Never worked in the defense industry, have you? There is PLENTY that gets locked down and stays that way. F o r e v e r.
Utter nonsense. I've worked in the civilian defense industry and prior to that I was in military intelligence. Whether something is classified or not has almost no relation to whether it's common knowledge. As we were told early on, what's classified is generally not the facts themselves, but the verification that they're true. There are indeed things that stay unknown essentially forever, but they are very small, unimportant things, like the SINCGARS radio encryption keys we used in Feb 1990. The actual secrecy of something is inversely proportional to its scope, times its importance, times the number of years it's been around. It would be absolutely, utterly impossible to keep a series of faked moon landings secret for that long.
In order to believe it was a hoax, one must believe one of two things: A) most or all of the scientists, engineers, and workers at the contractors who built the Apollo mission components were in on the hoax, or B) only the top brass at NASA knew, and the contractors thought they were building real moon shot hardware.
In order for A) to work they'd have to pay off or threaten literally thousands of people to keep them quiet. And yet, in the 40 years since then there has not been a single deathbed confession, anonymous book, or even subtle hinting by disgruntled former employees of Apollo contractors. It would be literally impossible to keep that many people completely silent for this long, no matter what leverage you applied.
That leaves us with B). A conspiracy kept down to the top officials is somewhat more plausible. However, it requires that all the contractors believe they are building hardware that's actually going to the moon. Now, in what kind of idiot universe do you have to live to believe that NASA would blow a huge wad of dough on several missions worth of lunar-capable equipment, and then not use it, instead incurring the additonal expense and burden of secretly simulating a moon landing? What would be the possible point?
Why dont they just mothball the space shuttle and get everything to ISS on Soviet Soyuz capsules and on conventional rockets (e.g. Titan, Delta, whatever the soviets have)?
Unfortunately, to do that now would be to admit that it's been money down the rat hole. The only way to not lose credibility is to pretend it's OK and keep pouring that money...
Take some photo's of any evidence that may be left on the moon from the original trip to finally shut all the whack-job fucks up about us not going to the moon for real initially.
Heh. They're too far gone to be shut up. Almost by definition, they don't listen to reason. I predict it'll be about forty seconds from the release of the first NASA photo till the first screams of "PHOTOSHOP!" from the nutcases.
For months I've been reading the ApolloHoax.net/clavius.org forum wherein a handful of ignorant goofballs continuously argue with scores of rational people about whether the moon landings were faked. When asked what it will take to prove to them that the landings are real, most essentially essentially evade the question because they're not interested in the truth-- they want to believe the conspiracy. But one nut at least likes to ask "why doesn't NASA go back and take some pictures if it's really true?" The rebuttal is usually along the lines of "even if they did, you'd claim THOSE were faked too". It will be interesting to see how long it takes him to start shouting "PHOTOSHOP!" once the pics come out...
Really, I think the best proof that it's not a hoax is that there's no way that many people could keep a secret for that long.
The USSR landed men on the moon? When did that happen exactly?
Who said anything about men? The Soviets safely landed seven probes of the Luna series, and a whole lot more... uh... impacted destructively. Details can be found on NASA's web site here: http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunarus sr.html
The problem is that there are no arguments. Only assertions of the form, "I can tell you that..." That only works if you are an authority, otherwise it's just noise.
Point taken. The real problem is that it's a quotation from a speech, and pretty much all public speeches are arguments from authority presented without documentary evidence because the format demands it. Point is, the appropriate counter to the quoted speech is not "Crichton is not an authority in those fields", but "Crichton makes claims but presents no substantiating evidence". Claiming someone is credible or not based on authority or lack thereof isn't valid debate in scientific matters.
And I can tell you that Michael Chricton is not an authority on any of these things, despite writing excellent science fiction stories.
One doesn't have to be an authority to be correct. I can't speak on the veracity of the rest, but the part about DDT is dead-on accurate. Essentially "appealing to NON-authority" to dismiss his arguments and citations is poor rebuttal. If the speaker isn't claiming authority, you have to debunk the argument, not the speaker's credentials.
