Okay, I can already see where this is going. You're going to completely ignore the actual meaning of the word "stealing" (that is, taking without permission) and define it as being dependent on deprivation.
To illustrate the absurdity of your position, I will then define "murder" as "being a jackass in a public forum" and argue that you should be sentenced to life in prison.
You're then going to call me a troll and a tool of the establishment that's trying to keep you down.
At that point, everyone will point and laugh at your neo-hippie act.
This story was posted under a heading of "YRO," which I'm told stands for "your rights" something.
Isn't that just a bit misleading here? Whose rights are we talking about, exactly? I thought we were talking about the rights of content owners, rights that are being ignored en masse by pirates all over the world.
I'm pretty sure you're going to have a hard time spinning this into a "me me me" situation.
I tried it once, long ago. I used it for about ten minutes before learning that it didn't support such revolutionary and leading-edge Mac technologies as cut-and-paste.
Please tell me that they've at least fixed that little omission?
It seems to me that Macs are good for "new to computers" people and for "old to computers" people. You're absolutely right that they're good for people who don't have lots of experience with computers, but I think they're also good for people who have way too much experience with computers. I've seen one person after another become fed up with the dismal state of the other platforms (Windows, Linux, whatever) and make the move to Mac OS X. See, the thing about OS X is that you can play around with it if you want to, but you don't have to. That's not really true of any other platform right now.
So Apple's in the unusual position of being great for newbies and for old-timers, two market segments with practically nothing in common.
You say that the eMac was made "primarily" for educational use, but you might not know that it was originally made exclusively for educational use. It was released in April 2002 and was only available to education customers. It proved so popular that Apple made it available to everybody in June.
Apple has a history of doing this kind of thing. There are Mac models out there that you've probably never even heard of because they were only sold to schools. Like the "Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One" for instance.
You know what's real charming? I mean, what's a real make-friends kind of maneuver? Citing a dictionary. When, you know, the point the other person was trying to make was as plain as the nose on your face.
See, when we were kids-- and by "we" I mean "everybody but you," evidently --we learned two big, scary words: "connotation" and "denotation." Maybe you were out sick that day or something.
That the system is broken is a claim you have now made twice, without providing any more evidence
Um. I guess what you're, in a bafflingly roundabout way, trying to say here is that you don't think the system is broken. You think it works just fine.
Explain to me, then, the heartbreakingly sad state of affairs on this Web site. If the system works so well, why is the status quo so dismal?
How does moderating and meta-moderating "make the things which are already bad worse"?
The system is broken. Participating in it perpetuates it. Bad plus more equals worse. What part of that confused you?
That's an accusation that/. solicits readers that post junk
Yes.
and an accusation that the moderation system is inadequate
The word I used was "broken." I'd prefer that we stick with that term. If you call it "inadequate," that connotes (ooh, there's that troublesome concept again) that the system could work if it were just bigger. That's not an idea I agree with.
but not an explanation of why
Why does the site solicit contributors who post junk? Page views. This site, which like all human endeavors is driven by a profit motive, lives and dies by the number of page views it gets. The content of contributions is not relevant, as you can see by, you know, reading the Web site we're talking about. As far as the proprietors are concerned, a contribution of absolutely no worth whatsoever is precisely equal to a contribution of great wisdom. And there are a lot more of the former.
Why is the system broken? Because there's obviously no motive to fix it. See the above paragraph.
Maybe the problem is that all of the people who would make really good moderators are lurking instead of logging in?
No, that's not the problem. The problem, as I said, is that this Web site is fundamentally broken. It was conceived not to generate wisdom but merely to generate page views. (Actually, when I put it in those terms, this site is a smashing success. But I'd like to think that there's a higher standard than merely "works as designed," you know?)
And I think the problem is that you read what you want to read into my statements, because you are biased.
Sky: blue. Grass: green. Crullers: tasty but fattening. Any other readily self-evident facts you want to state with great pomp and circumstance?
The fact that I used jargon that anyone could pick up after reading two articles with the threshold set to 0 or 1
More jargon. Do you at least see what I mean? You are defending the system behind this Web site because you can't see the forest for the trees. Take a step back. Gain some perspective. Change your point of view. You'll see, then, what I'm talking about.
I would counter that you're too far from the solution!
I'm confused. Are you saying that there is a solution, thereby tacitly acknowledging that which you've up to this point fervently denied, i.e., that there is in fact a problem? Or are you saying that the "solution," in a metaphorical sense, is already in place? If the answer is B, please refer back to the part above where I asked you to explain the wretched state of affairs in context of your position that there's no problem?
