You seem to think that the US has been attacked by Afghanistan and is at war with the country. Not even GWB agrees with that, and there isn't much to say to you if you haven't caught on to that.
Also, for your information, there is no Somalian government.
Re:But these were non hostile
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 2
And the message is: if you fight us we'll kill you.
It's not clear to me how killing people who do not fight the US conveys this message. Would you care to elaborate?
1. If Al Qaida is occypying a village that in no way implies that it is "harboring" them. You seem to think that it's the unarmed villagers duty to kill the Al Qaida soldiers in combat, while it is too dangerous for the vastly superior US soldiers to attempt the same thing.
This is after all Americas war. As the worlds by far strongest military power, it should be able to fight it itself.
2. The witnesses are frequently westeern journalists. They go to a village that the US claimed it has not bombed, and find it bombed. Who else is conducting bombings in Afghanistan?
You can find these kind of reports in non US media on the net. Try Australian, British or Canadian media. Sadly, US media pretty much only reprints Pentagon press releases in the name of National Unity.
3. Even the US military claims that the Chinese Embassy bombing was a mistake. Do you have a different theory?
But these were non hostile
on
The Drone War
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· Score: 2
What makes you think these villagers were hostile? Even if they were, how many hundred civilian deaths does it take to balance the risk of small losses to your own side?
The right thing to do is to risk your own soldiers lifes to fight your war, not massacre innocent civilians becuase you don't dare to go close to the place.
Killing masses of civilians rather than risking minute losses from your own vastly superior armed forces sends a very clear message to the world about how the US values the lifes of foreigners.
I've had 2 optical Microsoft Intellimouses, and I loved them, except for two things
-- Both broke the same way within a year. They started tracking worse and worse until they got unusable.
-- They're butt ugly
I'm now back to using the regular Apple mouse. I'd love if Apple sold a 2 button mouse with wheel and Apple design and quality.
Guilt By Association, don't buy it
on
Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Why is this relevant? Well, Monsanto is currently one of biggest proponents of GM (genetically modified) foods.
It should be obvious, but it probably needs to be said:
To claim that GM foods are bad because a corporation that have done evil things is a proponent of it, is no more valid an argument than claiming that since Hitler claimed that 2+2=4, the real value must be something else.
If there are any real factual arguments against GM foods, by all means present them. But if this is the best argument, it's a big endorsement of GM foods.
Because you're not only trying to "protect people from doing stupid things", you're also attempting to combat the criminals who take advantage of people who do stupid things. You may like to think that this is a dumb idea, but things that make crime harder also make it less likely that someone might turn to crime.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that it creates a lot of "crime" by making stupid actions criminal. Now the criminals are not only the people trying to steal your stuff, but the stupid people leaving your info where it's not 100% safe. The police has to chase both groups. And pretty soon everyone is a criminal and at the mercy of the police.
I had to put a sofa in front of my electric heater, and now my electric bills have skyrocketed. I'd love to have a quiet fan back there that starts when the heater gets hot and blows the trapped heat heat out.
A CPU cooler fan already has the heat triggered activation, it's small enough, and according to the article, at least this Thermaltake Volcano 7 model is designed to be quiet. But how hard is it to take a component designed to be inside a PC and plug it into a regular out let?
If it doesn't already exist, someone should create a web page with all the big M$ security problems described chronologically. Just listed in the order they were discovered with 1-2 lines about what they do.
It would be a neat place to refer people to who don't believe that M$ is a security problem.
You have no idea how wrong you are... I used to think that too before I watched the show. I even felt slightly dirty for tuning in to it. That quickly was replaced by stunned fascination for the storys, characters and humor. It's the best show on TV, burdened by a silly name and a small network.
Most the fans are female. I went to a small Buffy convention recently, and found myself to be the only guy of 16 participants.
He is bitchin' all the way to the bank about these movies... so if he has a prob with the way that Hollywood does him, then he needs to get out. Geeeez. He can't have it both ways, y'know, big time writer and not prostituted by the studios.
Actually, I'm pretty sure he has quit Hollywood entirely, and is only working for TV now. In TV, the writer is king.