Note to Verizon: if it is more profitable to lease bandwidth to ISPs than it is to be one, get out of the ISP business!
Seriously, I think they ought to be thrown out of the ISP business. I think that for internet service they should be either allowed to own the copper infrastructure or sell connectivity over the infrastructure, but not both.
Hauling troops anywhere quickly is what they said the V-22 was for
No they didn't. That's what the C-17 is for. The V-22 was intended to move troops short hops around the battlefield with the speed of an airplane, but the agility of a helicopter.
Our military would never settle for a slow blimp, unless it's got anti-grav or some exotic weapon.
The purpose of a military airship is for heavy lift long distance transport. Currently, if they want to move a large number of M-1A1 tanks, they roll them onto cargo ships and wait two weeks. An airship would be slightly faster, plus it wouldn't have to sail around land masses. It's intended as a compromise between transporting armored vehicles very quickly by ones and twos via the limited fleet of cargo planes, or very slowly by the dozens via ship.
I mean really, how long before these babies go autonomous.
All it'll take is a lightning strike and goodbye humanity.
Surely you're not serious. Do you really get your science education from bad movies? Lightning would do one of two things, even to a mythical sentient machine: A) nothing, or B) break it. Believing that lightning can turn an simple autonomous robot into some crazed, scheming killing machine is as asinine as believing you can repair an aneurysm with a sledgehammer.
This war and the mindless support US citizens have given it will go down as one of the greatest crimes of modern history
Are you serious? The fact that the adversary, Saddam Hussein, was a murdering jackass who fancied himself another Stalin pretty much guarantees that no matter what convoluted logic the current administration used to sell the war, it'll never be considered worse than a push. It's pretty hard to sell it as a crime when the new regime is objectively better than the old. No, in order to sell the notion of "crime" you have to produce a "victim" and show that they're worse off than before the "crime". Kind of a tough sell there.
I call shenanigans (link to wikipedia: guerilla marketing) on this post.
Why? Because you can't imagine a [conservative|republican|military veteran] who isn't a rabid , intelligent design pushing, abortion clinic bombing, "kill all the towelheads" screamin' fool? I'm a Desert Storm vet and (with the possible exception that I am deeply pessimistic about all politicians) I agree entirely with the GP post.
Yeah, yeah... listen to you...
"I work with celebrities--but I don't like it. No, sirree. I don't like working with celebrities... Like Nicholas Cage. I don't like working with Nick. He's kind of clingy and he keeps asking for my autograph. Did I mention I work with celebrities?"
See, trying to convince people that celebrities are largely just irritating gasbags not worth wanting to know is a catch-22. Anyone relating personal experience is accused of name dropping, and anyone who doesn't mention specific names is accused of not knowing anyone worth naming.
Seriously. They're gasbags. I don't give a fuck what a bunch of slashdot morons think of me-- not even me, but my/. nick!-- so why the fuck would I drop names for you people? (this comment is primarily directed at the moron who rated the preceding comment "insightful" rather than "funny")
Why should a tech monkey aspire to developer status?
Because you've got to have goals.
Yeah, I'm with ya there, but I meant it more in the spirit of "why should a tech monkey necessarily aspire to be a developer?" Most lower-rung IT tech guys are probably better suited to become sales managers or the like. Sure, there are aspiring coders/developers stuck amongst the ranks of the professional USB driver installer crowd, but it does not logically follow that ALL such workers are.
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the reason the talent is so easy-going is because they have so many hard-working underlings doing everything for them? And if one underling decided "I better take it easy" you can bet your ass that Mr. Cool Guy Laid-back star will be screaming "WHERE THE FUCK IS MY CAPPUCINNO YOU NOBODY?!?!?"
These overzealous types are more or less forced to work this way to keep up the star's lazy lifestyle.
I dunno, in my experience the toadies' attitudes tend to match the star's. Dustin Hoffman is a cool, chill guy who's not above saying "hi" to someone working on his house. His "people" are likewise relaxed, efficient, and never have to scream about anything. They know Mr Hoffman likes quality work and understand that quality isn't cheap. They pay invoices promptly.
