The Norwegians had to fight, totally unprepared and on their own ground.
Sounds like a good reason for fighting totalitarianism when it's on the other side of the world to be honest. I.e. an interventionist foreign policy like the US and UK have. If you leave until it threatens you with invasion, you're likely invaded like Norway or forced into moral dubious fellow traveller status like Sweden did with Germany in WWII and Russia did with Sweden afterwards.
Norway clearly learned its lesson (unlike Sweden) - that's the reason it joined the US and UK in NATO post WWII.
probably not as bad as every single war you have lost since.
I don't know who you think 'you' is, since a moment's reading of my comment history would tell you I'm not an American.
Still one think the UK and US have in common is that they have not been occupied for hundreds of years. Part of the reason for that is that historically they have been willing to kill people in huge numbers to keep that from happening.
Talking is nice and all but they only way to get rid of scourges like National Socialism is carpet bombing, not talking. If we'd have kept talking we would have ended up getting picked off like Norway did.
Another part of the reason is that the US and UK intervene all around the world to try to sabotage totalitarian movements whose existence they feel is not in their national interests. At its best that strategy brought down another totalitarian movement, Communism without actually needing to fry their cities with nukes. Because that, not talking, was the alternative.
A predatory and occasionally just plain murderous foreign policy on the part of the US and UK is one of the reasons that Scandinavia didn't fold like a house of cards in the face of the Russians the way most of it did with the Nazis.
Read your Orwell - a world dominated by interchangeable tyrannies would be a world in a dark age. That justifies all the Dresdens and aid to the nasty anti Communist forces that made sure that both National Socialism and USSR and Warsaw Pact are now things we only read about in the history books.
Think I'm misquoting Orwell? Perhaps, but I'm not so sure. He defended Dresden and disdained international agreements and pacifists like the irritating Vera Brittain - who I'm sure Scandinavians would have loved.
Miss Vera Brittain's pamphlet, Seed of Chaos, is an eloquent attack on indiscriminate or 'obliteration' bombing. 'Owing to the R.A.F. raids,' she says, 'thousands of helpless and innocent people in German, Italian and German-occupied cities are being subjected to agonizing forms of death and injury comparable to the worst tortures of the Middle Ages.' Various well-known opponents of bombing, such as General Franco and Major-General Fuller, are brought out in support of this. Miss Brittain is not, however, taking the pacifist standpoint. She is willing and anxious to win the war, apparently. She merely wishes us to stick to 'legitimate' methods of war and abandon civilian bombing, which she fears will blacken our reputation in the eyes of posterity. Her pamphlet is issued by the Bombing Restriction Committee, which has issued others with similar titles.
Now, no one in his senses regards bombing, or any other operation of war, with anything but disgust. On the other hand, no decent person cares tuppence for the opinion of posterity. And there is something very distasteful in accepting war as an instrument and at the same time wanting to dodge responsibility for its more obviously barbarous features. Pacifism is a tenable position, provided that you are willing to take the consequences. But all talk of 'limiting' or 'humanizing' war N is sheer humbug, based on the fact that the average human being never bothers to examine catchwords.
The catchwords used in this connexion are 'killing civilians', 'massacre of women and children' and 'destruction of our cultural heritage'. It is tacitly assumed that air bombing does more of this kind of thing than ground warfare.
When you look a bit closer, the first question that strikes you is: Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers? Obviously one must not kill children if it is in any way avoidable, but it is only in propaganda pamphlets that every bomb drops on a school or an orphanage. A bomb kills a cross-section of the population; but not quite a representative selection, because the children and expectant mothers
If someone's doing one commit a week and think's he's an 'ace developer' then the odds are he will not be missed.
In fact I've seen several people who thought they were ace developers walk off in a huff in my time. Life went on. The share price didn't budge. All anyone felt was a sense of relief for the next few weeks.
Most of the time people who think they're ace anything aren't because of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.
Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others".
And in the fact that in this case they're not doing much and you're better off laying them off.
Top management tip. If you suggest a test to see which employees aren't working and someone comes up with a highly technical objection with lots of TLAs in it and explains how 'Ace developers' only commit once a week, nod politely and then tell them they're laid off next time performance reviews come up.
Successful managers are on uppers - caffeine, the odd line of cocaine and some 'steroids' and 'testosterone' they got from their gym buddies but those are mostly coke and caffeine anyway. You can tell the successful managers by throwing raw meat into a pit full of them and hiring the ones that end up with the biggest share. Those that end up with more than the total amount of meat than you've thrown must have eaten some of the other managers, and that means they are straight shooters with upper management written all over them.
If you look at the US/SK exercises they had names like "Team Sprint". I think if war broke out you'd see
1) A lot of cruise missile and airstrikes on NK missiles and artillery north of the DMZ - it would be a much more intensive bombing campaign than any yet seen.
2) An amphibious landing north of the DMZ by South Korean forces. They'd divide into a group that would go for Pyongyang to end the regime and another group to head back south to attack the DMZ from behind.
3) If NK uses nukes I think the US would respond with tactical nuclear strikes against NK military formations.
The reason is that in a real war Seoul is very vulnerable to dug in NK missiles and artillery. The US doesn't really do trench warfare. It prefers blitzkrieg style warfare i.e. lots of tanks on the move - the Gulf War being the classic example.