I thought I was suggesting a more constructive way to deal with the perceived "problem"
Ah. Okay. I think I just found the answer to my own question. Your use of quotation marks here indicates that
Nope. You may not have meant to, but you certainly did. It was the part where you dismissed discussion as "complaining about it."
Besides, you missed the point. The system is broken. Participation in the system won't change the fact that it's broken. It'll just make the things which are already bad worse.
What troubles me most of all, though, is your stridence. You're downright shrill about keeping within the rules of the system. You even use Slashdot jargon like "moderate" and "AC" and "lurking." I think maybe you're a little too close to the problem to be able to see it clearly.
You don't have to "pretty much" me. What I said is written down. I said,
Things that should be easy are hard, none of the applications I use every day will run on it, alternatives suggested to me (Firefox over Safari, Thunderbird over Mail, Gimp over Photoshop, nothing over InDesign) don't stack up, and it's just plain ugly to look at all day.
There's the whole thing, word for word.
Some are based on just plain wrong information or faulty arguments, which is fine
See what I mean? There's that "I'm right, you're wrong" mindset again. That's the problem.
Well, not "matches," no. That'd look weird. But you'd want to get in the same neighborhood. To do that, you'd use the colorimeter built in to InDesign or whatever. See, you know the color value you're trying to hit --if Coca-Cola Red were a PMS color, there would be a published process equivalent; since it's a custom spot color, you use the color values that you read off of a sample with an actual colorimeter --so you just adjust your values until you get it there. No eyeballing is necessary, or even desired.
More on the pro-Linux side, of course, because most people here are a) geeks, b) more informed
See? That's it, right there. It's this "I'm right, you're wrong" mentality. If somebody were to come in here and say, "You know, I just don't like Linux at all. I much prefer Windows," he'd be shouted down as a fool, or as a paid Microsoft shill.
And the ones who say that they don't like Linux at all and prefer Mac OS X are dismissed as "fanboys," whatever that means.
The problem here is that there's this self-reinforcing cult of personality around Linux on this site. And you're participating in it. Whether you mean to or not.
I'm going to say something now, and I want you think notice how you react to it: I think Linux stinks. I've used it, extensively, and while it does have its merits, I think it stinks. Things that should be easy are hard, none of the applications I use every day will run on it, alternatives suggested to me (Firefox over Safari, Thunderbird over Mail, Gimp over Photoshop, nothing over InDesign) don't stack up, and it's just plain ugly to look at all day.
That's my opinion. But on this site, that's the sort of thing that people will argue with me about.
And telling people to shut up and participate is just another way of trying to deny that there's a problem.
Let's speak frankly here, shall we? Slashdot's moderation system is fundamentally broken. It doesn't merely permit the kind of groupthink the other guy complained about; it actively encourages it.
Of course, the problem is not merely technical. This site's tolerance of --active solicitation of, really --people who litter the comments with hundreds and hundreds of pieces of trash makes the use of filtering by score a practical necessity. Which throws the flaws of the moderation system into stark contrast.
But let's think about it for a second, huh? What are the proprietors' motivations in this? Do they want to build a high-class site with lots of productive and useful discussion? Of course not. They want page views. More page views means more advertising revenue.
What's better for page views, censuring abusive posters or encouraging them? What's better for page views, encouraging diversity of ideas and tolerance of opinions or promoting ideology?
Your suggestion is that we shouldn't talk about this. We should all just go log in and use our moderator points and be good little content consumers. But when what's broken is the underlying system, participation in that system isn't a good fix. When the system is not self-correcting, but is in fact self-destabilizing, participation isn't going to help.
The need for color calibration in print production is way overstated. There are some areas in which having a color-calibrated workflow really helps, like catalog production for example. But for most print work, it's just not helpful. To use your example, Coca-Cola Red is a specially defined printing ink. It's not a process-color mix. That is, control over the color of Coca-Cola Red happens on the printing press, not in the computer.
Like I said, there are people who really benefit from a color-calibrated workflow: camera to computer to printing plate. But for everybody else, it's just a big waste of time and money.
Last night I played "Call of Duty: United Offensive" for three hours on my Apple 17" Studio Display. (One of the old square ones with the acrylic body, not one of the even-nicer new ones.) No complaints at all.
(Except about that stupid chateau level. When the tanks started coming from all directions at once and the music came up and the P-47s took out the German armor, seriously, I got tears in my eyes. Wow.)
Thousands of illegal immigrants come over the border easily each day and you're saying we can stop terrorists or countries from coming over?
I'm saying that we are safe from nuclear infiltration across our borders. As you'd know if you thought about it for about ten seconds. If you, you know, used your brain.
All they need to bring is a freaking suitcase.