John Travolta, on the other hand, is a nutcase who hires shrill, swirly-eyed scientologists to work for him-- people who will run up to you while you're in the middle of working on something fairly involved at his house and shriek "you have to leave right now! He's coming home right now and he doesn't like workmen here when he's home!" They also tend to complain that you charge multiple service calls even they are the ones turning a simple one-day, one-trip job into a complex process of working for 1.5 hours at a time over 3 days, so JT and his wife don't have to "see people".
Why would these guys want to continue work for 32k USD per annum? They don't need a CS degree to become developers earning a lot more than that.
Who says they want to, or are even capable of, becoming "developers"? These guys are like auto mechanics (or even tow truck drives). It doesn't naturally follow that a mechanic should aspire to be an automotive engineer. Why should a tech monkey aspire to developer status?
Fly over states?
I'm from a "Flyover State", South Dakota, western South Dakota too, where the people from the populated parts of South Dakota flyover. It ain't us who go gaga over celebrities, its the people from the "cool" parts of the Country like the coasts who go gaga over the celebrities.
Now that I sit back and think about it, I think it's a combination of both. Most people like me who were born and raised in southern california, Los Angeles in particular, tend to not give a rat's ass about celebs because you see so damn many of them starting at an early age. At the same time, Los Angeles is teeming with star-struck people from "flyover country" who've come here to try to "work in the industry". One of my girlfriend's friends, who came from Iowa, still says "OMG, I saw (movie star) at the mall" after living here ten years (to which I usually remark "your Iowa is showing"). I'm certain most people in other parts of the country don't give a rat's ass either-- it's just that all the one's that do have come here!
He hooked up the contraption and a few minutes later was playing videogames with Bono. "It was one of the coolest things that has ever happened to me," says Mr. Kapellen.'"
Seriously, what's people's thing with celebrities? What, exactly, lends a higher level of "cooleness" to playing a video game with a celebrity? Is there something about the way an over-the-hill rocker says "bastard!" when you steal the ball in NBA 2K6 that's significantly better than the way your friends do? Is there something about being in the presence of giant egos that makes the mundane feel exceptional? I end up working for a lot of film and TV people at work and frankly, if it wasn't for the fact that they pay well (and reliably), I wouldn't work for most of them. In fact, we won't work for Nicholas Cage again because he's an annoying nutcase. Maybe it's just my proximity to them that lets me see what bratty, childish gasbags most of them are. Do people in "flyover country" really go this ga-ga over these folks?
Oh... right then. That TOTALLY EXPLAINS how evolution works, thanks for that. Um not, let's hope thats not the best defense evolution has.p.
It's not meant to explain how evolution works. I assumed you already knew the theory. I'm just saying the evolutionary leap is not as far as it may appear.
I signed up for an account at the stardestroyer.net forums about 4 months ago. It was never processed. Seems kind of pointless to plug a site that's not processing new accounts.
You don't need an account to read the website, which is all I'm plugging.
how on earth would a parasite evolve the right chemical signal to trigger its host to jump into water or perch at the top of a tree?
Randomly. That's kinda the idea behind evolution. The one's that didn't develop the right chemical trigger didn't get the distinct advantage of the climbing-slave-bug spore dispersal.
Slashdot Mirror
I have looked into his background, and I'm still laughing. The man's a kook.
Utter nonsense. I've worked in the civilian defense industry and prior to that I was in military intelligence. Whether something is classified or not has almost no relation to whether it's common knowledge. As we were told early on, what's classified is generally not the facts themselves, but the verification that they're true. There are indeed things that stay unknown essentially forever, but they are very small, unimportant things, like the SINCGARS radio encryption keys we used in Feb 1990. The actual secrecy of something is inversely proportional to its scope, times its importance, times the number of years it's been around. It would be absolutely, utterly impossible to keep a series of faked moon landings secret for that long.