The North is probably very short of food and fuel but it probably has dug deep fortifications to protect its forces aimed at Seoul from air attack and stocked them up with enormous amounts of ammunition. So a war of attrition favours the North and is deadly for Seoul. A war of maneuver and movement favours the south and is probably what their US advisers have taught them because that is what the US does well. Also if they want to minimize the deaths of registered voters in Seoul that is the only choice.
Put those together and I think you'd see a very aggressive attempt by the US and SK to end the war before the North could do too much damage to Seoul. You can't be sure of that with air strikes alone, so I'd expect an amphibious landing in the North.
Also the North would be thrown badly off balance politically by an amphibious landing - it would be like in D Day where no one dared wake Hitler because he'd apparently said the invasion wasn't going to happen the way it did. Lastly no one with first hand experience of them really likes murderous totalitarian regimes and most people in NK probably know the South is a better place to live. So if the South is lucky the NK regime will fracture and collapse completely once SK tank columns start to roll through the countryside and individual NK commanders switch sides or decide not to fight.
It's reasonable to assume for example that the US and SK forces will be able to destroy NK's communications systems. So if you're an NK commander you don't even know if King Kim is even alive once the war starts.
What about China? Well if you look at Wikileaks they may well have told the South Koreans they're not to fussed if they remove the regime and unify the country so long as US forces are not stationed in the North.
In highly sensitive discussions in February this year, the-then South Korean vice-foreign minister, Chun Yung-woo, told a US ambassador, Kathleen Stephens, that younger generation Chinese Communist party leaders no longer regarded North Korea as a useful or reliable ally and would not risk renewed armed conflict on the peninsula, according to a secret cable to Washington.
Chun, who has since been appointed national security adviser to South Korea's president, said North Korea had already collapsed economically.
Political collapse would ensue once Kim Jong-il died, despite the dictator's efforts to obtain Chinese help and to secure the succession for his son, Kim Jong-un.
"Citing private conversations during previous sessions of the six-party talks , Chun claimed [the two high-level officials] believed Korea should be unified under ROK [South Korea] control," Stephens reported.
"The two officials, Chun said, were ready to 'face the new reality' that the DPRK [North Korea] now had little value to China as a buffer state - a view that, since North Korea's first nuclear test in 2006, had reportedly gained traction among senior PRC [People's Republic of China] leaders. Chun argu
The CEO's job should be to axe the least successful projects and lay off everyone. It actually helps if you're cute as a button like Ms Mayer. She reminds me of this cartoon
The middle manager's job should be to sack the least successful employees in order to not end up running the least successful project. As the saying goes, you don't have to outrun run the predator, you only need to outrun your fellow runners.
I'd make them cute too, like cartoon characters to cut down on the number of layoffs going postal and damaging valuable equipment.
If you're not in my office by 6am tomorrow in smart casual dress for a pop quiz on "Watercooler Culture" you're fired.
Smart casual means ironed chinos and a dress shirt by the way, not filthy jeans and a filthier Tux T shirt with pin burns in it. Which reminds me, they'll be a drugs test afterwards.
Also a visit to the hairdresser might be in the best interests of your career, if you know what I mean.
Once that first living system started, it probably ate every other nascent living system.
That reminds me a bit of Microsoft. DOS and 16 bit Windows weren't actually very good. However they could run on cheap 8086 and 80286 hardware. Unix really needed an MMU and only really worked well in flat mode, both of which needed a 80386 or later. MS got DOS and Windows out into the market relatively early. They had very good relations with "Developers! Developers! Developers!" too. So most of the world end up with a box running an OEM copy of Microsoft Windows because the hardware was cheap and the software plentiful (and usually cheaper than on Unix).
So you don't need an optimum solution. You need a solution you can ship. You can fix the bugs in version 2.0 - the problem is surviving that long. Also you need to make sure that version 2.0 can run all the applications that run on 1.0 - even the ones that are buggy.
Both of these are an anathema in the academic world where it is more important to get things right before shipping and everyone builds from source. So if you need to break compatibility with buggy applications that's fine - it's a problem that the application maintainer needs to fix.
I.e. like cockroaches Dos and 16 bit Windows were survivors.
What does all this have to do with biology? I guess it's a reminder that evolution isn't necessarily an algorithm that produces optimum solution. It definitely gets shit done, but maybe like in software you can end up with dominant solution that most academic types regard as being a bit of a hack. In fact by mass evolution produces a lot more subjectively loathsome and extremely limited but objectively highly survivable creatures like cockroaches and bacteria than bald eagles. Or Homo sapiens.
I'm getting damn sick of people saying "this comment is best" or "I came here to say this" to try to karma whore. get fucked. No one gives a shit who said it, stop trying to jump on the upvotes train by pretending you came up with the exact same clever thing. Upvote what the other person said and get over it.
This entire website and it's stupid memetic "[FIXED]" posts and the "I see your X and raise you Y," are fucking retarded. Not to mention the whole fuckload of stupid shit where people post this "faith in humanity restored" hippie-dip-bleeding-heart bull shit. This isn't Facebook, I come here to read interesting content, not sit through endless fuckhead attention whores posting "LIKE IF YOU CARE ABOUT CANCER, IF YOU DON'T LIKE I'LL COMMIT SUICIDE" go fucking commit suicide then. Stupid bunch of whiny teenage girls cutting themselves on tumblr, hit an artery and bleed to death. No one will give a shit.
