misuses seem to out number them (IMO) in a society that still has troubles seeing everyone as an equal. This "development" is very far ahead of its time.
Wait.. Jobs built the phone? Jobs wrote the software? Certainly Jobs did SOMETHING on this phone to call it his mistake.
Oh wait, he didn't. He just gave Motorola the terms of services and a name to use. How is that a mistake? It looks like Win-Win to Apple; demo a new product without taking the blow, AND sell more songs through iTunes.
Well, that list is conclusive of all countries that have made the weapons (North Korea probably has made nuclear weapons).
The thing is, we have no idea of knowing if some of the earlier Chinese or Russian nuclear weapons have been moved, stolen, or sold since the whole "non-poliferation treaty" happened. I'm sure we tried to keep a good eye on them with spies and satellites, but, well, you see how well that worked in Iraq now didn't you?
This is a travesty and everyone in the country should stand up for themselves. Bush went from being a pompous warmonger to a very dangerous kid in a candy store when Congress opened the flood gates for military spending. Now we're seeing nuclear weapons coming back into vogue; this is only going to lead to more nuclear weapons build up, and all of the progress towards peace we've made in the past few decades is right in the toilet.
My only hope is that the currently sane European Union sees this as an over-zealous political ego bent on bringing back the Crusades and not a serious coup in nuclear policy. More to the point, I hope when the nukes go flying, the rest of the world will sit out and watch North Korea, the US and whatever middle eastern countries decided to get involved, get wiped off the face of the planet. Call me a troll or self-destructive, but it'd be a testimate to the European Union's sanity and the troubles we get into when we forget to work together as a team instead of doing everything our own ways.
Okay sure, the F-117 has the radar cross section equivalent to that of a small bird (quoting the US DOD on the subject). This means it's virtually invisible until you are sitting on top of it.
Secondly, Stealth is a strategic technology: nobody's gonna fly a stealth aircraft right through the middle of a fire fight or an area lit up with radar 8 ways from Sunday. It's dumb.
Lastly, I'm not disputing the Russkies. I'm pretty sure they actually can detect these aircraft, but the question is when, how often, and to what accuracy. Hell, we have airforce bases here that pick up the Stealth Bombers when they leave from Missouri, but they say the signature's either always artifically augmented (a radar beacon), or they only get a flash of something that doesn't fit as an ordinary aircraft.
The F-117 lost in the Balkans was purely luck; they knew the plane was overhead, but couldn't detect it, so they just started throwing everything they had into the air, much like over Baghdad during the Gulf War.
Only this time, one hit the air craft. The F-117 isn't invincible; it's just very hard to see with any kind of technology. As much of the plane was still intact when found, it's very likely that the aircraft was only clipped in one of the wings by a SAM or artillary fire. The pilot had time to make it out alive (ejected).
The US air force KNEW that their stealth fighter fleet needed to be invisible, so they engineered it with ALL the aspects of stealth in mind.
The F-117 is RADAR invisible, virtually indetecable in the night sky, flies too slow to make a audible detection (no sonic boom), and produces a very low heat signature by using a dove-tail section on the rear with protective tiles that absorb heat and disappate it just like the space shuttle tiles.
The F/A-22 was engineered to be RADAR stealthy, but it's engines still produce a considerable amount of heat, and isn't coated with the same kind of RAM; but the F/A-22 was designed to be a true air-to-air combat fighter. The F-117, though called a fighter, is truely a light, stragetic bomber.
Oh it doesn't? Do you have a counter-example of life for us to look at that isn't carbon based, and mostly water and oxygen breathing? (well, trees breathe CO2 for the carbon content, but trees need oxidants too).
If so, please contact someone in the scientific community immediately.
And you think with the rapid adoption of Firefox (which may be supported in the future with a "Google Browser"; a Firefox dressed in Google's clothing) that people will stand for these Microsoft moves?
