Picture of woman sucking off a horse == free speech.
Giving money to a candidate whose political beliefs you agree with == corruption of the highest order and worthy of heavy-handed restrictions.
I mean, really. When the Supreme Court will forbid political speech but allow barnyard porn it's time to refresh that tree of liberty with a little tyrant blood. Well, okay, not tyrants per se. Just really blitheringly dumb.
Okay, I'll talk defaults. I installed a RedHat box several years ago. The default install included wu-ftpd, the biggest piece of crap ever coded out of ass-fresh cow patties. Within a week, a lovely root kit was installed, and I only found out about the rooting (and wu-ftpd) when "ls" stopped working correctly. After this experience, I moved to FreeBSD and have never looked back.
So. You want to talk about defaults? Are you sure?
pgsql fulfills certain needs better than mysql. I prefer pgsql, because I have a lot more experience with it. Often, pgsql is touted for its ACID compliance, which is (usually) unneccessary for Web applications.
mysql always seemed to me to be a real amateurish production, while pgsql seemed more professional. That's just interpretation, however, and may be influenced by the fact that every half-assed Perl hackery uses mysql as its backend. Guilt by association, I suppose.
If I were doing something that needed a certain degree of robustness, however, I'd definitely go for pgsql. I'm less terrified of it.
The first time an employee comes to you (as the head nerd, whether officially or unofficially) and says "my computer is screwed up", and you go and find a machine so filled with crap, fluff, and outright dangerous bullshit--that's when you lock down the machines.
I'm doing that now, because I don't have the time to fix people's machines when they've downloaded "cool new cursors", or whatever, and now their machine runs like a dog.
P.S. Training is not the answer, because the question they ask is not, "Will this hurt my machine," it's "Well, if it screws up, I'll just call for Bob--he'll fix it." You can threaten, cajole and wheedle all you want. The lure of a rotating Dale Earnhardt "3" cursor and a dancing alien on top of the Taskbar will overrule you every time.
...and which utterly fails the test of "usability", under any sense of the word. Your idea of a piece of paper is particularly funny. He can simply do that now, with the individual remotes. Unless your argument is that your plan involves a shorter crib-sheet.
The problem is that there is no way for a remote to determine the state of the device it controls, and there is no way for another device to determine the state of another device. That is the problem. Every remote in the world tries to solve the problem, and none of them have, because the fundamental problem lies with the device, not the remote. It is simply not a solvable problem with the current tech.
(It is slightly less intractable if you purchase an "all-in-one" setup from Sony or the like. My statement only applies to disparate components from multiple manufacturers. Neither are you to mention the remote with the LCD that tries to remember your settings. When somebody comes through and turns things on and off without the remote and screws up everything, that remote then goes into 20-Questions. I do not find that amusing in my devices of convenience.)
Indeed, I solved the problem of how-to-do-this-or-that with the entertainment center by showing people how to do what they want to do AT the entertainment center. The remotes only serve as Volume +/- and Channel +/- buttons. And, since we don't have cable, we hardly ever use the Channel buttons anyway. Our lives are significantly simpler, since all we do is watch the occasional movie from Netflix, but even so, it's only a matter of pushing a few well-labled buttons on the reciever to set things the way you want, then you sit down to watch. I find that to be easier to explain than non-, poorly-, or misleadingly-labled, miniscule buttons with no tactile feedback on modern remotes.
BTW, spending >$30 on a remote should be grounds for automatic promotion into the 95% "Too much money, not enough sense" tax bracket, and automatic nutsack-ectomy. (Yes, everybody who buys a schmancy remote is a guy--guaranteed.)
The best part of this cohesion you get from FreeBSD (and Open- and Net-) is that the filesystem is not laid out like they gave a paintbrush to an epileptic. Things are put in logical places.
This changes a bit when you delve into the/usr/ports/ tree, but not much. The port maintainers generally keep to the standards. I.e., they don't fill/etc with a bunch of crap.
I can't bear to use any of the GNU/Linux distros these days. Partially for aethetic reasons, but also because of the gung-ho mentality of Linux nerds who will stick any damn thing any damn place they damn well want to. *BSD admins tend to stick to canon, I've noticed, whereas GNU/Linux admins each do their own thing. So after a couple of years, you can't find anything and often enough find the same thing installed twice. My experience, YMMV.
I haven't installed Linux on a machine of mine in probably 6 years. I've become quite the fan of FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
I was running OpenBSD 2.8 on a Thinkpad 760ed. That's a Pentium 133 with 48MB of RAM. You'll be hard-pressed to find a computer less capable. But, running OBSD 2.8, with XFree 3.3.6, it was entirely usable. I ran XEmacs and Netscape 4 with no troubles on top of WindowMaker--still the finest window manager around, to my mind.
Later, I upgraded to OBSD 2.9, but hated it. 2.9 moved to XFree 4.0, which was MUCH slower than 3.3.6.
Of course, running Netscape 4.0 these days is just asking for trouble; but, jeez, there is hardly a single graphical web browser that isn't a bloated pig.
I have another old Thinkpad, a 760e that has similar specs. I run Windows 98 on it. Why? Well, it can run a recent web browser (IE), it can run an office suite (MS Office 97), and you can play MP3s on it (Windows Media Player, or WinAmp). All that, and on a 133mhz Pentium with 64 MB RAM and a 700 MB hard drive.
There is a market for sprucing up old computers with Free software written to accomodate older and slower hardware, but it is hard. You have to make usability decisions--is this important? Can I lose this? We have to keep that--and write careful code. In other words, you have to do hard work, and hard work isn't sexy. At the end, you get an OS that will run on an 8 year old computer... when a brand new computer can be had from eMachines for $500. That's incredibly hard to justify.
Rather than "revitalizing" old computers, the Free software crowd would do better to anticipate the needs of the future, rather than chasing the current offerings from Cupertino or Redmond. What are the needs of the future? I dunno--if I did know, I sure wouldn't tell you. But, I think that it will involve distributed services and rapid propogation of data through multiple channels. Meaning, I think that our "computers" will become even MORE personal, as in our mobile phones will become our primary device. When we're away from home, all our data will be available through the phone, either stored physically on the phone, or virtually through data services offered by the phone company. We'll be able to augment our phone's capabilities with near-remote (docking station), or far-remote (your ISP's server) services. The phone can switch between a wired, 802.11 wireless, or CDMA/TDMA/Whatever wireless through your phone service seamlessly.
