Yeah, these are all equally offensive? You should check your own moral compass....right after you pull your head out of your ass.
Most normal people would find indiscriminate bombing far more offensive than sexual promiscuity. But if you read about Sayyid Qutb I think he'd feel the opposite.
Qutb was extremely critical of many things in the United States: its materialism, individual freedom, economic system, racism, brutal boxing matches, poor haircuts, triviality, restrictions on divorce, enthusiasm for sports, "animal-like" mixing of the sexes (which went on even in churches), and lack of support for the Palestinian struggle. In an article published in Egypt after his travels, he noted with disapproval the sexuality of Americans:
the American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs and she shows all this and does not hide it.
And their taste in music:
Jazz is his preferred music, and it is created by Negroes to satisfy their love of noise and to whet their sexual desires...
The odd thing is it's the benign parts of US culture - jazz and uninhibited sexuality - that he really hates. His views are very different from people who object only to the US's morally questionable foreign policy and are socially liberal.
My theory (equally worthless, mind) is that not all violent extremists are created equal. The ones that you really have to worry about are the ones who are *not* passionately angry, but are quietly and calmly dedicated to their task or mission.
Well you can't detect those with this test. But reading about the 9/11 terrorists or even Timothy McVeigh I think they fit the passionate anger model better. I've seen video tapes of McVeigh, and he was very angry indeed. I think he'd fail my test. Different things would make him angry than the 9/11 guys though. But there's probably some common ground.
Well the US has been involved in a greater number of wars than everyone else. And worse, the US military has relied on massive air strikes - especially in the period from the end of WWII which was arguably won by carpet bombing to the end of Vietnam which was arguably forfeited because the US public disagreed it. And while I think for most of that period the US government has been more squeamish about collateral damage than its opponents purely because of reliance of strategic air power it has probably been a more visible civillian kiler. Not that its opponents had more qualms about killing civillians on purpose on did it less often by mistake, quite the reverse. They wouldn't normally have allowed journalists to film it though, so it doesn't enter the popular imagination in the way that poor Phan Thi Kim Phuc did.
But if you just look at pictures of Trang Bang and don't read the backstory it does seem as if the US is particularly guilty. And I think totalitarian enemies of the US exploit this gut reaction for their own purposes. Incidentally Kim Phuc, the girl in the photo, later criticized the Vietnamese government for exploiting it after she defected to Canada. She also forgave the South Vietnamese pilot who dropped the bomb and the American advisers who supplied the wrong coordinates.
I think it's impossible now. But in principle I think it could be done.
I thought of a thought criminal detector for airports actually. The idea is on entry to the US you hook people up to an MRI scanner and then show them a quick "America fuck yeah" type montage. Patriotic stuff - cheerleaders and so on. But you cut in news footage that people who hate America will be annoyed by. Like B52s carpet bombing, fighter jets dropping napalm or Mardi Gras parades. Or George Bush flipping the finger to the masses. Now there are presumably bits of your brain that will light up with anger as you get a short term burst of anger.
So you have a bunch of annoyance data. Now my model of this is that conservatives will register very low levels of annoyance at the patriotic stuff. I'd toss in some gay rights parades and pictures on Michael Moore though, just to make sure you get a few spikes. Left wingers, at least the Kos/Democratic Underground ones will register a bit higher on the patriotic stuff and lower on the gay rights/Michael Moore stuff. And the sort of people who might blow themselves up in airports will register a bit more. And America does have a few terrorists on ice in various locations around the world, so you could run the test on them. Actually, in a twisted sort of way it doesn't matter if the people in Gitmo had a patholigical hatred of America before they were locked up, they certainly do now. So they're ideal test subjects to get a potential terrorist response.
Now this is not precrime and you can't punish people for thought crimes. But you can tag them for surveillance later. If a right wing, Christian terrorist group started to blow shit up, you can in principle detect them too. It's not really about politics, my theory is that violent extremists are motivated by uncontrolled anger.
I think if you have enough visual trolls, you can probably deduce someone's political views quite accurately. And if their politics are too extreme and their are terrorist groups that share them, you tag 'em.
Yeah and now Apple is bragging to its loathsome friends at the bar and open source is wandering drunk and teary eyed around the bad part of town looking for a cheap abortionist.
