Actually the USSR version of SDI was likely to be much more effective at protecting the leadership than anything us in the West would come up with.
Basically the idea as to build a huge centralised bunker under moscow. Then aim loads of nukes at moscow but set them to airburst in the upper atmosphere. This would have created a huge superheated nuclear fallout cloud that would cause any incoming nukes to detonate before they reached the ground. It would probably also have killed people all over Russia and the world when it fell to earth but the Russian leadership would have survived.
I have just tried searching for some links about this plan but found nothing. I originaly heard about it from some post cold war documentary about Russia's nuclear capability. If anyone else knows anything about it could they post some links?
Thanks for the definition of the word troll. It does seem to be a little different to the one posted in a link above though. I think I prefer the definition posted above as it seems to suggest that a prerequisite for being a troll is an ignorance of the subject you are posting about.
I posted a reply to someone else regarding my sig and see no reason to repeat it here.
The sig is a way of trying to express my disdain for people to lazy to read linked articles but who still try and take part in a discussion of said article.
I am an ordinary person, I also have bills to pay.
But I do not go to work for some bunch of scum sucking pigs just because I could earn more money than I currently do. Instead I work for a company that I find agreeable.
I know alot of people who try and pass on the responsiblity for what they do at work to management, and I tell them what a load of crap that is too. If you don't like what you do then find a better job, even if it does involve a pay cut. Otherwise you are complicit in whatever misdeeds you might be asked to perform at work.
And don't tell me that if someone said 'here, have lots of money and all you have to do is write some blog entries', you'd say no. Not if the money were good. I wouldn't. Then you have no morals, but why do you find it so hard to believe that some of us do have a moral code which we value as such an important part of who we are that no amount of money would justify tearing it up and putting it in the bin.
And before you talk about how I have never been desperate enough, guess again. To get my current job involved me relocating a long way at considerable inconvenience to take a cut in salary.
I think I am probably in the minority in this otherwise the world would be a better place, but I am very unlikely to change in this regard. The only thing I can think of that might change my outlook would be watching my kids starve, but seeing as I have spent years in the past doing dead end jobs, I know I could return to this and still earn a not too dissimilar wage.
Ethics are easy if your wealthy, but.. Actually, I think the opposite is true. Since I have never been wealthy, I have never been in situation where I got used to having alot of money to spend. Once you get used to having a large amount of money at you disposal (or your wife does) it is much harder to go back to being closer to the breadline.
This also makes it easier when looking for work as my salary demands are lower. This does not mean I am bad at my job or that I value my work less. It simply means that I get other satisfaction from my job apart from just getting a monthly wage. I think it actually means I take far more pride in the code I produce. This argument should not really come as any surprise to people who use Linux as this is built and maintained on similar, non-monetary values.
Since you have a very low ID, you get this question:
What constitutes a troll?
I regularly post expressing my disagreement with american foreign policy and get modded as a troll. I know I hold alot of views that many US citizens disagree with, but does that make me a troll? What was the origin of the expression?
Also ask Sun about the needless patents they seem to want to hold on ZFS.
Patents are usually not needless. Usually you obtain a patent on critical new technology not so you can sue other people who infringe it, but so you can stop some other company patenting your idea and dragging you through the courts after you make money and have some to lose.
I know that the patent system has checks and balances that are designed to prevent this but the reality is that those check and balances have been know to be inadequate for years.
I guarantee that such a move by Yahoo would decimate googles usage by Americans.
It might work, yes. Unfortunately China currently has a population of 1.3 Billion against Americas population of 0.3 billion.
So if you gain every single american who ditches google, but lose every single resident of China you are still at least 1 billion down. The reason that all companies are so keen to jump into bed with China is that they have such a huge population and yet the standard of living is rising at a scary rate.
This is also one of the reasons why they are going to break the bank as far as oil and the world environment. Those 1.3 Billion are all now looking at gaining the same standard of living as us in the west, and if they do we are in for some tough times. The nation could end up with the consumer spending power equivalent to at least the US and Canada combined. That would still leave another half a billion people to live below the poverty line and do all the grunt work.
Of course, had he picked a different license it's dubious that Linux would have gained any significant traction in the end.
I'd love to hear your rationale for that statement. I thought alot of companies used linux because of the flexibility it offered. The flexibilty to base a product on it and save alot of effort of developing from scratch. I would have thought that if you get too fussy with regard to the licence and how the code can be used alot of companies will just run away for the sake of avoiding the legal issues, after all coders are cheaper than lawyers.
