If you can't get good scientists internally then you are putting your secure projects at risk.
Umm, wasn't he a naturalized American citizen? Or do you mean to suggest that it's a risk to employ anyone who wasn't a natural-born citizen on secure projects? This traitorous asshole notwithstanding, most immigrants to this country are fiercely patriotic. You tend to have an appreciation for the United States if you immigrate here from a poorer/more oppressive country -- whereas those of us who were born here tend to take what we have for granted.
The display of force in Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated that the weapons were too morally reprehensible to use against human targets
I don't see how you can claim that they were any more morally reprehensible than firebombing cities with conventional weapons. A civilian killed by a ton of high explosive is just as dead as one killed by a fission reaction.
As far as the "morality" of bombing civilians goes -- it was total war and the Axis powers bombed their share of civilian targets. Funny how few people mention this when they condemn the Allied powers for Hiroshima, Nagasaki or Dresden. There are some other cities I could mention: London, Warsaw, Coventry, Nanjing, Rotterdam, Belgrade, etc, etc, etc.
It's all an invention of American war-losers who still can't admit that they were beaten by people of "inferior race".
Given that we were there fighting on behalf of that "inferior race" I'd say that you deserved your troll mod. You'd have to look back to the Pacific Front in WW2 to find racial undertones in our campaign against someone.
Nobody in USSR cared about Vietnam (or China, or Yugoslavia, or Cuba, or Nicaragua, or Grenada...) enough to start a nuclear war.
No, they didn't. The USSR aided North Vietnam primarily to tie down the United States. We did the same thing to them in Afghanistan. This is how Great Powers play the game with other Great Powers in the nuclear age -- because the consequences of going to war directly are too horrible to contemplate.
If you have $100m to spare, form a political party, and then vote for it. The ruling elite are only a ruling elite because people keep voting for them.
Who is this "ruling elite" supposed to be anyway? It's not a racial class in this country. It's not a financial class -- having money certainly helps you get into politics (just as it helps you get into a good school or land a good job) but it's not a prerequisite. You can find your share of non-rich people within the halls of Congress. You can find even more of them if you look at your State Legislature and local government. So who exactly is the "ruling elite"? I'm dying to know.
Admittedly, when the masses unite, establish a party to represent the interests of the common man, and get it elected to government, it's generally called 'Socialism'. That this is considered a dirty word in America is still more evidence that the Americans support the imperialists.
Socialism is a dirty word in this country because socialism tends to stifle individual liberty and the ability to innovate. It might be a workable model for other countries and I don't begrudge them for adopting it -- but it's not something that I would want to see implemented here. I've had enough of the nanny state as it is without giving it more power.
Well, most of our elected officials in Congress and the half of the country that voted for GWB in 2004, apparently. But you can keep on believing it was the "military-industrial complex" if that helps you to sleep at night.
Senators and Congressmen create and pass laws and funding measures all the time that only benefit the corporations.
Which by extension would benefit the shareholders of those corporations (do you have a 401(k)?) and the employees thereof. Mind you, I'm not a big fan of corporate welfare but it's not nearly as one-sided as you are making it out to be.
Citizen participation in politics only occurs when they are under the illusion (delusion really) that they have any meaningful effect on the outcome
Yeah, because voting never has a meaningful effect on the outcome. It's not as though there have everbeenclose elections before.
In other words, hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good phaser at your side, kid?
I dunno. Ranged weapons seemed to be pretty effective against Jedi not equipped with character shields... err I mean, not as well versed in the force;)
I'm with Han on this one. Gimme a good piece of technology over a biological process any day of the week.
I got some clarification which resulted in the understanding that that particular phrase was left open so that if I went home and wrote an NLP engine from scratch while I was employed, it was their intellectual property
Just because they put that clause in doesn't mean it will stand up in court....
True, but the number of people who can wield them effectively enough to actually do that is small.... and there's always tactical nuclear weapons for those occasions;)
Any method of killing is uncivilized.... so it stands to reason that it's better to do it from a distance where it's harder for your foe to retaliate;) Or to quote Garek:
"Well, it's the safest way isn't it?" (when asked if he would shoot a man in the back)
Why not just shoot the grenades in there. Then you'll know what lies ahead (bodies).