The smallest possible nuclear weapon is about two feet by three feet, and weighs nearly 200 pounds. Considerably larger than a suitcase. And a weapon of that size, when detonated, would be basically indistinguishable from a truck bomb. There's no practical use for such a weapon in a terrorist attack. It's too small to conceal without a vehicle to carry it around in, and if you have a vehicle you can get a bigger bang with a conventional explosive.
Practically speaking, a nuclear weapon that would be of use to a terrorist would be about six feet long and would weigh half a ton. Think Ryder truck, not suitcase.
I was just pointing out that there are many other ways to attack the US.
You may have been trying to do that, but you were not successful.
making missles faster
Are you familiar with the phrase "ballistic trajectory?" ICBMs can only travel at one speed.
launching more plus decoys
That's what you said was "easy" and "cheap." If our enemies could build more missiles, friend, they would.
You go on to attack tiny points in my post but miss the big picture.
Your "big picture" is that this system is not worth building. You are mistaken about that.
The point is that the Defense System can be circumvented.
No, the point is that in practical terms it cannot be. You talk about things like changing the acceleration of gravity or magically manufacturing additional missiles as if they were practical objections. They're not.
Bush did win the election after all...
Hey, thanks. Because, you know, you'd done such an incredible job of hiding your politics up to that point. Ahem.
Um. How do you think I know what I know? The Iraqis I met there told me.
Pre-Iran-Iraq war, Iraq was a pretty well-off country
Yes, that's correct.
The war, the First Persian Gulf war, the years of sanctions, pushed Iraq into a nasty decline
Um. You seem to have lost a decade there.
History lesson: Saddam seized absolute power over Iraq in 1979. (Prior to '79 there were limits on his power that he chose to respect.) The next year, he launched the devastating war with Iran over the Shat-al-Arab. The following 8 years destroyed the country's economy as Saddam funneled every penny of the nation's treasury into his military and his palaces. Schools and roads and water pipes and power lines and electric plants literally fell apart.
In 1988, Saddam grudgingly accepted a cease-fire with Iran and decided to be a Muslim --though Shia make up a tiny minority of the world's Muslims, they make up 60% of the population of Iraq, and Saddam decided to be more openly supportive of Islam in an effort to placate them after nearly a decade of total war.
In 1990, desperate for additional oil revenues and enraged that the Kuwaitis were selling their oil at a lower price than Saddam was willing to take for his oil, he sent his army over the border and declared that Kuwait was the 19th province of Iraq. Only then were Iraq's oil exports shut down and import sanctions put in place.
See? A whole decade of history, forgotten.
Now, for the first time ever in Iraq, there is an Oil shortage and a gas crisis within Iraq.
In Iraq, gasoline is literally cheaper than bottled water, because it's subsidized by the Coalition. When I was last there in the spring, it was going for about a nickel per gallon.
Iraq had water and electricity fine before the US invasion.
In some places, the water and power systems were well maintained. In Mesopotamia, they were crumbling. (It's a Sunni-Shia thing.)
Saddam Hussein's government didn't let schools and hospitals fall apart.
Again, not correct.
The schools were running fine
Wow. That's so wrong. Most of the schools weren't running at all. They had just been abandoned when Saddam stopped paying the teachers' salaries.
the hospitals crumbled under UN and US sanctions, regardless of what the Iraqi government tried to do
Have you not been reading the newspapers for, oh, the last year or so? You are aware, are you not, that Saddam skimmed billions -- at least $20 billion, and maybe more --through illegal trading under the oil-for-food program. Where did that money go? To schools? To hospitals? To repairing the country's crumbling infrastructure? No, it went into Saddam's pockets, into his palaces and into his military.
The hospitals would never get their medication
Sounds like you didn't know that no sanctions ever restricted the importation of medicines. Saddam was free to buy all the medicines he wanted. He chose not to buy medicines. He chose instead to use the revenues from oil sold through oil-for-food to line his pockets and those of his Mukhabarat and Fedayeen.
I could go on with a list of others.
I have no doubt. You could continue coughing up absurdly inapplicable analogies all day.
Tens of millions of dollars were wasted on this test.
"Wasted?" No. Spent. Would it have been good if we'd been able to get more useful data for that investment? Sure. But that's not the same as saying we got none at all.
Tests are sometimes successful and sometimes they fail. This one was in between.
Untold billions were wasted in this program.
No, again, you're evidently unclear on what "wasted" means.
Probably put into the Bush family's coffers.
Hey, it's good to see that Michael Moore is still working.
We were promised that this worthy successor to the equally non-functional Patriot missile would be deployed this year.
Um. Promised by whom? Also, this system has absolutely no relationship to any variety of the Patriot.
Finally, you need to pick up a newspaper sometime. What you refer to as the "non-functional Patriot missile" was no such thing; when PAC-1 was deployed in the Gulf in 1990/1991, it was about 40% effective against incoming ballistic missiles. That was obviously not perfect, but it was 40% better than nothing.
