This robot is far better than a land mine however; It can be switched off, can be configured to give a warning, and can be removed easily when it is no longer needed.
If these things are radio-controlled, they can be hacked. Don't think the North Koreans won't be working on that. And speaking from experience of my misspent youth 30ish years ago, I can categorically say it's easier to defeat an electronic/mechanical/computerised system than it is to defeat a Mark 1 calibrated eyeball. Gotta love statutes of limitation. I'm thinking Sanyo's gonna make a killing (no pun intended) at $200k per.
Land mines have none of these properties.
Dumb mines are dirt cheap, too. Not a whole lot of markup or chances for cost overruns and such. And they have a proven track record of area denial.
Would it be nice to live in a world where such things were not needed?
Absolutely. Unfortunately, they won't sell anybody a shuttle ticket to that world. Know any sane, moral, legal way to change human nature? I don't. It gets me when I hear somebody say things like 'Well, if we don't provoke them, they'll leave us alone' and 'If we all give up our guns, the world will be SUCH a better place. Great idea. You first.
The US, for example, could buy these for defending Guantanamo, and remove the land mines we have placed there.
Or, here's a thought. Buy a few thousand of these for 'inner city urban warfare' er, 'police useage'. Yeah, that would work. I'm just curious if any counters to them that show up on the Internet would be considered covered by the Second Amendment.
Yeah, I love my country. My government, OTOT, scares me shitless...
First thing to figure out, though, is what projects Novell has contributed code to. Samba, for one. Firefox, for another. Now, is it just me, or did Microsoft look over the field very carefully before dropping its $350 million dollar FUD bomb?
I'm sorry, I don't think it would work out the way you think. Whether IT uses SuSe Linux or any other distro, their end users like M$ products. End users don't care if the back end is SuSe, Red Hat, or any other distro. What they don't see (the back end) their not concerned about. Hypothetically, If M$ then sues that company for not coupleing their M$ applications with a SuSe back end, they might be able squeeze every cent out of their bank account. However, that would never go unoticed by the rest of the business world. M$ suing a company for integrating their Apps with Linux would yield small gains compaired to allowing the entire Linux community to use/buy their apps. We're obviously not going to touch their OS, enabling us to use their apps is only damage control. Choosing the winnings of one court case agenst an offending IT department would be "penny-wise pound-foolish" in comparison to the revenue from selling M$ apps to the Linux community...MHO
I saw quite a bit of the 'Linux? Isn't that owned by SCO, and don't we need to buy a $699 license for that?' a couple years back. The companies I was consulting with went with Windows Server 2000 & 2003 for their backends. They hated it, but they paid the ridiculous per-chair licensing fee for it and refused to consider Linux of any stripe. Like they say, nobody ever got fired for specifying Microsoft.
In IT, if you want to make sure your market is cornered, just sue 1 competing company out of business. All their customers are now yours.
A lot of end users like M$ products and this will make it easier for IT to give them what they want from a Linux back end.
Only if they use SuSE for a back end. Anybody else, call your l*wy*rs.
If M$ then sues said IT for using compatibality software to allow MS/Linux integration, said IT will then just return to previously used Open Source solutions/applications.
No, they'll be broke, bankrupt, and out of business, with a friendly MS sales rep more than happy to step in and have a MS Partner come in to 'fix' their backends and desktops.
M$ would be shooting theselves in the foot by said lawsuit and only causing a slight burdon to the IT community.
No, they get to close off one more razor cut to their bottom line and open the door to the possibility of a few thousand dollars or so in new sales to bring the system into 'compliance'. All they have to do to put an independent IT company out of business is to drop the paperwork on them. If their pockets aren't deep enough to defend against the suit, they'll bankrupt immediately, or plead no contest, and bankrupt as soon as the judgement is entered against them. Here in the US, l*wy*rs don't work on contingency when they're on the defense. They want cashy money, and too bad if you don't have it, because there are NO 'public defenders' in civil cases.
Microsoft has used this patent pledge to indicate that, in their view, the only good Free Software developer is an isolated, uncompensated, unimportant Free Software developer.
Obviously. Especially if said developer is just writing stuff for use on his own machine. Utilities & apps that don't make it into the wild are no threat, and thus, unimportant from a cash flow point of view, and won't be sued. People only sue when there are monetary & tactical advantages to sue. If there's no money involved, a suit is not just a waste of time, it's a waste of money and resources, which cuts down the bottom line. The stockholders would Not Be Pleased...
Personally, I'm all for the inheritance (aka: death) tax. You can't take it with you, and why shouldn't your estate have to pay something to the government? If you've managed to amass enough to hit the threshold where the tax comes in (what is it, $80,000 or something) after you die, you can afford give a little back.
I spent time in the US Army during Vietnam. I've paid taxes every year since. They take taxes out on unemployment benefits now. The government picks my pocket to the tune of 35% and more every year. Why should my kids and grandkids fork over 50% of whatever I want to leave them behind? Where was the government when I was socking it away? IMNSFBHO, i've already 'given back'.
mm looks like no big gay wedding for Big Gay Al in Colorado. Or anywhere else for that matter.