Yeah but it might be good to know if those bodies are enemies, civilians or friendlies before you frag them;)
My million dollar question: What's to stop your opponent from figuring out which frequencies this device transmits on and jamming it and/or targeting it with anti-radiation weapons?
Not to mention that terrible terrible smell it would likely make.
The smell would be the least of your problems. Vaporizing that much water (and other compounds in the human body) would probably produce an effect similar to a steam explosion at the very least. You wouldn't want to be standing next to someone who got vaporized.....
The energy question leaves me to think that accelerants packed into containers and accelerated through barrels is probably going to remain the "state of the art" in making dead people for some time to come.
Quite likely. Directed energy weapons could have some real world applications -- missile defense for example (imagine a laser replacement for this bad boy) -- but I doubt we'll see them as personal sidearms in our lifetimes.
On the other hand, you'd probably have a sonic boom as elements expand in disintegration, so...
I've always rationalized it in my mind as a conversion to neutrinos or some other particle that doesn't really interact with normal matter and which would allow the disintegration of objects as people stand right next to them with little to no ill effects.
I don't know how doable phasers are as described in canon. They utilize a completely invented subatomic particle (the nadion) for their effects. The vaporization effect in particular seems far-fetched -- in Trek they explain it away because of the magical properties of the nadion -- in reality you'd need an awful lot of energy to vaporize the human body (imagine taking 100-200 pounds of water from 98 degrees to >212 degrees in under a second) and you wouldn't want to be standing nearby when it happened.
The concept of a directed energy weapon that would be adjustable and which could stun/injure or kill seems doable in the future though.
Especially when the article in question involves lightsabers. (And wishing that they were real. *daydreams at work*)
I'd rather have a working phaser than a lightsaber. The phaser is a ranged weapon -- works better for us geek weaklings who don't want to get our hands dirty. It also seems more versatile -- you can stun people, injure them, kill them or completely disappear them (let's see them CSI a vaporized corpse!).
In short, the phaser slices, dices and makes julienne fries.
Well, the F-22 is a special case, because as another post points out, the security around it's avionics software isn't really compatible with open source.
In the case of the hospital though, I agree, open-source would be great. But I still don't think it's compatible with Stallman's idea of open-source. How are you going to get the capital to pay your programmers if any idiot can take all of your hard work and redistribute it himself for a possibly lower (or even free) price?
Is there a necessity for software to be proprietary?
It's necessary for there to be an economic incentive to develop software. Nobody is going to donate millions of man-hours to write the software for the F-22 out of the goodness of their heart. Nobody is going to donate the man-hours to write the software for my insurance agency or hospital.
I don't think open-source is inherently incompatible with that economic incentive but if Stallman thinks that open-source is the cure-all for every single problem that can be solved with software then he is just as much of a zealot as the Microsoft trolls that think all open-source software is communist and evil.
...that Stallman wasn't out to destroy the software industry as we know it. Now, his own words condemn him.
I can't decide if you are trolling or not but Stallman is mostly harmless. I seriously doubt that he has the ability to destroy the software industry as we know it.
and his dreams of a day where nobody is involved in developing or promoting proprietary software
I mean, I'm all about open source but nobody developing or promoting proprietary software? What about the business world and the wide variety of custom made software tailored to specific business segments? What about gaming?
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't get good scientists internally then you are putting your secure projects at risk.
Umm, wasn't he a naturalized American citizen? Or do you mean to suggest that it's a risk to employ anyone who wasn't a natural-born citizen on secure projects? This traitorous asshole notwithstanding, most immigrants to this country are fiercely patriotic. You tend to have an appreciation for the United States if you immigrate here from a poorer/more oppressive country -- whereas those of us who were born here tend to take what we have for granted.
