The guy has a persecution complex. The way you respond is to call his bluff.
You invite him to the whitehouse for a peace summit. You try to figure out what he wants in an open dialogue. If he didn't agree to come, he'd lose all credibility.
JFK told Castro that if he didn't get the nukes out of Cuba, Cuba would be wiped out proactively.
But that was 40 years ago. Times have changed.
We're now in an era where the US sits hamstrung by global politics while country after country gets nukes. Pakistan, North Korea, and now Iran who is suceeding in stalling until they inevitably reveal that the secret cake is out of the oven.
I don't see how we could stop anybody from acquiring nuclear technology no matter how close to home unless we were willing to threaten a first strike to prevent it. And doing so pretty much shoots the rhetoric of the evils of having "weapons of mass destruction" out the window.
We just don't have the troop count without reinstituting the draft to fight a conventional war.
So to me I think China could ultimately supply nukes to Venezuela and Cuba as a way of insuring unfettered access to Venezuelan oil at the expense of the US.
What would happen is the US would continue to be hamstrung. We are too dependent on China as an economic partner to ramp up a cold war, and yet by not doing anything we are assuring the gradual decay of the country from a shortage of oil imports now getting gobbled up by rivals.
Here is a curious situation. I live in an apartment in Culver City,CA and I work 10 minutes away from the office. I'm paying as much money for this apartment as you'd normally pay for a cheap home mortgage. Houses around here are priced so high it would be hard to buy into them for fear of the bubble bursting.
What a lot of my peers have done is bought houses pretty far away from work. We have one person who bought a house for a half a million dollars halfway to San Bernardino. He considers the house a bargain even though he is "house poor" (i.e. all his money goes to the mortage).
What happens when the gas prices increase commuting costs to the point where people just can't make ends meet?
I think a big problem with businesses is they feel obligated to locate their offices in areas that have no affordable housing. Wouldn't it be better to move the office towards where people actually live? No. We have offices in places like Beverly Hills.
Do you think businesses want to pay higher salaries to subsidize the average person's commuting costs?
I really think that business themselves have to relocate.
The pain of cost increases is proportionate to the necessity of the product and the rate you go through it.
How many gallons of milk does the average household consume each week? Probably 1 at most. And even then you can probably make do without it for a while, switch to another beverage.
How many gallons does the typical commuter go through a week? Probably at least 10-20.
Once you cut out extraneous travel and you downsize your car, there isn't much else you can do to minimize your commuting costs. Living close to work is not always economically possible or the area might not be very safe.
I see someone is still using Telnet to post to Slashdot. Look dude, it's 2005. Nobody knows what the ^H joke means unless you are ready for a retirement home.
Computers are not parallel enough to be able to simulate the brain. They would take a lot longer to complete a full "thought" than an equivalent human. They are only good at solving static problems in a tight inner loop (think chess) rather than open-ended consciousness.
However, I do think that the brain can ultimately be emulated just as any machine can.
The thing is, unless you are talking about NPCs in an RPG, AI doesn't have to model all aspects of the human brain. It just has to model enough in order to act out the limited role that that character has to play in the specific game.
For instance, in a racing game, the AI of the other drivers only should know how to drive the car. You don't need to give the driver a fullblown consciousness.
So you have to scale your AI approach to the game.
It's more convenient to attack a figure that is conveniently accessibe (i.e. GW Bush) than one that is not (Bin Laden).
That doens't mean it's productive to do that. Whether you voted for the guy or not, he's our commander in chief for another 4 years so there is no alternative but to stand by him and wait until the next election to vote democrat. That's how our country works. If you don't like it, blame The Constitution.
Whether you like the patriot act or not, the president has a duty to do something and I'd rather have a president that is overreacting than one who is doing nothing so as to avoid labels like fascist.
I'm trying to read between the lines here. Are you saying there is no terrorism problem, then? Are you advocating we do nothing? It's fine to lay on the liberal propaganda that GW is just using terrorism as a cover for his own agenda, and maybe that's true, but that doesn't mean the proper approach is to sit around and pretend there is no problem.
It really doesn't matter if there are terrorism "masterminds" or it's just a brand-name as you call it, it's still a problem.
To me the #1 bomb of all time was POP.COM, the Dreamworks-funded failure. The site never officially even LAUNCHED after a year of effort and a lot of buzz and publicity!
I once interviewed over there. The office was a big square room with a center area that had a ping pong table and other recreational stuff (I think a grand piano). It was the epitome of dot com excess. And the guy who was running the place said something like "oh yeah, we're in a great position because upper management is letting us experiment and make mistakes until we find what works". It turns out that there wasn't as much patience as he originally thought.