Or alternatively they decide to risk it, throw the entire licence in the bin and challenge it on a technicality. They then throw huge amounts of money at it until they win. Even the most diehard fan of the US legal system must admit that this is at least a risk. I have certainly heard of more bizarre miscarriages of justice than a licence being binned simply because the people defending the licence were out spent in court.
How exactly does IBM feel about the GPL3? Have they made any public announcements of even tacit support? In a previous slashdot debate someone told me that certain products not aimed at consumers would be exempt from the part of the licence that meant you had to open up your entire products source (with respect to google intranet search boxes - they also contain google proprietary algorithms so you are not allowed to even open the case). I would hate to have to argue in court what a product aimed at consumers was, especially against either Google or IBM's lawyers. And these are just two companies pulled off the top of my head. I bet there are other companies selling linux based devices that are certainly aimed at consumers like cell phones.
The problem is that if a company already has a product in production but not quite on the market they may just risk launching it to see how much it makes. There would be plenty of people who would buy it regardless of it violating the GPL3 if they found it useful.
Sadam was not an islamic dictator. He was in fact doing a better job of keeping the islamic fundamentalists repressed with his totalitarian regime than we seem to have been doing more recently.
That is one of the reasons why their was a bitter war between Iran and Iraw for years.
You seem to be a little confused. The contention ratio of a broadband account is how many times thet sell the same bandwidth. So if you buy a 5000/1000 account, they sell the same 5000 to 50 (or 20) other people on the basis that you wont all try and use it at the same time.
On a business connection you should be fairly safe.
Where I work we have a similar business connection which used to be 24Meg / 1Meg. Part of my job involves uploading content to our offsite servers. This would usually involve files a few Gb in size. After we would regularly leave work at 5pm and leave it uploading through their busiest evening period they got back to use to ask if we wanted to upgrade our upstream speed at the expense of downstream. We did and now we have 2 or 3 Meg depending on how busy they are. The downstream speed is pretty irrelevant to us as we rarely use it to its full capacity.
Most business ISP's expect this. Certainly here in britain a business account usually comes with 20:1 contention ratio instead of 50:1 which most home users get. A business is also expected to be sharing a single DSL line amongst an entire office so they expect higher levels of constant usage.
It will be called The Church of the AntiReal. We will be dedicated to driving a certain dead video format even further into the ground, not for any logical reason mind you, then it wouldn't be a proper religious crusade.
You gotta love the lawyers letter regarding how well he does at getting people off Sexual Misconduct charges. If I ever rape anyone in his neck of the woods I'll know just where to turn.
Thanks for the article, it made interesting reading.
But it does only speculate as to Chinese involvement in the Code Red worm. I got the impression from hacking incidents over the spyplane that the people participating on both sides were just silly little script kiddies (on both sides). I would hope that any US or Chinese government hacker could find better things to do than deface some random websites.
It is also interesting that at the bottom of the article they have a note saying that the first version of the story pointed a finger at a respected security company for helping in the worms creation. The fact that they suggested this than had to correct the article goes some way to robbing it of any credibilty it might have once had in suggesting a Chinese link.
The problem is that until China start invading other countries it is quite hard to justify doing anything, especially when you consider that they have nuclear weapons.
I suppose we could strike first with our nuclear weapons but it is a bit hard to justify doing this using the argument of helping the Chinese people. There are a great many injustices in the world but for the most part we can do nothing about them. I try and avoid buying Chinese produce but this is bloody difficult nowadays being that the seem to make everything.
The reality is that the any effective, long term solution has to come from the people of China.
Do you actually have any information on where I can read more about this? I just tried a search and all I found was an article saying it originated in the Phillipines.
Which side am I supposed to choose here? The recording industry, or Real Networks. I hate them both.
Why?
The answer to the recording industry in can guess if you actually mean RIAA. But they are not the whole industry, they only represent the biggest companies.
But why hate Real Networks? They have indulged in some dubious business practices in the past I thought they stopped those when they jumped on the Open Source bandwagon.
No offence but who gives a fuck about violating the "wishes" of human rights violators.
Do you feel the same way about the US government. They also violate peoples human rights. The two most current examples are Gauntanamo Bay and the rendition torture express flights being operated by the CIA.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the USSR version of SDI was likely to be much more effective at protecting the leadership than anything us in the West would come up with.
Basically the idea as to build a huge centralised bunker under moscow. Then aim loads of nukes at moscow but set them to airburst in the upper atmosphere. This would have created a huge superheated nuclear fallout cloud that would cause any incoming nukes to detonate before they reached the ground. It would probably also have killed people all over Russia and the world when it fell to earth but the Russian leadership would have survived.