Most of the time, an API is platform-locked; once you learn an API on one platform, there's just about no way to use it on another. Unix tried to deal away with this in a lot of ways (POSIX..), but the truth still holds true today that when you move platforms, you'd better be prepared to relearn everything; be a master at one, or a geek of all.
That said, people will probably have to choose between either using the Google API (which works fine on Firefox and IE, not to mention Linux and Safari), or the Microsoft API which only works with IE, only on Windows. With Apple coming through as a serious computer distributor these days (its marketshare is exploding), this cross-platform play will be a more important battle than it was when Netscape squared off with Microsoft.
Plus, I'd like to mention Microsoft's acquiesence; instead of trying to force their way of things down users necks, they are slowly morphing their way to looking like their competitors. They're slowly starting to change things around to make them look less like Windows, less like Internet Explorer, and more like any other utility already available. Don't think the public doesn't look at these things and notice.
Number of users doesn't matter when it comes to amount of money made per user. Google's business grows faster because though they may have a smaller number of users, those users are generating a much larger part of their revenue (in fact, virtually all of it).
That being said, Microsoft's revenue stream is entirely Windows and Office, thus the need now to diversify, and quickly, as their upcoming offering is about to be outclassed in every way by the competition.
The game isn't "who gets there first", nor is it "who has the most traffic". The game is entirely "who makes the most money off people". MSN's artificial lead could be strapped from Windows all together with an anti-trust lawsuit ("Microsoft is competing unfairly by strapping MSN to the operating system" "But we can't remove it!!!!1 It provides core functionality!!"...) As for hotmail, you heard it here first: hotmail has been dying for a long time, and as for my "proof", every hotmail user I know shy of one has moved to Gmail (and she stays with hotmail because it's tied to MSN).
By the way, Myspace is owned by News Corp, who also recently bought GameSpy; they're trying to move these services out of the way of the oncoming Google/Microsoft war, as if either got into those positions, it is likely the surrounding businesses like Myspace would be absolutely slaughtered by the competition (anyone using myspace can tell you why).
This is war, the way that the web has been from the beginning. Just because Microsoft won some early battles doesn't mean that this war is over by a long shot; it's been brewing in the back alleys and corners all over the internet. And now (in the eyes of the Geek) the benevolent Google verses the evil Microsoft battle is going to be dominated by a player who's eye is more on helping the community than destroying it.
Netscape was different; netscape, though being the leading competitor, was also the far less powerful competitor. They had virtually no finances to fight the battle, and their development teams seemed to keep starting over, or getting pissed and spinning their wheels.
Google, on the other hand, has the lead, and the money, to fight Microsoft in this market. Their recent IPO has freed up billions of dollars to throw around as they see fit, and I'm fairly certain they are going to be expanding their bases of operations quickly. Alliances in SIP (VoIP), quick competition with Google Talk, and Gmail, and Google Earth's rapid media acceptance (see Hurricane Katrina for details) are all ways Google hopes to stay superior.
This won't be a battle like Netscape vs Microsoft. This time, the software isn't tied to Microsoft's infrastructure in any way (see the prevalance of cross platform tools from Google; they haven't completely full compatibility, but I insure you that they are working on it feverishly). Pair this with extreme competition from Microsoft in market dominance (Apple's catching up fast with the recent iPod successes), and you start seeing a really pissed off Microsoft.
It seems at this point, Microsoft, as well as News Corp, along with EBay, are all feeling the on-coming war, and are sweeping the playing field clear, buying up their places on the battlefield so that Google and Microsoft won't destroy them. See the recent purchase/intent to purchase GameSpy, Skype, etc.
This is war, and a war that Google can fight. Don't expect them to roll over and die like Netscape did.
The question really is "should we start mopping up CO2?". We invented CO2 scubbers a long time ago; the moon modules had to have extensive scrubbers to keep the atmosphere breatheable for the astronauts.