Funny, the marriage ammendment to the Arizona constitution got voted down bigtime. Guess Big Gay Al's gonna have to do what I did a few years back, leave the People's Bureaucratic Republic of Colorado and get political assylum here in La Zona...
My biggest problem with the Bush Administration? That that did everything they could (and still do) to keep that fear alive and build on it. That alone has to be one of the more despicable acts of any public official in recent years. It has certainly led to its share of further despicable acts.
Haven't read much Leo Strauss, eh? You might want to someday, before he's required reading in every school in the country. Ol' Leo was the 'father' and 'prophet' of the neocon movement, and everything he published was all about stomping out liberalism to 'save us from ourselves'. Is it any wonder he loved watching 'Gunsmoke', where good & evil were so clearly defined, and 'good' was always destined to win?
Would she make a worse president that Bush or Cheney?
Other than being a bit nuts about gun control, she doesn't seem too awful bad. If she'd be in favor of balancing the Federal budget, that'd go a long way for her...
Way to go Arizona, sorry about Napolitano. She's right up there with Blanco as far as reactionary leadership.
I didn't vote for her. I voted for Hess. Janet I can handle. I didn't like Kyl getting re-elected. And yeah, I was one of the 1300 in my county to vote for Gammill...
On the up side, we voted down a marriage definition to our Constitution and for limiting the impact of eminent domain. At least we won't be getting a measly hundred bucks when the county takes our house & turns it into a Kwiki Mart. Downside, the antismoking lobby turned us into a non-smoking state & passed an.80 a pack tax to fund it.
Iraq has had 2 engagements now that have had politician meddling. The 1991 Gulf War was short of a victory for us. We used total military superiority and then, for whatever reason, 100hrs into the ground invasion we stopped and retreated. Sound like Vietnam anyone?
The military mission in 1991 was to remove an occupation army of an allied nation, not regime change in said occupying country. And for that military mission, we had the support of the world. It was the right thing to do to stop at the border of Iraq once the occupying army was driven out.
1. War is an inevitability.
No, it's not. Ask the Swiss. The way to avoid war is to have a strong defensive military to the point where attacking that country is unthinkable. When was the last time the Swiss got involved in a war? When was the last time Switzerland was invaded?
We cannot escape war. As long as humanity is on this Earth, war will always be among us. We must re-learn how to be victorious again, or our way of life will be subdued by someone else who has learned.
The Romans knew that if you would have peace, you have to be prepared for war. They forgot this. Good-bye Roman Empire. War can be eliminated, you just need to figure out the causes of war and eliminate those totally and without mercy. Back in the 70's, I got the chance to talk with a Buddhist monk for awhile. He told me that we should have dropped Army PXes on the North Vietnamese, Coca-Cola, Levis, transistor radios, new cars, not bombs. He realised it was all 'hearts and minds'. I'm beginning to think he had something there...
Where do you get your information from. All the real economic indicators from reputable news sources show that the economy is doing great. Which economy is crumbling and what currency is worthless?
Imagine Java not as a plugin, but as part of your browser.
No thank you. Not unless there's a way to turn it off. Embed Java/ActiveX/generic scripting of any kind in a browser is just begging for trouble. Yeah, it sounds like a Good Thing, but think it through. You just added one more vector for the l33t script kiddies to pwn your machine.
Pretty much, but I wasn't paying attention when they did it so I dunno if MS licensed Java from Sun or just clean-roomed it. I'm thinking, licensed, otherwise Sun woulda sued for trademark infringement...
Slashdot Mirror
And this would be bad how??
So much for the Joint Chiefs...
If these things are radio-controlled, they can be hacked. Don't think the North Koreans won't be working on that. And speaking from experience of my misspent youth 30ish years ago, I can categorically say it's easier to defeat an electronic/mechanical/computerised system than it is to defeat a Mark 1 calibrated eyeball. Gotta love statutes of limitation. I'm thinking Sanyo's gonna make a killing (no pun intended) at $200k per.
Dumb mines are dirt cheap, too. Not a whole lot of markup or chances for cost overruns and such. And they have a proven track record of area denial.
Absolutely. Unfortunately, they won't sell anybody a shuttle ticket to that world. Know any sane, moral, legal way to change human nature? I don't. It gets me when I hear somebody say things like 'Well, if we don't provoke them, they'll leave us alone' and 'If we all give up our guns, the world will be SUCH a better place. Great idea. You first.
Or, here's a thought. Buy a few thousand of these for 'inner city urban warfare' er, 'police useage'. Yeah, that would work. I'm just curious if any counters to them that show up on the Internet would be considered covered by the Second Amendment.
Yeah, I love my country. My government, OTOT, scares me shitless...
First thing to figure out, though, is what projects Novell has contributed code to. Samba, for one. Firefox, for another. Now, is it just me, or did Microsoft look over the field very carefully before dropping its $350 million dollar FUD bomb?
Meh. I didn't use SuSE much before this. Fedora & Ubuntu serve my needs. I understand them. Why would I wanna go to SuSE now?