The display of force in Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated that the weapons were too morally reprehensible to use against human targets
I don't see how you can claim that they were any more morally reprehensible than firebombing cities with conventional weapons. A civilian killed by a ton of high explosive is just as dead as one killed by a fission reaction.
As far as the "morality" of bombing civilians goes -- it was total war and the Axis powers bombed their share of civilian targets. Funny how few people mention this when they condemn the Allied powers for Hiroshima, Nagasaki or Dresden. There are some other cities I could mention: London, Warsaw, Coventry, Nanjing, Rotterdam, Belgrade, etc, etc, etc.
It's all an invention of American war-losers who still can't admit that they were beaten by people of "inferior race".
Given that we were there fighting on behalf of that "inferior race" I'd say that you deserved your troll mod. You'd have to look back to the Pacific Front in WW2 to find racial undertones in our campaign against someone.
Nobody in USSR cared about Vietnam (or China, or Yugoslavia, or Cuba, or Nicaragua, or Grenada...) enough to start a nuclear war.
No, they didn't. The USSR aided North Vietnam primarily to tie down the United States. We did the same thing to them in Afghanistan. This is how Great Powers play the game with other Great Powers in the nuclear age -- because the consequences of going to war directly are too horrible to contemplate.
If you have $100m to spare, form a political party, and then vote for it. The ruling elite are only a ruling elite because people keep voting for them.
Who is this "ruling elite" supposed to be anyway? It's not a racial class in this country. It's not a financial class -- having money certainly helps you get into politics (just as it helps you get into a good school or land a good job) but it's not a prerequisite. You can find your share of non-rich people within the halls of Congress. You can find even more of them if you look at your State Legislature and local government. So who exactly is the "ruling elite"? I'm dying to know.
Admittedly, when the masses unite, establish a party to represent the interests of the common man, and get it elected to government, it's generally called 'Socialism'. That this is considered a dirty word in America is still more evidence that the Americans support the imperialists.
Socialism is a dirty word in this country because socialism tends to stifle individual liberty and the ability to innovate. It might be a workable model for other countries and I don't begrudge them for adopting it -- but it's not something that I would want to see implemented here. I've had enough of the nanny state as it is without giving it more power.
Who really wanted the Patriot Act?
Well, most of our elected officials in Congress and the half of the country that voted for GWB in 2004, apparently. But you can keep on believing it was the "military-industrial complex" if that helps you to sleep at night.
Senators and Congressmen create and pass laws and funding measures all the time that only benefit the corporations.
Which by extension would benefit the shareholders of those corporations (do you have a 401(k)?) and the employees thereof. Mind you, I'm not a big fan of corporate welfare but it's not nearly as one-sided as you are making it out to be.
Citizen participation in politics only occurs when they are under the illusion (delusion really) that they have any meaningful effect on the outcome
Yeah, because voting never has a meaningful effect on the outcome. It's not as though there have ever been close elections before.
Yeh but bush isnt a very competent president. His methods and plans lack the... finesse of his predecessors
I don't know... at least one of his predecessors had less finesse. I mean, that SOB actually got caught! Amateur.
In other words, hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good phaser at your side, kid?
I dunno. Ranged weapons seemed to be pretty effective against Jedi not equipped with character shields... err I mean, not as well versed in the force ;)
I'm with Han on this one. Gimme a good piece of technology over a biological process any day of the week.
And I am not a science-fiction writer, but WTF do you mean by "Anti-Radiation Weapons"?!?
The HARM and similar weapons....
True enough, but all the same I'd be less intimidated by it.
I got some clarification which resulted in the understanding that that particular phrase was left open so that if I went home and wrote an NLP engine from scratch while I was employed, it was their intellectual property
Just because they put that clause in doesn't mean it will stand up in court....
Are you speaking from experience, Ethanol-Fueled?
No, that's his real name. It stems from the ethanol fueled orgy that led to his conception ;)
But lightsabers can block phaser blasts!
True, but the number of people who can wield them effectively enough to actually do that is small.... and there's always tactical nuclear weapons for those occasions ;)
"I sense a disturbance in the for....." [flash!]