Goddamn it fat people and whiny teenage girls and stupid "feels" people are ruining this goddamn website. People upvote total cunt shit, inane bullshit inspirational posts and whatever other bullshit they can find, including ass-tarded memes. AskReddit has begun to circle, Funny has turned into "cute pictures of mushrooms that look like smiley faces that no one gives a dead horse's last shit about", and politics is 1,000,000 users sucking Barack Obama's dick and making fun of Repubicans. Yeah we get the point. What a bunch of dumbass cunts. or dumb ass-cunts. I really don't care. Romney and Obama were both shit.
No wonder the guy who invented this website shot himself, he had to watch his dream overrun and destroyed by 5 million whiny left-wing-eurofags (oh dont even get me started on the "merica" bullshit. you cunts think we're all fat? cool story, have fun sucking your uppity pussies and running out of money because you can't compete in the global economy anymore). I don't blame him in the least; spending time on this website makes me want to commit suicide too. The stupid upvotes-suck-my-circlejerk-ass-liberal-cunt-woman-feminazi-friendzone-cute-bullshit-sympathy-emo-vagina-dickass-gore posts need to fucking STOP. I believe in free speech but honestly I wish this website would be taken down by the government. You're all fucking abominations to society.
It's all true too. It reminds me of Weev's quote on bloggers
I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny's house. "I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money," he boasted. "I make people afraid for their lives." On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny's. "Trolling is basically Internet eugenics," he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. "I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!"
There's a saying in Norwegian diplomacy, 'always keep talking'. Why? Because it allows for the elements in a society who want change, to actually effect that change.
For Internet kiddies "fascism" is when mum and dad tell them to move out to their own place and get a job to pay the rent, and then the RIAA tells them they need to pay for HBO and movies rather than just downloading them for free.
The idea that there's a actual holocaust happening on the other side of the world is far beyond their comprehension, hence the irritating "North Korea is the Best Korea" meme.
Murder is murder. It's just as illegal to kill a Yemeni as it is to kill an American, wherever you are.
Not if you're the POTUS it isn't. Well it might be against Yemeni law but if you're POTUS that doesn't matter.
It's like the bit in Rome when Julius Caesar tells the Egyptians they must pay him "under the law". The Pharaoh's court eunuch says bitterly "Roman law". Caesar says "What other sort is there, you silly woman?". By the end of the episode the Pharoah is dead and so as his eunuch and Cleopatra is on the throne with the backing of the Romans.
Law is meaningless without the force to back it up
Killing US citizens without due process is more immediately problematic as it would lead to impeachment. That's just a way of saying that US law is meaningful to the POTUS because it is backed up by force. By violence. The supreme authority from which all authorities are derived.
Really the only reason people in Yemen or anywhere in the world worry about what the US people and thus government think is because the US Government has force - violence - to back up its will. In fact the only reason the US Government hasn't been replaced by something worse - and most governments are far worse - is because it has the violence to back up its will.
There is no such thing as international law. The only governments that survive are the ones that are better at using violence than their opponents and thus bend their opponents to their will. Despite the fact the the POTUS is under much more legal restraint on the use of force domestically than the sort of political leaders it fought in WWII and the Cold War it is was much better than them at using violence. Indeed no power in history has been better at using violence than the US Government. Now Germany and Japan are states with an American designed political system. If the US had lost the reverse would have happened.
And then you really would have a government that could kill its own citizens with no legal problems.
Zhou Yongkang no longer holds the post as secretary of the Committee of Political and Legislative Affairs of the CPC Central Committee.
Meng Jianzhu, Minister of Chinese Ministry of Public Security, has been appointed as the new secretary, CPC Central Committee announced Monday afternoon
So You Yongkang got sacked but no one in China is allowed to speculate as to why.
In May 2012 the Financial Times reported that Zhou had relinquished the operational control of the party's Political and Legal Affairs Commission to Minister of Public Security Meng Jianzhu due to his support for former Chinese politician Bo Xilai, and had lost his right to select his successor when he retires from the Politburo Standing Committee in fall 2012. The New York Times later reported that Zhou's status remained unchanged.
Bo Xilai was a Maoist and a very dangerous person who got denounced by Wen Jiabao (who as someone put it "seems quite nice for a Chicom")
On 15 March, Bo was dismissed as Chongqing party chief and its related municipal posts, while temporarily retaining a seat on the Politburo. Due to the potentially destructive effects Bo's dismissal would have on party unity, party elders were consulted on the matter. The decision was reportedly made at a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee on 7 March, during which security tsar Zhou Yongkang cast a lone dissenting vote. On 14 March, Bo was reprimanded by Premier Wen Jiabao during the Premier's annual press conference. Wen called the achievements of Chongqing "significant," but the result of "multiple administrations," i.e., not just Bo himself. Wen also made numerous allusions to the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, an indirect rebuke of Bo's efforts to revive "red culture". Addressing high-level political changes by a Premier to an open public forum was unprecedented. Political observers believe that Wen's remarks and Bo's downfall represented a consensus within the central leadership that Bo not only needed to shoulder the responsibility for the Wang Lijun scandal, but also marked a significant victory for liberal reformers.
On 10 April, Bo was suspended from the party's Central Committee and its Politburo, pending investigation for "serious disciplinary violations." Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, was now a prime suspect in the inquiry into the death of British businessman Neil Heywood. The announcements, carrying criminal implications, likely marked the end of Bo's political career.
On 28 September, the party's Politburo adopted a decision to expel him from the CPC. He was accused of major disciplinary violations and corruption charges during his tenure in Dalian, the Ministry of Commerce and Chongqing, including the Gu Kailai case. He was also accused of having "improper sexual relationships with a number of women."
