It's political theater. I'm sure the administration could be very persuasive, but if Rumsfeld truly wanted to resign, he could. Offering his resignation the first time around was a way of accepting responsibility for the Abu Ghraib scandal, not necessarily an indication that he truly wanted to resign. I don't know about the second time, but I think it's traditional for all of the President's secretaries to hand in their resignations at the beginning of the second term, which he then will/will not accept. This is the president's way of asserting that they are his bitches. Finally, in politics, "resigning" is frequently a polite word for "got your ass fired". It's a way of giving the person a graceful exit and saving face. That isn't done out of charity or anything; it's just that people with nothing left in terms of their reputation have nothing left to lose, and that makes them dangerous. If Bush publicly fired Rumsfeld and humiliated him in doing so, Rumsfeld might try to redeem his reputation a bit by bringing Bush down a notch or two.
There's an old saying that says, if you want to get out of a hole, the first thing you've got to do is stop digging. Between Bush and the Republican Congress, America has been digging itself into hole for the past six years, on multiple fronts. Civil liberties, dismantling of checks and balances, deficits, torture, a disastrous failure in the occupation of Iraq. Hopefully, we can at least stop digging, and start finding a way out.
But even assuming the Democrats pull together and show brilliant leadership and vision (and I'm not holding my breath), it would take years to undo Bush's damage. I think a key issue to watch is going to be Rumsfeld. It's clear his strategies have failed, repeatedly; he needs to be held accountable. And it's clear he can't fix things in Iraq. He has to go. Bush's instincts will be to protect him, because Bush rewards loyalty (a good character, to a point) and because Bush thinks that firing him would be an admission of failure, and Bush does not admit failure (but admitting failure is a technicality at this point, Rumsfeld and Bush's efforts in Iraq so far have failed utterly).
"Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship....Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
I recently came across this quote about exploiting nationalism, and it disturbed me for two reasons. First, it is a very accurate description of the post 9/11 political situation, which has resulted in the loss of civil liberties, the disastrous occupation of Iraq, secret prisons, torture, and the dismantling of the government's system of checks and balances. Second, the author is Hermann Goering.
Godwin's Law, I know, but there are some eerie parallels, and that's scary as hell. I am truly afraid for my country's future. These are dark times; it's the worst I've ever seen the United States of America. We've got the monkeys running the zoo... these are small, foolish, and dangerous little men- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld. And they are tearing the country apart. They've got the left hating the right and the right hating the left. They've got us caught up in an eternal war against terror (as if you can wage war on a military tactic, that's as nonsensical as a "war against flanking maneuvers"). In their war, in order to save our freedoms from the terrorists, they've got to take our freedoms away. Meanwhile, our executive branch is obsessed with using torture to the point that it starts to seem creepily sadistic, running secret prisons and shipping people off to be tortured in foreign countries. Finally, we've got to keep fighting endlessly in Iraq as it spirals into civil war, and I still haven't heard something that even vaguely resembles a strategy for success, or a convincing explanation of why we even went in, and killed thousands of our own men and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
I've always criticized America, not because I hate her, but because I love her and want her to be better. I thought there was a lot wrong with the country, but I believed it was basically a good country, and that other nations had a lot to learn from us. But now, when I travel through foreign countries, I am ashamed to show my American passport. I actually tell people I'm "coming from Canada" (misleading but true, because that's where I study). Living abroad, I now realize that deep down, I still do love America. But not the America of George Bush. That America is an America of constant fear, divisive hate, endless war, domestic spying, and torture. And we can do better than George Bush's America.
You people are so pessimistic. Next you'll be saying that my perfectly harmless experiments to re-animate formerly living tissue could somehow have unforeseen, disastrous consequences!
Radio as a distribution system may be on its way out, but I think the content has a lot of potential. I've been listening to a lot of NPR either as podcasts or streaming audio, for instance, and sometimes the BBC.
The question is how to distribute it. Satellite definitely has its advantages, but you could also incorporate wireless capability into an iPod and allow it to download radio shows as podcasts or to access radio as streaming audio.
This is just terrible. You simply can't imagine the disappointment this will cause me- uh, I mean, will cause little Junior this Christmas. He really wants a Lego Millenium Falcon. It's just so cute when he says "ma-ma" but he just can't quite get "-llenium Falcon" part of the ship's name out. Of course, he'd just eat the mini-figures, so the set will have to stay in my room.
Remember: There are only two tools in life. WD-40, for when something doesn't move, and should, and Duct Tape, for when something is moving and it shouldn't.
So does the universe explode if you spray duct tape with WD-40?
There's nothing more annoying than a whiny, self-righteous, American-hating Canadian. The reason that the "invade canada" joke annoys you is because of the element of truth- Canada has one of the world's weakest militaries, next to the world's strongest. But that's Canada's choice.