Putting this kind of scrubber in play on earth would be possible, but very, very expensive. And with expense, comes corporate questioning: is the gas really bad enough to warrant installing scrubbers to clean up the atmosphere? Or should we just spend the money on putting scrubbers on our houses, cars, and airplanes?
I know it's terrible to think that the environment could be damaging itself just as badly as we are, and who knows, the CO2 might be a normal puff that earth releases every thousand years or so, to re-invigorate plantlife and exterminate species that are being evil...;)
So really, the answer is "who knows?". It's way too early to start thinking about that; right now the focus should be on reducing emmissions. Once they're reduced, we can think about reducing polution.
Music composition has very little to do with mathematics, and much more to do with patterns
You are aware, that a huge chunk of mathematics (and Computer Science, for that matter) is all about dealing with patterns? So while you might be atomizing the fact that music is about pattern and progression, you are also confirming the fact that music is very mathematical and logical.
Mathematical approaches to music have lead to anything but a dead end; you'd be happy to know that your expensive amplifier, your perfectly-acoustic adjusted headphones, and the software that play back those tones, are all very math-based deals. Hell, the instrument that music was created on was crafted to mathematical perfection; after years of experimenting, someone defeated it by plugging numbers into functions.
Of course, the obvious argument here is that the human trial and error methods will always generate a better sound, but maybe that's because the human that is listening to it isn't perfect... all of that, of course, is speculation.
Astronauts aren't as expensive to replace as their in-flight hardware is, considering it hasn't been manufactured since the late 80's, and there have been nearly a hundred thousand revisions to the shuttle since.
No, the real reason for being so cautious is the reputation of NASA and trying to maintain a pristine record so the old folks don't think they're just spending money frivilously and killing people in the process.
Every astronaut steps on that platform knowing that this very well could be the last time they step foot on terra firma. They knew what they were getting into, each and every astronaut that died. If they weren't well aware of the risk, they would never have been allowed to fly. But, they pressed on because they didn't care; it's an honor to fly in space. You're joining one of the very few humans to have ever been outside of earth's gravity well. To go once is just a dream, to have flown many times.. that's miraculous.
NASA is being reluctant to fly back into space with the shuttle. Every news reporter on the planet wants to see the shuttle fail again; what better PR is there than a story of human tragedy? People build their careers around them, people fail because of them.
NASA is afraid to fly because they can't afford to make mistakes again. Why weren't the nessicary in-flight pictures of the shuttle taken after its first or second flights? Why are we just now taking pictures of regions of the shuttle that have flown into space twenty times without as much as a blink of the eye?
Katrina delaying the shuttle is a travesty, but its one that NASA and the public can live with. Delaying it will help draw some of the heat off the engineers and the space program. Delaying it will give the engineers more time to try to figure out how to make their gunk work and fix those RCC panels. It's terrible we won't get to fly again anytime soon, but it's a godsend to the developers, and I'm sure they've been looking for any way just to get a little more time.
Based on SlashStatistics (a general look through the comments), these movies will fail, miserabily.
The novelty of a comic book movie or a video game movie wears off very quickly, and are often greatly critisized by the true fans of the comic/video game. Yet they keep making these movies because they don't need to put a lot of thought into them; their designers already put their hearts into it and spent their life drawing these characters out in the comic books.
I will admit, there is an occasional breakout hit: The Matrix, Sin City were amazing, Spiderman was not as bad as it could have been. But it hardly makes up for the disasters they wage in the process (Daredevil, Elektra, The Incredible Hulk, come on).
It really is evident in the hollywood scheme of things that they have ran out of movie ideas because the corporation is stifling the idealists. People are too busy crunching the numbers on the films instead of spending the money, making it, and learning something from it. Some say Hollywood has matured in this way, but just look at the box offices: Hollywood hasn't matured at all. They're just remaking the same movies over and over, with different names for the characters, different actors, and in different cities.
I think that's all I can say before I get into a rant..