The PAC-3 system which we used in Kuwait in 2003 was 100% effective. Every incoming missile targeted by a PAC-3 battery was intercepted and destroyed.
Boy, are we dumb.
You're absolutely right there, but not in the way you intended, I think.
The nuclear warhead does not magically warp into space. It simply falls short of its target and lands somewhere else.
No, it begins to tumble, enters what they call an aerodynamic unstable orientation, breaks up into pieces upon contact with the atmosphere, and vaporizes at altitude.
It may even spew radioactive material into the atmosphere.
Of course it spews radioactive material into the atmosphere; where else would it go? As much as 10 or 20 kilograms of radioactive material per missile end up smeared over an area the size of Canada.
The phrase you're groping here is "immeasurably insignificant."
the whole fucking world will just be scorched earth
I think you've been reading too many comic books.
I don't think you understand how difficult it is to hit one warhead with another warhead.
It is exceedingly difficult. It's also something we did with 100% accuracy during the invasion of Iraq. Saddam lobbed somewhere on the order of 20 medium-range ballistic missiles at Kuwait; of those that were on target, 100% were intercepted by PAC-3 missiles.
I think you're confusing "difficult" with "impossible." When there's a 200 kiloton nuclear bomb heading toward your home town, that distinction becomes pretty important.
There are plenty of other things we can spend this money on
Yes, that will always be true. But it'll also always be true that we have to be prepared to blow stuff up if it comes to that.
The phrase "war zone" doesn't really have any meaning. It's just an expression that people who've never left home use in order to sound worldly.
I was in Iraq for nine months from the summer of 2003 to the spring of 2004. Does that count?
Much of the fighting has taken place in cities with marines moving door to door to secure the city.
Very little of the fighting has been like that. That kind of work took place almost exclusively in Fallujah, last month.
We bomb the cities from ships forty miles away
No, we used only PGMs in the Iraqi conurbations. We never "bombed the cities." We used regular, unguided munitions dropped from B-52s to destroy the terrorist camps northeast of Baghdad, but those were dozens of miles away from any built-up areas. There was nothing to pound but dirt and terrorist camps.
we told the UN to fuck off
Um. You're very confused. The UN Security Council, in the person of permanent member France, told us to fuck off, not the other way around.
And yes, we invaded on our own terms. That's the only way an invasion happens. You don't invade on anybody else's terms.
Strangely, we can't even supply our troops with enough armor!
Take a look at the loss figures and explain to me, please, how the most successful military campaign in the history of warfare can be characterized by the phrase "not enough armor."
Regardless, we should address the problems at home before we go invading other countries.
Typical wrong-headed thinking. We go invading other countries to prevent problems at home. During the 1990s we failed to invade Sudan, choosing instead to fire cruise missiles. We failed to invade Afghanistan when the Taliban set up a veritable terrorist ivy league, choosing instead to (again) fire cruise missiles.
What happened? September 11 happened. It became --you see where I'm going here? --a problem at home.
What I do want is to be able to answer "No", truthfully, if asked if I was ever arrested.
Confused now. The truth is that you were never arrested. (Well, I'm assuming. You have not described having been arrested at any point.)
But you believe that you were. You insist that you were, in fact, in spite of being corrected on that point more than once. You say you want to be able to say "no" truthfully, but if you really were arrested, you can't. Instead, you went to a lot of trouble --and caused a lot of trouble for others -- so that you could lie about it in such a way that it'd be difficult for anybody to catch you.
That's kinda embarrassing, I'd think. Particularly the part where you talk about wanted to earn your citizenship under false pretenses.
The part where the shutdown was described as automatic, the part where it was described as of unknown origin, and the part where it was described as a failure: None of these was accurately reported.
The first writethru was even worse. And don't even talk to me about Jim Wolf's story for Reuters. That was just a mess.
Because to overcome the defense, all you need to do is send more warheads and make the warheads travel faster. A CHEAP EASY WAY TO OVERCOME A TRILLION DOLLAR SYSTEM.
My favorite part was where you called doubling or tripling the size of an enemy's strategic missile force and somehow inventing ballistic missiles that, you know, go faster than physics allows "cheap" and "easy."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not Christian. I'm just tolerant of them.
You, on the other hand, are an unapologetic bigot, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
But copyright infringment is not stealing.
Okay, I can already see where this is going. You're going to completely ignore the actual meaning of the word "stealing" (that is, taking without permission) and define it as being dependent on deprivation.
To illustrate the absurdity of your position, I will then define "murder" as "being a jackass in a public forum" and argue that you should be sentenced to life in prison.