I have just tried searching for some links about this plan but found nothing. I originaly heard about it from some post cold war documentary about Russia's nuclear capability. If anyone else knows anything about it could they post some links?
Thanks for the definition of the word troll. It does seem to be a little different to the one posted in a link above though. I think I prefer the definition posted above as it seems to suggest that a prerequisite for being a troll is an ignorance of the subject you are posting about.
I posted a reply to someone else regarding my sig and see no reason to repeat it here.
The sig is a way of trying to express my disdain for people to lazy to read linked articles but who still try and take part in a discussion of said article.
I suppose it is my attempt at Socratic irony:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony
But I do not go to work for some bunch of scum sucking pigs just because I could earn more money than I currently do. Instead I work for a company that I find agreeable.
I know alot of people who try and pass on the responsiblity for what they do at work to management, and I tell them what a load of crap that is too. If you don't like what you do then find a better job, even if it does involve a pay cut. Otherwise you are complicit in whatever misdeeds you might be asked to perform at work. And don't tell me that if someone said 'here, have lots of money and all you have to do is write some blog entries', you'd say no. Not if the money were good. I wouldn't. Then you have no morals, but why do you find it so hard to believe that some of us do have a moral code which we value as such an important part of who we are that no amount of money would justify tearing it up and putting it in the bin.
And before you talk about how I have never been desperate enough, guess again. To get my current job involved me relocating a long way at considerable inconvenience to take a cut in salary.
I think I am probably in the minority in this otherwise the world would be a better place, but I am very unlikely to change in this regard. The only thing I can think of that might change my outlook would be watching my kids starve, but seeing as I have spent years in the past doing dead end jobs, I know I could return to this and still earn a not too dissimilar wage. Ethics are easy if your wealthy, but.. Actually, I think the opposite is true. Since I have never been wealthy, I have never been in situation where I got used to having alot of money to spend. Once you get used to having a large amount of money at you disposal (or your wife does) it is much harder to go back to being closer to the breadline.
This also makes it easier when looking for work as my salary demands are lower. This does not mean I am bad at my job or that I value my work less. It simply means that I get other satisfaction from my job apart from just getting a monthly wage. I think it actually means I take far more pride in the code I produce. This argument should not really come as any surprise to people who use Linux as this is built and maintained on similar, non-monetary values.
Since you have a very low ID, you get this question:
What constitutes a troll?
I regularly post expressing my disagreement with american foreign policy and get modded as a troll. I know I hold alot of views that many US citizens disagree with, but does that make me a troll? What was the origin of the expression?
Also ask Sun about the needless patents they seem to want to hold on ZFS.
Patents are usually not needless. Usually you obtain a patent on critical new technology not so you can sue other people who infringe it, but so you can stop some other company patenting your idea and dragging you through the courts after you make money and have some to lose.
I know that the patent system has checks and balances that are designed to prevent this but the reality is that those check and balances have been know to be inadequate for years.
Count yourself lucky. I accidentally put ampersands before the second to last test in my code.
I guarantee that such a move by Yahoo would decimate googles usage by Americans.
It might work, yes. Unfortunately China currently has a population of 1.3 Billion against Americas population of 0.3 billion.
So if you gain every single american who ditches google, but lose every single resident of China you are still at least 1 billion down. The reason that all companies are so keen to jump into bed with China is that they have such a huge population and yet the standard of living is rising at a scary rate.
This is also one of the reasons why they are going to break the bank as far as oil and the world environment. Those 1.3 Billion are all now looking at gaining the same standard of living as us in the west, and if they do we are in for some tough times. The nation could end up with the consumer spending power equivalent to at least the US and Canada combined. That would still leave another half a billion people to live below the poverty line and do all the grunt work.
I'd rather not do that... to me, health and safety is worth more than money.
:)
Then you obviously dont have enough yet.
Of course, had he picked a different license it's dubious that Linux would have gained any significant traction in the end.
I'd love to hear your rationale for that statement. I thought alot of companies used linux because of the flexibility it offered. The flexibilty to base a product on it and save alot of effort of developing from scratch. I would have thought that if you get too fussy with regard to the licence and how the code can be used alot of companies will just run away for the sake of avoiding the legal issues, after all coders are cheaper than lawyers.
Or alternatively they decide to risk it, throw the entire licence in the bin and challenge it on a technicality. They then throw huge amounts of money at it until they win. Even the most diehard fan of the US legal system must admit that this is at least a risk. I have certainly heard of more bizarre miscarriages of justice than a licence being binned simply because the people defending the licence were out spent in court.