Yes, but they are SO uncivilized
Any method of killing is uncivilized.... so it stands to reason that it's better to do it from a distance where it's harder for your foe to retaliate ;) Or to quote Garek:
"Well, it's the safest way isn't it?" (when asked if he would shoot a man in the back)
Why not just shoot the grenades in there. Then you'll know what lies ahead (bodies).
Yeah but it might be good to know if those bodies are enemies, civilians or friendlies before you frag them ;)
My million dollar question: What's to stop your opponent from figuring out which frequencies this device transmits on and jamming it and/or targeting it with anti-radiation weapons?
Not to mention that terrible terrible smell it would likely make.
The smell would be the least of your problems. Vaporizing that much water (and other compounds in the human body) would probably produce an effect similar to a steam explosion at the very least. You wouldn't want to be standing next to someone who got vaporized.....
The energy question leaves me to think that accelerants packed into containers and accelerated through barrels is probably going to remain the "state of the art" in making dead people for some time to come.
Quite likely. Directed energy weapons could have some real world applications -- missile defense for example (imagine a laser replacement for this bad boy) -- but I doubt we'll see them as personal sidearms in our lifetimes.
On the other hand, you'd probably have a sonic boom as elements expand in disintegration, so...
I've always rationalized it in my mind as a conversion to neutrinos or some other particle that doesn't really interact with normal matter and which would allow the disintegration of objects as people stand right next to them with little to no ill effects.
I don't know how doable phasers are as described in canon. They utilize a completely invented subatomic particle (the nadion) for their effects. The vaporization effect in particular seems far-fetched -- in Trek they explain it away because of the magical properties of the nadion -- in reality you'd need an awful lot of energy to vaporize the human body (imagine taking 100-200 pounds of water from 98 degrees to >212 degrees in under a second) and you wouldn't want to be standing nearby when it happened.
The concept of a directed energy weapon that would be adjustable and which could stun/injure or kill seems doable in the future though.
Because they're completely individual items
Don't worry -- eventually China will figure out how to stamp them out of plastic for three cents a unit ;)
Especially when the article in question involves lightsabers. (And wishing that they were real. *daydreams at work*)
I'd rather have a working phaser than a lightsaber. The phaser is a ranged weapon -- works better for us geek weaklings who don't want to get our hands dirty. It also seems more versatile -- you can stun people, injure them, kill them or completely disappear them (let's see them CSI a vaporized corpse!).
In short, the phaser slices, dices and makes julienne fries.
You see, he can't get laid so he has to masturbate
The fact that you are posting on /. suggests that you probably aren't doing any better ;)
Well, the F-22 is a special case, because as another post points out, the security around it's avionics software isn't really compatible with open source.
In the case of the hospital though, I agree, open-source would be great. But I still don't think it's compatible with Stallman's idea of open-source. How are you going to get the capital to pay your programmers if any idiot can take all of your hard work and redistribute it himself for a possibly lower (or even free) price?
Is there a necessity for software to be proprietary?
It's necessary for there to be an economic incentive to develop software. Nobody is going to donate millions of man-hours to write the software for the F-22 out of the goodness of their heart. Nobody is going to donate the man-hours to write the software for my insurance agency or hospital.
I don't think open-source is inherently incompatible with that economic incentive but if Stallman thinks that open-source is the cure-all for every single problem that can be solved with software then he is just as much of a zealot as the Microsoft trolls that think all open-source software is communist and evil.
...that Stallman wasn't out to destroy the software industry as we know it. Now, his own words condemn him.
I can't decide if you are trolling or not but Stallman is mostly harmless. I seriously doubt that he has the ability to destroy the software industry as we know it.
some of what he is smoking....
and his dreams of a day where nobody is involved in developing or promoting proprietary software
I mean, I'm all about open source but nobody developing or promoting proprietary software? What about the business world and the wide variety of custom made software tailored to specific business segments? What about gaming?
Maybe this was retconned later somewhere
It was retconned in First Contact. Riker or Data has a line about arriving ten years after the "Third World War".