I could never find the time to find and listen to new music, manage a playlist and load all the current songs into my MP3 players even if I had the inclination to do so. That must take hours every day. I'd be very happy to pay $10 a month for someone else to do that for me. Plus all the news, traffic info and different talk shows.
My only concern is whether they actually produce good channels. I have satellite TV with 30 chanels of non stop "radio" music, but they are pretty lame. It's all in the execution.
Drawing parallels is fine, but it's no substitute for thinking and analysis.
The rabbit, like the rat and the cockroach, is pretty much unexterminable. The large mammals this would be about, OTOH, are already threatened and by definition easy to exterminate, should the need arise.
There may be problems with the plan, but the chance that the introduced species will overrun the local fauna and be impossible to control isn't one of them.
Re:That's a global moral statement...
on
Message from Kabul
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· Score: 2
You said "morality is not globally valid" and "moral is nothing".
Then you say "You don't have the right to force someone to do (or don't do) something unless that other person "agrees" (has the same cultural, religious or ethnic backround, or lives in the same country and abides to the same laws). "
This second statement tells us what actions are right and wrong. It is clearly a moral statement, and a global one too. That is the contradiction I was pointing out.
The apocalypse is near, and chrisd is it's harbinger. Calling the place the story is about is a dead giveaway. A real slashdot editor would never do that.
I was thrilled when Titan AE came out and two of the three script writers were the creators of my absolute favorite TV shows. That's you, and Joss Whedon of Buffy fame.
I was surprised when I eventually saw the movie and found very little of that creative genius making any imprint in the final product. Later I've seen Joss talk about how writers are treated as crap in Hollywood, as opposed to TV where they're pretty powerful. "[about Atlantis] The movie they made has nothing to do with that treatment, but I'm happier having my name on that movie than on Titan A.E."
So to get to the question, do you have any commment on Hollywood writing as opposed to TV, the Titan AE experience, or working with Joss Whedon (if you did). If you can't really answer honestly for fear of insulting powerful showbiz moguls, signal it by using a lot of fish and poultry references in your answer.
The Tivo runs on just a 50 MHz PPC! But then the encoding is done by a dedicated chip.
What strikes me is the resilience of the hard drives. A Tivo is always recording signal. One Gig per hour 24 hours a day. I'm surprised the drives hold up as well as they do. I'd guess a regular PC accesses disk about 1% of the time, and even then only 5% writing.
It's probably not hard to get the basic functionality to record shows on disk. But I'm pretty sure that is less than 1% of the engineering work that goes into one of these products. There are zillions of features on top of that that makes it convenient, usable and fun. Just a few: Remote Control, switching your cable box for you, knowing all the tv schedules, live buffer, etc.
The other thing is that a 1.4 GHz Athlon system costs way more than a good Tivo. Don't expect to be able to use it for anything else while it's recording. And a Tivo is always recording.
OTOH, if you want to be able to burn your favorite shows to DVDs, this is the only way to go. Well, actually, I would still get the Tivo, and record whatever I wanted to burn off it.
How is it different? It's extremely different! In case you didn't know, the FBI still needs a court to approve phone tapping, and it's only supposed to be done when there is reasonable suspicion that you're involved in serious crime.
The phone eqivalent of this proposal would be that the FBI taped every phone call ever made. It's like being in permanent arrest. Everything you say can be used against you, or anyone you may talk about.
And while it may save some people thousands, it will cost billions to do so, so it's probbaly not that great from that angle either.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to think that the US has been attacked by Afghanistan and is at war with the country. Not even GWB agrees with that, and there isn't much to say to you if you haven't caught on to that.
Also, for your information, there is no Somalian government.
And the message is: if you fight us we'll kill you.
It's not clear to me how killing people who do not fight the US conveys this message. Would you care to elaborate?
Where do I start...
1. If Al Qaida is occypying a village that in no way implies that it is "harboring" them. You seem to think that it's the unarmed villagers duty to kill the Al Qaida soldiers in combat, while it is too dangerous for the vastly superior US soldiers to attempt the same thing.