How exactly does IBM feel about the GPL3? Have they made any public announcements of even tacit support? In a previous slashdot debate someone told me that certain products not aimed at consumers would be exempt from the part of the licence that meant you had to open up your entire products source (with respect to google intranet search boxes - they also contain google proprietary algorithms so you are not allowed to even open the case). I would hate to have to argue in court what a product aimed at consumers was, especially against either Google or IBM's lawyers. And these are just two companies pulled off the top of my head. I bet there are other companies selling linux based devices that are certainly aimed at consumers like cell phones.
The problem is that if a company already has a product in production but not quite on the market they may just risk launching it to see how much it makes. There would be plenty of people who would buy it regardless of it violating the GPL3 if they found it useful.
You seem to know an awful lot about this, how so?
Also, didn't the US help put Saddam in power in Iraq and help arm him during the Iran - Iraq war.
Sadam was not an islamic dictator. He was in fact doing a better job of keeping the islamic fundamentalists repressed with his totalitarian regime than we seem to have been doing more recently.
That is one of the reasons why their was a bitter war between Iran and Iraw for years.
You seem to be a little confused. The contention ratio of a broadband account is how many times thet sell the same bandwidth. So if you buy a 5000/1000 account, they sell the same 5000 to 50 (or 20) other people on the basis that you wont all try and use it at the same time.
Here is a link describing this better than I:
http://www.getonlinebroadband.com/faqs/faq02.html
Thanks, I meant what I said sbout your insightful post too. I wish I had some points for it.
lol, but they still let you onto slashdot? I'm sure that will be blocked soon enough.
A wonderfully insightful post from Mr Bullshit.
On a business connection you should be fairly safe.
Where I work we have a similar business connection which used to be 24Meg / 1Meg. Part of my job involves uploading content to our offsite servers. This would usually involve files a few Gb in size. After we would regularly leave work at 5pm and leave it uploading through their busiest evening period they got back to use to ask if we wanted to upgrade our upstream speed at the expense of downstream. We did and now we have 2 or 3 Meg depending on how busy they are. The downstream speed is pretty irrelevant to us as we rarely use it to its full capacity.
Most business ISP's expect this. Certainly here in britain a business account usually comes with 20:1 contention ratio instead of 50:1 which most home users get. A business is also expected to be sharing a single DSL line amongst an entire office so they expect higher levels of constant usage.
I think I am going to start a new religion.
It will be called The Church of the AntiReal. We will be dedicated to driving a certain dead video format even further into the ground, not for any logical reason mind you, then it wouldn't be a proper religious crusade.
You gotta love the lawyers letter regarding how well he does at getting people off Sexual Misconduct charges. If I ever rape anyone in his neck of the woods I'll know just where to turn.
Thanks for the article, it made interesting reading.
But it does only speculate as to Chinese involvement in the Code Red worm. I got the impression from hacking incidents over the spyplane that the people participating on both sides were just silly little script kiddies (on both sides). I would hope that any US or Chinese government hacker could find better things to do than deface some random websites.
It is also interesting that at the bottom of the article they have a note saying that the first version of the story pointed a finger at a respected security company for helping in the worms creation. The fact that they suggested this than had to correct the article goes some way to robbing it of any credibilty it might have once had in suggesting a Chinese link.
The problem is that until China start invading other countries it is quite hard to justify doing anything, especially when you consider that they have nuclear weapons.
I suppose we could strike first with our nuclear weapons but it is a bit hard to justify doing this using the argument of helping the Chinese people. There are a great many injustices in the world but for the most part we can do nothing about them. I try and avoid buying Chinese produce but this is bloody difficult nowadays being that the seem to make everything.
The reality is that the any effective, long term solution has to come from the people of China.
Do you actually have any information on where I can read more about this? I just tried a search and all I found was an article saying it originated in the Phillipines.
Curiousity.
Which side am I supposed to choose here? The recording industry, or Real Networks. I hate them both.
Why?
The answer to the recording industry in can guess if you actually mean RIAA. But they are not the whole industry, they only represent the biggest companies.
But why hate Real Networks? They have indulged in some dubious business practices in the past I thought they stopped those when they jumped on the Open Source bandwagon.
No offence but who gives a fuck about violating the "wishes" of human rights violators.
i on
Do you feel the same way about the US government. They also violate peoples human rights. The two most current examples are Gauntanamo Bay and the rendition torture express flights being operated by the CIA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendit