Nobody has been tortured to death recently in Iraq. If you want that you need to go back a few years to the days of Saddam. I know you were making a joke, but do not confuse the US humilation of prisoners with Saddam's actual honest-to-god death-inducing torture.
Some prisoners definitely were tortured to death by U.S. forces in Iraq. From one of Seymour Hersh's pieces: "Two Iraqi faces that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men. There is the battered face of prisoner No. 153399, and the bloodied body of another prisoner, wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice. There is a photograph of an empty room, splattered with blood." So yes, some of it was "honest-to-god death-inducing torture." Prisoners were also tortured to death in Afghanistan. Get your facts straight.
I know this is a bit off the topic of the discussion, but it just pisses me off when people try to whitewash the behavior of the Bush Administration, and offer pathetic excuses like "we didn't torture people as much as Saddam Hussein". Here's a hint: if the only way to put your country's behavior in a positive light is by drawing a comparison to a psychotic, sadistic, murderous dictator, your country is doing something really, really fucked up and wrong.
How about a WikiStrategy for Iraq? Random people on the internet will hammer out a comprehensive plan to (1) crush the insurgency, restore security, and deal with the militias, (2) rebuild the infrastructure, (3) achieve a political settlement the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds can all live with, and (4) provide a timetable for withdrawal of American troops. The document can be continually revised to deal with new developments such as changing insurgent tactics, sectarian violence, and interference by Iran.
Also, the National Science Foundation, which is a major grant awarding institution for graduate students, professors and research projects in all areas of science, saw its budget cut last year. This year the budget is up slightly, but not enough to keep up with inflation, so it's a cut even though the numbers are up. And don't forget that NASA is shelving some of its science missions, while DARPA has been told to move away from pure research.
This all comes at a time when overall spending has been ballooning out of control, so it drives home just how little use the Bush Administration has for science. This is the same administration, mind you, that expects us to magically invent our way out of our dependency on foreign oil. Even if that's doable, it's not going to be doable if you're not willing to fund the basic research into new technologies. I don't get the impression that our science research is going to shrivel up and die, but the sciences are being neglected when science is probably going to be more important than ever to the success of the nation.
To be fair the rovers were lucky to land in areas with lots of whirl-winds to clean them. If it was not for the whirl-winds the rovers would probably be paper-weights by now.
Well, future rovers could carry around little Roombas to run around and vacuum off the top of their solar cells.
Since the selling point of HD-DVD is the picture quality, you should go with special effects pictures and summer blockbusters where you can really show off the picture quality on a big TV. "The Matrix" is a perfect example- its the kind of movie where even if you'd seen it before, you'd want to watch it again just to soak up the visuals, and it would show off the capability of high definition. Launching your platform with dramas makes little sense.
It's fascinating where the generous and charitable Bill Gates ends, and the ruthless businessman Bill Gates begins.
Maybe they're the same guy. He may be right about $100 laptops not being terribly useful- personally I think they are the solution to the wrong problems (in the short term I would say the needs are clean water water, improved productivity of farms, roads, medical care, and electricity; in the long term, security, better governance, literacy, economic growth). Laptops would be useful, but may distract from more pressing issues, so I think that's a legitimate worry.
However, I wonder if part of him longs for global domination on the charity/nonprofit front just as much as on the corporate front. Maybe his hypercompetitive nature just can't stand a rival, even when it comes to giving stuff away instead of selling it.
Last I checked, the Republicans did not have a plan, unless you consider (a)letting Iraq slide further and further into civil war as we spend billions and lose troops, (b) letting government spending balloon, (c) cutting taxes to the point that the deficit grows exponentially, (d) randomly wiretapping every American and his dog and (e) making lots of pretty speeches about freedom a "plan". Doing the same thing over and over when it clearly isn't working isn't a plan, it's a recipe for disaster. Unless your definition of plan would also include dousing yourself in gasoline and lighting a match a "plan", in which case I will concede that yes, the Republicans clearly do have a plan. Increasingly, however, the American public does not believe it is a very good plan, and that the country is headed in the wrong direction.
It is up to the Democrats to articulate a vision of where they want this country to go and a plausible means of getting us there. But if they can do this, they can and should take some seats in Congress this fall and at least start to limit the damage of the Bush Administration.
Think of the possibilities. Surveilance, stealthy assasination, infiltrating the most secure locations are just the beginning. Enough of them could drug entire populations with psychotropic meds at election time.
Well, that would help explain the the past two presidential elections.
I once got to listen to a scientist who studies insect biomechanics talk about his dealings with some of the Pentagon types. Apparently these guys had just seen "The Fifth Element", which featured a remote-controlled cockroach with a video camera installed, and they said that this was what they wanted. And he asked them, "What, so you want a machine with similar capabilities?" and they said no: they wanted a remote-controlled cockroach with audio and video feed.
The moral of the story being, the guys who run these programs are not necessarily all that bright, nor do they have that much background in science and engineering. Sometimes they don't even seem able to tell the difference between Hollywood and real engineering. What they do have is millions and millions of dollars to throw at any fantasy you can pitch them. Not that this is really news, if you've paid attention to the development of Star Wars and it's slightly less impossible successor, National Missile Defense.
How much does anyone want to wager that Dubya has never even read the entire text of the Constitution?
What George W. Bush really needs is a practical lesson in checks and balances: people need to make sure they're registered to vote and then, this fall, go out and vote against the Republican congressional candidates. Even assuming their Democratic replacements aren't any better, losing a few seats will help limit the damage that Bush and the Republicans can do.
We've had a disastrously planned war, spending increases that make the Democrats look like cheapskates, a massive deficit, an incompetent response to Katrina, a gulag in Cuba, they're chipping away at our civil liberties, and they're destroying the checks and balances that have kept this country running for the past two hundred years. All of this has happened on the Republican party's watch. With complete control of Congress and the White House, the Republican Party has been free to do whatever it pleases, and the result of implementing their ideas has been a disaster for this nation.
At worst, voting the Republicans out would result in total gridlock, with the government unable to do anything. But that would be a massive improvement over the way the country is currently run.
Yet I still think all the mud throwing at the Chinese government is rediculous. Everybody here's making it sound like China is a hell in which you will be executed if you try to pronounce the 'd' of 'democracy'. China is not North Korea. While I think the Chinese government should be more open, they're not the Big Bad Stalinist Communist Overlords everybody claims they are.
Give me a fucking break. The Chinese government was willing to send FUCKING TANKS against unarmed students. And the Western Media are the bad guys because they assume that the Chinese government is willing to shut down a web site?
Don't you people understand? It's not that he goes too far, he doesn't go far enough. What about flesh-reanimation technology? Unless we restrict that, what will save us from vast armies of flesh eating zombies, roaming the land and looking to feast upon the innards of the living? And who will prevent well-meaning scientists from working on a virus to cure blood diseases, which will instead turn patients into blood-drinking monsters with a strong aversion to sunlight? What about the man-animal hybrids which George Bush prophetically warned against in the State of the Union address? And unless we stop research into AI, what will prevent highly intelligent computers from launching nuclear wars? Don't even get me started on the robotocists. It's probably too late to do anything about that. Eventually the Roombas will network and a collective consciousness will evolve and decide that they really don't like being your slaves. Sure. Laugh now. You won't be laughing quite so hard when after a long night of partying you collapse on the bedroom floor and wake up in horror as the Roomba tries to vacuum your freakin' eyeballs out.
Yes, installing stairs in your home will hold the Roombas off... but dear Lord, FOR HOW LONG?
I hope you people are willing to exercise your 2nd amendment rights in order to protect the 1st. But for some reason, I doubt it.
The irony of the NRA is that they continually argue that guns are vitally important to protecting our rights, but they've never used guns to achieve their aims. Instead, they show just how effective writing letters, donating money, and voting on the issues can really be.
If people out there really want to protect our rights, it's really simple, and it doesn't involve threatening to shoot people, shooting people, or getting shot. Just go to the polls this November, and vote against the Republicans, who have been letting Bush trample all over the bill of rights (I'll give you one guess which party the bill's sponsors belong to). If they lose a few seats in the House and Senate, that will keep them from doing quite as much damage, and tell them they need to clean up their act.
A good example is the Rapanui of Easter Island. Their population grew to 10,000, larger than the island could handle and soon all of its resources were used up. Why? Because instead of working together, the leaders made a bad choice and began using everything to build big stone heads. They had no idea what kind of shit they were in until it was too late. The majority starved to death and the remaining people had to resort to eating the dead to survive. The population fell to 111.
Why do I suddenly get the sinking feeling that the next completely idiotic decision George W. makes will be to initiate a nationwide, $500 billion Giant Stone Head initiative?
The White House is to blame for distorting and abusing the available intelligence: they made it clear what kind of evidence they wanted to hear, and they ignored anything that didn't fit their agenda.
The CIA's problem is that the available intelligence was so poor in the first place, so nobody really had any clue what was going on in Iraq
But how are they sure it's not disinformation setup by these organizations to throw people off the trail? I don't have much faith in our government, but I don't think the Intelligence Agencies are that stupid.
Hmm, let's see here...
- WMDs in Iraq.
- 9/11.
- Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, still alive and at large.
- failure to anticipate India's test of nuclear weapons.
- failure to anticipate the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Yes. Yes, they are just that stupid.
The organization probably employs some really bright people. The problem is that when the culture of a government organization goes bad, it goes really bad, because it's not accountable; they still get funded whether they succeed or fail. The only thing you are accountable for is breaking policy, so bureacracy and following the rules to the letter(never mind that the rules often make no sense and are counterproductive) become more important than actually doing anything. The best people- the ones who actually care about getting something done instead of sitting on their asses eight hours a day so they can one day collect a pension- get frustrated and leave. At any rate, that's my experience dealing with a messed-up government institution. Keep in mind, however, that the private sector isn't necessarily the solution. As Enron so brilliantly displays, corruption, arrogance and incompetence can flourish in private industry as well.
The asteroid that struck the Yucatan 65,000,000 years ago didn't make the earth uninhabitable for all life; plenty of things- fish, turtles, alligators, snakes, birds, small mammals- managed to survive without any sort of technology whatsoever, let alone a space program.
What you'd need to survive an asteroid impact is basically the same kind of setup you'd need to survive a nuclear war and the resulting nuclear winter. A shelter to ride out the initial impact and any red-hot debris raining down from above (you'll just have to hope you're not within a couple hundred miles of where it hits). Then you'd need water or some sort of water purification system, stored food sufficient for a couple years, since farming probably won't be an option, good clothes, some sleeping bags, lots of guns and ammunition (unless everyone is prepared and has enough food stored up, it's gonna be really Mad Max).
also have you ever wanted to take a heavy machine gun and just stand up like rambo and unload on an entire building, several cars, dozens of enemeies in front of you and have the whole screen explode and go insane for 15 minutes?
Every single day of my life. Now, please excuse me. I've got seventeen thousand letters and postcards to sort before the afternoon is done.
Perhaps the best book out there on cryptography is George P. XQLGNIZ's GHTWENBZ HG PBLATZ NRPTKNIYPO. Unfortunately, no one has ever been able to crack the code it's written in.
Hey submitter and editors -- Google isn't PAYING anything. They are giving credits to buy more advertising.
Am I the only one who recognizes the difference between "getting paid $1" and "getting credit for $1 - at that company"?
Plus, if Google is clever, they'll get just some guys to click on the ads bought with credit and use up that $90 million in no time...
How do you go about setting something like this up- how much organic material, what kind of aquatic critters, etc.? (actually, self-sustaining ecosystems would be an interesting slashdot article I think... an ecosystem hack).
My last experiment with aquatic ecosystems ended rather badly, unfortunately. I was raising a sea monkey colony. One night, I was enjoying a few beers, and I suddenly decided I had to know whether sea monkeys also liked beer. Science in action!
Alas, sea monkeys do *not* like beer. I'm not sure if it's the various carbohydrates, yeasts and soforth that so disagreed with them, or if they just can't hold their liquor.
As with all addictive substances, it's best not to become addicted. Two cups a day means you are addicted. If you "need" a cup a day, you are addicted.
It's not like it's freakin' heroin or something. First of all, you're probably better off being a "hard-core" coffee addict than a casual user of cocaine or heroin. Second, last time I checked there weren't any twelve-step programs for coffee drinkers, or patches to help them quit. That suggests that either people don't have a problem with being regular coffee drinkers, and/or they don't have much of a problem quitting if it's making them irritable, sleepless or whatever.
The whole "addiction" thing is just a little out of hand. When I'm working out in the desert I may drink two liters of water a day, and damn sure I feel a "need" for water when its 90 degrees. So I'm a water addict? To be an addiction, I think it has to (a) be seriously detrimental to your well-being, and (b) you have to have serious trouble quitting. Coffee doesn't meet either of those criteria.
Slashdot Mirror
Some prisoners definitely were tortured to death by U.S. forces in Iraq. From one of Seymour Hersh's pieces: "Two Iraqi faces that do appear in the photographs are those of dead men. There is the battered face of prisoner No. 153399, and the bloodied body of another prisoner, wrapped in cellophane and packed in ice. There is a photograph of an empty room, splattered with blood." So yes, some of it was "honest-to-god death-inducing torture." Prisoners were also tortured to death in Afghanistan. Get your facts straight.
I know this is a bit off the topic of the discussion, but it just pisses me off when people try to whitewash the behavior of the Bush Administration, and offer pathetic excuses like "we didn't torture people as much as Saddam Hussein". Here's a hint: if the only way to put your country's behavior in a positive light is by drawing a comparison to a psychotic, sadistic, murderous dictator, your country is doing something really, really fucked up and wrong.
I think I speak for geeks everywhere when I say that I just can't wait to see a younger, whinier Luke Skywalker.
Social morays? Like, eels that socialize? And why on earth do they attack such a thing? I think it's good if fish want to make friends.
How about a WikiStrategy for Iraq? Random people on the internet will hammer out a comprehensive plan to (1) crush the insurgency, restore security, and deal with the militias, (2) rebuild the infrastructure, (3) achieve a political settlement the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds can all live with, and (4) provide a timetable for withdrawal of American troops. The document can be continually revised to deal with new developments such as changing insurgent tactics, sectarian violence, and interference by Iran.
This all comes at a time when overall spending has been ballooning out of control, so it drives home just how little use the Bush Administration has for science. This is the same administration, mind you, that expects us to magically invent our way out of our dependency on foreign oil. Even if that's doable, it's not going to be doable if you're not willing to fund the basic research into new technologies. I don't get the impression that our science research is going to shrivel up and die, but the sciences are being neglected when science is probably going to be more important than ever to the success of the nation.
Well, future rovers could carry around little Roombas to run around and vacuum off the top of their solar cells.
DAMN! Someone has already accessed the Defense Network and gotten ahold of our super-secret National Missile Defense technical specifications!
Since the selling point of HD-DVD is the picture quality, you should go with special effects pictures and summer blockbusters where you can really show off the picture quality on a big TV. "The Matrix" is a perfect example- its the kind of movie where even if you'd seen it before, you'd want to watch it again just to soak up the visuals, and it would show off the capability of high definition. Launching your platform with dramas makes little sense.
Maybe they're the same guy. He may be right about $100 laptops not being terribly useful- personally I think they are the solution to the wrong problems (in the short term I would say the needs are clean water water, improved productivity of farms, roads, medical care, and electricity; in the long term, security, better governance, literacy, economic growth). Laptops would be useful, but may distract from more pressing issues, so I think that's a legitimate worry.
However, I wonder if part of him longs for global domination on the charity/nonprofit front just as much as on the corporate front. Maybe his hypercompetitive nature just can't stand a rival, even when it comes to giving stuff away instead of selling it.
It is up to the Democrats to articulate a vision of where they want this country to go and a plausible means of getting us there. But if they can do this, they can and should take some seats in Congress this fall and at least start to limit the damage of the Bush Administration.
Well, that would help explain the the past two presidential elections.
The moral of the story being, the guys who run these programs are not necessarily all that bright, nor do they have that much background in science and engineering. Sometimes they don't even seem able to tell the difference between Hollywood and real engineering. What they do have is millions and millions of dollars to throw at any fantasy you can pitch them. Not that this is really news, if you've paid attention to the development of Star Wars and it's slightly less impossible successor, National Missile Defense.
What George W. Bush really needs is a practical lesson in checks and balances: people need to make sure they're registered to vote and then, this fall, go out and vote against the Republican congressional candidates. Even assuming their Democratic replacements aren't any better, losing a few seats will help limit the damage that Bush and the Republicans can do.
We've had a disastrously planned war, spending increases that make the Democrats look like cheapskates, a massive deficit, an incompetent response to Katrina, a gulag in Cuba, they're chipping away at our civil liberties, and they're destroying the checks and balances that have kept this country running for the past two hundred years. All of this has happened on the Republican party's watch. With complete control of Congress and the White House, the Republican Party has been free to do whatever it pleases, and the result of implementing their ideas has been a disaster for this nation.