Actually, if you look at my post about customer workarounds, as described (at least when they were originally described) they couldn't work either. The customer explanation for the workaround was inconsistent.
But that was because my knowledge of the rules was incomplete. Once I knew a few more rules (i.e. understood the bug) I could explain why they worked i.e. I could give a consistent explanation for why it worked that was completely different from their inconsistent one.
Now if I hadn't tested the workaround and rejected it because the explanation was inconsistent I'd never have discovered the new rules that explained why it works. Which is my point about the need to test pseudoscientific claims - it doesn't matter if the explanation for why they work is inconsistent, they might work anyway. And since the only way they could work would be if we discovered some new physical law which would be very important, it's worth doing the tests.
Of course, if we are all living inside a simulation, then the world would not have to be consistent, but then there wouldn't be much point in testing anything.
If things seem inconsistent it just means that you don't understand all the rules and you need to discover (or maybe invent, it's not really clear) some new ones.
In both cases the idea was to devise a thought expermiment where either something 'impossible' happens (non local action) or quantum mechanics is inconsistent, or at least incomplete.
But if you do the experminent the impossible thing actually happens. So even if you're Einstein, thought expermiments and reductio ad absurdem doesn't work, because reality is sometimes absurd.
Did you even read what I wrote? If you asked a Chinese herbal doctor to explain why his wormwood potion cured malaria I'm sure the explanation he gave would not be consistent. But it turns out that Artemisinin from wormwood does actually cure malaria. So the explanation people give for something can be completely wrong and they can still be correct about the facts.
A software analogy would be if some customer finds a workaround that prevents a crash in code before the author knows about the bug which causes the crash. Often the explanation they give will not make sense, but the workaround does actually work for a different reason. Once you understand the bug that causes the crash, you can figure out why the workaround avoids it.
Software is not maths, and neither is medicine. Logical argument is no substitute for testing. Actually, even in physics what you're suggesting doesn't work. If you don't do experiments because theory already tells you the result there is no way for experiments to find holes in the theory, and thus no way to know where the theory needs to be improved.
Here are a couple of quotes -
"We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture." Hannes Alfven
"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality." Nikola Tesla
The problem is really people are wasting a lot of money, and potentially harming themselves from not seeking treatments that actually work. You might say "who cares?", but eventually those people are likely to wind up in the normal health care system when the snake-oil treatments fail to do anything, and in worse shape than they would have if they had sought "conventional" treatments. That winds up increasing premiums for everyone else.
What's the alternative though? That we have government mandated "true science" and everything else is banned? That seems to me to be far worse. In fact a government legislating behaviour based on "scientific truth" seems like a disguised theocracy with the "true scientists" as the priests and the "false scientists" as the heretics or maybe dhimmis. Come to think of it, communist governments have many of the characteristics of a theocracy, and they do claim to be based on objective scientific truth.
It reminds me of Noam Chomsky's criticism of anti Holocaust denial laws. His point was that even though people who deny the holocaust are dangerous it is far more dangerous to allow governments to have the power to decide that some versions of history should be illegal.
Re:Here's VERY simple proof it's a fraud
on
Science vs. Homeopathy
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· Score: 4, Insightful
That sounds good, except that you can't tell if a medical treatment will work or not by logical argument since we don't know all the rules. Maybe there is some weird reason why homeopathy works that no one understands yet.
Having said that, double blind tests have shown that homepathy is bogus too.
My point is that making reasoned arguments why some treatment will or not work is basically pointless. Even if you had infinitely good science that knows every possible physical law and understands every metabolic pathway to the extent that we could design drugs it still wouldn't be safe to use that science to decide which untested drug to use, because the rules might interact in an unexpected way.
It's a bit like software really. You can understand a programming environment pretty well - i.e. know all the rules, but you still get some nasty surprises when you actually test something because of some interaction between the rules that you didn't think of.
Or the weather - in principle humans understand all the necessary physics to predict it, but in practice chaotic effects mean that we cannot.
I don't disagree with you about homeopathy though, my point is just that even though the theory behind it is clearly nonsense, there's a slim possibility it did work but just for a different reason so you still need to test it.