I don't have mod points, but I want to thank you for a nice, coheirent post on why both current microprocessor companies are good. Not too many of us left here on/.
Slashdot Mirror
To be perfectly honest, and this is just my opinion on the whole situation so don't take it as gospel or anything, but I think the only reason Bush got back in is because the person he was running against never stood a chance in the first place (Kerry was a complete jackass), and I believe that like in the 2000's elections, some unfair play might have taken place.
;) (note: I'm agnostic->athiest)). I really don't feel the media has as much a play in the brainwashing as does the whole American climate; hardly anyone feels any interest in making their own country a better place, and is instead more worried about their daily chores and that taxes are too high.
;). Wouldn't it be a coup.. maybe the American public would notice the disturbing trends in politics..
Ohio (the deciding state) had a lot of counties using electronic voting machines which disturbingly broke down or didn't report accurately, and no record was ever kept of these voting transactions, so this will be impossible to prove one way or another.
Worse, Gore actually won the popular vote in the nation, yet didn't make it to presidency. I feel this a failure of the Democratic process in favor of the Republic process, but that's something we have to live with being a republic. Even moreso, I keep feeling less and less the need for an actual president, and moreso all of its positions cabinet members, restoring the balance of power to the executive branch (in contrast to congress, which was segmented by our system of federalism in a most ideal way).
Our government has a lot of interesting pecularities like all of the above, and that's not to say it's perfect. Disasters happen just as they have been continuously these past 5 years (and it's interesting to see them both happen one year after Bush is confirmed, in the very same window of time.. almost as if God is punishing the nation for their foolishness or telling us the end is near or something
Gore would have made an excellent president to follow Clinton, but Clinton may make an incredible president to follow Bush
But who knows, this entire post is just a bunch of mind questions and personal conspiracy theories/speculations. (Moderators; if you mod this post you are glaringly retarded as this is entirely of opinion. If you agree, reply, or don't if you have already moderated elseware. Sorry for telling you how to do your jobs but this isn't insightful, funny, informative, and I certainly hope it isn't flamebait or troll as it is only my viewpoint of the system as a whole.)
If you're going to make an obscure reference to Nazi Germany that's not likely to be understood by many people, and then refer us to an offsite location for explaination, at least have the courtesy of making it a clicky link ;)
I (as an American) am staunchly against what is happening in Guantanamo Bay; I think it's an absolute travesty, and I believe that the international community should not look at these past five years as an example of how the United States of America deals with a problem.
I would be entirely for economic sanctions against America until we released those people from that base. It's disgusting that we have that much of a lack of respect for the other countries on this planet. It's disgusting to think that our military personel are so entrenched in following orders that nobody would stand up to their superiors and say that what we are doing is just plain wrong.
Luckily, I live in a very liberal community where protesting is a right of passage more than civil disobediance, and I have personally wrote my congressman about this (along with a hundred different topics for different discussions here on Slashdot), but I'm afraid as a single human being my clout doesn't reach that far. The American People should have stood up in 2004 when they had a chance to put an end to this madness...
The problem is that this system, good intention or not, has such a large net of effectiveness that it is overwhelmingly a positive, and overwhelmingly a negative situation, all rolled into one convenient digital package.
This has honestly hit me like a load of bricks tonight. The societial rammifications this kind of system could have are absolutely mindboggling. I honestly didn't believe I would live to see the day that this kind of system made it to the real world, but here we are, and the floodgates are open and wrought with a flood of questions.
While one would hope the government will approach this system with a level of benevolence that the all-mighty Google would bow to, I have the overwhelming pit forming in my stomach that it might not be the case. The peacetime and wartime uses of this system for any political power are so far and beyond that of anything that exists today; one could argue that this is a more dangerous weapon than a nuclear arsenal.