The fact that they couldn't even do a soft-launch and were waiting like some perfectionists for the perfect launch is just the antithesis of dot com.
There is no excuse for not being able to put something meaningful up in a whole year.
Iceland has a very low population, and therefore their energey needs are below what alternative energy sources can provide. Their solution can not be replicated everywhere.
The world would not have energy problems if we had a small global population clustered around hot springs and waterfalls and other areas that could be tapped for energy.
And, most importantly, he button should be on the LEFT. A lot of coinops moved the joystick to the left and buttons to the right during the whole fighting craze, but to me it's more intuitive to control movement with your dominant hand.
Moving buttons to to be controlled by the right hand shows that games evolved towards random "button mashing".
My opinion is that newer consoles do not see the kind of improvement over time as you saw with older consoles. They see some, but diminishing returns show up rapidly. For instance, nothing you could do was going to be able to give you the transparency effects that the PSX could do on the Saturn. And nothing you could do could completely eliminate flickering polygons on the PSX. A lot of the graphical effects you see on today's consoles a result of the hardware and only the hardware. How MANY polygons or how fast a framerate might be helped by better coding, but it's not as simplistic as you put it.
Sony has hyped the crap out of PS3. They are not in a position to deliver something that is not what they claim it is. Nintendo is in a better position of delivering something intentionally mediocre.
3d0 was released a a time when technology was shifting between generations. It didn't have enough dedicated 3D hardware. It failed. Same with the Jaguar and the Saturn, and to a lesser Extent, the Dreamcast (which to my eyes was only marginally less powerful than the PS2). If you think that the console designers don't have to really think hard about what to put in these things and how often to release consoles you are crazy.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know why you say that.
You see a lot of panty shots in anime or shots of girls in the shower, but in Japan all genitals are blacked out/fuzzed out/pixellated out.
The guy has a persecution complex. The way you respond is to call his bluff.
You invite him to the whitehouse for a peace summit. You try to figure out what he wants in an open dialogue. If he didn't agree to come, he'd lose all credibility.
So did we, since it's based on oil.
JFK told Castro that if he didn't get the nukes out of Cuba, Cuba would be wiped out proactively.
But that was 40 years ago. Times have changed.
We're now in an era where the US sits hamstrung by global politics while country after country gets nukes. Pakistan, North Korea, and now Iran who is suceeding in stalling until they inevitably reveal that the secret cake is out of the oven.
I don't see how we could stop anybody from acquiring nuclear technology no matter how close to home unless we were willing to threaten a first strike to prevent it. And doing so pretty much shoots the rhetoric of the evils of having "weapons of mass destruction" out the window.
We just don't have the troop count without reinstituting the draft to fight a conventional war.
So to me I think China could ultimately supply nukes to Venezuela and Cuba as a way of insuring unfettered access to Venezuelan oil at the expense of the US.
What would happen is the US would continue to be hamstrung. We are too dependent on China as an economic partner to ramp up a cold war, and yet by not doing anything we are assuring the gradual decay of the country from a shortage of oil imports now getting gobbled up by rivals.
Where does Wal-Mart fit into this?
US vs. China pretty much means the US vs. its own capitalism as long as we destroy our manufacturing sector in favor of China.
Here is a curious situation. I live in an apartment in Culver City,CA and I work 10 minutes away from the office. I'm paying as much money for this apartment as you'd normally pay for a cheap home mortgage. Houses around here are priced so high it would be hard to buy into them for fear of the bubble bursting.
What a lot of my peers have done is bought houses pretty far away from work. We have one person who bought a house for a half a million dollars halfway to San Bernardino. He considers the house a bargain even though he is "house poor" (i.e. all his money goes to the mortage).
What happens when the gas prices increase commuting costs to the point where people just can't make ends meet?
I think a big problem with businesses is they feel obligated to locate their offices in areas that have no affordable housing. Wouldn't it be better to move the office towards where people actually live? No. We have offices in places like Beverly Hills.
Do you think businesses want to pay higher salaries to subsidize the average person's commuting costs?
I really think that business themselves have to relocate.
And a particularly swishy guy at that.
Stupid analogy but I hear it a lot.
The pain of cost increases is proportionate to the necessity of the product and the rate you go through it.
How many gallons of milk does the average household consume each week? Probably 1 at most. And even then you can probably make do without it for a while, switch to another beverage.
How many gallons does the typical commuter go through a week? Probably at least 10-20.
Once you cut out extraneous travel and you downsize your car, there isn't much else you can do to minimize your commuting costs. Living close to work is not always economically possible or the area might not be very safe.
Those types of comments belong on Engadget.