(Say you're a geek, your SSH session to a remote server will (through the miracle of screen)
automatically detach your session when you yank your phone out of it's cradle and go to work. At work, when you attach your phone to another station, hey presto your session reattaches itself, and you continue where you left off.)
What makes this work is powerful, reliable servers, and lightweight, network transparent protocols that scale from a simple terminal to a full-screen GUI. Golly, it sounds like the Free software community running free *nixes and X, don't it?
I almost bought the 12" Powerbook because of it's size. Small and lightweight, I could more or less carry it anywhere. I didn't go for it, and went with the 15" TiBook instead, because at the time the 12" would only go to 640MB of RAM. I needed the gig of RAM the 15" TiBook offered. (I can't fucking believe I'm saying that. Anyway...)
I can certainly see the phone becoming an uber device, eventually. The various PalmOS phones already are nearly there. A friend who is in anthropology was trying to figure out a data-entry solution for a few months while he was in Chiapas state. We discussed a few options (such as buying a cheap ThinkPad in the 133mhz Pentium range like the 760e), but what we eventually figured would be his best option was his Palm IIIxe with one of those collapsible keyboards.
The IIIxe is a complete computer in itself. It can do almost everything a bigger computer can do, functionally. It's only real limitations are speed and storage--you can do a whole lot of useful work with just a B/W text interface. Where the device might fall down (such as with photo editing), it can be enhanced by external server-based services.
For example, assume you store photos in your phone/PDA/camera. A processor capable of doing real photo-manipulation would be more than such a small device is capable of. So, when you get home, you plug your phoneto a USB keyboard and mouse, and to a big monitor. The phone talks wirelessly to your home server (or to a server on the wider Internet), and you run a local X server on the phone with the photo manipulation software running on the beefier server.
When you're done, the photos are synced back to the phone, all nicely edited.
It's things like this where the Free software community could really be forging ahead with new ideas and new ways of thinking. The old, traditional X, often thought of as bloated and outdated, is actually a great solution for situations just like this. This is a business opportunity just waiting for somebody to pick up the ball and run with it. Imagine real estate agents--they can access everything they need from a convenient device that can interface with various I/O devices that meet a relatively simple standard. Plug the phone into a cradle in their cars, and the agent's client can browse through photos and whatnot while they're driving around.
The business traveller only needs to bring his uber-phone, since the hotel he's staying at will have one of the stripped-down terminals available on demand.
Never mind all that, though--I'd rather re-implement Microsoft's Exchange protocol so I can strike back against the Evil Empire by installing a Linux server. Take that, Bill!
That's funny... When pictures show up of American soldiers playing Nude Iraqi Jenga, Ted Kennedy gets on and compares this to Saddam's torture chambers. Compares--he equates the two. That he's getting any airtime speaks to either a bias, or a complete failure of editorial control that (in a just world) would presage the total collapse of the journalism world.
This story is still getting play in "mainstream" media outlets, when most of America is saying, "Meh." There is no effort made to put the photos in perspective, or to get any real objective information about them. It's all simply a smear job on the whole war effort. "Tonight on 'Face the Pressline': seven soldiers made Iraqi soldiers strip and form a human pyramid. Is it time that we disband our military and start polka-dancing for world peace?"
Does the sarin gas prove WMDs? No. Does the prison scandal prove some of the really absurd things that have been bandied about by the press? No. So, maybe now, you see the point of the other side, where they wonder at the wild accusations that seem to constitute "news".
Re:The only real answer is to reorganize society.
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
Enjoy it while you still can. It's not sustainable in the long term.
Sure it's sustainable. Perhaps it's not sustainable with internal combustion engines, but that's not what we're arguing. Whether the car runs on gasoline or Mr. Fusion, the result is the same: utter freedom of movement.
It doesn't mean you can't go to a grocery store farther away if you don't like the selection in your neighborhood.
Sure it does. Oh, technically you can take the bus to the grocery across town, but really--are you going to make the effort? You're limited to what you can carry on the bus, whereas you can fit enough food for a month in an Explorer. You have to haul your groceries to the bus from the grocery, from the bus station to your house, instead of just from the garage to the front door.
Just because a cripple can run the NY Marathon, it's not the best option available.
Part of the reason public transportation in the US stinks so badly, is that our society is just not built for people to get around in. It's built for cars to get around in. Study old european cities, even New York City, for how to get around without *requiring* a car.
I vacationed for a week in NYC just last December. I think I used a taxi once. The rest of the time, the subway worked wonders. The diffence is that NYC started as a largely pedestrian city. In comparison, a city like Atlanta is brand new. It is designed appropriately (okay, appropriately-ish) for the major form of transportation, which is automobiles.
Don't misuderstand. I'd much rather use light-rail or a high-speed monorail ("Monorail!
Homer: Mono... D'oh!") rather than a car to go visit the in-laws on the coast. It's a 3-hour drive. Even if it was a 4-hour train ride, as long as it was reasonable ($20/person or so), it would be better (except in emergencies), because I can relax, or work, or chat with my wife on the train in comfort. But that's not available. Instead, I can take Greyhound--for $111 round-trip, and it will take 6 hours (one way, 8 hours for the return trip), and I don't have a swell compartment with AC, or a club car where I can get a martini. I'd have to be insane to choose that. It costs me $35 in gas.
Your problem is that you're looking at Tokyo and NYC--I'm looking at Jackson, Mississippi. I literally cannot live without a car. I don't have that option. If I lived in NYC, I wouldn't own a car; or if I did, I would hardly use it. But here? I can walk to a grocery, and do, but too many other things are too far away. And, to be honest, if I decide to go visit friends, I don't wish to be at the mercy of the public transportation system. AFAIK, it doesn't even run at night.
"Suburbia" in its present form certainly will not. How long should we wait before we get around to organizing our lives for sustainability? I say we start now.
I say it will be sustainable, given time. (Remember, there used to be thousands of horses in NYC. Pedestrians were ankle-deep in horseshit. Which is better--dying of emphysema at 80, or typhus at 9?) Everything is moving out to suburbia--they will be the new cities, but they'll be automobile-friendly. People will drive less, as their jobs move out to suburbia with their homes and entertainment. Then, new suburbs will develop, further out, and the cycle begins again.
NYC is automobile-hostile. When given the choice between the option of freedom, and externally enforced strictures on movement, people (strangely enough) choose freedom. To force people to accept a non-free option through gas taxes, or government regulations on highways, or whatever the Left is going on about these days, is simply totalitarianism. It's easily recognized as such, which is why it's unpopular, no matter how it's dressed up.