There have been cases of this - e.g. Chinese medicine uses Artemisinin to treat malaria. Now I'm sure the Chinese medical theory as to why it works would be nonsense. But it does work pretty well in double blind trials (unlike homepathy) and there's a plausible scientific explanantion why it does.
Re:So Slashdot joins the anti-homeopathy conspirac
on
Science vs. Homeopathy
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· Score: 1
and the suppression of homeopathy.
No, slashdotters are firm believers in homeopathy. We never ever use it. But by homeopathic principles that means it is at its most effective.
Homeopathy, relative to intelligent design, is uncontroversial. That's like saying that a rat, relative to a tiger, is harmless.
But the rat is not a relative of the tiger. The tiger, P. tigris tigris is part of the genus Panthera. The rat, Rattus rattus is part of the genus rattus.
And the rat isn't harmless - they spread diseases. Of course, if you had to choose between being locked up with a hungry rat or a hungry tiger, the rat would be the safer option.
I can't wait for these lunar satellites to be in position. I have a $50 bet with a "nut case" friend of mine that NASA's moon landing was real (he is a real conspiracy theorist - I blame drugs).
Hmm. I've noticed the link between conspiracy theories and drugs before. There's a certain irony in some pothead insisting that pot is harmless and then launching into a conspiracy filled rant that shows strong signs of clinical paranoia. Not that they can appreciate the irony anymore of course.
But what about the heat? It's quite difficult to cool off lump of metal in a vacuum without discarding hot material to do so. Even if you could feasibly power a craft to Mars with this, how would you stop yourself from arriving as Astronaut McNuggets?
Our chief scientist, Davros McDonald, has calculated the ultimate evolutionary form of the human race to be McNuggets. Why do you struggle against progress?
I think he's referring to a crash where inventor went from 60-0 in less than a second. The joke being that the bike is designed to accelerate rapidly, but this makes it hard to control it easy to crash. And it's the rapid deceleration that makes a crash harmful.
Incidentally, I suspect for some reason you've also missed the irony of the inventor of the 'Killa'Cycle almost being killed by it.
All of which is grimly amusing. Ha ha ha. But there is a lesson here, and that is to not try to build machines that move quickly. As someone who's never built anything except for a pyramid of 42 empty ramen containers this story fills me with schadenfreude.
Theo is younger (39 vs 54) and fitter than Stallman. More aggressive too - Stallman seems like a fat old hippy who'd go into the cage expecting to talk his way out of it. Theo's got a nasty streak and he'd instinctively grasp the rule that two men enter, one man leaves. Life's always been like that for Theo it's just that up to now the violence has been sublimated. Finally, even though he hides it well, the Winged Monkeys of proprietary software would help Theo if things got tough, especially against Stallman.
More to the point, what happens to all the urea, feces and all the non water parts of the sweat? Fremen presumably aren't big on bathing or dental hygiene either, since those all require water. And they don't wash the suits.
My guess is if a sandworm eats one it would probably spit them out once it realises how fucking foul they really are.
Oh yeah and when the machines take over, don't you think they'll dump a load of bacteria and viruses in those? THEY don't need water remember, but WE do.
Especially as he didn't predict anything too extraordinary about Iapetus.
If he's right about life on Europa though, that would be much more impressive. Which is why it was strange he's not lobbying for a Europa mission. It's not as if life on Europa is impossible, in fact it seems quite plausible.
I think the Mother of All Bombs is a sly reference to Saddam's "Mother of All Battles" rhetoric before the Gulf War, since the people who build know it was likely at the time that the US would fight him again.
True, and the same applies to the UK. Theoretically the Monarch dissolves parliament essentially whenever he or she wants. By convention it's done when the Prime Minister requests it (and note it's still technically a request) or when the PM loses a vote of confidence. Similarly the Monarch appoints whoever he or she wants as Prime Minister but by convention it's the leader of the largest party first, and failing that whoever can win a vote of confidence. And the PM can sack ministers whenever he or she wants. Of course ministers can also rebel and persuade an unpopular PM to step down.
But technically the Monarch has absolute power and loans it to a PM for day to day running of the government. Just like in Russia the President has absolute power and loans it to a PM. What's odd is that in the UK this results in a fairly stable democratic system where PMs are in office for about a decade until the lose an election or are deposed by ministers. During that time they have a couple of reshuffles where they sack and replace ministers. But in Russia it's much more like the President makes sure that he never actually gives up any power at all until he decides on a successor.