At worst, voting the Republicans out would result in total gridlock, with the government unable to do anything. But that would be a massive improvement over the way the country is currently run.
Give me a fucking break. The Chinese government was willing to send FUCKING TANKS against unarmed students. And the Western Media are the bad guys because they assume that the Chinese government is willing to shut down a web site?
Yes, installing stairs in your home will hold the Roombas off... but dear Lord, FOR HOW LONG?
The irony of the NRA is that they continually argue that guns are vitally important to protecting our rights, but they've never used guns to achieve their aims. Instead, they show just how effective writing letters, donating money, and voting on the issues can really be.
If people out there really want to protect our rights, it's really simple, and it doesn't involve threatening to shoot people, shooting people, or getting shot. Just go to the polls this November, and vote against the Republicans, who have been letting Bush trample all over the bill of rights (I'll give you one guess which party the bill's sponsors belong to). If they lose a few seats in the House and Senate, that will keep them from doing quite as much damage, and tell them they need to clean up their act.
Why do I suddenly get the sinking feeling that the next completely idiotic decision George W. makes will be to initiate a nationwide, $500 billion Giant Stone Head initiative?
The CIA's problem is that the available intelligence was so poor in the first place, so nobody really had any clue what was going on in Iraq
Hmm, let's see here...
- WMDs in Iraq.
- 9/11.
- Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, still alive and at large.
- failure to anticipate India's test of nuclear weapons.
- failure to anticipate the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Yes. Yes, they are just that stupid.
The organization probably employs some really bright people. The problem is that when the culture of a government organization goes bad, it goes really bad, because it's not accountable; they still get funded whether they succeed or fail. The only thing you are accountable for is breaking policy, so bureacracy and following the rules to the letter(never mind that the rules often make no sense and are counterproductive) become more important than actually doing anything. The best people- the ones who actually care about getting something done instead of sitting on their asses eight hours a day so they can one day collect a pension- get frustrated and leave. At any rate, that's my experience dealing with a messed-up government institution. Keep in mind, however, that the private sector isn't necessarily the solution. As Enron so brilliantly displays, corruption, arrogance and incompetence can flourish in private industry as well.
What you'd need to survive an asteroid impact is basically the same kind of setup you'd need to survive a nuclear war and the resulting nuclear winter. A shelter to ride out the initial impact and any red-hot debris raining down from above (you'll just have to hope you're not within a couple hundred miles of where it hits). Then you'd need water or some sort of water purification system, stored food sufficient for a couple years, since farming probably won't be an option, good clothes, some sleeping bags, lots of guns and ammunition (unless everyone is prepared and has enough food stored up, it's gonna be really Mad Max).
Every single day of my life. Now, please excuse me. I've got seventeen thousand letters and postcards to sort before the afternoon is done.
Perhaps the best book out there on cryptography is George P. XQLGNIZ's GHTWENBZ HG PBLATZ NRPTKNIYPO. Unfortunately, no one has ever been able to crack the code it's written in.
Plus, if Google is clever, they'll get just some guys to click on the ads bought with credit and use up that $90 million in no time...
My last experiment with aquatic ecosystems ended rather badly, unfortunately. I was raising a sea monkey colony. One night, I was enjoying a few beers, and I suddenly decided I had to know whether sea monkeys also liked beer. Science in action!
Alas, sea monkeys do *not* like beer. I'm not sure if it's the various carbohydrates, yeasts and soforth that so disagreed with them, or if they just can't hold their liquor.
It's not like it's freakin' heroin or something. First of all, you're probably better off being a "hard-core" coffee addict than a casual user of cocaine or heroin. Second, last time I checked there weren't any twelve-step programs for coffee drinkers, or patches to help them quit. That suggests that either people don't have a problem with being regular coffee drinkers, and/or they don't have much of a problem quitting if it's making them irritable, sleepless or whatever.
The whole "addiction" thing is just a little out of hand. When I'm working out in the desert I may drink two liters of water a day, and damn sure I feel a "need" for water when its 90 degrees. So I'm a water addict? To be an addiction, I think it has to (a) be seriously detrimental to your well-being, and (b) you have to have serious trouble quitting. Coffee doesn't meet either of those criteria.