The way for you to be happy, and for the rest of us to be happy, is to do what I suggested: work on "public" transportation from a "convenience" or commercial point-of-view, not from an ideological point-of-
Re:The only real answer is to reorganize society.
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
If our lives could be structured such that cars were not *necessary*, we can do fine.
Sure, sure. We can survive without cars. We can also survive without grocery stores. Growing your own crops isn't that hard, after all, and you could probably stand to lose a little weight anyway. That's not the point, though.
Owning cars, in America, is not just about getting from here to there. It's also one of the purest expressions of freedom there is. Don't like where you live? Get in your car and make a change. Don't like the store down the street? Go to another across town. You are not restriced by your geography, because you can always go somewhere else. A car gives the individual power, rather than forcing the individual to submit to the whims of their neighbors or local officials.
This is the reason I hate the way public transportation is marketed today; it's always about "conservation" (Save the trees!), or "compassion" (Help the poor!). If they made the focus "convenience", both in design of the service and in marketing the service, you'd have more people using it. It's the difference between buying more buses because you have the budget, and buying more buses because you have to meet capacity. Our city bus system recently (in the last few years) bought new buses. I've never seen a bus with more than 5 people in them. Why? Everybody's got a car, and you can't take a bus anywhere. Didn't stop them from building a multi-million dollar multi-mode bus/train station, to serve the empty buses and empty trains.
I don't want to drive into work every morning, but my options are a 5 minute drive, or a 45 minute wait for a 35 minute bus ride. Or, I could walk--crossing 3-lane frontage roads with no sidewalks, dodging people who are late for work. Neither is appealling, so I drive 5 minutes, spend $0.15 in gas, and I'm happy.
People who live in the 'burbs have longer commutes, I know, but the question is not to say "How do we force people to move closer so they can use public transportation?" The correct question to ask is "Why is everybody leaving?" And the answers generally are "Because living in the city is ridiculously expensive considering what you get, and I don't want my kid to grow up with a 'hood' mentality." Toss in corrupt officials, incompetant schools and crime, and no wonder suburbia looks so good. So they move out there, they get a bigger car so their commute is more comfortable, and... here we are. Businesses move out to suburbia before long, and now you have a rotten core with thriving edges.
(Also, for the anti-car people, do you complain about TCP/IP being wasteful? After all, it would be much faster if your data stream was one big constant flow, right? Rather than broken up into small, inefficient packets? Cars are the IP packets of the analog world.)
You sound like the Christians you're so opposed to. "It's a parable!" It sure is. Your plan for salvation is similarly couched in poetic phrases.
I can pluck all of the verses out of all the chapters in the Bible that have anything to do with salvation and you would have no hope of reconciling them.
Didn't you just do that? You just summed up salvation into Five E-Z Points. Now you're saying there's more? Smells like bullshit in here.
I am completely evil and living for my own selfish desires, right?
Yep. So am I. So is every other human--including Christians. The ones who don't believe that are a) fooling themselves, and b) totally wrong. The fallen nature of Man is a well-versed and easily defended article of faith.
If not, then please show me the chapter and verse that indicates that slavery is not part of "God's plan".
Jesus covered it. The rest of the "slavery" argument largely deals with the "argument from silence" charge that Jesus never explicitly condemned it. Jesus never explicitly condemned a lot of stuff. Being an Internet jackhole, for instance. Lucky for you.
Your defenses suck and my points stand.
Like this one? Not only is my son allowed to rape little girls, but he must also beat and murder them as well. Ask a stupid question and you'll get a stupid answer. Way to totally dodge the question. You handwaved away the simplest challenge to your nonsense belief system, proving that your philosophy is fragile bullshit.
The extreme--raping little girls--is just for kicks and to illustrate the point. The challenge scales very well. How about crack? Dope? Masturbation until he reinvents fire from first principles? Your philosohpy also seems to missing your "Big Win"--slavery. If your son believes himself to be good, and having a slave makes him happy--he's golden? You can't defend your position, so you blow it off. Way to go, coward, maybe you should hit the drawing board again. Or open another fortune cookie--maybe there's a new philosophy to be had over your Sum Dim Fuk.
To cover the other defenses, how do they suck? You're looking at them one-by-one, without the finial point--that Jesus clarified the Law, making it impossible for man to follow on his own. Watch and learn, you simple-minded Randian:
Angry with his brother without cause == murder. If "Thou shalt not kill" expands to cover getting pissed off, I think it just might apply to torture as well. D'ya think? Moron.
What happened to "I've read the Bible", Mr. Theology? Guess you missed some spots. Your philosophy, and now your argument, looks like locusts got to it, and your face looks like you ate live coals. Sucker.
(BTW, adultery is not just sex with a married person. It is also sex outside of marriage. For a "Bible reader", you sure do seem awfully ignorant. Which Bible did you read? Bible for Dummies?)
...and if you look at Matthew 25:14-30, if you bury a talent in the ground, you go to Hell. Hey, I'm just "reading the Bible for what it says," which according to you is how it should be read. I'm going to have a heck of a time burying my talent for art. How deep do you dig that hole?
So, according to you, reading something into context and placing a paragraph in context to the rest of the book is somehow wrong? You can pluck a handful of verses out of a single chapter of a single book, and have God's plan for salvation? Let me show you how well that works.
Loundry's philosophy: But feel free to kidnap a child and rape him...
Interpretation and weighing one phrase against another is the only way to read the Bible--indeed, any book--and hope to make any sense out of it.
The words that I have my son repeat are, "I'm a good person and I deserve to be happy."
So, if your son likes to rape little girls, it's okay? If he's a good person, and deserves to be happy, anything he does that makes him happy is by default also good. A good person cannot desire evil, after all. Are you seeing where humanism starts to fall apart? Oh, I know, you'll dismiss it as "playing the pedophile card", instead of explaining why your "philosophy" is worth anything since it can't withstand the simplest of moral challenges.
yet I don't see where they prohibit rape, torture, kidnapping, child abuse, or slavery
Rape: Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Torture: Thou shalt not kill.
Kidnapping and slavery: Thou shalt not covet.
Child abuse: Thou shalt not kill, and Honor thy father and mother.
Not good enough? Probably not for you, because you don't believe in "total context"; so you ignored the part where Jesus said that if you were angry with your brother without cause, then you violated "Thou shalt not kill". I think torture easily falls somewhere in between "kill" and "flipping the bird". You may differ--the right to be wrong is a long-held right on Slashdot.