Canadians buy into the myth that they don't need to defend themselves because- unlike Americans- they aren't assholes to the rest of the world. Which is a joke. Think of Poland vs.Germany, or all the little states the Soviet Union swallowed up- that didn't happen because of their foreign policy. Or for that matter, think of all the land that the United States swiped from Mexico. I don't recall that the Mexicans were asking for it. The reality is, you need to have an army to defend you. "Being nice" is not enough to keep a country independent.
And the army that defends Canada is... the United States Army. Along with the Air Force. And the Navy. And the Marines. It's a perfect situation. Who's going to fuck with the next door neighbor of the biggest, meanest, toughest kid on the block? At the same time, you don't have to support an army, so you're free to spend it on lots of social programs. I'm not saying that means that you can't criticize the U.S., but for Christ's sake, don't be so fucking self-righteous about it. You Canadians benefit tremendously from the situation and from America's large, aggressive military. Take your fucking toque off so you get some blood to the brain, and think about that fact.
Also, remember Donald Rumsfeld. He's an old, white Princeton graduate, so he's obviously not there as some part of a quota system. He's failed repeatedly by refusing to commit enough troops, not planning for the aftermath, refusing the recognize the seriousness of the insurgency, refusing to send over more troops, letting torture get out of hand... and so on. The Army recently refused to submit a budget to him because they said they couldn't do what they needed to with the money they were being given. But he stays on. Firing him would mean admitting that Bush made an error in hiring him... and Bush does not like to admit errors.
But hell, this is not new stuff, people. These problems had all been remarked on during the leadup to the presidential campaign. You cannot make the argument that a well-informed voter should be surprised at any of this or the continually deteriorating situation in Iraq given how the Bush administration was run in its first term. John Kerry might or might not have made a great president, but almost anyone would have been preferable to the people we now have in power.
And it is quite likely to get worse. What's worse than a couple of U.S. troops killed a day and 100 civilian bodies a day showing up, many of them mutilated by acid and power tools, I don't know. But that's where we seem to be headed. We have our troops caught in the middle of a brutal civil war. Refusing to recognize that is not going to help the situation.
On the other hand, Benton says they're full of shit with their impact evidence. But then, maybe Benton is full of shit when he says they're full of shit- not being an expert in impacts, I have no clue (he's who I'd been relying on for the bit about little evidence of impact, but after doing a bit of searching on Google Scholar he sounds like he may be standing alone out in left field on this one). There are a number of studies which date the Siberian Traps to the Permian-Triassic boundary. The Siberian traps were formed by enormous lava outpourings, which covered 1.6 million square kilometers at depths of up to 3 kilometers.
At any rate, there's still a lot of questions. Does this structure sit on the Permian-Triassic boundary? What about the 100km Bedout crater off Australia- is that an impact crater, and if so, does it coincide with the Permian? Could they both be impact craters, part of a series of impacts like the comet that hit jupiter? Are an impact and lava even mutually exclusive mechanisms or could an impact actually cause eruptions? If an impact is involved, why is there less evidence for it, even though the extinction appears to have been much more severe than the Cretaceous one?
What are the odds of this being a coincidence, however? Think about it. The extinction of the dinosaurs was one of the five largest mass extinctions of all time, an event which occurs on the order of once every hundred million years. The Chicxulub impact is the largest confirmed asteroid impact for the past 200 million years; again we're dealing with an event which occurs on the order of once every 100 million years. The odds that two such phenomenally rare events occurred simultaneously and had nothing to do with each other are extremely low.
As for a decline of dinosaurs, there is no evidence that dinosaurs were declining in abundance in the last few million years. There is evidence for a decline in number of species, but only in North America (we don't know enough yet about China, Mongolia, or Argentina). A couple sub-families (lambeosaurine duckbills, short-frilled ceratopsians) appear to drop out in the Latest Cretaceous in North America, but most major groups (horned dinosaurs, duckbills, tyrannosaurs, etc.) persist and at least one group actually makes a first appearance towards the end (Alvarezsauridae). So there's evidence for a modest decline, in one part of the world, but nothing comparable to what happens at the end of the Cretaceous, when all large land animals die out.
As for "dinosaur friendly climates" those have nothing to do with shallow seas, since dinosaurs lived in all kinds of environments- inland, coastal, equatorial and polar. In, fact dinosaurs coped much better with polar environments than conventional reptiles like turtles and alligators, which did not live near the poles at the time. All climates were "dinosaur friendly", and dinosaurs did perfectly well with cool climates throughout the Cretaceous. Finally, cooling and warming, and expansion and retraction of the Western Interior Seaway occurred throughout the Cretaceous. They probably did influence dinosaur diversity, but the dinosaurs persisted throughout these.