In order to believe it was a hoax, one must believe one of two things: A) most or all of the scientists, engineers, and workers at the contractors who built the Apollo mission components were in on the hoax, or B) only the top brass at NASA knew, and the contractors thought they were building real moon shot hardware.
In order for A) to work they'd have to pay off or threaten literally thousands of people to keep them quiet. And yet, in the 40 years since then there has not been a single deathbed confession, anonymous book, or even subtle hinting by disgruntled former employees of Apollo contractors. It would be literally impossible to keep that many people completely silent for this long, no matter what leverage you applied.
That leaves us with B). A conspiracy kept down to the top officials is somewhat more plausible. However, it requires that all the contractors believe they are building hardware that's actually going to the moon. Now, in what kind of idiot universe do you have to live to believe that NASA would blow a huge wad of dough on several missions worth of lunar-capable equipment, and then not use it, instead incurring the additonal expense and burden of secretly simulating a moon landing? What would be the possible point?
Unfortunately, to do that now would be to admit that it's been money down the rat hole. The only way to not lose credibility is to pretend it's OK and keep pouring that money...
Heh. They're too far gone to be shut up. Almost by definition, they don't listen to reason. I predict it'll be about forty seconds from the release of the first NASA photo till the first screams of "PHOTOSHOP!" from the nutcases.
Really, I think the best proof that it's not a hoax is that there's no way that many people could keep a secret for that long.
Who said anything about men? The Soviets safely landed seven probes of the Luna series, and a whole lot more... uh... impacted destructively. Details can be found on NASA's web site here:s sr.html
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/lunaru
Point taken. The real problem is that it's a quotation from a speech, and pretty much all public speeches are arguments from authority presented without documentary evidence because the format demands it. Point is, the appropriate counter to the quoted speech is not "Crichton is not an authority in those fields", but "Crichton makes claims but presents no substantiating evidence". Claiming someone is credible or not based on authority or lack thereof isn't valid debate in scientific matters.
One doesn't have to be an authority to be correct. I can't speak on the veracity of the rest, but the part about DDT is dead-on accurate. Essentially "appealing to NON-authority" to dismiss his arguments and citations is poor rebuttal. If the speaker isn't claiming authority, you have to debunk the argument, not the speaker's credentials.
Seriously, I think they ought to be thrown out of the ISP business. I think that for internet service they should be either allowed to own the copper infrastructure or sell connectivity over the infrastructure, but not both.
No they didn't. That's what the C-17 is for. The V-22 was intended to move troops short hops around the battlefield with the speed of an airplane, but the agility of a helicopter.
Our military would never settle for a slow blimp, unless it's got anti-grav or some exotic weapon.
The purpose of a military airship is for heavy lift long distance transport. Currently, if they want to move a large number of M-1A1 tanks, they roll them onto cargo ships and wait two weeks. An airship would be slightly faster, plus it wouldn't have to sail around land masses. It's intended as a compromise between transporting armored vehicles very quickly by ones and twos via the limited fleet of cargo planes, or very slowly by the dozens via ship.
Surely you're not serious. Do you really get your science education from bad movies? Lightning would do one of two things, even to a mythical sentient machine: A) nothing, or B) break it. Believing that lightning can turn an simple autonomous robot into some crazed, scheming killing machine is as asinine as believing you can repair an aneurysm with a sledgehammer.
http://www.theteenbrain.com/about/publications/pdf s/2005-Bennett-VBM.pdf
Posted elsewhere in the discussion here by one of the authors. Just spreading it around.
Are you serious? The fact that the adversary, Saddam Hussein, was a murdering jackass who fancied himself another Stalin pretty much guarantees that no matter what convoluted logic the current administration used to sell the war, it'll never be considered worse than a push. It's pretty hard to sell it as a crime when the new regime is objectively better than the old. No, in order to sell the notion of "crime" you have to produce a "victim" and show that they're worse off than before the "crime". Kind of a tough sell there.