You're then going to call me a troll and a tool of the establishment that's trying to keep you down.
At that point, everyone will point and laugh at your neo-hippie act.
Did I pretty much get it right?
This should be a civil matter, not a criminal one.
Trafficking in stolen goods is a crime. Why should the online equivalent not be a crime?
And please, don't answer with anything that can basically be boiled down to "because I want stuff for free."
This story was posted under a heading of "YRO," which I'm told stands for "your rights" something.
Isn't that just a bit misleading here? Whose rights are we talking about, exactly? I thought we were talking about the rights of content owners, rights that are being ignored en masse by pirates all over the world.
I'm pretty sure you're going to have a hard time spinning this into a "me me me" situation.
There is only 1 spare da a year (a real new-years-day)
Yes, that wouldn't needless complicate the process of writing dates. What's your plan, to go from 12/28/04 to 0/1/05 to 1/1/05?
Without exception, these so-called "better" calendars are just as bad as the one we use now. They're just different for the sake of being different.
I tried it once, long ago. I used it for about ten minutes before learning that it didn't support such revolutionary and leading-edge Mac technologies as cut-and-paste.
Please tell me that they've at least fixed that little omission?
It seems to me that Macs are good for "new to computers" people and for "old to computers" people. You're absolutely right that they're good for people who don't have lots of experience with computers, but I think they're also good for people who have way too much experience with computers. I've seen one person after another become fed up with the dismal state of the other platforms (Windows, Linux, whatever) and make the move to Mac OS X. See, the thing about OS X is that you can play around with it if you want to, but you don't have to. That's not really true of any other platform right now.
So Apple's in the unusual position of being great for newbies and for old-timers, two market segments with practically nothing in common.
You say that the eMac was made "primarily" for educational use, but you might not know that it was originally made exclusively for educational use. It was released in April 2002 and was only available to education customers. It proved so popular that Apple made it available to everybody in June.
Apple has a history of doing this kind of thing. There are Mac models out there that you've probably never even heard of because they were only sold to schools. Like the "Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One" for instance.
And it is merely complaining
/. solicits readers that post junk
You know what's real charming? I mean, what's a real make-friends kind of maneuver? Citing a dictionary. When, you know, the point the other person was trying to make was as plain as the nose on your face.
See, when we were kids-- and by "we" I mean "everybody but you," evidently --we learned two big, scary words: "connotation" and "denotation." Maybe you were out sick that day or something.
That the system is broken is a claim you have now made twice, without providing any more evidence
Um. I guess what you're, in a bafflingly roundabout way, trying to say here is that you don't think the system is broken. You think it works just fine.
Explain to me, then, the heartbreakingly sad state of affairs on this Web site. If the system works so well, why is the status quo so dismal?
How does moderating and meta-moderating "make the things which are already bad worse"?
The system is broken. Participating in it perpetuates it. Bad plus more equals worse. What part of that confused you?
That's an accusation that
Yes.
and an accusation that the moderation system is inadequate
The word I used was "broken." I'd prefer that we stick with that term. If you call it "inadequate," that connotes (ooh, there's that troublesome concept again) that the system could work if it were just bigger. That's not an idea I agree with.
but not an explanation of why
Why does the site solicit contributors who post junk? Page views. This site, which like all human endeavors is driven by a profit motive, lives and dies by the number of page views it gets. The content of contributions is not relevant, as you can see by, you know, reading the Web site we're talking about. As far as the proprietors are concerned, a contribution of absolutely no worth whatsoever is precisely equal to a contribution of great wisdom. And there are a lot more of the former.
Why is the system broken? Because there's obviously no motive to fix it. See the above paragraph.
Maybe the problem is that all of the people who would make really good moderators are lurking instead of logging in?
No, that's not the problem. The problem, as I said, is that this Web site is fundamentally broken. It was conceived not to generate wisdom but merely to generate page views. (Actually, when I put it in those terms, this site is a smashing success. But I'd like to think that there's a higher standard than merely "works as designed," you know?)
And I think the problem is that you read what you want to read into my statements, because you are biased.
Sky: blue. Grass: green. Crullers: tasty but fattening. Any other readily self-evident facts you want to state with great pomp and circumstance?
The fact that I used jargon that anyone could pick up after reading two articles with the threshold set to 0 or 1
More jargon. Do you at least see what I mean? You are defending the system behind this Web site because you can't see the forest for the trees. Take a step back. Gain some perspective. Change your point of view. You'll see, then, what I'm talking about.
I would counter that you're too far from the solution!
I'm confused. Are you saying that there is a solution, thereby tacitly acknowledging that which you've up to this point fervently denied, i.e., that there is in fact a problem? Or are you saying that the "solution," in a metaphorical sense, is already in place? If the answer is B, please refer back to the part above where I asked you to explain the wretched state of affairs in context of your position that there's no problem?