At this point, it's pretty clear that the dinosaur extinction was caused by an asteroid/comet impact. First, they found an iridium signature suggesting an extraterrestrial object, then shocked quartz suggesting an impact, and finally the Chicxulub crater. Dating of the crater and the ash layer it has produced place them at the same time the dinosaurs (as well as many other animals, such as ammonites) go extinct.
But the situation is much murkier with the Permian extinctions. Last I'd heard, we have yet to find clear evidence of an impact in the form of iridium, a dust layer or shocked quartz. So that sheds some doubt on the idea of an impact. Even if this is an impact crater, we don't know for certain that it dates to the time of the end-Permian mass extinctions: obviously, if it didn't occur at the same time as those extinctions, it couldn't have caused them. Given that the researchers are using radar and gravitometry, how do they know how old it is? You need to either do radiometric dating or look at the fossils to tell how old the underlying and overlying rocks are.
There is also some evidence that the Permian extinctions may have been drawn out, with several bouts of extinction occurring over the course of a million years or so, again that doesn't fit with an meteorite/comet impact. Anyhow, it might have been an impact, and it might not have been. It's still a mystery and probably will be for quite a while.
Also, they arn't being forced. It's the price of admission to America.
Frankly I'm disgusted that anyone would seriously consider this. Seriously, would you claim it was just the "price of admission" if you were required to get one before you could vote, or perhaps if you were required to have on implanted into you at birth before your citizenship would be official?
Implanting chips into people like they were a cow or your dog is just disgusting, it's treating people as less than people simply because they were born in a different country. I just can't see why having a passport that says "U.S." means you should be entitled to basic human dignity, while having one that says "Mexico" means you should be treated like an animal. But that's what supporting this proposal is arguing.
Does it record the origin of the offending articles and report them to the government, or merely deletes othe offending articles?
Neither. It deletes the origin of the offending articles. Not that I'm totally opposed to this, it sure would improve the quality of slashdot if there was a "-1, execute poster" mod.
Just imagine if they'd had this technology in "1984". Winston Smith would have been out of a job; any user could go online and edit people out of the history books.
How does one get from the fact that Microsoft is planning on spending more money this year than last to the assumption that they must be going to war with Google?
The indicators consist of more than just an increase in Microsoft's spending. The price of aircraft carriers, cruise missiles and B-2 Stealth bombers has gone up considerably in recent months.
I'm sure the parent is well aware of that. Of course, as another poster points out with Jobs "do you want to sell flavored sugar water or do you want to change the world?", quote, it takes a different kind of CEO to run Apple. Apple always has been about marketing revolutionary machines and software, first with the Apple II, bringing computers to the masses, then the with Mac, redefining operating systems, and then with the iPod and iTunes music store, redefining how people listen to and purchase music.
People will point out that Macintosh wasn't really first with any of these things, and rightly so. Apple's genius has laid not so much in inventing (although it does a fair amount of that, a lot more than Microsoft) but in using a combination of engineering, fashion design and marketing to bring these things mainstream.
Honestly I don't know that Apple can survive without Jobs, at least not the Apple that has thrived on being at the cutting edge. He was the vision behind it initially, they putted along and then foundered without him, and they've made a huge comeback with him. His combination of vision, drive, cult-like fanatacism, and titanic ego kept it going. Likewise I kind of wonder if Gates handing the reins over on Microsoft was what turned it from unstoppable devourer of worlds into the dumb, lumbering behemoth its been lately. It just seems like the qualities that certain CEOs and businessmen use to keep their companies on the cutting edge are not just difficult to incorporate into a corporate culture, they are almost the polar opposite of being part of a corporate culture- a willingness to break ranks, take risks, and think in a completely different way.
Second Life may not end up taking the world by storm, but it raises some interesting issues. What happens if the total value of goods and services in an online world- its gross domestic product (GDP)- starts exceeding that of, say, small African nations? That idea sounds laughable, but when you consider the billions of dollars involved in movies, music, and video games, it seems more like an inevitability than a possibility. Then what happens? If someone pisses off your Clan by using cheats, do you launch a war against their country, or just an embargo? I'm being a bit facetious here, but you could imagine that a large online community could potentially be a force to reckon with. They might be virtual, but their dollars are real, and that would give them power.
The problem with creating artificial communities of course is that what starts out as a fun exercise in anarchy quickly starts needing rules, just like its real counterpart. Otherwise, people start abusing the system. Multiplayer FPS quickly lose popularity when you've got a handful of people using cheats, and as the reporter found, it's kind of annoying when someone decides to build on top of the virtual property you bought. So you need systems to keep stuff in check, feedbacks like Slashdots moderation system, or something analogous. Of course, if it goes too far with the regulation and ordering, then you're right back where you started: a highly restrictive environment, which is what you went online to get away from.