I saw quite a bit of the 'Linux? Isn't that owned by SCO, and don't we need to buy a $699 license for that?' a couple years back. The companies I was consulting with went with Windows Server 2000 & 2003 for their backends. They hated it, but they paid the ridiculous per-chair licensing fee for it and refused to consider Linux of any stripe. Like they say, nobody ever got fired for specifying Microsoft.
In IT, if you want to make sure your market is cornered, just sue 1 competing company out of business. All their customers are now yours.
Only if they use SuSE for a back end. Anybody else, call your l*wy*rs.
No, they'll be broke, bankrupt, and out of business, with a friendly MS sales rep more than happy to step in and have a MS Partner come in to 'fix' their backends and desktops.
No, they get to close off one more razor cut to their bottom line and open the door to the possibility of a few thousand dollars or so in new sales to bring the system into 'compliance'. All they have to do to put an independent IT company out of business is to drop the paperwork on them. If their pockets aren't deep enough to defend against the suit, they'll bankrupt immediately, or plead no contest, and bankrupt as soon as the judgement is entered against them. Here in the US, l*wy*rs don't work on contingency when they're on the defense. They want cashy money, and too bad if you don't have it, because there are NO 'public defenders' in civil cases.
Obviously. Especially if said developer is just writing stuff for use on his own machine. Utilities & apps that don't make it into the wild are no threat, and thus, unimportant from a cash flow point of view, and won't be sued. People only sue when there are monetary & tactical advantages to sue. If there's no money involved, a suit is not just a waste of time, it's a waste of money and resources, which cuts down the bottom line. The stockholders would Not Be Pleased...
Besides looting it?
No, just the drivers.
Bush has been a lame duck president for two years now. Remember the 22nd Amendment?
I spent time in the US Army during Vietnam. I've paid taxes every year since. They take taxes out on unemployment benefits now. The government picks my pocket to the tune of 35% and more every year. Why should my kids and grandkids fork over 50% of whatever I want to leave them behind? Where was the government when I was socking it away? IMNSFBHO, i've already 'given back'.
Funny, the marriage ammendment to the Arizona constitution got voted down bigtime. Guess Big Gay Al's gonna have to do what I did a few years back, leave the People's Bureaucratic Republic of Colorado and get political assylum here in La Zona...
Haven't read much Leo Strauss, eh? You might want to someday, before he's required reading in every school in the country. Ol' Leo was the 'father' and 'prophet' of the neocon movement, and everything he published was all about stomping out liberalism to 'save us from ourselves'. Is it any wonder he loved watching 'Gunsmoke', where good & evil were so clearly defined, and 'good' was always destined to win?
Other than being a bit nuts about gun control, she doesn't seem too awful bad. If she'd be in favor of balancing the Federal budget, that'd go a long way for her...
I didn't vote for her. I voted for Hess. Janet I can handle. I didn't like Kyl getting re-elected. And yeah, I was one of the 1300 in my county to vote for Gammill...
On the up side, we voted down a marriage definition to our Constitution and for limiting the impact of eminent domain. At least we won't be getting a measly hundred bucks when the county takes our house & turns it into a Kwiki Mart. Downside, the antismoking lobby turned us into a non-smoking state & passed an .80 a pack tax to fund it.
Here, here.
Eventually, the neocons will die off. Personally, IMNSFBHO, it just won't happen fast enough.
The military mission in 1991 was to remove an occupation army of an allied nation, not regime change in said occupying country. And for that military mission, we had the support of the world. It was the right thing to do to stop at the border of Iraq once the occupying army was driven out.
No, it's not. Ask the Swiss. The way to avoid war is to have a strong defensive military to the point where attacking that country is unthinkable. When was the last time the Swiss got involved in a war? When was the last time Switzerland was invaded?
The Romans knew that if you would have peace, you have to be prepared for war. They forgot this. Good-bye Roman Empire. War can be eliminated, you just need to figure out the causes of war and eliminate those totally and without mercy. Back in the 70's, I got the chance to talk with a Buddhist monk for awhile. He told me that we should have dropped Army PXes on the North Vietnamese, Coca-Cola, Levis, transistor radios, new cars, not bombs. He realised it was all 'hearts and minds'. I'm beginning to think he had something there...
Good. It gives us a 2 year period to catch our breath and figure out what we wanna do with the neocons.
Yeah, I think he got it in one.
As of today, the euro is now worth about $1.28. Source: http://www.thebulliondesk.com/RHS_FX.aspx
I remember when the euro came out, it was at 1.18. It fell to 83 cents to the euro, in July 2001. It met par again during 2002, & has climbed since.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro
And we wonder why Iran wanted its oil market based in euros, not dollars?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article83 54.htm
You're new here. Most of us that are here already know how to secure a computer. Most of the regular users out there don't.
Yeah, but emacs isn't an editor, it's a religion.
No thank you. Not unless there's a way to turn it off. Embed Java/ActiveX/generic scripting of any kind in a browser is just begging for trouble. Yeah, it sounds like a Good Thing, but think it through. You just added one more vector for the l33t script kiddies to pwn your machine.
Pretty much, but I wasn't paying attention when they did it so I dunno if MS licensed Java from Sun or just clean-roomed it. I'm thinking, licensed, otherwise Sun woulda sued for trademark infringement...