This is after all Americas war. As the worlds by far strongest military power, it should be able to fight it itself.
2. The witnesses are frequently westeern journalists. They go to a village that the US claimed it has not bombed, and find it bombed. Who else is conducting bombings in Afghanistan?
You can find these kind of reports in non US media on the net. Try Australian, British or Canadian media. Sadly, US media pretty much only reprints Pentagon press releases in the name of National Unity.
3. Even the US military claims that the Chinese Embassy bombing was a mistake. Do you have a different theory?
What makes you think these villagers were hostile? Even if they were, how many hundred civilian deaths does it take to balance the risk of small losses to your own side?
The right thing to do is to risk your own soldiers lifes to fight your war, not massacre innocent civilians becuase you don't dare to go close to the place.
Killing masses of civilians rather than risking minute losses from your own vastly superior armed forces sends a very clear message to the world about how the US values the lifes of foreigners.
Why is this revolutionary? Aren't things like this mostly old hat with a nifty interface?
Well, you're right except that doing old things in a new way is exactly what most revolutions are.
After all, a computer is just a slide rule with a nifty interface. And a car doesn't do anything that you can't do by walking.
That might be great, but remember that the screen would be 2-3 times as far away from you, so you'd need real good eye sight.
I've had 2 optical Microsoft Intellimouses, and I loved them, except for two things
-- Both broke the same way within a year. They started tracking worse and worse until they got unusable.
-- They're butt ugly
I'm now back to using the regular Apple mouse. I'd love if Apple sold a 2 button mouse with wheel and Apple design and quality.
Why is this relevant? Well, Monsanto is currently one of biggest proponents of GM (genetically modified) foods.
It should be obvious, but it probably needs to be said:
To claim that GM foods are bad because a corporation that have done evil things is a proponent of it, is no more valid an argument than claiming that since Hitler claimed that 2+2=4, the real value must be something else.
If there are any real factual arguments against GM foods, by all means present them. But if this is the best argument, it's a big endorsement of GM foods.
Because you're not only trying to "protect people from doing stupid things", you're also attempting to combat the criminals who take advantage of people who do stupid things. You may like to think that this is a dumb idea, but things that make crime harder also make it less likely that someone might turn to crime.
That's one way of looking at it. Another is that it creates a lot of "crime" by making stupid actions criminal. Now the criminals are not only the people trying to steal your stuff, but the stupid people leaving your info where it's not 100% safe. The police has to chase both groups. And pretty soon everyone is a criminal and at the mercy of the police.
[Yeah,I get carried away. So what?]
This is a little of topic, but bear with me...
I had to put a sofa in front of my electric heater, and now my electric bills have skyrocketed. I'd love to have a quiet fan back there that starts when the heater gets hot and blows the trapped heat heat out.
A CPU cooler fan already has the heat triggered activation, it's small enough, and according to the article, at least this Thermaltake Volcano 7 model is designed to be quiet. But how hard is it to take a component designed to be inside a PC and plug it into a regular out let?
Actually the math is even worse than that. The percentage adds up for each unit.
1GB = 1024*1024*1024 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes
That's 7.3% difference from the base 10 math, so your advertised 100 Gig drive is really only 93 Gigs.
If it doesn't already exist, someone should create a web page with all the big M$ security problems described chronologically. Just listed in the order they were discovered with 1-2 lines about what they do.
It would be a neat place to refer people to who don't believe that M$ is a security problem.
The arrogance of the US government is far bigger than M$'s. When they take over, things usually do not get better.
You have no idea how wrong you are... I used to think that too before I watched the show. I even felt slightly dirty for tuning in to it. That quickly was replaced by stunned fascination for the storys, characters and humor. It's the best show on TV, burdened by a silly name and a small network.
Most the fans are female. I went to a small Buffy convention recently, and found myself to be the only guy of 16 participants.
He is bitchin' all the way to the bank about these movies... so if he has a prob with the way that Hollywood does him, then he needs to get out. Geeeez. He can't have it both ways, y'know, big time writer and not prostituted by the studios.