The one pit in this program that really burns me is that these human beings are being borne into it. They have no choice to the matter of how this information is collected and generated about them. The system has no opt-in or opt-out features to allow anyone who doesn't agree with the government on how their information is collected to stand out. The system has very few failsafes mentioned on how it would deal with a breech in security, a data-retention policy wasn't discussed.. there are so many questions that a single post could not possibly deal with them all. I hope the government is ready to open up their phone lines and listen, and that the people won't smile and nod their way through what is easily the most important and scary decision of their child's future.
Good luck Dutchmen.
Nobody has attempted it yet because it is very shaky ground to step upon. What anyone could do with this kind of centralized information is nightmarish, and at the same time it seems like such an obvious idea.
Imagine if you would, a worse case scenario taking place where the Nazi's would have a municipal database pointing them to every Jew in their country. Do you think it would have been possible for any of them to escape? Or how about here in America; track every Mexican person that ever crossed a border to try to give their child citizenship and a good future, and deport the ones with "the worse history", be it based on criminal records or genetic profiling.
You would think in a civilized world, people wouldn't need to do any of these things, and yet, they still happen, even today. With terrorism being a hot-button issue, imagine what an anti-terrorist country could do with a database of every known terrorist, who they are related to, who they've come into contact to.. the murder and detention would be madness to think about.
With great power comes great responsibility. The Dutch obviously think that their politicial climate is primed for such responsibility, that their socioeconomic pressure is great enough for a need for this kind of system to be in place. While it could do great good for welfare systems, great good for making sure no young students "fall through the cracks", great good for those families who are broken apart by sex offenders, this same system has the overwhelming potential for the bad.
I wouldn't mind it as much if it were an opt-in system; if these files were created as the person came to age and had the ability to register what they were doing by entering into a database where anyone could know anything they needed to know with a few clicks. I wouldn't mind as much because Pedophiles couldn't abuse this. I wouldn't mind as much because people would have choice. But starting them at birth is like The Matrix or Gattica; no escape from the system unchanged.
1)Get national repository of everyones demographics, from birth to death, catalog everything.
2) Pay crackers to hack into the municipal database, target advertisements specifically to each individual based on their medical and criminal histories.
3)PROFIT!!
fixed.
Even if I would step back and honestly believe that it's not a terrible invasion of privacy, which I'm willing to do for a post or two on slashdot, it will be incredibly telling to see how the government will use this new ability to crosslink and track people a lot more closely.
This is one of the few times where centralization makes sense in one light, but is completely blind in another. Police officers could track "potential offenders" by running a query on who's doing badly in school and who comes from more troubled areas in cities. Governments could decide more closely who gets benefits for college education based on what high schools they came from, what exactly their grades were in every subject, and on what their intended major in college was going to be. These kinds of databases in America are not connected, and thus, everything's a mediated shot in the dark, but with the connections the Dutch will be making, well, anything's possible.
Sitting on the opening of a system like this, we can only speculate what it will mean for the dutch people. We'll have to wait at least another 20 years to see what's really becoming of the system, and then we will have an objective standpoint in which to base judgement. The government saying it will be benevolent now means nothing to me when in five years the whole regime is changed out for a new radical party with cross views on certain topics (hints abound what I'm talking about).
Personally I'd be more worried about what the Government would be doing with that wealth of information verses what the balls-to-the-wall, caffeine-hyped, advertising firm-paid cracker would do.
There are some crazy things a government could do with that kind of information; track genetic traits, mental defects, medical procedures, medicines taken.. This information is a combination of things that us Americans see as private and need things such as subpenas to see.. Now the police department can be granted access to rummage and look for "possible offenders" before they do anything wrong.
It has strong uses, but its misuses seem to out number them (IMO) in a society that still has troubles seeing everyone as an equal. This "development" is very far ahead of its time.
Wait.. Jobs built the phone? Jobs wrote the software? Certainly Jobs did SOMETHING on this phone to call it his mistake.
Oh wait, he didn't. He just gave Motorola the terms of services and a name to use. How is that a mistake? It looks like Win-Win to Apple; demo a new product without taking the blow, AND sell more songs through iTunes.