But 2L satisfies neither the "escape" nor "fantasy" part of that. Just trading one mundane dog-eat-dog existance for another, without even the perk of entertainment. And you can't even call it an even trade, because while trudging along in "real life" might get you fed, sheltered, and offspring, no amount of success in Second Life will keep you alive and viable.
Yes, but if Second Life sucks you could easily solve that by creating a network of virtual computers inside Second Life where the avatars could go to get away from their mundane online existence!
Nice job mindlessly reciting the racist caricature put forth by the military propagandists. You duckspeak doubleplusgood. Now let me ask: How many real-life Japanese people do you actually know? I bet the answer is: "none". I, on the other hand, know quite a few, tourists and exchange students I've met, and immigrants and their descendants I've gotten to know long-term.
And obviously, Japanese culture hasn't changed at allin 60 years, following hundreds of thousands of casualties, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, nuclear attacks, surrender to the U.S., the loss of the Japanese military, and the rise of Japan as one of the most technologically advanced nations on earth. So everything you've learned about Japan from nineteen-year-old Japanese exchange students carrying Hello Kitty purses and Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" provides an accurate window into Japan as it existed circa 1941-45. Whereas all the AC has to offer is verifiable, historical facts from articles and books.
The AC is NOT being racist, he is referring to documented facts about WII. Read some history books. Japanese soldiers often fought to the death, and many chose suicide- sometimes blowing themselves up with hand grenades, or leaping off of cliffs- rather than be captured. In Saipan, soldiers even forced women and children off of cliffs, rather than allow them to be captured by the Americans. I've got Japanese friends, and yes, they're nice people. But it doesn't alter the fact that an amphibious invasion of Japan would have resulted in massive civilian casualties. Arguing that the Japanese weren't fighting to the death because you've met some modern Japanese people who are nice in casual conversation is idiotic. I've met nice German people, therefore the Holocaust is anti-German propaganda? I've also met very nice people from the South and enjoyed their hospitality. So slavery didn't happen, it's just a prejudice against Southerners?
Yes, it's hard to look at people you've met from Japan and believe that during the war, Japan engaged in some atrocities which were just as brutal as anything that Germany did: raping and murdering civilians in China, forcing Korean women to work as prostitutes, working British POWs to death as slave labor, eating POWs (admittedly they were running low on food due to a successful American campaign to disrupt shipping). But these things happened. And the fact is, those nice exchange students we know from Japan, had they been born earlier, would have been part of a society that committed these acts, probably would have done nothing to stop them, and probably would have even helped. Of course, had we been born in that time and place, we probably would have helped as well, which is the scary thing.
Look at the sequence of events. The U.S. captures the Marianas, putting B-29 bombers in range of the Japanese homeland. By the end of the war, the U.S. was able to put 500 B-29s in the air at once, and used them for fire-bombing Japanese cities. The bombing of Tokyo on May 9-10 1945 kills ~100,000- more than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. On April 1, the U.S. invades Okinawa, with maybe 12,000 U.S. dead, 100,000 Japanese soldiers killed, and 100,000 Japanese civilian dead. Few Japanese soldiers are captured, they fight to the death or commit suicide rather than surrender. On August 6, the U.S. bombs Hiroshima. On August 8, the USSR attacks Japan in Manchuria, so now Japan is facing the U.S. and USSR. On August 9, Nagasaki is hit with an atomic bomb. On August 15, Japan surrenders.
Now, it may be that elements within the Japanese government were looking to surrender. And probably, within a matter of months, the Japanese government would have surrendered. But I don't think you can argue that the Japanese government had already decided to surrender, even conditionally. When your home islands are invaded, you get hit by an atomic bomb, Stalin declares war on you, you get hit again, and then wait a week to surrender, it's pretty clear you're not exactly falling over yourself to surrender.
Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't a pretty option, and it faced resistance even within the U.S. military. Would it have saved lives? Probably, if the U.S. had continued bombing cities with conventional bombs, cut off Japan from all imports of food, and/or launched an amphibious assault. Any of these things would easily have claimed 200,000 civilian lives. I doubt that saving Japanese lives was the top priority of course: we were at war. Our priorities were the lives of our troops. Behind that, the enormous cost of waging war, the need to rebuild Europe after Germany's surrender, a desire not to let the USSR claim a chunk of Japan, and probably a desire to test the atomic bomb probably all factored into the decision. So no, the U.S. wasn't playing the rule of humanitarian... but again, we were at war. Our first priority is looking out for U.S. citizens. The people who were supposed to look out for the lives of Japanese citizens were the Japanese government.