On 26 October, the Standing Committee of the 11th National People's Congress expelled him, removing his final party or state position and setting the stage for his trial.
On 4 November, Bo Xilai was formally kicked out of the Chinese Communist Party. There is speculation that he is going to be tried by the Supreme People's Court in original jurisdiction, the first time since the trial of the Gang of Four.
Ha ha. It's like when the Daleks took Davros off to "stand trial for crimes against the Daleks". Or when the Island decided to put Patrick McGoohan's chief tormentor on (predictably insane and Orwellian) tr
If you're a typical slashdotter 'fascism' is when Mum and Dad used to tell you to clean your room. If some party describing itself as Communist censors the internet and ships people off to re-education camps because they complained about corruption, re-education camps and so on that is 'appropriate'.
The US Government have had 64 bit Risc systems running Lisp based OSs since Roswell, but they've been gradually leaking out the technology so as to avoid temporal anomalies the sort of alien attack that wiped out the dinosaurs. The reason for that attack is that velociraptor sapiens had discovered a language very similar to Smalltalk which meant their embedded systems (e.g. spaceprobes) didn't crash and burn with kernel panics and null pointer exceptions when things got a bit tricky. Also they knew that the galaxy is full of life and all of it was made out of meat. Other, older, civilisations felt this was a bad combination.
You don't know what C3PO got up to at night when the humans were sleeping. A good cover for a killbot would a a C3PO like personality when the humans were awake but reboot into a separate Terminator like personality when they were asleep.
If R2D2 was the mastermind behind the rebellion, C3PO and other "protocol droids" were ideal to act as covert assassins - i.e. eliminating people the rebellion needed to eliminate. Not that their relatively sunny and innocuous "daytime" personality would have been aware of it - in fact they'd be quite shocked to discover that persons unknown had deactivated them, killed their much loved masters and turned them back on again. Or so they'd think.
Actually of course their R2 partner would have dual booted them into terminator mode set the target, let them make the kill and then booted them back into C3 mode. After which the R2 would just claim they'd been deactivated when it happened too and thus they knew nothing about it.
In fact R2 has a better "front man" in C3PO than Chewbacca had in Han. Han may be clueless about the way the world really works at the start of the films but being human he's capable figuring it out and you can't just mind wipe him if he managed that too early. Also humans have problems with Option C in cases like this.
Obi-Wan has spent the last 20 years in the Tattoine desert, keeping watch over Luke Skywalker and trying to decide on one of the three available options: A) If Luke shows no significant access to the Force, then leave him alone in obscurity B) If Luke shows real Force ability, then consider recruiting him as a Jedi. The rebellion needs Jedi and it needs them now.But, if Luke shows any signs of turning out like his father, then: C) sneak into his house one fine night and chop his head off. With great regret but it'll save a lot of trouble later on.
Knowing this to be the case, Bail Organa (perhaps at the insistence of his wife) has found excuses not to send Leia to Ben for assessment of Jedi potential, largely for fear of option C.
Humans feel bad about unprovoked, pre-meditated murder of someone that considers them a friend. A dual boot C3PO doesn't have the 'great regret' problem - all the dangerous knowledge could be confined to his night time personality which would be engineered to follow the Zeroth Law of Robotics.
In the final scenes of the novel Robots and Empire R. Giskard Reventlov is the first robot to act according to the Zeroth Law. Giskard is telepathic, like the robot Herbie in the short story "Liar!", and tries to apply the Zeroth Law through his understanding of a more subtle concept of "harm" than most robots can grasp.[15] However, unlike Herbie, Giskard grasps the philosophical concept of the Zeroth Law allowing him to harm individual human beings if he can do so in service to the abstract concept of humanity. The Zeroth Law is never programmed into Giskard's brain but instead is a rule he attempts to rationalize through pure metacognition. Though he fails - it ultimately destroys his positronic brain as he is not certain whether his choice will turn out to be for the ultimate good of humanity or not - he gives his successor R. Daneel Olivaw his telepathic abilities. Over the course of many thousands of years Daneel adapts himself to be able to fully obey the Zeroth Law. As Daneel formulates it, in the novels Foundation and Earth and Prelude to Foundation, the Zeroth Law reads:
A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
Replace "humanity" with "the Republic" and you've got the idea.
If Luke or Leia show signs of turning into Vader sneaking into their houses one fine
It would probably say "Come join the jihad in Somalia" on revolutionmuslim.net and lead the wannabe jihadis off to doom (a secret jail run by the Syrian Baath Party and the CIA) rather like the Pied Piper led off the rats.
Mind you if you were going to do that why not just pay a human to do it?
In fact you don't need to set up the site yourself - there will always be someone stupid enough to set up sites like revolutionmuslim. You can just do a lawful intercept on the site and pay a few agents to set up sock puppet accounts to do your Pied Pipering.
Slashdot Mirror
The Norwegians had to fight, totally unprepared and on their own ground.
Sounds like a good reason for fighting totalitarianism when it's on the other side of the world to be honest. I.e. an interventionist foreign policy like the US and UK have. If you leave until it threatens you with invasion, you're likely invaded like Norway or forced into moral dubious fellow traveller status like Sweden did with Germany in WWII and Russia did with Sweden afterwards.
Norway clearly learned its lesson (unlike Sweden) - that's the reason it joined the US and UK in NATO post WWII.
probably not as bad as every single war you have lost since.
I don't know who you think 'you' is, since a moment's reading of my comment history would tell you I'm not an American.