The hydrogen bomb has always protected your freedom from Godless communism. My one regret is that the building of hydrogen bombs is being done big Big Government in Washington rather than by skilled private contractors like Ryan Industries.
Every American should have a small (<5MT) hydrogen bomb in their homes to drop on the advancing Reds from their flying car should the need arise. There's no need for costly quasi socialist spending on Statist "Air Ministry" rife with bureaucrats. If those Commisars knew that they had to avoid provoking millions of normal Americans rather than a small group of fellow travellers in Washington, I bet they'd be much more cautious.
Better, if the cars were nuclear powered with a reactor and had an auto pilot like the German V2s, they could just be launched in waves by the militia to spread deadly radiation over an advancing Red army. Small towns would club together to buy a few cobalt salted 5MT devices to drop just in case the Reds proved to be hard to stop.
Most Americans will buy at least one car, and our Founding Fathers believed in the right to bear Arms, not just guns. Why not try to combine the two?
Well I suppose it's your choice, sir. Our professional customers prefer to spend a little extra money on something future proofed with HDMI 1.3. Our low end, entry level customers are often happen with HDMI 1.2. They can't see the difference apparently, and would rather spend their money on other, useless things. Mind you, you struck me as someone with higher standards, sir.
Funny thing is, I've had sales people say almost exactly that to me though about a different technology. It's really hard to get them to admit it's bullshit, but great fun.
Why is a 25 install limit a "pointless and intrusive restriction"?
I've installed it once, and if I uninstall it I can get the install recredited. And the Irrational have even said the limit will be removed in the future. Even if they are lying and I manage to destroy my machine so badly that I can't uninstall it twenty five times in a row I could just use the crack as you point out.
Seriously, people obviously spent ages developing this game and they want to be paid for it by every user, and not be paid by one person who then shares it with 25,000 people he's never met over bittorrent. Which is exactly what would have happened if they had not had a install limit.
There's a certain irony that the last sentence is something I can imagine Andrew Ryan saying admittedly, but that doesn't make it untrue.
Slashdot Mirror
Most normal people would find indiscriminate bombing far more offensive than sexual promiscuity. But if you read about Sayyid Qutb I think he'd feel the opposite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb
The odd thing is it's the benign parts of US culture - jazz and uninhibited sexuality - that he really hates. His views are very different from people who object only to the US's morally questionable foreign policy and are socially liberal.
My theory (equally worthless, mind) is that not all violent extremists are created equal. The ones that you really have to worry about are the ones who are *not* passionately angry, but are quietly and calmly dedicated to their task or mission.
Well you can't detect those with this test. But reading about the 9/11 terrorists or even Timothy McVeigh I think they fit the passionate anger model better. I've seen video tapes of McVeigh, and he was very angry indeed. I think he'd fail my test. Different things would make him angry than the 9/11 guys though. But there's probably some common ground.
Well the US has been involved in a greater number of wars than everyone else. And worse, the US military has relied on massive air strikes - especially in the period from the end of WWII which was arguably won by carpet bombing to the end of Vietnam which was arguably forfeited because the US public disagreed it. And while I think for most of that period the US government has been more squeamish about collateral damage than its opponents purely because of reliance of strategic air power it has probably been a more visible civillian kiler. Not that its opponents had more qualms about killing civillians on purpose on did it less often by mistake, quite the reverse. They wouldn't normally have allowed journalists to film it though, so it doesn't enter the popular imagination in the way that poor Phan Thi Kim Phuc did.
But if you just look at pictures of Trang Bang and don't read the backstory it does seem as if the US is particularly guilty. And I think totalitarian enemies of the US exploit this gut reaction for their own purposes. Incidentally Kim Phuc, the girl in the photo, later criticized the Vietnamese government for exploiting it after she defected to Canada. She also forgave the South Vietnamese pilot who dropped the bomb and the American advisers who supplied the wrong coordinates.
I think it's impossible now. But in principle I think it could be done.