Which brings us to the Japanese government and society. I don't think you can absolve the Japanese themselves of guilt. Japanese culture cultivated an obsession with death, to the point of having soldiers kill themselves rather than be captured, kill their own civilians rather than allow them to be captured, use suicide as a weapon against ships, and employ human beings as living guidance systems in cruise missiles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohka. Some civilian elements in the government might have wanted to surrender, but the Japanese military types who were making the decisions were willing to have their civilian population blown away by two atom bombs before they would seriously talk about surrender. Now, humans are a violent lot, but Japanese culture seems to have taken an obsession with death to an unhealthy extreme. You can't have it both ways: you can't have an obsession with suicidal behavior, and then act like you're the victim when hundreds of thousands of your people end up dead.
There's also a modern obsession, particularly on the far left, with painting the U.S. as the bad guy in all situations. Even if we do something good like trying to restore order in Somalia, it's got to be for fundamentally evil reasons, according to these people. Now, there are plenty of reasons to criticize the United States and question the government's motives, but I don't think that this simplistic idea is any more helpful than the conservative myth where the U.S. is a global Cowboy in a White Hat, fighting for Truth and Justice, and against Bad Guys with Moustaches and Black Hats. It's just a left-wing version of the same simplistic, black-and-white thinking that got us into the Iraq mess.
And for all this talk of "in the closet", that's the real barrier keeping people out: rabid intolerance for all things outside geekdom. Geeks, nerds, whatever aren't very big tent in approach. They make their bones by being exclusory. Everyone else is "Other People" and either an enemy or some sheep who can't be trusted to do anything. And attitude like that will keep most of that 40% (and a significant proportion of that 53% of the Science and Passion who are female) at arms reach.
My general impression is that geeks are probably more open-minded and accepting of people who are different from them than the general population, but that's just my subjective opinion, and of course it's biased as I'm a geek. As far as dislike of non-geeks go, sure: some geeks just aren't willing to take the time to understand people who don't think like they do. But part of it might have something to do with the deep anti-intellectualism that pervades American culture, where it's considered uncool and vaguely shameful to be intelligent, curious, and well-educated. A lot of us grew up being marginalized and looked down on by the cheerleeders and jocks, so given an excuse to look down on them, or some way we can view them as inferior, it's hardly surprising that we'll often take it.
Of course, being accepted by a geek vs. being accepted as a geek are two different things. To be a geek, you've got to display some expertise in an intellectually challenging field.
Kubrick's portrayal may be a nod to Plato's allegory of The Cave, where men spend their life in a cave, chained up and facing the wall. Men behind them build a fire and cast shadows upon the wall, and the prisoners believe that these shadows are reality because they don't know anything else.
Kinda like The Matrix, only it was envisioned 2500 years ago. That, and Plato's _Republic_ doesn't have people floating in midair and doing cool ninja moves.
Slashdot Mirror
It's political theater. I'm sure the administration could be very persuasive, but if Rumsfeld truly wanted to resign, he could. Offering his resignation the first time around was a way of accepting responsibility for the Abu Ghraib scandal, not necessarily an indication that he truly wanted to resign. I don't know about the second time, but I think it's traditional for all of the President's secretaries to hand in their resignations at the beginning of the second term, which he then will/will not accept. This is the president's way of asserting that they are his bitches. Finally, in politics, "resigning" is frequently a polite word for "got your ass fired". It's a way of giving the person a graceful exit and saving face. That isn't done out of charity or anything; it's just that people with nothing left in terms of their reputation have nothing left to lose, and that makes them dangerous. If Bush publicly fired Rumsfeld and humiliated him in doing so, Rumsfeld might try to redeem his reputation a bit by bringing Bush down a notch or two.
But even assuming the Democrats pull together and show brilliant leadership and vision (and I'm not holding my breath), it would take years to undo Bush's damage. I think a key issue to watch is going to be Rumsfeld. It's clear his strategies have failed, repeatedly; he needs to be held accountable. And it's clear he can't fix things in Iraq. He has to go. Bush's instincts will be to protect him, because Bush rewards loyalty (a good character, to a point) and because Bush thinks that firing him would be an admission of failure, and Bush does not admit failure (but admitting failure is a technicality at this point, Rumsfeld and Bush's efforts in Iraq so far have failed utterly).
I recently came across this quote about exploiting nationalism, and it disturbed me for two reasons. First, it is a very accurate description of the post 9/11 political situation, which has resulted in the loss of civil liberties, the disastrous occupation of Iraq, secret prisons, torture, and the dismantling of the government's system of checks and balances. Second, the author is Hermann Goering.