I see someone is still using Telnet to post to Slashdot. Look dude, it's 2005. Nobody knows what the ^H joke means unless you are ready for a retirement home.
Sounds like the history of the x86 instruction set.
And which of these private orbital spacecraft carry people?
Proven like 3-mile-island and Chernobyl?
Some scientist was quoted as saying that he felt that there isn't enough oil to turn the earth into Venus.
Before global warming, dwindling oil supply is going to cause more of an immediate impact on our day to day lives.
But there may still be enough oil and coal in the world to destroy the biosphere enough to have the "great die off" that the peak oilers talk about.
And this is something that I can see happening within our lifetimes.
I think it's just a problem of parallelization.
Computers are not parallel enough to be able to simulate the brain. They would take a lot longer to complete a full "thought" than an equivalent human. They are only good at solving static problems in a tight inner loop (think chess) rather than open-ended consciousness.
However, I do think that the brain can ultimately be emulated just as any machine can.
The thing is, unless you are talking about NPCs in an RPG, AI doesn't have to model all aspects of the human brain. It just has to model enough in order to act out the limited role that that character has to play in the specific game.
For instance, in a racing game, the AI of the other drivers only should know how to drive the car. You don't need to give the driver a fullblown consciousness.
So you have to scale your AI approach to the game.
You won't be calling it a "so-called" war on terror when your arm blows off in a restaurant.
It's more convenient to attack a figure that is conveniently accessibe (i.e. GW Bush) than one that is not (Bin Laden).
That doens't mean it's productive to do that. Whether you voted for the guy or not, he's our commander in chief for another 4 years so there is no alternative but to stand by him and wait until the next election to vote democrat. That's how our country works. If you don't like it, blame The Constitution.
Whether you like the patriot act or not, the president has a duty to do something and I'd rather have a president that is overreacting than one who is doing nothing so as to avoid labels like fascist.
I'm trying to read between the lines here. Are you saying there is no terrorism problem, then? Are you advocating we do nothing? It's fine to lay on the liberal propaganda that GW is just using terrorism as a cover for his own agenda, and maybe that's true, but that doesn't mean the proper approach is to sit around and pretend there is no problem.
It really doesn't matter if there are terrorism "masterminds" or it's just a brand-name as you call it, it's still a problem.
To me the #1 bomb of all time was POP.COM, the Dreamworks-funded failure. The site never officially even LAUNCHED after a year of effort and a lot of buzz and publicity!
I once interviewed over there. The office was a big square room with a center area that had a ping pong table and other recreational stuff (I think a grand piano). It was the epitome of dot com excess. And the guy who was running the place said something like "oh yeah, we're in a great position because upper management is letting us experiment and make mistakes until we find what works". It turns out that there wasn't as much patience as he originally thought.
The fact that they couldn't even do a soft-launch and were waiting like some perfectionists for the perfect launch is just the antithesis of dot com.
There is no excuse for not being able to put something meaningful up in a whole year.
Here is a sample piece about the shutdown:
http://www.teako170.com/pop2.html
Iceland has a very low population, and therefore their energey needs are below what alternative energy sources can provide. Their solution can not be replicated everywhere.
The world would not have energy problems if we had a small global population clustered around hot springs and waterfalls and other areas that could be tapped for energy.
Maybe they should be teaching MBA students how it's better not to outsource tech jobs and we wouldn't have a problem.
And, most importantly, he button should be on the LEFT. A lot of coinops moved the joystick to the left and buttons to the right during the whole fighting craze, but to me it's more intuitive to control movement with your dominant hand. Moving buttons to to be controlled by the right hand shows that games evolved towards random "button mashing".
My opinion is that newer consoles do not see the kind of improvement over time as you saw with older consoles. They see some, but diminishing returns show up rapidly. For instance, nothing you could do was going to be able to give you the transparency effects that the PSX could do on the Saturn. And nothing you could do could completely eliminate flickering polygons on the PSX. A lot of the graphical effects you see on today's consoles a result of the hardware and only the hardware. How MANY polygons or how fast a framerate might be helped by better coding, but it's not as simplistic as you put it.
Sony has hyped the crap out of PS3. They are not in a position to deliver something that is not what they claim it is. Nintendo is in a better position of delivering something intentionally mediocre.
3d0 was released a a time when technology was shifting between generations. It didn't have enough dedicated 3D hardware. It failed. Same with the Jaguar and the Saturn, and to a lesser Extent, the Dreamcast (which to my eyes was only marginally less powerful than the PS2). If you think that the console designers don't have to really think hard about what to put in these things and how often to release consoles you are crazy.
You sound like a Nintendo apologist.