I thought I was suggesting a more constructive way to deal with the perceived "problem"
Ah. Okay. I think I just found the answer to my own question. Your use of quotation marks here indicates that
That's because I didn't say not to talk about it.
Nope. You may not have meant to, but you certainly did. It was the part where you dismissed discussion as "complaining about it."
Besides, you missed the point. The system is broken. Participation in the system won't change the fact that it's broken. It'll just make the things which are already bad worse.
What troubles me most of all, though, is your stridence. You're downright shrill about keeping within the rules of the system. You even use Slashdot jargon like "moderate" and "AC" and "lurking." I think maybe you're a little too close to the problem to be able to see it clearly.
You don't have to "pretty much" me. What I said is written down. I said,
There's the whole thing, word for word.
Some are based on just plain wrong information or faulty arguments, which is fine
See what I mean? There's that "I'm right, you're wrong" mindset again. That's the problem.
Well, not "matches," no. That'd look weird. But you'd want to get in the same neighborhood. To do that, you'd use the colorimeter built in to InDesign or whatever. See, you know the color value you're trying to hit --if Coca-Cola Red were a PMS color, there would be a published process equivalent; since it's a custom spot color, you use the color values that you read off of a sample with an actual colorimeter --so you just adjust your values until you get it there. No eyeballing is necessary, or even desired.
Or we could actually present arguments for why we like one or the other in an attempt to justify our opinions.
Um. I did. Go read it again.
Nor does it always get modded +5 Informative as you seem to be claiming.
Look around you. Obviously you're mistaken.
More on the pro-Linux side, of course, because most people here are a) geeks, b) more informed
See? That's it, right there. It's this "I'm right, you're wrong" mentality. If somebody were to come in here and say, "You know, I just don't like Linux at all. I much prefer Windows," he'd be shouted down as a fool, or as a paid Microsoft shill.
And the ones who say that they don't like Linux at all and prefer Mac OS X are dismissed as "fanboys," whatever that means.
The problem here is that there's this self-reinforcing cult of personality around Linux on this site. And you're participating in it. Whether you mean to or not.
I'm going to say something now, and I want you think notice how you react to it: I think Linux stinks. I've used it, extensively, and while it does have its merits, I think it stinks. Things that should be easy are hard, none of the applications I use every day will run on it, alternatives suggested to me (Firefox over Safari, Thunderbird over Mail, Gimp over Photoshop, nothing over InDesign) don't stack up, and it's just plain ugly to look at all day.
That's my opinion. But on this site, that's the sort of thing that people will argue with me about.
Slashdot: Where opinions can be wrong.
And telling people to shut up and participate is just another way of trying to deny that there's a problem.
Let's speak frankly here, shall we? Slashdot's moderation system is fundamentally broken. It doesn't merely permit the kind of groupthink the other guy complained about; it actively encourages it.
Of course, the problem is not merely technical. This site's tolerance of --active solicitation of, really --people who litter the comments with hundreds and hundreds of pieces of trash makes the use of filtering by score a practical necessity. Which throws the flaws of the moderation system into stark contrast.
But let's think about it for a second, huh? What are the proprietors' motivations in this? Do they want to build a high-class site with lots of productive and useful discussion? Of course not. They want page views. More page views means more advertising revenue.
What's better for page views, censuring abusive posters or encouraging them? What's better for page views, encouraging diversity of ideas and tolerance of opinions or promoting ideology?
Your suggestion is that we shouldn't talk about this. We should all just go log in and use our moderator points and be good little content consumers. But when what's broken is the underlying system, participation in that system isn't a good fix. When the system is not self-correcting, but is in fact self-destabilizing, participation isn't going to help.
The need for color calibration in print production is way overstated. There are some areas in which having a color-calibrated workflow really helps, like catalog production for example. But for most print work, it's just not helpful. To use your example, Coca-Cola Red is a specially defined printing ink. It's not a process-color mix. That is, control over the color of Coca-Cola Red happens on the printing press, not in the computer.
Like I said, there are people who really benefit from a color-calibrated workflow: camera to computer to printing plate. But for everybody else, it's just a big waste of time and money.
Last night I played "Call of Duty: United Offensive" for three hours on my Apple 17" Studio Display. (One of the old square ones with the acrylic body, not one of the even-nicer new ones.) No complaints at all.
(Except about that stupid chateau level. When the tanks started coming from all directions at once and the music came up and the P-47s took out the German armor, seriously, I got tears in my eyes. Wow.)
Thousands of illegal immigrants come over the border easily each day and you're saying we can stop terrorists or countries from coming over?