Hmmm. I think most non-believers are willing to stipulate that Jesus walked the earth. What they're unwilling to accept is Jesus was the son of God, or the divine made manifest, or that failure to believe that Jesus alone is the path of salvation from an eternal life of torment and agony.
That used to be the case. Until recently (as it seems to me), people were saying things like "Jesus was a good, moral man with good philosophies of life, but he wasn't the son of God." Now, after enough people asked the question "If Jesus was so moral, why was he claiming to be the son of God?", they've fallen back and punted with "Well, there isn't really any evidence that Jesus existed."
This is purely subjective, of course. It just seems this way to me.
The act of faith, in itself, is a work. That is why "salvation through faith", while hugely popular, is in itself heretical. It's just a bolted-on idea with little Biblical basis. The comment that James is not canon is nonsense.
If you rewrite the grandparent post to say "salvation through irresistable grace", things start to make a lot more sense. If you accept the idea that Man is fallen (as it taught in the Bible), and is only redeemed through the grace of God (i.e. it is not by any work of ours that we are saved, as is taught in the Bible), then James starts to make sense. Faith, by itself, is only one manifestation of salvation--not salvation in and of itself--and works are an external expression of faith and salvation.
The inevitable question is, "How do you know if you are saved by grace, then?" Well, if you have faith, and you do works, it's a fair indicator.
Discussions like these are why I get so annoyed with religious discussions between believers and non-believers. Non-believers tend to lump all Christians under a single rubric, when Christian-on-Christian oppression is at least as significant as Non-Christian-on-Christian. We're hardly a homogenous group. (The same goes for Hinduism, Buddhism, and just about every other -ism, BTW, so the idea that "Hindus" won't have a problem with aliens is likely total nonsense.) It's intellectual laziness backed by raving bigotry when a non-believer lumps a Catholic with a Jehovah's Witness with a snake-handler. There is just as many key differences between them as there are between Perl and Java and Tcl/Tk hackers.
In reference to the news post itself, why is the Vatican speculating on alien civilization? We have less than adequate proof of alien life. We have no proof. When you look at the Hubble deep-sky photos, it's easy to say to yourself, "Gosh, all those galaxies, surely there's a civilization in at least one!" Who knows? I do know that there is less evidence for alien life than that Jesus walked the earth; but Jesus' existence is less than universally accepted among non-believers, while alien civilization is given serious thought.
Think about that--we have Old Testament prophecy concerning the coming of a Savior; we have New Testament witnessing to the fulfillment of those prophecies; we have new prophecies that the Savior will return with ultimate judgement. All of this is based on pretty reliable historical documents, and consistent over at least 4000 years. But we ignore this, and instead concentrate on wondering about alien civilizations and how they'll affect us? Even assuming that they do exist, what sense does it make to think they're even aware of us, or can ever reach us? So there's bug-eyed monsters in galaxy MCC-435PDQ, or whatever. Unless they have faster-than-light travel (another leap of faith that is bolder than the goofiest Christian Scientist praying for God to heal their kid's cancer), they will never get here. Generational ships and interstellar travel make fun science fiction, but the odds that ET is heading here because he's jonesing for Starbucks... well, it's just silly.
Doctors aren't only sued for death. They're sued for a variety of reasons, some of which are silly, pointless, or both.
Unless you're going to only allow malpractice suits when death is the end result, in which case we might find some common ground. But that's not what you were saying. You were just being a moron.
The cost of malpractice insurance is incredible. A close relation pays something on the order of $50K/year in insurance; this in a rural, close-knit community in a low-risk practice (as compared to, say, pediatrics).
This isn't "anti-consumer" behavior, it's defensive medicine. A doctor that doesn't practice because he's sick of being sued every other week for bogus cases isn't doing anybody any good.
I wonder if all the "programmers" who rail on Slashdot would be willing to take responsibility for every bug they write? To the extent that they have to buy liability insurance in case somebody uses their shitty program to do something important? No, of course not--that's why all those licenses for "Open Source" half-assed hacks are littered with "Yeah, I wrote this, but if you use it for something important, IT'S NOT MY FAULT, NUH-UH, I'M JUST A FAT SLOB PROGRAMMER, FNORD! *snort snort*" But you'll moan about doctors that can (and do) make mistakes. Yeah, consistency sure is an overrated attribute.
And I thought Linux was a pain to find stuff in. I had no idea how convoluted it could be to find the simplest of config files.
They are everywhere on Solaris:/etc,/usr/etc,/local/etc,/stand/over/here/etc,/hold/mouth/just/so... it was a pain in the ass.
The advantage of Solaris is many, many years of constant work and improvements. The disadvantage is many, many years of kludges and bizarre filesystem changes that have to be kept around for historical reasons, or the script written back in 1869 by some contract beard that nobody understands breaks horribly and sets fire to the machine room.
Which is why I give Solaris admins deep kisses, with tounge.
An interesting thing to know will be whether when/if everybody is doing this it will continue to be successful.
Right now, Baen's a novelty. If Baen is just one of millions, will it continue to be as successful? I'm not sure myself--I can see how it could turn into an extension of the current system: only those "blessed" by big publishers will be successful in rising above the noise.
If you're looking for free books, your options are limited. If your options cease to be limited, will you be swayed more by the author, or by the marketing surrounding an author?
Re:The problem with all these equations...
on
Rare Earth
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· Score: 2
is that they assume that any life that develops will be similar to us in basic body chemistry, and thus have the same requirements to develop. That's a huge assumption on our part.
I would suppose that this is because to go the other direction leads to a teflon-covered slope of "maybe ifs"--"Maybe if life was silicon based", "Maybe if life encoded genetic information in a single helix", "Maybe if life was based on tapioca pudding and whipped cream".
What kind of life do we know? Pretty much the carbon-based life here at home. What other kinds of life are out there? It's probably best not to start guessing.
Am I the only one who finds anime a bit stupid and very repetitious?
I'll admit I got a charge out of Akira w-a-a-y back in the day, but everything I've watched since is... well, almost exactly like everything else. A lot of perky teens (or brooding adults), shiny robots, spiky hair and "deer-in-the-headlight" vacuous stares.
If I wanted to watch the same cartoon over and over again, I'd watch "Scooby Doo", which at least has a talking dog hyped up on some derivative of canibus.