Actually, I'm pretty sure he has quit Hollywood entirely, and is only working for TV now. In TV, the writer is king.
I could never find the time to find and listen to new music, manage a playlist and load all the current songs into my MP3 players even if I had the inclination to do so. That must take hours every day. I'd be very happy to pay $10 a month for someone else to do that for me. Plus all the news, traffic info and different talk shows.
My only concern is whether they actually produce good channels. I have satellite TV with 30 chanels of non stop "radio" music, but they are pretty lame. It's all in the execution.
Drawing parallels is fine, but it's no substitute for thinking and analysis.
The rabbit, like the rat and the cockroach, is pretty much unexterminable. The large mammals this would be about, OTOH, are already threatened and by definition easy to exterminate, should the need arise.
There may be problems with the plan, but the chance that the introduced species will overrun the local fauna and be impossible to control isn't one of them.
You said "morality is not globally valid" and "moral is nothing".
Then you say "You don't have the right to force someone to do (or don't do) something unless that other person "agrees" (has the same cultural, religious or ethnic backround, or lives in the same country and abides to the same laws). "
This second statement tells us what actions are right and wrong. It is clearly a moral statement, and a global one too. That is the contradiction I was pointing out.
Do you realize that you're contradicting yourself? You're telling other people that it's wrong to tell other people what to do. Funny funny!
According to your own statement, as a Swede you have no right to tell Americans not to interfere in Afghani relations.
Many other arguments could be made againt your position, but it's disproved itself already, so I'll spare you the details.
The apocalypse is near, and chrisd is it's harbinger. Calling the place the story is about is a dead giveaway. A real slashdot editor would never do that.
I was thrilled when Titan AE came out and two of the three script writers were the creators of my absolute favorite TV shows. That's you, and Joss Whedon of Buffy fame.
7 31.html
7 31b.html
I was surprised when I eventually saw the movie and found very little of that creative genius making any imprint in the final product. Later I've seen Joss talk about how writers are treated as crap in Hollywood, as opposed to TV where they're pretty powerful. "[about Atlantis] The movie they made has nothing to do with that treatment, but I'm happier having my name on that movie than on Titan A.E."
So to get to the question, do you have any commment on Hollywood writing as opposed to TV, the Titan AE experience, or working with Joss Whedon (if you did). If you can't really answer honestly for fear of insulting powerful showbiz moguls, signal it by using a lot of fish and poultry references in your answer.
For reference: here is the full Whedon interview
http://avclub.theonion.com/avclub3731/avfeature_3
http://avclub.theonion.com/avclub3731/avfeature_3
My impression is that while art projects are sometimes late, they're no worse than any other mature industry.
So the argument that "we're late because we're artists" doesn't seem to hold any substance.
The Tivo runs on just a 50 MHz PPC! But then the encoding is done by a dedicated chip.
What strikes me is the resilience of the hard drives. A Tivo is always recording signal. One Gig per hour 24 hours a day. I'm surprised the drives hold up as well as they do. I'd guess a regular PC accesses disk about 1% of the time, and even then only 5% writing.
It's probably not hard to get the basic functionality to record shows on disk. But I'm pretty sure that is less than 1% of the engineering work that goes into one of these products. There are zillions of features on top of that that makes it convenient, usable and fun. Just a few: Remote Control, switching your cable box for you, knowing all the tv schedules, live buffer, etc.
The other thing is that a 1.4 GHz Athlon system costs way more than a good Tivo. Don't expect to be able to use it for anything else while it's recording. And a Tivo is always recording.
OTOH, if you want to be able to burn your favorite shows to DVDs, this is the only way to go. Well, actually, I would still get the Tivo, and record whatever I wanted to burn off it.
How is it different? It's extremely different! In case you didn't know, the FBI still needs a court to approve phone tapping, and it's only supposed to be done when there is reasonable suspicion that you're involved in serious crime.
The phone eqivalent of this proposal would be that the FBI taped every phone call ever made. It's like being in permanent arrest. Everything you say can be used against you, or anyone you may talk about.
And while it may save some people thousands, it will cost billions to do so, so it's probbaly not that great from that angle either.