I'm saying that we are safe from nuclear infiltration across our borders. As you'd know if you thought about it for about ten seconds. If you, you know, used your brain.
All they need to bring is a freaking suitcase.
The smallest possible nuclear weapon is about two feet by three feet, and weighs nearly 200 pounds. Considerably larger than a suitcase. And a weapon of that size, when detonated, would be basically indistinguishable from a truck bomb. There's no practical use for such a weapon in a terrorist attack. It's too small to conceal without a vehicle to carry it around in, and if you have a vehicle you can get a bigger bang with a conventional explosive.
Practically speaking, a nuclear weapon that would be of use to a terrorist would be about six feet long and would weigh half a ton. Think Ryder truck, not suitcase.
I was just pointing out that there are many other ways to attack the US.
You may have been trying to do that, but you were not successful.
making missles faster
Are you familiar with the phrase "ballistic trajectory?" ICBMs can only travel at one speed.
launching more plus decoys
That's what you said was "easy" and "cheap." If our enemies could build more missiles, friend, they would.
You go on to attack tiny points in my post but miss the big picture.
Your "big picture" is that this system is not worth building. You are mistaken about that.
The point is that the Defense System can be circumvented.
No, the point is that in practical terms it cannot be. You talk about things like changing the acceleration of gravity or magically manufacturing additional missiles as if they were practical objections. They're not.
Bush did win the election after all...
Hey, thanks. Because, you know, you'd done such an incredible job of hiding your politics up to that point. Ahem.
Um. How do you think I know what I know? The Iraqis I met there told me.
Pre-Iran-Iraq war, Iraq was a pretty well-off country
Yes, that's correct.
The war, the First Persian Gulf war, the years of sanctions, pushed Iraq into a nasty decline
Um. You seem to have lost a decade there.
History lesson: Saddam seized absolute power over Iraq in 1979. (Prior to '79 there were limits on his power that he chose to respect.) The next year, he launched the devastating war with Iran over the Shat-al-Arab. The following 8 years destroyed the country's economy as Saddam funneled every penny of the nation's treasury into his military and his palaces. Schools and roads and water pipes and power lines and electric plants literally fell apart.
In 1988, Saddam grudgingly accepted a cease-fire with Iran and decided to be a Muslim --though Shia make up a tiny minority of the world's Muslims, they make up 60% of the population of Iraq, and Saddam decided to be more openly supportive of Islam in an effort to placate them after nearly a decade of total war.
In 1990, desperate for additional oil revenues and enraged that the Kuwaitis were selling their oil at a lower price than Saddam was willing to take for his oil, he sent his army over the border and declared that Kuwait was the 19th province of Iraq. Only then were Iraq's oil exports shut down and import sanctions put in place.
See? A whole decade of history, forgotten.
Now, for the first time ever in Iraq, there is an Oil shortage and a gas crisis within Iraq.
In Iraq, gasoline is literally cheaper than bottled water, because it's subsidized by the Coalition. When I was last there in the spring, it was going for about a nickel per gallon.
Iraq had water and electricity fine before the US invasion.
In some places, the water and power systems were well maintained. In Mesopotamia, they were crumbling. (It's a Sunni-Shia thing.)
Saddam Hussein's government didn't let schools and hospitals fall apart.
Again, not correct.
The schools were running fine
Wow. That's so wrong. Most of the schools weren't running at all. They had just been abandoned when Saddam stopped paying the teachers' salaries.
the hospitals crumbled under UN and US sanctions, regardless of what the Iraqi government tried to do
Have you not been reading the newspapers for, oh, the last year or so? You are aware, are you not, that Saddam skimmed billions -- at least $20 billion, and maybe more --through illegal trading under the oil-for-food program. Where did that money go? To schools? To hospitals? To repairing the country's crumbling infrastructure? No, it went into Saddam's pockets, into his palaces and into his military.
The hospitals would never get their medication
Sounds like you didn't know that no sanctions ever restricted the importation of medicines. Saddam was free to buy all the medicines he wanted. He chose not to buy medicines. He chose instead to use the revenues from oil sold through oil-for-food to line his pockets and those of his Mukhabarat and Fedayeen.
I could go on with a list of others.
I have no doubt. You could continue coughing up absurdly inapplicable analogies all day.
Tens of millions of dollars were wasted on this test.
"Wasted?" No. Spent. Would it have been good if we'd been able to get more useful data for that investment? Sure. But that's not the same as saying we got none at all.
Tests are sometimes successful and sometimes they fail. This one was in between.
Untold billions were wasted in this program.
No, again, you're evidently unclear on what "wasted" means.
Probably put into the Bush family's coffers.
Hey, it's good to see that Michael Moore is still working.