Still one think the UK and US have in common is that they have not been occupied for hundreds of years. Part of the reason for that is that historically they have been willing to kill people in huge numbers to keep that from happening.
Talking is nice and all but they only way to get rid of scourges like National Socialism is carpet bombing, not talking. If we'd have kept talking we would have ended up getting picked off like Norway did.
Another part of the reason is that the US and UK intervene all around the world to try to sabotage totalitarian movements whose existence they feel is not in their national interests. At its best that strategy brought down another totalitarian movement, Communism without actually needing to fry their cities with nukes. Because that, not talking, was the alternative.
A predatory and occasionally just plain murderous foreign policy on the part of the US and UK is one of the reasons that Scandinavia didn't fold like a house of cards in the face of the Russians the way most of it did with the Nazis.
Read your Orwell - a world dominated by interchangeable tyrannies would be a world in a dark age. That justifies all the Dresdens and aid to the nasty anti Communist forces that made sure that both National Socialism and USSR and Warsaw Pact are now things we only read about in the history books.
Think I'm misquoting Orwell? Perhaps, but I'm not so sure. He defended Dresden and disdained international agreements and pacifists like the irritating Vera Brittain - who I'm sure Scandinavians would have loved.
http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/eaip_01
Miss Vera Brittain's pamphlet, Seed of Chaos, is an eloquent attack on indiscriminate or 'obliteration' bombing. 'Owing to the R.A.F. raids,' she says, 'thousands of helpless and innocent people in German, Italian and German-occupied cities are being subjected to agonizing forms of death and injury comparable to the worst tortures of the Middle Ages.' Various well-known opponents of bombing, such as General Franco and Major-General Fuller, are brought out in support of this. Miss Brittain is not, however, taking the pacifist standpoint. She is willing and anxious to win the war, apparently. She merely wishes us to stick to 'legitimate' methods of war and abandon civilian bombing, which she fears will blacken our reputation in the eyes of posterity. Her pamphlet is issued by the Bombing Restriction Committee, which has issued others with similar titles.
Now, no one in his senses regards bombing, or any other operation of war, with anything but disgust. On the other hand, no decent person cares tuppence for the opinion of posterity. And there is something very distasteful in accepting war as an instrument and at the same time wanting to dodge responsibility for its more obviously barbarous features. Pacifism is a tenable position, provided that you are willing to take the consequences. But all talk of 'limiting' or 'humanizing' war N is sheer humbug, based on the fact that the average human being never bothers to examine catchwords.
The catchwords used in this connexion are 'killing civilians', 'massacre of women and children' and 'destruction of our cultural heritage'. It is tacitly assumed that air bombing does more of this kind of thing than ground warfare.
When you look a bit closer, the first question that strikes you is: Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers? Obviously one must not kill children if it is in any way avoidable, but it is only in propaganda pamphlets that every bomb drops on a school or an orphanage. A bomb kills a cross-section of the population; but not quite a representative selection, because the children and expectant mothers
If someone's doing one commit a week and think's he's an 'ace developer' then the odds are he will not be missed.
In fact I've seen several people who thought they were ace developers walk off in a huff in my time. Life went on. The share price didn't budge. All anyone felt was a sense of relief for the next few weeks.
Most of the time people who think they're ace anything aren't because of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.
Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others".
And in the fact that in this case they're not doing much and you're better off laying them off.
Top management tip. If you suggest a test to see which employees aren't working and someone comes up with a highly technical objection with lots of TLAs in it and explains how 'Ace developers' only commit once a week, nod politely and then tell them they're laid off next time performance reviews come up.
If you lose your job in this economy, you're doing it even more wrong.
Successful managers are on uppers - caffeine, the odd line of cocaine and some 'steroids' and 'testosterone' they got from their gym buddies but those are mostly coke and caffeine anyway. You can tell the successful managers by throwing raw meat into a pit full of them and hiring the ones that end up with the biggest share. Those that end up with more than the total amount of meat than you've thrown must have eaten some of the other managers, and that means they are straight shooters with upper management written all over them.
Go $(LOCAL_COLLEGE_SPORTS_TEAM)!
Notice every hour or so the VNC icon in your system tray blinks? Yeah, didn't think so.
If you look at the US/SK exercises they had names like "Team Sprint". I think if war broke out you'd see
1) A lot of cruise missile and airstrikes on NK missiles and artillery north of the DMZ - it would be a much more intensive bombing campaign than any yet seen.
2) An amphibious landing north of the DMZ by South Korean forces. They'd divide into a group that would go for Pyongyang to end the regime and another group to head back south to attack the DMZ from behind.
3) If NK uses nukes I think the US would respond with tactical nuclear strikes against NK military formations.
The reason is that in a real war Seoul is very vulnerable to dug in NK missiles and artillery. The US doesn't really do trench warfare. It prefers blitzkrieg style warfare i.e. lots of tanks on the move - the Gulf War being the classic example.
The North is probably very short of food and fuel but it probably has dug deep fortifications to protect its forces aimed at Seoul from air attack and stocked them up with enormous amounts of ammunition. So a war of attrition favours the North and is deadly for Seoul. A war of maneuver and movement favours the south and is probably what their US advisers have taught them because that is what the US does well. Also if they want to minimize the deaths of registered voters in Seoul that is the only choice.
Put those together and I think you'd see a very aggressive attempt by the US and SK to end the war before the North could do too much damage to Seoul. You can't be sure of that with air strikes alone, so I'd expect an amphibious landing in the North.