I look at my video shelf with it's Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and other anime titles (whatever happened to the term "japanimation"?), and I realize I am so over the fad. I just can't be bothered anymore.
T(H)GSB
Re:Pax Americana
on
Space Wars
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· Score: 4, Informative
I might be worried, except the EU can barely operate cohesively now. Entropy always increases--they'll be squabbling like a bunch of horny teenage boys over a Playboy in 10 years (or less).
The EU already has traitors in their midst economically. The end result of that debate will be quite interesting.
If you want to get a look at what an EU military would look like, keep an eye on the UN's military endeavors.
Slashdot Mirror
Picture of woman sucking off a horse == free speech.
Giving money to a candidate whose political beliefs you agree with == corruption of the highest order and worthy of heavy-handed restrictions.
I mean, really. When the Supreme Court will forbid political speech but allow barnyard porn it's time to refresh that tree of liberty with a little tyrant blood. Well, okay, not tyrants per se. Just really blitheringly dumb.
Make up your mind: populism or perfection?
So. You want to talk about defaults? Are you sure?
mysql always seemed to me to be a real amateurish production, while pgsql seemed more professional. That's just interpretation, however, and may be influenced by the fact that every half-assed Perl hackery uses mysql as its backend. Guilt by association, I suppose.
If I were doing something that needed a certain degree of robustness, however, I'd definitely go for pgsql. I'm less terrified of it.
The first time an employee comes to you (as the head nerd, whether officially or unofficially) and says "my computer is screwed up", and you go and find a machine so filled with crap, fluff, and outright dangerous bullshit--that's when you lock down the machines.
I'm doing that now, because I don't have the time to fix people's machines when they've downloaded "cool new cursors", or whatever, and now their machine runs like a dog.
P.S. Training is not the answer, because the question they ask is not, "Will this hurt my machine," it's "Well, if it screws up, I'll just call for Bob--he'll fix it." You can threaten, cajole and wheedle all you want. The lure of a rotating Dale Earnhardt "3" cursor and a dancing alien on top of the Taskbar will overrule you every time.
...and which utterly fails the test of "usability", under any sense of the word. Your idea of a piece of paper is particularly funny. He can simply do that now, with the individual remotes. Unless your argument is that your plan involves a shorter crib-sheet.
The problem is that there is no way for a remote to determine the state of the device it controls, and there is no way for another device to determine the state of another device. That is the problem. Every remote in the world tries to solve the problem, and none of them have, because the fundamental problem lies with the device, not the remote. It is simply not a solvable problem with the current tech.
(It is slightly less intractable if you purchase an "all-in-one" setup from Sony or the like. My statement only applies to disparate components from multiple manufacturers. Neither are you to mention the remote with the LCD that tries to remember your settings. When somebody comes through and turns things on and off without the remote and screws up everything, that remote then goes into 20-Questions. I do not find that amusing in my devices of convenience.)
Indeed, I solved the problem of how-to-do-this-or-that with the entertainment center by showing people how to do what they want to do AT the entertainment center. The remotes only serve as Volume +/- and Channel +/- buttons. And, since we don't have cable, we hardly ever use the Channel buttons anyway. Our lives are significantly simpler, since all we do is watch the occasional movie from Netflix, but even so, it's only a matter of pushing a few well-labled buttons on the reciever to set things the way you want, then you sit down to watch. I find that to be easier to explain than non-, poorly-, or misleadingly-labled, miniscule buttons with no tactile feedback on modern remotes.
BTW, spending >$30 on a remote should be grounds for automatic promotion into the 95% "Too much money, not enough sense" tax bracket, and automatic nutsack-ectomy. (Yes, everybody who buys a schmancy remote is a guy--guaranteed.)
The best part of this cohesion you get from FreeBSD (and Open- and Net-) is that the filesystem is not laid out like they gave a paintbrush to an epileptic. Things are put in logical places.
This changes a bit when you delve into the /usr/ports/ tree, but not much. The port maintainers generally keep to the standards. I.e., they don't fill /etc with a bunch of crap.
I can't bear to use any of the GNU/Linux distros these days. Partially for aethetic reasons, but also because of the gung-ho mentality of Linux nerds who will stick any damn thing any damn place they damn well want to. *BSD admins tend to stick to canon, I've noticed, whereas GNU/Linux admins each do their own thing. So after a couple of years, you can't find anything and often enough find the same thing installed twice. My experience, YMMV.
I haven't installed Linux on a machine of mine in probably 6 years. I've become quite the fan of FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
I was running OpenBSD 2.8 on a Thinkpad 760ed. That's a Pentium 133 with 48MB of RAM. You'll be hard-pressed to find a computer less capable. But, running OBSD 2.8, with XFree 3.3.6, it was entirely usable. I ran XEmacs and Netscape 4 with no troubles on top of WindowMaker--still the finest window manager around, to my mind.
Later, I upgraded to OBSD 2.9, but hated it. 2.9 moved to XFree 4.0, which was MUCH slower than 3.3.6.
Of course, running Netscape 4.0 these days is just asking for trouble; but, jeez, there is hardly a single graphical web browser that isn't a bloated pig.
I have another old Thinkpad, a 760e that has similar specs. I run Windows 98 on it. Why? Well, it can run a recent web browser (IE), it can run an office suite (MS Office 97), and you can play MP3s on it (Windows Media Player, or WinAmp). All that, and on a 133mhz Pentium with 64 MB RAM and a 700 MB hard drive.
There is a market for sprucing up old computers with Free software written to accomodate older and slower hardware, but it is hard. You have to make usability decisions--is this important? Can I lose this? We have to keep that--and write careful code. In other words, you have to do hard work, and hard work isn't sexy. At the end, you get an OS that will run on an 8 year old computer... when a brand new computer can be had from eMachines for $500. That's incredibly hard to justify.
Rather than "revitalizing" old computers, the Free software crowd would do better to anticipate the needs of the future, rather than chasing the current offerings from Cupertino or Redmond. What are the needs of the future? I dunno--if I did know, I sure wouldn't tell you. But, I think that it will involve distributed services and rapid propogation of data through multiple channels. Meaning, I think that our "computers" will become even MORE personal, as in our mobile phones will become our primary device. When we're away from home, all our data will be available through the phone, either stored physically on the phone, or virtually through data services offered by the phone company. We'll be able to augment our phone's capabilities with near-remote (docking station), or far-remote (your ISP's server) services. The phone can switch between a wired, 802.11 wireless, or CDMA/TDMA/Whatever wireless through your phone service seamlessly.