Godwin's Law, I know, but there are some eerie parallels, and that's scary as hell. I am truly afraid for my country's future. These are dark times; it's the worst I've ever seen the United States of America. We've got the monkeys running the zoo... these are small, foolish, and dangerous little men- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld. And they are tearing the country apart. They've got the left hating the right and the right hating the left. They've got us caught up in an eternal war against terror (as if you can wage war on a military tactic, that's as nonsensical as a "war against flanking maneuvers"). In their war, in order to save our freedoms from the terrorists, they've got to take our freedoms away. Meanwhile, our executive branch is obsessed with using torture to the point that it starts to seem creepily sadistic, running secret prisons and shipping people off to be tortured in foreign countries. Finally, we've got to keep fighting endlessly in Iraq as it spirals into civil war, and I still haven't heard something that even vaguely resembles a strategy for success, or a convincing explanation of why we even went in, and killed thousands of our own men and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
I've always criticized America, not because I hate her, but because I love her and want her to be better. I thought there was a lot wrong with the country, but I believed it was basically a good country, and that other nations had a lot to learn from us. But now, when I travel through foreign countries, I am ashamed to show my American passport. I actually tell people I'm "coming from Canada" (misleading but true, because that's where I study). Living abroad, I now realize that deep down, I still do love America. But not the America of George Bush. That America is an America of constant fear, divisive hate, endless war, domestic spying, and torture. And we can do better than George Bush's America.
You people are so pessimistic. Next you'll be saying that my perfectly harmless experiments to re-animate formerly living tissue could somehow have unforeseen, disastrous consequences!
Radio as a distribution system may be on its way out, but I think the content has a lot of potential. I've been listening to a lot of NPR either as podcasts or streaming audio, for instance, and sometimes the BBC. The question is how to distribute it. Satellite definitely has its advantages, but you could also incorporate wireless capability into an iPod and allow it to download radio shows as podcasts or to access radio as streaming audio.
This is just terrible. You simply can't imagine the disappointment this will cause me- uh, I mean, will cause little Junior this Christmas. He really wants a Lego Millenium Falcon. It's just so cute when he says "ma-ma" but he just can't quite get "-llenium Falcon" part of the ship's name out. Of course, he'd just eat the mini-figures, so the set will have to stay in my room.
So does the universe explode if you spray duct tape with WD-40?
Wait- if you can't see them, how do you know they're actually black?
Canadians buy into the myth that they don't need to defend themselves because- unlike Americans- they aren't assholes to the rest of the world. Which is a joke. Think of Poland vs.Germany, or all the little states the Soviet Union swallowed up- that didn't happen because of their foreign policy. Or for that matter, think of all the land that the United States swiped from Mexico. I don't recall that the Mexicans were asking for it. The reality is, you need to have an army to defend you. "Being nice" is not enough to keep a country independent.
And the army that defends Canada is... the United States Army. Along with the Air Force. And the Navy. And the Marines. It's a perfect situation. Who's going to fuck with the next door neighbor of the biggest, meanest, toughest kid on the block? At the same time, you don't have to support an army, so you're free to spend it on lots of social programs. I'm not saying that means that you can't criticize the U.S., but for Christ's sake, don't be so fucking self-righteous about it. You Canadians benefit tremendously from the situation and from America's large, aggressive military. Take your fucking toque off so you get some blood to the brain, and think about that fact.
But hell, this is not new stuff, people. These problems had all been remarked on during the leadup to the presidential campaign. You cannot make the argument that a well-informed voter should be surprised at any of this or the continually deteriorating situation in Iraq given how the Bush administration was run in its first term. John Kerry might or might not have made a great president, but almost anyone would have been preferable to the people we now have in power.
And it is quite likely to get worse. What's worse than a couple of U.S. troops killed a day and 100 civilian bodies a day showing up, many of them mutilated by acid and power tools, I don't know. But that's where we seem to be headed. We have our troops caught in the middle of a brutal civil war. Refusing to recognize that is not going to help the situation.
At any rate, there's still a lot of questions. Does this structure sit on the Permian-Triassic boundary? What about the 100km Bedout crater off Australia- is that an impact crater, and if so, does it coincide with the Permian? Could they both be impact craters, part of a series of impacts like the comet that hit jupiter? Are an impact and lava even mutually exclusive mechanisms or could an impact actually cause eruptions? If an impact is involved, why is there less evidence for it, even though the extinction appears to have been much more severe than the Cretaceous one?
As for a decline of dinosaurs, there is no evidence that dinosaurs were declining in abundance in the last few million years. There is evidence for a decline in number of species, but only in North America (we don't know enough yet about China, Mongolia, or Argentina). A couple sub-families (lambeosaurine duckbills, short-frilled ceratopsians) appear to drop out in the Latest Cretaceous in North America, but most major groups (horned dinosaurs, duckbills, tyrannosaurs, etc.) persist and at least one group actually makes a first appearance towards the end (Alvarezsauridae). So there's evidence for a modest decline, in one part of the world, but nothing comparable to what happens at the end of the Cretaceous, when all large land animals die out.