We were promised that this worthy successor to the equally non-functional Patriot missile would be deployed this year.
Um. Promised by whom? Also, this system has absolutely no relationship to any variety of the Patriot.
Finally, you need to pick up a newspaper sometime. What you refer to as the "non-functional Patriot missile" was no such thing; when PAC-1 was deployed in the Gulf in 1990/1991, it was about 40% effective against incoming ballistic missiles. That was obviously not perfect, but it was 40% better than nothing.
The PAC-3 system which we used in Kuwait in 2003 was 100% effective. Every incoming missile targeted by a PAC-3 battery was intercepted and destroyed.
Boy, are we dumb.
You're absolutely right there, but not in the way you intended, I think.
The nuclear warhead does not magically warp into space. It simply falls short of its target and lands somewhere else.
No, it begins to tumble, enters what they call an aerodynamic unstable orientation, breaks up into pieces upon contact with the atmosphere, and vaporizes at altitude.
It may even spew radioactive material into the atmosphere.
Of course it spews radioactive material into the atmosphere; where else would it go? As much as 10 or 20 kilograms of radioactive material per missile end up smeared over an area the size of Canada.
The phrase you're groping here is "immeasurably insignificant."
the whole fucking world will just be scorched earth
I think you've been reading too many comic books.
I don't think you understand how difficult it is to hit one warhead with another warhead.
It is exceedingly difficult. It's also something we did with 100% accuracy during the invasion of Iraq. Saddam lobbed somewhere on the order of 20 medium-range ballistic missiles at Kuwait; of those that were on target, 100% were intercepted by PAC-3 missiles.
I think you're confusing "difficult" with "impossible." When there's a 200 kiloton nuclear bomb heading toward your home town, that distinction becomes pretty important.
There are plenty of other things we can spend this money on
Yes, that will always be true. But it'll also always be true that we have to be prepared to blow stuff up if it comes to that.
Have you ever been in the middle of a war zone?
The phrase "war zone" doesn't really have any meaning. It's just an expression that people who've never left home use in order to sound worldly.
I was in Iraq for nine months from the summer of 2003 to the spring of 2004. Does that count?
Much of the fighting has taken place in cities with marines moving door to door to secure the city.
Very little of the fighting has been like that. That kind of work took place almost exclusively in Fallujah, last month.
We bomb the cities from ships forty miles away
No, we used only PGMs in the Iraqi conurbations. We never "bombed the cities." We used regular, unguided munitions dropped from B-52s to destroy the terrorist camps northeast of Baghdad, but those were dozens of miles away from any built-up areas. There was nothing to pound but dirt and terrorist camps.
we told the UN to fuck off
Um. You're very confused. The UN Security Council, in the person of permanent member France, told us to fuck off, not the other way around.
And yes, we invaded on our own terms. That's the only way an invasion happens. You don't invade on anybody else's terms.
Strangely, we can't even supply our troops with enough armor!
Take a look at the loss figures and explain to me, please, how the most successful military campaign in the history of warfare can be characterized by the phrase "not enough armor."
Regardless, we should address the problems at home before we go invading other countries.
Typical wrong-headed thinking. We go invading other countries to prevent problems at home. During the 1990s we failed to invade Sudan, choosing instead to fire cruise missiles. We failed to invade Afghanistan when the Taliban set up a veritable terrorist ivy league, choosing instead to (again) fire cruise missiles.
What happened? September 11 happened. It became --you see where I'm going here? --a problem at home.
What I do want is to be able to answer "No", truthfully, if asked if I was ever arrested.
Confused now. The truth is that you were never arrested. (Well, I'm assuming. You have not described having been arrested at any point.)
But you believe that you were. You insist that you were, in fact, in spite of being corrected on that point more than once. You say you want to be able to say "no" truthfully, but if you really were arrested, you can't. Instead, you went to a lot of trouble --and caused a lot of trouble for others -- so that you could lie about it in such a way that it'd be difficult for anybody to catch you.
That's kinda embarrassing, I'd think. Particularly the part where you talk about wanted to earn your citizenship under false pretenses.
The part where the shutdown was described as automatic, the part where it was described as of unknown origin, and the part where it was described as a failure: None of these was accurately reported.
The first writethru was even worse. And don't even talk to me about Jim Wolf's story for Reuters. That was just a mess.
Because to overcome the defense, all you need to do is send more warheads and make the warheads travel faster. A CHEAP EASY WAY TO OVERCOME A TRILLION DOLLAR SYSTEM.
My favorite part was where you called doubling or tripling the size of an enemy's strategic missile force and somehow inventing ballistic missiles that, you know, go faster than physics allows "cheap" and "easy."
That was my very favorite part.
Admit it: You're the Time Cube guy, aren't you?