(Say you're a geek, your SSH session to a remote server will (through the miracle of screen) automatically detach your session when you yank your phone out of it's cradle and go to work. At work, when you attach your phone to another station, hey presto your session reattaches itself, and you continue where you left off.)
What makes this work is powerful, reliable servers, and lightweight, network transparent protocols that scale from a simple terminal to a full-screen GUI. Golly, it sounds like the Free software community running free *nixes and X, don't it?
I can certainly see the phone becoming an uber device, eventually. The various PalmOS phones already are nearly there. A friend who is in anthropology was trying to figure out a data-entry solution for a few months while he was in Chiapas state. We discussed a few options (such as buying a cheap ThinkPad in the 133mhz Pentium range like the 760e), but what we eventually figured would be his best option was his Palm IIIxe with one of those collapsible keyboards.
The IIIxe is a complete computer in itself. It can do almost everything a bigger computer can do, functionally. It's only real limitations are speed and storage--you can do a whole lot of useful work with just a B/W text interface. Where the device might fall down (such as with photo editing), it can be enhanced by external server-based services.
For example, assume you store photos in your phone/PDA/camera. A processor capable of doing real photo-manipulation would be more than such a small device is capable of. So, when you get home, you plug your phoneto a USB keyboard and mouse, and to a big monitor. The phone talks wirelessly to your home server (or to a server on the wider Internet), and you run a local X server on the phone with the photo manipulation software running on the beefier server.
When you're done, the photos are synced back to the phone, all nicely edited.
It's things like this where the Free software community could really be forging ahead with new ideas and new ways of thinking. The old, traditional X, often thought of as bloated and outdated, is actually a great solution for situations just like this. This is a business opportunity just waiting for somebody to pick up the ball and run with it. Imagine real estate agents--they can access everything they need from a convenient device that can interface with various I/O devices that meet a relatively simple standard. Plug the phone into a cradle in their cars, and the agent's client can browse through photos and whatnot while they're driving around.
The business traveller only needs to bring his uber-phone, since the hotel he's staying at will have one of the stripped-down terminals available on demand.
Never mind all that, though--I'd rather re-implement Microsoft's Exchange protocol so I can strike back against the Evil Empire by installing a Linux server. Take that, Bill!
This story is still getting play in "mainstream" media outlets, when most of America is saying, "Meh." There is no effort made to put the photos in perspective, or to get any real objective information about them. It's all simply a smear job on the whole war effort. "Tonight on 'Face the Pressline': seven soldiers made Iraqi soldiers strip and form a human pyramid. Is it time that we disband our military and start polka-dancing for world peace?"
Does the sarin gas prove WMDs? No. Does the prison scandal prove some of the really absurd things that have been bandied about by the press? No. So, maybe now, you see the point of the other side, where they wonder at the wild accusations that seem to constitute "news".
Enjoy it while you still can. It's not sustainable in the long term.
Sure it's sustainable. Perhaps it's not sustainable with internal combustion engines, but that's not what we're arguing. Whether the car runs on gasoline or Mr. Fusion, the result is the same: utter freedom of movement.
It doesn't mean you can't go to a grocery store farther away if you don't like the selection in your neighborhood.
Sure it does. Oh, technically you can take the bus to the grocery across town, but really--are you going to make the effort? You're limited to what you can carry on the bus, whereas you can fit enough food for a month in an Explorer. You have to haul your groceries to the bus from the grocery, from the bus station to your house, instead of just from the garage to the front door.
Just because a cripple can run the NY Marathon, it's not the best option available.
Part of the reason public transportation in the US stinks so badly, is that our society is just not built for people to get around in. It's built for cars to get around in. Study old european cities, even New York City, for how to get around without *requiring* a car.
I vacationed for a week in NYC just last December. I think I used a taxi once. The rest of the time, the subway worked wonders. The diffence is that NYC started as a largely pedestrian city. In comparison, a city like Atlanta is brand new. It is designed appropriately (okay, appropriately-ish) for the major form of transportation, which is automobiles.
Don't misuderstand. I'd much rather use light-rail or a high-speed monorail ("Monorail! Homer: Mono... D'oh!") rather than a car to go visit the in-laws on the coast. It's a 3-hour drive. Even if it was a 4-hour train ride, as long as it was reasonable ($20/person or so), it would be better (except in emergencies), because I can relax, or work, or chat with my wife on the train in comfort. But that's not available. Instead, I can take Greyhound--for $111 round-trip, and it will take 6 hours (one way, 8 hours for the return trip), and I don't have a swell compartment with AC, or a club car where I can get a martini. I'd have to be insane to choose that. It costs me $35 in gas.
Your problem is that you're looking at Tokyo and NYC--I'm looking at Jackson, Mississippi. I literally cannot live without a car. I don't have that option. If I lived in NYC, I wouldn't own a car; or if I did, I would hardly use it. But here? I can walk to a grocery, and do, but too many other things are too far away. And, to be honest, if I decide to go visit friends, I don't wish to be at the mercy of the public transportation system. AFAIK, it doesn't even run at night.
"Suburbia" in its present form certainly will not. How long should we wait before we get around to organizing our lives for sustainability? I say we start now.
I say it will be sustainable, given time. (Remember, there used to be thousands of horses in NYC. Pedestrians were ankle-deep in horseshit. Which is better--dying of emphysema at 80, or typhus at 9?) Everything is moving out to suburbia--they will be the new cities, but they'll be automobile-friendly. People will drive less, as their jobs move out to suburbia with their homes and entertainment. Then, new suburbs will develop, further out, and the cycle begins again.
NYC is automobile-hostile. When given the choice between the option of freedom, and externally enforced strictures on movement, people (strangely enough) choose freedom. To force people to accept a non-free option through gas taxes, or government regulations on highways, or whatever the Left is going on about these days, is simply totalitarianism. It's easily recognized as such, which is why it's unpopular, no matter how it's dressed up.
The way for you to be happy, and for the rest of us to be happy, is to do what I suggested: work on "public" transportation from a "convenience" or commercial point-of-view, not from an ideological point-of-
If our lives could be structured such that cars were not *necessary*, we can do fine.
Sure, sure. We can survive without cars. We can also survive without grocery stores. Growing your own crops isn't that hard, after all, and you could probably stand to lose a little weight anyway. That's not the point, though.