I thought of a thought criminal detector for airports actually. The idea is on entry to the US you hook people up to an MRI scanner and then show them a quick "America fuck yeah" type montage. Patriotic stuff - cheerleaders and so on. But you cut in news footage that people who hate America will be annoyed by. Like B52s carpet bombing, fighter jets dropping napalm or Mardi Gras parades. Or George Bush flipping the finger to the masses. Now there are presumably bits of your brain that will light up with anger as you get a short term burst of anger.
So you have a bunch of annoyance data. Now my model of this is that conservatives will register very low levels of annoyance at the patriotic stuff. I'd toss in some gay rights parades and pictures on Michael Moore though, just to make sure you get a few spikes. Left wingers, at least the Kos/Democratic Underground ones will register a bit higher on the patriotic stuff and lower on the gay rights/Michael Moore stuff. And the sort of people who might blow themselves up in airports will register a bit more. And America does have a few terrorists on ice in various locations around the world, so you could run the test on them. Actually, in a twisted sort of way it doesn't matter if the people in Gitmo had a patholigical hatred of America before they were locked up, they certainly do now. So they're ideal test subjects to get a potential terrorist response.
Now this is not precrime and you can't punish people for thought crimes. But you can tag them for surveillance later. If a right wing, Christian terrorist group started to blow shit up, you can in principle detect them too. It's not really about politics, my theory is that violent extremists are motivated by uncontrolled anger.
I think if you have enough visual trolls, you can probably deduce someone's political views quite accurately. And if their politics are too extreme and their are terrorist groups that share them, you tag 'em.
I thought Apple had embraced open source
Yeah and now Apple is bragging to its loathsome friends at the bar and open source is wandering drunk and teary eyed around the bad part of town looking for a cheap abortionist.
As described/ homeopathy /cannot/ work.
Actually, if you look at my post about customer workarounds, as described (at least when they were originally described) they couldn't work either. The customer explanation for the workaround was inconsistent.
But that was because my knowledge of the rules was incomplete. Once I knew a few more rules (i.e. understood the bug) I could explain why they worked i.e. I could give a consistent explanation for why it worked that was completely different from their inconsistent one.
Now if I hadn't tested the workaround and rejected it because the explanation was inconsistent I'd never have discovered the new rules that explained why it works. Which is my point about the need to test pseudoscientific claims - it doesn't matter if the explanation for why they work is inconsistent, they might work anyway. And since the only way they could work would be if we discovered some new physical law which would be very important, it's worth doing the tests.
Of course, if we are all living inside a simulation, then the world would not have to be consistent, but then there wouldn't be much point in testing anything.
If things seem inconsistent it just means that you don't understand all the rules and you need to discover (or maybe invent, it's not really clear) some new ones.
But what about quantum mechanics? Back when it was new there were lots of logical arguments that it was nonsense e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler's_delayed_choice_experiment
Or the EPR paradox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epr_paradox
In both cases the idea was to devise a thought expermiment where either something 'impossible' happens (non local action) or quantum mechanics is inconsistent, or at least incomplete.
But if you do the experminent the impossible thing actually happens. So even if you're Einstein, thought expermiments and reductio ad absurdem doesn't work, because reality is sometimes absurd.
Did you even read what I wrote? If you asked a Chinese herbal doctor to explain why his wormwood potion cured malaria I'm sure the explanation he gave would not be consistent. But it turns out that Artemisinin from wormwood does actually cure malaria. So the explanation people give for something can be completely wrong and they can still be correct about the facts.
A software analogy would be if some customer finds a workaround that prevents a crash in code before the author knows about the bug which causes the crash. Often the explanation they give will not make sense, but the workaround does actually work for a different reason. Once you understand the bug that causes the crash, you can figure out why the workaround avoids it.
Software is not maths, and neither is medicine. Logical argument is no substitute for testing. Actually, even in physics what you're suggesting doesn't work. If you don't do experiments because theory already tells you the result there is no way for experiments to find holes in the theory, and thus no way to know where the theory needs to be improved.
Here are a couple of quotes -
"We have to learn again that science without contact with experiments is an enterprise which is likely to go completely astray into imaginary conjecture." Hannes Alfven
"Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality." Nikola Tesla
The problem is really people are wasting a lot of money, and potentially harming themselves from not seeking treatments that actually work. You might say "who cares?", but eventually those people are likely to wind up in the normal health care system when the snake-oil treatments fail to do anything, and in worse shape than they would have if they had sought "conventional" treatments. That winds up increasing premiums for everyone else.