Well, that list is conclusive of all countries that have made the weapons (North Korea probably has made nuclear weapons).
The thing is, we have no idea of knowing if some of the earlier Chinese or Russian nuclear weapons have been moved, stolen, or sold since the whole "non-poliferation treaty" happened. I'm sure we tried to keep a good eye on them with spies and satellites, but, well, you see how well that worked in Iraq now didn't you?
This is a travesty and everyone in the country should stand up for themselves. Bush went from being a pompous warmonger to a very dangerous kid in a candy store when Congress opened the flood gates for military spending. Now we're seeing nuclear weapons coming back into vogue; this is only going to lead to more nuclear weapons build up, and all of the progress towards peace we've made in the past few decades is right in the toilet.
My only hope is that the currently sane European Union sees this as an over-zealous political ego bent on bringing back the Crusades and not a serious coup in nuclear policy. More to the point, I hope when the nukes go flying, the rest of the world will sit out and watch North Korea, the US and whatever middle eastern countries decided to get involved, get wiped off the face of the planet. Call me a troll or self-destructive, but it'd be a testimate to the European Union's sanity and the troubles we get into when we forget to work together as a team instead of doing everything our own ways.
Okay sure, the F-117 has the radar cross section equivalent to that of a small bird (quoting the US DOD on the subject). This means it's virtually invisible until you are sitting on top of it.
Secondly, Stealth is a strategic technology: nobody's gonna fly a stealth aircraft right through the middle of a fire fight or an area lit up with radar 8 ways from Sunday. It's dumb.
Lastly, I'm not disputing the Russkies. I'm pretty sure they actually can detect these aircraft, but the question is when, how often, and to what accuracy. Hell, we have airforce bases here that pick up the Stealth Bombers when they leave from Missouri, but they say the signature's either always artifically augmented (a radar beacon), or they only get a flash of something that doesn't fit as an ordinary aircraft.
The F-117 lost in the Balkans was purely luck; they knew the plane was overhead, but couldn't detect it, so they just started throwing everything they had into the air, much like over Baghdad during the Gulf War.
Only this time, one hit the air craft. The F-117 isn't invincible; it's just very hard to see with any kind of technology. As much of the plane was still intact when found, it's very likely that the aircraft was only clipped in one of the wings by a SAM or artillary fire. The pilot had time to make it out alive (ejected).
What the FUCK are you talking about?
The US air force KNEW that their stealth fighter fleet needed to be invisible, so they engineered it with ALL the aspects of stealth in mind.
The F-117 is RADAR invisible, virtually indetecable in the night sky, flies too slow to make a audible detection (no sonic boom), and produces a very low heat signature by using a dove-tail section on the rear with protective tiles that absorb heat and disappate it just like the space shuttle tiles.
The F/A-22 was engineered to be RADAR stealthy, but it's engines still produce a considerable amount of heat, and isn't coated with the same kind of RAM; but the F/A-22 was designed to be a true air-to-air combat fighter. The F-117, though called a fighter, is truely a light, stragetic bomber.
Oh it doesn't? Do you have a counter-example of life for us to look at that isn't carbon based, and mostly water and oxygen breathing? (well, trees breathe CO2 for the carbon content, but trees need oxidants too).
If so, please contact someone in the scientific community immediately.
And you think with the rapid adoption of Firefox (which may be supported in the future with a "Google Browser"; a Firefox dressed in Google's clothing) that people will stand for these Microsoft moves?
Most of the time, an API is platform-locked; once you learn an API on one platform, there's just about no way to use it on another. Unix tried to deal away with this in a lot of ways (POSIX..), but the truth still holds true today that when you move platforms, you'd better be prepared to relearn everything; be a master at one, or a geek of all.