As for "dinosaur friendly climates" those have nothing to do with shallow seas, since dinosaurs lived in all kinds of environments- inland, coastal, equatorial and polar. In, fact dinosaurs coped much better with polar environments than conventional reptiles like turtles and alligators, which did not live near the poles at the time. All climates were "dinosaur friendly", and dinosaurs did perfectly well with cool climates throughout the Cretaceous. Finally, cooling and warming, and expansion and retraction of the Western Interior Seaway occurred throughout the Cretaceous. They probably did influence dinosaur diversity, but the dinosaurs persisted throughout these.
But the situation is much murkier with the Permian extinctions. Last I'd heard, we have yet to find clear evidence of an impact in the form of iridium, a dust layer or shocked quartz. So that sheds some doubt on the idea of an impact. Even if this is an impact crater, we don't know for certain that it dates to the time of the end-Permian mass extinctions: obviously, if it didn't occur at the same time as those extinctions, it couldn't have caused them. Given that the researchers are using radar and gravitometry, how do they know how old it is? You need to either do radiometric dating or look at the fossils to tell how old the underlying and overlying rocks are.
There is also some evidence that the Permian extinctions may have been drawn out, with several bouts of extinction occurring over the course of a million years or so, again that doesn't fit with an meteorite/comet impact. Anyhow, it might have been an impact, and it might not have been. It's still a mystery and probably will be for quite a while.
Frankly I'm disgusted that anyone would seriously consider this. Seriously, would you claim it was just the "price of admission" if you were required to get one before you could vote, or perhaps if you were required to have on implanted into you at birth before your citizenship would be official?
Implanting chips into people like they were a cow or your dog is just disgusting, it's treating people as less than people simply because they were born in a different country. I just can't see why having a passport that says "U.S." means you should be entitled to basic human dignity, while having one that says "Mexico" means you should be treated like an animal. But that's what supporting this proposal is arguing.
Neither. It deletes the origin of the offending articles. Not that I'm totally opposed to this, it sure would improve the quality of slashdot if there was a "-1, execute poster" mod.
Just imagine if they'd had this technology in "1984". Winston Smith would have been out of a job; any user could go online and edit people out of the history books.
The indicators consist of more than just an increase in Microsoft's spending. The price of aircraft carriers, cruise missiles and B-2 Stealth bombers has gone up considerably in recent months.
People will point out that Macintosh wasn't really first with any of these things, and rightly so. Apple's genius has laid not so much in inventing (although it does a fair amount of that, a lot more than Microsoft) but in using a combination of engineering, fashion design and marketing to bring these things mainstream.
Honestly I don't know that Apple can survive without Jobs, at least not the Apple that has thrived on being at the cutting edge. He was the vision behind it initially, they putted along and then foundered without him, and they've made a huge comeback with him. His combination of vision, drive, cult-like fanatacism, and titanic ego kept it going. Likewise I kind of wonder if Gates handing the reins over on Microsoft was what turned it from unstoppable devourer of worlds into the dumb, lumbering behemoth its been lately. It just seems like the qualities that certain CEOs and businessmen use to keep their companies on the cutting edge are not just difficult to incorporate into a corporate culture, they are almost the polar opposite of being part of a corporate culture- a willingness to break ranks, take risks, and think in a completely different way.
How's stuff treating you at Abu Ghraib these days, anyhow?
The problem with creating artificial communities of course is that what starts out as a fun exercise in anarchy quickly starts needing rules, just like its real counterpart. Otherwise, people start abusing the system. Multiplayer FPS quickly lose popularity when you've got a handful of people using cheats, and as the reporter found, it's kind of annoying when someone decides to build on top of the virtual property you bought. So you need systems to keep stuff in check, feedbacks like Slashdots moderation system, or something analogous. Of course, if it goes too far with the regulation and ordering, then you're right back where you started: a highly restrictive environment, which is what you went online to get away from.
Yes, but if Second Life sucks you could easily solve that by creating a network of virtual computers inside Second Life where the avatars could go to get away from their mundane online existence!
And obviously, Japanese culture hasn't changed at allin 60 years, following hundreds of thousands of casualties, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, nuclear attacks, surrender to the U.S., the loss of the Japanese military, and the rise of Japan as one of the most technologically advanced nations on earth. So everything you've learned about Japan from nineteen-year-old Japanese exchange students carrying Hello Kitty purses and Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" provides an accurate window into Japan as it existed circa 1941-45. Whereas all the AC has to offer is verifiable, historical facts from articles and books.