What's the alternative though? That we have government mandated "true science" and everything else is banned? That seems to me to be far worse. In fact a government legislating behaviour based on "scientific truth" seems like a disguised theocracy with the "true scientists" as the priests and the "false scientists" as the heretics or maybe dhimmis. Come to think of it, communist governments have many of the characteristics of a theocracy, and they do claim to be based on objective scientific truth.
It reminds me of Noam Chomsky's criticism of anti Holocaust denial laws. His point was that even though people who deny the holocaust are dangerous it is far more dangerous to allow governments to have the power to decide that some versions of history should be illegal.
That sounds good, except that you can't tell if a medical treatment will work or not by logical argument since we don't know all the rules. Maybe there is some weird reason why homeopathy works that no one understands yet.
The only way to do it is by a double blind test.
Having said that, double blind tests have shown that homepathy is bogus too.
My point is that making reasoned arguments why some treatment will or not work is basically pointless. Even if you had infinitely good science that knows every possible physical law and understands every metabolic pathway to the extent that we could design drugs it still wouldn't be safe to use that science to decide which untested drug to use, because the rules might interact in an unexpected way.
It's a bit like software really. You can understand a programming environment pretty well - i.e. know all the rules, but you still get some nasty surprises when you actually test something because of some interaction between the rules that you didn't think of.
Or the weather - in principle humans understand all the necessary physics to predict it, but in practice chaotic effects mean that we cannot.
I don't disagree with you about homeopathy though, my point is just that even though the theory behind it is clearly nonsense, there's a slim possibility it did work but just for a different reason so you still need to test it.
There have been cases of this - e.g. Chinese medicine uses Artemisinin to treat malaria. Now I'm sure the Chinese medical theory as to why it works would be nonsense. But it does work pretty well in double blind trials (unlike homepathy) and there's a plausible scientific explanantion why it does.
and the suppression of homeopathy.
No, slashdotters are firm believers in homeopathy. We never ever use it. But by homeopathic principles that means it is at its most effective.
Homeopathy, relative to intelligent design, is uncontroversial. That's like saying that a rat, relative to a tiger, is harmless.
But the rat is not a relative of the tiger. The tiger, P. tigris tigris is part of the genus Panthera. The rat, Rattus rattus is part of the genus rattus.
And the rat isn't harmless - they spread diseases. Of course, if you had to choose between being locked up with a hungry rat or a hungry tiger, the rat would be the safer option.
I can't wait for these lunar satellites to be in position. I have a $50 bet with a "nut case" friend of mine that NASA's moon landing was real (he is a real conspiracy theorist - I blame drugs).
Hmm. I've noticed the link between conspiracy theories and drugs before. There's a certain irony in some pothead insisting that pot is harmless and then launching into a conspiracy filled rant that shows strong signs of clinical paranoia. Not that they can appreciate the irony anymore of course.
But what about the heat? It's quite difficult to cool off lump of metal in a vacuum without discarding hot material to do so. Even if you could feasibly power a craft to Mars with this, how would you stop yourself from arriving as Astronaut McNuggets?
Our chief scientist, Davros McDonald, has calculated the ultimate evolutionary form of the human race to be McNuggets. Why do you struggle against progress?
I think he's referring to a crash where inventor went from 60-0 in less than a second. The joke being that the bike is designed to accelerate rapidly, but this makes it hard to control it easy to crash. And it's the rapid deceleration that makes a crash harmful.
Incidentally, I suspect for some reason you've also missed the irony of the inventor of the 'Killa'Cycle almost being killed by it.
All of which is grimly amusing. Ha ha ha. But there is a lesson here, and that is to not try to build machines that move quickly. As someone who's never built anything except for a pyramid of 42 empty ramen containers this story fills me with schadenfreude.
Personally, I want to stick Theo and RMS in a cage and see who lasts longest...