That said, people will probably have to choose between either using the Google API (which works fine on Firefox and IE, not to mention Linux and Safari), or the Microsoft API which only works with IE, only on Windows. With Apple coming through as a serious computer distributor these days (its marketshare is exploding), this cross-platform play will be a more important battle than it was when Netscape squared off with Microsoft.
Plus, I'd like to mention Microsoft's acquiesence; instead of trying to force their way of things down users necks, they are slowly morphing their way to looking like their competitors. They're slowly starting to change things around to make them look less like Windows, less like Internet Explorer, and more like any other utility already available. Don't think the public doesn't look at these things and notice.
One word: anti-trust.
Number of users doesn't matter when it comes to amount of money made per user. Google's business grows faster because though they may have a smaller number of users, those users are generating a much larger part of their revenue (in fact, virtually all of it).
That being said, Microsoft's revenue stream is entirely Windows and Office, thus the need now to diversify, and quickly, as their upcoming offering is about to be outclassed in every way by the competition.
The game isn't "who gets there first", nor is it "who has the most traffic". The game is entirely "who makes the most money off people". MSN's artificial lead could be strapped from Windows all together with an anti-trust lawsuit ("Microsoft is competing unfairly by strapping MSN to the operating system" "But we can't remove it!!!!1 It provides core functionality!!"...) As for hotmail, you heard it here first: hotmail has been dying for a long time, and as for my "proof", every hotmail user I know shy of one has moved to Gmail (and she stays with hotmail because it's tied to MSN).
By the way, Myspace is owned by News Corp, who also recently bought GameSpy; they're trying to move these services out of the way of the oncoming Google/Microsoft war, as if either got into those positions, it is likely the surrounding businesses like Myspace would be absolutely slaughtered by the competition (anyone using myspace can tell you why).
This is war, the way that the web has been from the beginning. Just because Microsoft won some early battles doesn't mean that this war is over by a long shot; it's been brewing in the back alleys and corners all over the internet. And now (in the eyes of the Geek) the benevolent Google verses the evil Microsoft battle is going to be dominated by a player who's eye is more on helping the community than destroying it.
Can't wait for Google's reaction come next week.
Netscape was different; netscape, though being the leading competitor, was also the far less powerful competitor. They had virtually no finances to fight the battle, and their development teams seemed to keep starting over, or getting pissed and spinning their wheels.
Google, on the other hand, has the lead, and the money, to fight Microsoft in this market. Their recent IPO has freed up billions of dollars to throw around as they see fit, and I'm fairly certain they are going to be expanding their bases of operations quickly. Alliances in SIP (VoIP), quick competition with Google Talk, and Gmail, and Google Earth's rapid media acceptance (see Hurricane Katrina for details) are all ways Google hopes to stay superior.
This won't be a battle like Netscape vs Microsoft. This time, the software isn't tied to Microsoft's infrastructure in any way (see the prevalance of cross platform tools from Google; they haven't completely full compatibility, but I insure you that they are working on it feverishly). Pair this with extreme competition from Microsoft in market dominance (Apple's catching up fast with the recent iPod successes), and you start seeing a really pissed off Microsoft.
It seems at this point, Microsoft, as well as News Corp, along with EBay, are all feeling the on-coming war, and are sweeping the playing field clear, buying up their places on the battlefield so that Google and Microsoft won't destroy them. See the recent purchase/intent to purchase GameSpy, Skype, etc.
This is war, and a war that Google can fight. Don't expect them to roll over and die like Netscape did.
The question really is "should we start mopping up CO2?". We invented CO2 scubbers a long time ago; the moon modules had to have extensive scrubbers to keep the atmosphere breatheable for the astronauts.
;)
Putting this kind of scrubber in play on earth would be possible, but very, very expensive. And with expense, comes corporate questioning: is the gas really bad enough to warrant installing scrubbers to clean up the atmosphere? Or should we just spend the money on putting scrubbers on our houses, cars, and airplanes?