Owning cars, in America, is not just about getting from here to there. It's also one of the purest expressions of freedom there is. Don't like where you live? Get in your car and make a change. Don't like the store down the street? Go to another across town. You are not restriced by your geography, because you can always go somewhere else. A car gives the individual power, rather than forcing the individual to submit to the whims of their neighbors or local officials.
This is the reason I hate the way public transportation is marketed today; it's always about "conservation" (Save the trees!), or "compassion" (Help the poor!). If they made the focus "convenience", both in design of the service and in marketing the service, you'd have more people using it. It's the difference between buying more buses because you have the budget, and buying more buses because you have to meet capacity. Our city bus system recently (in the last few years) bought new buses. I've never seen a bus with more than 5 people in them. Why? Everybody's got a car, and you can't take a bus anywhere. Didn't stop them from building a multi-million dollar multi-mode bus/train station, to serve the empty buses and empty trains.
I don't want to drive into work every morning, but my options are a 5 minute drive, or a 45 minute wait for a 35 minute bus ride. Or, I could walk--crossing 3-lane frontage roads with no sidewalks, dodging people who are late for work. Neither is appealling, so I drive 5 minutes, spend $0.15 in gas, and I'm happy.
People who live in the 'burbs have longer commutes, I know, but the question is not to say "How do we force people to move closer so they can use public transportation?" The correct question to ask is "Why is everybody leaving?" And the answers generally are "Because living in the city is ridiculously expensive considering what you get, and I don't want my kid to grow up with a 'hood' mentality." Toss in corrupt officials, incompetant schools and crime, and no wonder suburbia looks so good. So they move out there, they get a bigger car so their commute is more comfortable, and... here we are. Businesses move out to suburbia before long, and now you have a rotten core with thriving edges.
(Also, for the anti-car people, do you complain about TCP/IP being wasteful? After all, it would be much faster if your data stream was one big constant flow, right? Rather than broken up into small, inefficient packets? Cars are the IP packets of the analog world.)
You sound like the Christians you're so opposed to. "It's a parable!" It sure is. Your plan for salvation is similarly couched in poetic phrases.
I can pluck all of the verses out of all the chapters in the Bible that have anything to do with salvation and you would have no hope of reconciling them.
Didn't you just do that? You just summed up salvation into Five E-Z Points. Now you're saying there's more? Smells like bullshit in here.
I am completely evil and living for my own selfish desires, right?
Yep. So am I. So is every other human--including Christians. The ones who don't believe that are a) fooling themselves, and b) totally wrong. The fallen nature of Man is a well-versed and easily defended article of faith.
If not, then please show me the chapter and verse that indicates that slavery is not part of "God's plan".
Jesus covered it. The rest of the "slavery" argument largely deals with the "argument from silence" charge that Jesus never explicitly condemned it. Jesus never explicitly condemned a lot of stuff. Being an Internet jackhole, for instance. Lucky for you.
Your defenses suck and my points stand.
Like this one? Not only is my son allowed to rape little girls, but he must also beat and murder them as well. Ask a stupid question and you'll get a stupid answer. Way to totally dodge the question. You handwaved away the simplest challenge to your nonsense belief system, proving that your philosophy is fragile bullshit.
The extreme--raping little girls--is just for kicks and to illustrate the point. The challenge scales very well. How about crack? Dope? Masturbation until he reinvents fire from first principles? Your philosohpy also seems to missing your "Big Win"--slavery. If your son believes himself to be good, and having a slave makes him happy--he's golden? You can't defend your position, so you blow it off. Way to go, coward, maybe you should hit the drawing board again. Or open another fortune cookie--maybe there's a new philosophy to be had over your Sum Dim Fuk.
To cover the other defenses, how do they suck? You're looking at them one-by-one, without the finial point--that Jesus clarified the Law, making it impossible for man to follow on his own. Watch and learn, you simple-minded Randian: Angry with his brother without cause == murder. If "Thou shalt not kill" expands to cover getting pissed off, I think it just might apply to torture as well. D'ya think? Moron.
What happened to "I've read the Bible", Mr. Theology? Guess you missed some spots. Your philosophy, and now your argument, looks like locusts got to it, and your face looks like you ate live coals. Sucker.
(BTW, adultery is not just sex with a married person. It is also sex outside of marriage. For a "Bible reader", you sure do seem awfully ignorant. Which Bible did you read? Bible for Dummies?)
...and if you look at Matthew 25:14-30, if you bury a talent in the ground, you go to Hell. Hey, I'm just "reading the Bible for what it says," which according to you is how it should be read. I'm going to have a heck of a time burying my talent for art. How deep do you dig that hole?
So, according to you, reading something into context and placing a paragraph in context to the rest of the book is somehow wrong? You can pluck a handful of verses out of a single chapter of a single book, and have God's plan for salvation? Let me show you how well that works.
Loundry's philosophy: But feel free to kidnap a child and rape him...
Interpretation and weighing one phrase against another is the only way to read the Bible--indeed, any book--and hope to make any sense out of it.
The words that I have my son repeat are, "I'm a good person and I deserve to be happy."
So, if your son likes to rape little girls, it's okay? If he's a good person, and deserves to be happy, anything he does that makes him happy is by default also good. A good person cannot desire evil, after all. Are you seeing where humanism starts to fall apart? Oh, I know, you'll dismiss it as "playing the pedophile card", instead of explaining why your "philosophy" is worth anything since it can't withstand the simplest of moral challenges.
yet I don't see where they prohibit rape, torture, kidnapping, child abuse, or slavery
Rape: Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Torture: Thou shalt not kill.
Kidnapping and slavery: Thou shalt not covet.
Child abuse: Thou shalt not kill, and Honor thy father and mother.
Not good enough? Probably not for you, because you don't believe in "total context"; so you ignored the part where Jesus said that if you were angry with your brother without cause, then you violated "Thou shalt not kill". I think torture easily falls somewhere in between "kill" and "flipping the bird". You may differ--the right to be wrong is a long-held right on Slashdot.
Hmmm. I think most non-believers are willing to stipulate that Jesus walked the earth. What they're unwilling to accept is Jesus was the son of God, or the divine made manifest, or that failure to believe that Jesus alone is the path of salvation from an eternal life of torment and agony.
That used to be the case. Until recently (as it seems to me), people were saying things like "Jesus was a good, moral man with good philosophies of life, but he wasn't the son of God." Now, after enough people asked the question "If Jesus was so moral, why was he claiming to be the son of God?", they've fallen back and punted with "Well, there isn't really any evidence that Jesus existed."
This is purely subjective, of course. It just seems this way to me.