Also the North would be thrown badly off balance politically by an amphibious landing - it would be like in D Day where no one dared wake Hitler because he'd apparently said the invasion wasn't going to happen the way it did. Lastly no one with first hand experience of them really likes murderous totalitarian regimes and most people in NK probably know the South is a better place to live. So if the South is lucky the NK regime will fracture and collapse completely once SK tank columns start to roll through the countryside and individual NK commanders switch sides or decide not to fight.
It's reasonable to assume for example that the US and SK forces will be able to destroy NK's communications systems. So if you're an NK commander you don't even know if King Kim is even alive once the war starts.
What about China? Well if you look at Wikileaks they may well have told the South Koreans they're not to fussed if they remove the regime and unify the country so long as US forces are not stationed in the North.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/29/wikileaks-cables-china-reunified-korea
In highly sensitive discussions in February this year, the-then South Korean vice-foreign minister, Chun Yung-woo, told a US ambassador, Kathleen Stephens, that younger generation Chinese Communist party leaders no longer regarded North Korea as a useful or reliable ally and would not risk renewed armed conflict on the peninsula, according to a secret cable to Washington.
Chun, who has since been appointed national security adviser to South Korea's president, said North Korea had already collapsed economically.
Political collapse would ensue once Kim Jong-il died, despite the dictator's efforts to obtain Chinese help and to secure the succession for his son, Kim Jong-un.
"Citing private conversations during previous sessions of the six-party talks , Chun claimed [the two high-level officials] believed Korea should be unified under ROK [South Korea] control," Stephens reported.
"The two officials, Chun said, were ready to 'face the new reality' that the DPRK [North Korea] now had little value to China as a buffer state - a view that, since North Korea's first nuclear test in 2006, had reportedly gained traction among senior PRC [People's Republic of China] leaders. Chun argu
The CEO's job should be to axe the least successful projects and lay off everyone. It actually helps if you're cute as a button like Ms Mayer. She reminds me of this cartoon
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-12/
The middle manager's job should be to sack the least successful employees in order to not end up running the least successful project. As the saying goes, you don't have to outrun run the predator, you only need to outrun your fellow runners.
I'd make them cute too, like cartoon characters to cut down on the number of layoffs going postal and damaging valuable equipment.
Stop posting on Slashdot, Kevin.
If you're not in my office by 6am tomorrow in smart casual dress for a pop quiz on "Watercooler Culture" you're fired.
Smart casual means ironed chinos and a dress shirt by the way, not filthy jeans and a filthier Tux T shirt with pin burns in it. Which reminds me, they'll be a drugs test afterwards.
Also a visit to the hairdresser might be in the best interests of your career, if you know what I mean.
Enjoy your evening!
Once that first living system started, it probably ate every other nascent living system.
That reminds me a bit of Microsoft. DOS and 16 bit Windows weren't actually very good. However they could run on cheap 8086 and 80286 hardware. Unix really needed an MMU and only really worked well in flat mode, both of which needed a 80386 or later. MS got DOS and Windows out into the market relatively early. They had very good relations with "Developers! Developers! Developers!" too. So most of the world end up with a box running an OEM copy of Microsoft Windows because the hardware was cheap and the software plentiful (and usually cheaper than on Unix).
So you don't need an optimum solution. You need a solution you can ship. You can fix the bugs in version 2.0 - the problem is surviving that long. Also you need to make sure that version 2.0 can run all the applications that run on 1.0 - even the ones that are buggy.
Both of these are an anathema in the academic world where it is more important to get things right before shipping and everyone builds from source. So if you need to break compatibility with buggy applications that's fine - it's a problem that the application maintainer needs to fix.
I.e. like cockroaches Dos and 16 bit Windows were survivors.
What does all this have to do with biology? I guess it's a reminder that evolution isn't necessarily an algorithm that produces optimum solution. It definitely gets shit done, but maybe like in software you can end up with dominant solution that most academic types regard as being a bit of a hack. In fact by mass evolution produces a lot more subjectively loathsome and extremely limited but objectively highly survivable creatures like cockroaches and bacteria than bald eagles. Or Homo sapiens.
It's redditors fault. They're such dickhead hipster fucks that he killed himself out of grief at what they turned his beloved site into
http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/19pwgc/i_dont_tip/c8qbpec
Then upvote it. then shut the fuck up, cunt.
I'm getting damn sick of people saying "this comment is best" or "I came here to say this" to try to karma whore. get fucked. No one gives a shit who said it, stop trying to jump on the upvotes train by pretending you came up with the exact same clever thing. Upvote what the other person said and get over it.
This entire website and it's stupid memetic "[FIXED]" posts and the "I see your X and raise you Y," are fucking retarded. Not to mention the whole fuckload of stupid shit where people post this "faith in humanity restored" hippie-dip-bleeding-heart bull shit. This isn't Facebook, I come here to read interesting content, not sit through endless fuckhead attention whores posting "LIKE IF YOU CARE ABOUT CANCER, IF YOU DON'T LIKE I'LL COMMIT SUICIDE" go fucking commit suicide then. Stupid bunch of whiny teenage girls cutting themselves on tumblr, hit an artery and bleed to death. No one will give a shit.
Goddamn it fat people and whiny teenage girls and stupid "feels" people are ruining this goddamn website. People upvote total cunt shit, inane bullshit inspirational posts and whatever other bullshit they can find, including ass-tarded memes. AskReddit has begun to circle, Funny has turned into "cute pictures of mushrooms that look like smiley faces that no one gives a dead horse's last shit about", and politics is 1,000,000 users sucking Barack Obama's dick and making fun of Repubicans. Yeah we get the point. What a bunch of dumbass cunts. or dumb ass-cunts. I really don't care. Romney and Obama were both shit.