I know it's terrible to think that the environment could be damaging itself just as badly as we are, and who knows, the CO2 might be a normal puff that earth releases every thousand years or so, to re-invigorate plantlife and exterminate species that are being evil...
So really, the answer is "who knows?". It's way too early to start thinking about that; right now the focus should be on reducing emmissions. Once they're reduced, we can think about reducing polution.
Music composition has very little to do with mathematics, and much more to do with patterns
You are aware, that a huge chunk of mathematics (and Computer Science, for that matter) is all about dealing with patterns? So while you might be atomizing the fact that music is about pattern and progression, you are also confirming the fact that music is very mathematical and logical.
Mathematical approaches to music have lead to anything but a dead end; you'd be happy to know that your expensive amplifier, your perfectly-acoustic adjusted headphones, and the software that play back those tones, are all very math-based deals. Hell, the instrument that music was created on was crafted to mathematical perfection; after years of experimenting, someone defeated it by plugging numbers into functions.
Of course, the obvious argument here is that the human trial and error methods will always generate a better sound, but maybe that's because the human that is listening to it isn't perfect... all of that, of course, is speculation.
You mean you actually bought Sex For Dummies??
Astronauts aren't as expensive to replace as their in-flight hardware is, considering it hasn't been manufactured since the late 80's, and there have been nearly a hundred thousand revisions to the shuttle since.
No, the real reason for being so cautious is the reputation of NASA and trying to maintain a pristine record so the old folks don't think they're just spending money frivilously and killing people in the process.
Every astronaut steps on that platform knowing that this very well could be the last time they step foot on terra firma. They knew what they were getting into, each and every astronaut that died. If they weren't well aware of the risk, they would never have been allowed to fly. But, they pressed on because they didn't care; it's an honor to fly in space. You're joining one of the very few humans to have ever been outside of earth's gravity well. To go once is just a dream, to have flown many times.. that's miraculous.
NASA is being reluctant to fly back into space with the shuttle. Every news reporter on the planet wants to see the shuttle fail again; what better PR is there than a story of human tragedy? People build their careers around them, people fail because of them.
NASA is afraid to fly because they can't afford to make mistakes again. Why weren't the nessicary in-flight pictures of the shuttle taken after its first or second flights? Why are we just now taking pictures of regions of the shuttle that have flown into space twenty times without as much as a blink of the eye?
Katrina delaying the shuttle is a travesty, but its one that NASA and the public can live with. Delaying it will help draw some of the heat off the engineers and the space program. Delaying it will give the engineers more time to try to figure out how to make their gunk work and fix those RCC panels. It's terrible we won't get to fly again anytime soon, but it's a godsend to the developers, and I'm sure they've been looking for any way just to get a little more time.
Godspeed NASA.
Based on SlashStatistics (a general look through the comments), these movies will fail, miserabily.
The novelty of a comic book movie or a video game movie wears off very quickly, and are often greatly critisized by the true fans of the comic/video game. Yet they keep making these movies because they don't need to put a lot of thought into them; their designers already put their hearts into it and spent their life drawing these characters out in the comic books.
I will admit, there is an occasional breakout hit: The Matrix, Sin City were amazing, Spiderman was not as bad as it could have been. But it hardly makes up for the disasters they wage in the process (Daredevil, Elektra, The Incredible Hulk, come on).
It really is evident in the hollywood scheme of things that they have ran out of movie ideas because the corporation is stifling the idealists. People are too busy crunching the numbers on the films instead of spending the money, making it, and learning something from it. Some say Hollywood has matured in this way, but just look at the box offices: Hollywood hasn't matured at all. They're just remaking the same movies over and over, with different names for the characters, different actors, and in different cities.
I think that's all I can say before I get into a rant..
I don't have mod points, but I want to thank you for a nice, coheirent post on why both current microprocessor companies are good. Not too many of us left here on /.
Cool, I guess.. This really isn't news, but eh, it's still pretty neat.
Sad to say I've never even heard of the MESSENGER spacecraft before today.