The AC is NOT being racist, he is referring to documented facts about WII. Read some history books. Japanese soldiers often fought to the death, and many chose suicide- sometimes blowing themselves up with hand grenades, or leaping off of cliffs- rather than be captured. In Saipan, soldiers even forced women and children off of cliffs, rather than allow them to be captured by the Americans. I've got Japanese friends, and yes, they're nice people. But it doesn't alter the fact that an amphibious invasion of Japan would have resulted in massive civilian casualties. Arguing that the Japanese weren't fighting to the death because you've met some modern Japanese people who are nice in casual conversation is idiotic. I've met nice German people, therefore the Holocaust is anti-German propaganda? I've also met very nice people from the South and enjoyed their hospitality. So slavery didn't happen, it's just a prejudice against Southerners?
Yes, it's hard to look at people you've met from Japan and believe that during the war, Japan engaged in some atrocities which were just as brutal as anything that Germany did: raping and murdering civilians in China, forcing Korean women to work as prostitutes, working British POWs to death as slave labor, eating POWs (admittedly they were running low on food due to a successful American campaign to disrupt shipping). But these things happened. And the fact is, those nice exchange students we know from Japan, had they been born earlier, would have been part of a society that committed these acts, probably would have done nothing to stop them, and probably would have even helped. Of course, had we been born in that time and place, we probably would have helped as well, which is the scary thing.
Now, it may be that elements within the Japanese government were looking to surrender. And probably, within a matter of months, the Japanese government would have surrendered. But I don't think you can argue that the Japanese government had already decided to surrender, even conditionally. When your home islands are invaded, you get hit by an atomic bomb, Stalin declares war on you, you get hit again, and then wait a week to surrender, it's pretty clear you're not exactly falling over yourself to surrender.
Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't a pretty option, and it faced resistance even within the U.S. military. Would it have saved lives? Probably, if the U.S. had continued bombing cities with conventional bombs, cut off Japan from all imports of food, and/or launched an amphibious assault. Any of these things would easily have claimed 200,000 civilian lives. I doubt that saving Japanese lives was the top priority of course: we were at war. Our priorities were the lives of our troops. Behind that, the enormous cost of waging war, the need to rebuild Europe after Germany's surrender, a desire not to let the USSR claim a chunk of Japan, and probably a desire to test the atomic bomb probably all factored into the decision. So no, the U.S. wasn't playing the rule of humanitarian... but again, we were at war. Our first priority is looking out for U.S. citizens. The people who were supposed to look out for the lives of Japanese citizens were the Japanese government.
Which brings us to the Japanese government and society. I don't think you can absolve the Japanese themselves of guilt. Japanese culture cultivated an obsession with death, to the point of having soldiers kill themselves rather than be captured, kill their own civilians rather than allow them to be captured, use suicide as a weapon against ships, and employ human beings as living guidance systems in cruise missiles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohka. Some civilian elements in the government might have wanted to surrender, but the Japanese military types who were making the decisions were willing to have their civilian population blown away by two atom bombs before they would seriously talk about surrender. Now, humans are a violent lot, but Japanese culture seems to have taken an obsession with death to an unhealthy extreme. You can't have it both ways: you can't have an obsession with suicidal behavior, and then act like you're the victim when hundreds of thousands of your people end up dead.
There's also a modern obsession, particularly on the far left, with painting the U.S. as the bad guy in all situations. Even if we do something good like trying to restore order in Somalia, it's got to be for fundamentally evil reasons, according to these people. Now, there are plenty of reasons to criticize the United States and question the government's motives, but I don't think that this simplistic idea is any more helpful than the conservative myth where the U.S. is a global Cowboy in a White Hat, fighting for Truth and Justice, and against Bad Guys with Moustaches and Black Hats. It's just a left-wing version of the same simplistic, black-and-white thinking that got us into the Iraq mess.
My general impression is that geeks are probably more open-minded and accepting of people who are different from them than the general population, but that's just my subjective opinion, and of course it's biased as I'm a geek. As far as dislike of non-geeks go, sure: some geeks just aren't willing to take the time to understand people who don't think like they do. But part of it might have something to do with the deep anti-intellectualism that pervades American culture, where it's considered uncool and vaguely shameful to be intelligent, curious, and well-educated. A lot of us grew up being marginalized and looked down on by the cheerleeders and jocks, so given an excuse to look down on them, or some way we can view them as inferior, it's hardly surprising that we'll often take it.
Of course, being accepted by a geek vs. being accepted as a geek are two different things. To be a geek, you've got to display some expertise in an intellectually challenging field.
Kinda like The Matrix, only it was envisioned 2500 years ago. That, and Plato's _Republic_ doesn't have people floating in midair and doing cool ninja moves.