The act of faith, in itself, is a work. That is why "salvation through faith", while hugely popular, is in itself heretical. It's just a bolted-on idea with little Biblical basis. The comment that James is not canon is nonsense.
If you rewrite the grandparent post to say "salvation through irresistable grace", things start to make a lot more sense. If you accept the idea that Man is fallen (as it taught in the Bible), and is only redeemed through the grace of God (i.e. it is not by any work of ours that we are saved, as is taught in the Bible), then James starts to make sense. Faith, by itself, is only one manifestation of salvation--not salvation in and of itself--and works are an external expression of faith and salvation.
The inevitable question is, "How do you know if you are saved by grace, then?" Well, if you have faith, and you do works, it's a fair indicator.
Discussions like these are why I get so annoyed with religious discussions between believers and non-believers. Non-believers tend to lump all Christians under a single rubric, when Christian-on-Christian oppression is at least as significant as Non-Christian-on-Christian. We're hardly a homogenous group. (The same goes for Hinduism, Buddhism, and just about every other -ism, BTW, so the idea that "Hindus" won't have a problem with aliens is likely total nonsense.) It's intellectual laziness backed by raving bigotry when a non-believer lumps a Catholic with a Jehovah's Witness with a snake-handler. There is just as many key differences between them as there are between Perl and Java and Tcl/Tk hackers.
In reference to the news post itself, why is the Vatican speculating on alien civilization? We have less than adequate proof of alien life. We have no proof. When you look at the Hubble deep-sky photos, it's easy to say to yourself, "Gosh, all those galaxies, surely there's a civilization in at least one!" Who knows? I do know that there is less evidence for alien life than that Jesus walked the earth; but Jesus' existence is less than universally accepted among non-believers, while alien civilization is given serious thought.
Think about that--we have Old Testament prophecy concerning the coming of a Savior; we have New Testament witnessing to the fulfillment of those prophecies; we have new prophecies that the Savior will return with ultimate judgement. All of this is based on pretty reliable historical documents, and consistent over at least 4000 years. But we ignore this, and instead concentrate on wondering about alien civilizations and how they'll affect us? Even assuming that they do exist, what sense does it make to think they're even aware of us, or can ever reach us? So there's bug-eyed monsters in galaxy MCC-435PDQ, or whatever. Unless they have faster-than-light travel (another leap of faith that is bolder than the goofiest Christian Scientist praying for God to heal their kid's cancer), they will never get here. Generational ships and interstellar travel make fun science fiction, but the odds that ET is heading here because he's jonesing for Starbucks... well, it's just silly.
Doctors aren't only sued for death. They're sued for a variety of reasons, some of which are silly, pointless, or both.
Unless you're going to only allow malpractice suits when death is the end result, in which case we might find some common ground. But that's not what you were saying. You were just being a moron.
The cost of malpractice insurance is incredible. A close relation pays something on the order of $50K/year in insurance; this in a rural, close-knit community in a low-risk practice (as compared to, say, pediatrics).
This isn't "anti-consumer" behavior, it's defensive medicine. A doctor that doesn't practice because he's sick of being sued every other week for bogus cases isn't doing anybody any good.
I wonder if all the "programmers" who rail on Slashdot would be willing to take responsibility for every bug they write? To the extent that they have to buy liability insurance in case somebody uses their shitty program to do something important? No, of course not--that's why all those licenses for "Open Source" half-assed hacks are littered with "Yeah, I wrote this, but if you use it for something important, IT'S NOT MY FAULT, NUH-UH, I'M JUST A FAT SLOB PROGRAMMER, FNORD! *snort snort*" But you'll moan about doctors that can (and do) make mistakes. Yeah, consistency sure is an overrated attribute.
Like how SCSI was supposed to be pronounced "sexy", but instead got labled "scuzzy", because of SCSI1's unrepentant idiocy and world-class nastiness.
I tried x86 Solaris....
And I thought Linux was a pain to find stuff in. I had no idea how convoluted it could be to find the simplest of config files.
They are everywhere on Solaris: /etc, /usr/etc, /local/etc, /stand/over/here/etc, /hold/mouth/just/so... it was a pain in the ass.
The advantage of Solaris is many, many years of constant work and improvements. The disadvantage is many, many years of kludges and bizarre filesystem changes that have to be kept around for historical reasons, or the script written back in 1869 by some contract beard that nobody understands breaks horribly and sets fire to the machine room.
Which is why I give Solaris admins deep kisses, with tounge.
T(H)GSB
An interesting thing to know will be whether when/if everybody is doing this it will continue to be successful.
Right now, Baen's a novelty. If Baen is just one of millions, will it continue to be as successful? I'm not sure myself--I can see how it could turn into an extension of the current system: only those "blessed" by big publishers will be successful in rising above the noise.
If you're looking for free books, your options are limited. If your options cease to be limited, will you be swayed more by the author, or by the marketing surrounding an author?
T(H)GSB
I'll allow "larnin'", as it might be a regional colloquialism to the GA-Tech area.
However, as a born and bred Mississippi redneck, I can unequivocably state that the correct spelling/pronunciation is "book larnin'".
T(H)GSB
I would suppose that this is because to go the other direction leads to a teflon-covered slope of "maybe ifs"--"Maybe if life was silicon based", "Maybe if life encoded genetic information in a single helix", "Maybe if life was based on tapioca pudding and whipped cream".
What kind of life do we know? Pretty much the carbon-based life here at home. What other kinds of life are out there? It's probably best not to start guessing.
T(H)GSB
Am I the only one who finds anime a bit stupid and very repetitious?
I'll admit I got a charge out of Akira w-a-a-y back in the day, but everything I've watched since is... well, almost exactly like everything else. A lot of perky teens (or brooding adults), shiny robots, spiky hair and "deer-in-the-headlight" vacuous stares.
If I wanted to watch the same cartoon over and over again, I'd watch "Scooby Doo", which at least has a talking dog hyped up on some derivative of canibus.
I look at my video shelf with it's Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and other anime titles (whatever happened to the term "japanimation"?), and I realize I am so over the fad. I just can't be bothered anymore.
T(H)GSB
I might be worried, except the EU can barely operate cohesively now. Entropy always increases--they'll be squabbling like a bunch of horny teenage boys over a Playboy in 10 years (or less).
The EU already has traitors in their midst economically. The end result of that debate will be quite interesting.
If you want to get a look at what an EU military would look like, keep an eye on the UN's military endeavors.