No wonder the guy who invented this website shot himself, he had to watch his dream overrun and destroyed by 5 million whiny left-wing-eurofags (oh dont even get me started on the "merica" bullshit. you cunts think we're all fat? cool story, have fun sucking your uppity pussies and running out of money because you can't compete in the global economy anymore). I don't blame him in the least; spending time on this website makes me want to commit suicide too. The stupid upvotes-suck-my-circlejerk-ass-liberal-cunt-woman-feminazi-friendzone-cute-bullshit-sympathy-emo-vagina-dickass-gore posts need to fucking STOP. I believe in free speech but honestly I wish this website would be taken down by the government. You're all fucking abominations to society.
It's all true too. It reminds me of Weev's quote on bloggers
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny's house. "I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money," he boasted. "I make people afraid for their lives." On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny's. "Trolling is basically Internet eugenics," he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. "I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. . . . We need to put these people in the oven!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KTsXHXMkJA
There's a saying in Norwegian diplomacy, 'always keep talking'. Why? Because it allows for the elements in a society who want change, to actually effect that change.
How did that work out for you in WWII?
For Internet kiddies "fascism" is when mum and dad tell them to move out to their own place and get a job to pay the rent, and then the RIAA tells them they need to pay for HBO and movies rather than just downloading them for free.
The idea that there's a actual holocaust happening on the other side of the world is far beyond their comprehension, hence the irritating "North Korea is the Best Korea" meme.
Spoiled little shits.
well, if you've decided to hate it, we can't really do anything about it, can we :). Especially not here :)
You could recant your heresy.
Murder is murder. It's just as illegal to kill a Yemeni as it is to kill an American, wherever you are.
Not if you're the POTUS it isn't. Well it might be against Yemeni law but if you're POTUS that doesn't matter.
It's like the bit in Rome when Julius Caesar tells the Egyptians they must pay him "under the law". The Pharaoh's court eunuch says bitterly "Roman law". Caesar says "What other sort is there, you silly woman?". By the end of the episode the Pharoah is dead and so as his eunuch and Cleopatra is on the throne with the backing of the Romans.
Law is meaningless without the force to back it up
Killing US citizens without due process is more immediately problematic as it would lead to impeachment. That's just a way of saying that US law is meaningful to the POTUS because it is backed up by force. By violence. The supreme authority from which all authorities are derived.
Really the only reason people in Yemen or anywhere in the world worry about what the US people and thus government think is because the US Government has force - violence - to back up its will. In fact the only reason the US Government hasn't been replaced by something worse - and most governments are far worse - is because it has the violence to back up its will.
There is no such thing as international law. The only governments that survive are the ones that are better at using violence than their opponents and thus bend their opponents to their will. Despite the fact the the POTUS is under much more legal restraint on the use of force domestically than the sort of political leaders it fought in WWII and the Cold War it is was much better than them at using violence. Indeed no power in history has been better at using violence than the US Government. Now Germany and Japan are states with an American designed political system. If the US had lost the reverse would have happened.
And then you really would have a government that could kill its own citizens with no legal problems.
I take this sort of story with a pinch of salt to be honest.
It's probably a reference to this
http://english.sina.com/china/2012/1119/528202.html
Zhou Yongkang no longer holds the post as secretary of the Committee of Political and Legislative Affairs of the CPC Central Committee.
Meng Jianzhu, Minister of Chinese Ministry of Public Security, has been appointed as the new secretary, CPC Central Committee announced Monday afternoon
So You Yongkang got sacked but no one in China is allowed to speculate as to why.
According to Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhou_Yongkang
In May 2012 the Financial Times reported that Zhou had relinquished the operational control of the party's Political and Legal Affairs Commission to Minister of Public Security Meng Jianzhu due to his support for former Chinese politician Bo Xilai, and had lost his right to select his successor when he retires from the Politburo Standing Committee in fall 2012. The New York Times later reported that Zhou's status remained unchanged.
Bo Xilai was a Maoist and a very dangerous person who got denounced by Wen Jiabao (who as someone put it "seems quite nice for a Chicom")
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Xilai#Removal_from_posts
On 15 March, Bo was dismissed as Chongqing party chief and its related municipal posts, while temporarily retaining a seat on the Politburo. Due to the potentially destructive effects Bo's dismissal would have on party unity, party elders were consulted on the matter. The decision was reportedly made at a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee on 7 March, during which security tsar Zhou Yongkang cast a lone dissenting vote. On 14 March, Bo was reprimanded by Premier Wen Jiabao during the Premier's annual press conference. Wen called the achievements of Chongqing "significant," but the result of "multiple administrations," i.e., not just Bo himself. Wen also made numerous allusions to the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, an indirect rebuke of Bo's efforts to revive "red culture". Addressing high-level political changes by a Premier to an open public forum was unprecedented. Political observers believe that Wen's remarks and Bo's downfall represented a consensus within the central leadership that Bo not only needed to shoulder the responsibility for the Wang Lijun scandal, but also marked a significant victory for liberal reformers.
On 10 April, Bo was suspended from the party's Central Committee and its Politburo, pending investigation for "serious disciplinary violations." Bo's wife, Gu Kailai, was now a prime suspect in the inquiry into the death of British businessman Neil Heywood. The announcements, carrying criminal implications, likely marked the end of Bo's political career.