Interesting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt
vs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
Theo is younger (39 vs 54) and fitter than Stallman. More aggressive too - Stallman seems like a fat old hippy who'd go into the cage expecting to talk his way out of it. Theo's got a nasty streak and he'd instinctively grasp the rule that two men enter, one man leaves. Life's always been like that for Theo it's just that up to now the violence has been sublimated. Finally, even though he hides it well, the Winged Monkeys of proprietary software would help Theo if things got tough, especially against Stallman.
More to the point, what happens to all the urea, feces and all the non water parts of the sweat? Fremen presumably aren't big on bathing or dental hygiene either, since those all require water. And they don't wash the suits.
My guess is if a sandworm eats one it would probably spit them out once it realises how fucking foul they really are.
Oh yeah and when the machines take over, don't you think they'll dump a load of bacteria and viruses in those? THEY don't need water remember, but WE do.
Especially as he didn't predict anything too extraordinary about Iapetus.
If he's right about life on Europa though, that would be much more impressive. Which is why it was strange he's not lobbying for a Europa mission. It's not as if life on Europa is impossible, in fact it seems quite plausible.
Read the second paragraph. The first one is a parody of marketing speak.
I think the Mother of All Bombs is a sly reference to Saddam's "Mother of All Battles" rhetoric before the Gulf War, since the people who build know it was likely at the time that the US would fight him again.
True, and the same applies to the UK. Theoretically the Monarch dissolves parliament essentially whenever he or she wants. By convention it's done when the Prime Minister requests it (and note it's still technically a request) or when the PM loses a vote of confidence. Similarly the Monarch appoints whoever he or she wants as Prime Minister but by convention it's the leader of the largest party first, and failing that whoever can win a vote of confidence. And the PM can sack ministers whenever he or she wants. Of course ministers can also rebel and persuade an unpopular PM to step down.
But technically the Monarch has absolute power and loans it to a PM for day to day running of the government. Just like in Russia the President has absolute power and loans it to a PM. What's odd is that in the UK this results in a fairly stable democratic system where PMs are in office for about a decade until the lose an election or are deposed by ministers. During that time they have a couple of reshuffles where they sack and replace ministers. But in Russia it's much more like the President makes sure that he never actually gives up any power at all until he decides on a successor.
The hydrogen bomb has always protected your freedom from Godless communism. My one regret is that the building of hydrogen bombs is being done big Big Government in Washington rather than by skilled private contractors like Ryan Industries.
Every American should have a small (<5MT) hydrogen bomb in their homes to drop on the advancing Reds from their flying car should the need arise. There's no need for costly quasi socialist spending on Statist "Air Ministry" rife with bureaucrats. If those Commisars knew that they had to avoid provoking millions of normal Americans rather than a small group of fellow travellers in Washington, I bet they'd be much more cautious.
Better, if the cars were nuclear powered with a reactor and had an auto pilot like the German V2s, they could just be launched in waves by the militia to spread deadly radiation over an advancing Red army. Small towns would club together to buy a few cobalt salted 5MT devices to drop just in case the Reds proved to be hard to stop.
Most Americans will buy at least one car, and our Founding Fathers believed in the right to bear Arms, not just guns. Why not try to combine the two?
there's championship "wrestling" on the Sci-Fi Channel
;-)
Boxing too, sometimes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfinished_Business_(Battlestar_Galactica)
Well I suppose it's your choice, sir. Our professional customers prefer to spend a little extra money on something future proofed with HDMI 1.3. Our low end, entry level customers are often happen with HDMI 1.2. They can't see the difference apparently, and would rather spend their money on other, useless things. Mind you, you struck me as someone with higher standards, sir.
Funny thing is, I've had sales people say almost exactly that to me though about a different technology. It's really hard to get them to admit it's bullshit, but great fun.
Why is a 25 install limit a "pointless and intrusive restriction"?
I've installed it once, and if I uninstall it I can get the install recredited. And the Irrational have even said the limit will be removed in the future. Even if they are lying and I manage to destroy my machine so badly that I can't uninstall it twenty five times in a row I could just use the crack as you point out.
Seriously, people obviously spent ages developing this game and they want to be paid for it by every user, and not be paid by one person who then shares it with 25,000 people he's never met over bittorrent. Which is exactly what would have happened if they had not had a install limit.
There's a certain irony that the last sentence is something I can imagine Andrew Ryan saying admittedly, but that doesn't make it untrue.