Why? Because you can't imagine a [conservative|republican|military veteran] who isn't a rabid , intelligent design pushing, abortion clinic bombing, "kill all the towelheads" screamin' fool? I'm a Desert Storm vet and (with the possible exception that I am deeply pessimistic about all politicians) I agree entirely with the GP post.
See, trying to convince people that celebrities are largely just irritating gasbags not worth wanting to know is a catch-22. Anyone relating personal experience is accused of name dropping, and anyone who doesn't mention specific names is accused of not knowing anyone worth naming.
Seriously. They're gasbags. I don't give a fuck what a bunch of slashdot morons think of me-- not even me, but my /. nick!-- so why the fuck would I drop names for you people? (this comment is primarily directed at the moron who rated the preceding comment "insightful" rather than "funny")
Because you've got to have goals.
Yeah, I'm with ya there, but I meant it more in the spirit of "why should a tech monkey necessarily aspire to be a developer?" Most lower-rung IT tech guys are probably better suited to become sales managers or the like. Sure, there are aspiring coders/developers stuck amongst the ranks of the professional USB driver installer crowd, but it does not logically follow that ALL such workers are.
No time for proofreading, must rebut immediately!
"Mr. Kapellen, 28 years old, put his life in Minneapolis on hold in 2004... "
U2 is recording in Canada. Kapellen is from Minnesota.
I dunno, in my experience the toadies' attitudes tend to match the star's. Dustin Hoffman is a cool, chill guy who's not above saying "hi" to someone working on his house. His "people" are likewise relaxed, efficient, and never have to scream about anything. They know Mr Hoffman likes quality work and understand that quality isn't cheap. They pay invoices promptly.
John Travolta, on the other hand, is a nutcase who hires shrill, swirly-eyed scientologists to work for him-- people who will run up to you while you're in the middle of working on something fairly involved at his house and shriek "you have to leave right now! He's coming home right now and he doesn't like workmen here when he's home!" They also tend to complain that you charge multiple service calls even they are the ones turning a simple one-day, one-trip job into a complex process of working for 1.5 hours at a time over 3 days, so JT and his wife don't have to "see people".
Who says they want to, or are even capable of, becoming "developers"? These guys are like auto mechanics (or even tow truck drives). It doesn't naturally follow that a mechanic should aspire to be an automotive engineer. Why should a tech monkey aspire to developer status?
Now that I sit back and think about it, I think it's a combination of both. Most people like me who were born and raised in southern california, Los Angeles in particular, tend to not give a rat's ass about celebs because you see so damn many of them starting at an early age. At the same time, Los Angeles is teeming with star-struck people from "flyover country" who've come here to try to "work in the industry". One of my girlfriend's friends, who came from Iowa, still says "OMG, I saw (movie star) at the mall" after living here ten years (to which I usually remark "your Iowa is showing"). I'm certain most people in other parts of the country don't give a rat's ass either-- it's just that all the one's that do have come here!
Seriously, what's people's thing with celebrities? What, exactly, lends a higher level of "cooleness" to playing a video game with a celebrity? Is there something about the way an over-the-hill rocker says "bastard!" when you steal the ball in NBA 2K6 that's significantly better than the way your friends do? Is there something about being in the presence of giant egos that makes the mundane feel exceptional? I end up working for a lot of film and TV people at work and frankly, if it wasn't for the fact that they pay well (and reliably), I wouldn't work for most of them. In fact, we won't work for Nicholas Cage again because he's an annoying nutcase. Maybe it's just my proximity to them that lets me see what bratty, childish gasbags most of them are. Do people in "flyover country" really go this ga-ga over these folks?
Oh... right then. That TOTALLY EXPLAINS how evolution works, thanks for that. Um not, let's hope thats not the best defense evolution has.p. It's not meant to explain how evolution works. I assumed you already knew the theory. I'm just saying the evolutionary leap is not as far as it may appear.
You don't need an account to read the website, which is all I'm plugging.
Randomly. That's kinda the idea behind evolution. The one's that didn't develop the right chemical trigger didn't get the distinct advantage of the climbing-slave-bug spore dispersal.