On 28 September, the party's Politburo adopted a decision to expel him from the CPC. He was accused of major disciplinary violations and corruption charges during his tenure in Dalian, the Ministry of Commerce and Chongqing, including the Gu Kailai case. He was also accused of having "improper sexual relationships with a number of women."
On 26 October, the Standing Committee of the 11th National People's Congress expelled him, removing his final party or state position and setting the stage for his trial.
On 4 November, Bo Xilai was formally kicked out of the Chinese Communist Party. There is speculation that he is going to be tried by the Supreme People's Court in original jurisdiction, the first time since the trial of the Gang of Four.
Ha ha. It's like when the Daleks took Davros off to "stand trial for crimes against the Daleks". Or when the Island decided to put Patrick McGoohan's chief tormentor on (predictably insane and Orwellian) tr
You mean like the Chinese Civil War? Funny I can't seem to find any records of an armistice. It must still be going on.
If you're a typical slashdotter 'fascism' is when Mum and Dad used to tell you to clean your room. If some party describing itself as Communist censors the internet and ships people off to re-education camps because they complained about corruption, re-education camps and so on that is 'appropriate'.
Why appeal though? If you get a warning, sign up for a P2P friendly VPN provider which would be $5-$7 per month.
The US Government have had 64 bit Risc systems running Lisp based OSs since Roswell, but they've been gradually leaking out the technology so as to avoid temporal anomalies the sort of alien attack that wiped out the dinosaurs. The reason for that attack is that velociraptor sapiens had discovered a language very similar to Smalltalk which meant their embedded systems (e.g. spaceprobes) didn't crash and burn with kernel panics and null pointer exceptions when things got a bit tricky. Also they knew that the galaxy is full of life and all of it was made out of meat. Other, older, civilisations felt this was a bad combination.
You don't know what C3PO got up to at night when the humans were sleeping. A good cover for a killbot would a a C3PO like personality when the humans were awake but reboot into a separate Terminator like personality when they were asleep.
If R2D2 was the mastermind behind the rebellion, C3PO and other "protocol droids" were ideal to act as covert assassins - i.e. eliminating people the rebellion needed to eliminate. Not that their relatively sunny and innocuous "daytime" personality would have been aware of it - in fact they'd be quite shocked to discover that persons unknown had deactivated them, killed their much loved masters and turned them back on again. Or so they'd think.
Actually of course their R2 partner would have dual booted them into terminator mode set the target, let them make the kill and then booted them back into C3 mode. After which the R2 would just claim they'd been deactivated when it happened too and thus they knew nothing about it.
In fact R2 has a better "front man" in C3PO than Chewbacca had in Han. Han may be clueless about the way the world really works at the start of the films but being human he's capable figuring it out and you can't just mind wipe him if he managed that too early. Also humans have problems with Option C in cases like this.
http://km-515.livejournal.com/746.html
Obi-Wan has spent the last 20 years in the Tattoine desert, keeping watch over Luke Skywalker and trying to decide on one of the three available options:
A) If Luke shows no significant access to the Force, then leave him alone in obscurity
B) If Luke shows real Force ability, then consider recruiting him as a Jedi. The rebellion needs Jedi and it needs them now.But, if Luke shows any signs of turning out like his father, then:
C) sneak into his house one fine night and chop his head off. With great regret but it'll save a lot of trouble later on.
Knowing this to be the case, Bail Organa (perhaps at the insistence of his wife) has found excuses not to send Leia to Ben for assessment of Jedi potential, largely for fear of option C.
Humans feel bad about unprovoked, pre-meditated murder of someone that considers them a friend. A dual boot C3PO doesn't have the 'great regret' problem - all the dangerous knowledge could be confined to his night time personality which would be engineered to follow the Zeroth Law of Robotics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics#Zeroth_Law_added
In the final scenes of the novel Robots and Empire R. Giskard Reventlov is the first robot to act according to the Zeroth Law. Giskard is telepathic, like the robot Herbie in the short story "Liar!", and tries to apply the Zeroth Law through his understanding of a more subtle concept of "harm" than most robots can grasp.[15] However, unlike Herbie, Giskard grasps the philosophical concept of the Zeroth Law allowing him to harm individual human beings if he can do so in service to the abstract concept of humanity. The Zeroth Law is never programmed into Giskard's brain but instead is a rule he attempts to rationalize through pure metacognition. Though he fails - it ultimately destroys his positronic brain as he is not certain whether his choice will turn out to be for the ultimate good of humanity or not - he gives his successor R. Daneel Olivaw his telepathic abilities. Over the course of many thousands of years Daneel adapts himself to be able to fully obey the Zeroth Law. As Daneel formulates it, in the novels Foundation and Earth and Prelude to Foundation, the Zeroth Law reads:
A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
Replace "humanity" with "the Republic" and you've got the idea.
If Luke or Leia show signs of turning into Vader sneaking into their houses one fine
It would probably say "Come join the jihad in Somalia" on revolutionmuslim.net and lead the wannabe jihadis off to doom (a secret jail run by the Syrian Baath Party and the CIA) rather like the Pied Piper led off the rats.
Mind you if you were going to do that why not just pay a human to do it?
In fact you don't need to set up the site yourself - there will always be someone stupid enough to set up sites like revolutionmuslim. You can just do a lawful intercept on the site and pay a few agents to set up sock puppet accounts to do your Pied Pipering.