It sounds to me like the US needs an open investigation into what happened in Somalia, just like what the Canadians did. Yes, it will be painful bringing the truth out in public. The American military won't like and it will surely tarnish their image and honour. However, they are their to serve and represent the people, and so the people have a right to know what they're doing, and that they act in an appropriate manner that doesn't dishonour America. The Canadian military was serverly embarrased and humbled by their Somalia investigation, but real measures have been put inplace to ensure they repeat themselves - can the same be said for the US?
> > The loss of American business to foreign
> > countries will hurt you more than any system
> > of immigration ever will.
>
> The world wasn't a dead piece of rock before the
> Internet boom, though. Sure, we didn't have this
> "wonderful" global village thing going on, but
> we did have stability and we knew what was
> important. I can't believe I'm thinking this
> way, anti-technology, but tech and tariff games
> and global trade has made the the USA sell out
> its own people.
Stability? Good lord man! Don't you remember the recession in the early 90's right before the internet boom? You know, images of union workers on strike, la-dee-da-dee-dah. Before that, there was Reagan calling USSR the "evil empire". There have been many many nasty recessions, just like this one or worse. There's been lots of instability, such as the 70's oil crisis, or the Cuban missile crisis, or Pearl Harbour. Get with the programme: things are bad for you right now and you're staring down the barrel, but really, is this bigotry and small-mindedness really necessary? You could have been in this situation many a time before the internet boom. Nothing has changed. If you don't want this to happen again, pay more taxes and get a goverment that will provide a safety net for it's citizens instead of options for going of to war.
Now you're experiencing the bad side of the USA. Why do you think other western countries such those in Europe or Canada expend so much effort on building a more caring society (at the expense of higher taxes)? That's right, to provide a welfare safety net that ensures that your family is provided for. If you don't like your current situation, vote for a governement that will fix this situation, or move your family to a more caring country that places human needs above greed and money.
BTW, I might sound unsympathetic... I'm not. I understand your situation: I have a friend in Denver who was unemployed for a similar length of time until a couple of months ago. His wife was an intern, and he has three children. I've never seen a man get so desparate. He ended up accepting a huge paycut.
The USA is a great country if you're wealthy. It sucks if you're not, and it's a downright disgrace if you're unemployed and low on funds.
I guess the moderator disagreed with the parent posting and all its replies, and moderated them all "off-topic". I think that the moderator needs to go and read the moderation rules. I tried to meta-moderate the ignoramus, but unfortunately I didn't get a chance to comment on this thread:( This moderator has abused the moderation system. Moderation isn't about trying to hide posts that one disagrees with. None of the posts were above 1, so why moderate them down? Sure, the posts were offtopic to the original post, but they were ON-TOPIC to the post that they were replying to further up the thread. If we tried to maintain such tunnel vision with our posts, the discussion and debate in this forum would be very dull indeed.
America is distancing herself from the sacrifices
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 1
"A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea. Why should citizens of any country hesitate to wage such a war if they have the machinery? War has recently seemed so terrible that civilized societies view it as a last resort. But American history is crammed with technological innovations that are neither discussed nor much thought out. Drone Wars might not appear so terrible. They might even become irresistible. "
Technology isn't making the sacrifices go away. In recent years, America has been distancing herself from the risks. I don't see America making much effort to contribute to the UN forces in Afghanistan. No, America wants their troops out and let other countries take the real risks. The US should take responsibility for its actions and contribute to the repair work. If it wants to bomb the crap out of other countries, it should be willing to accept the risks involved in fixing the mess it has made.
Other examples of avoiding risk are the bombing campaigns. Sure, no Americans get hurt, but there are still huge numbers of other people maimed, killed or suffering because of their actions. In Kosovo, the American ground commitment is a joke because of their fear of taking risks - they forces are in huge fortresses and only venture out for inneffective patrols in large heavily armoured groups. They're certainly not doing the job properly.
Americans are more and more distanced from the horrors of war. Those horrors are still there, but the American people just don't hear about them anymore. This is bad! This emboldens the US and causes more death and destruction in the world, albeit to non-Americans. How is this right? Just because it doesn't effect you, doesn't make it right. Whenever there's war, there's sacrifice by somebody, thus making war easier to wage is not good at all.
"I hate it when my new toy doesn't even support "yet-to-be-defined enhanced DVDs ""
I don't know why the article says "yet to be defined" when it's already here! DVD-Videos are already shipping with "settop" folders in the ROM content for use with InterActual API devices. So far, the only device is the Win32 InterActual Player (replacement of PCFriendly). The demo described in the article that I linked to is obviously the first public implementation of a device that supports the existing ROM content of many DVDs. I will much prefer using my interactive DVDs on a set-top box instead of my PC!
Also at CES is a demo of interactive DVD set top boxes. All this convergence and integration, and this Moxi box doesn't even offer this feature. For now I think I shall keep my money for other things until the market matures... I'll let those people with more money than sense be guinnea pigs for this kind of technology.
Re:Congrats to the Brits
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
You seem to imply that it is bad for a currency's exchange rate to constantly drift lower. It could be argued that from a European perspective that it is VERY GOOD. Their exports have become cheaper making them more desirable and thus generating jobs. It has also made imports more expensive thus encouraging local solutions and generating jobs. For some reason, people seem to think their nationalistic pride is hurt when a currency's exchange rate drops. This is missplaced pride.
I deliberately didn't pick on that point: I assumed it was written by an American, and they don't seem to like adding "ly" when they create adverbs from adjectives. It makes them sound "real" stupid... but we'll laugh amongst ourselves about that. Side-note: my British dictionary notes that "real" is used in as an informal adverb in Scotland (!) and America.
"The drives use Fluid drive bearings which make the drive run very silent."
How can one improve on silence? Isn't silence the complete lack of sound that a quiet PC strives for? If one machine is silent, another machine can't be very silent and be better (i.e. quieter).
MSHTML.DLL might be loaded be loaded by other processes at startup. The only benefit that that gives to IE is that it is already in the disk cache when IE comes to load. However, IE does have to load it's own copy of this file for itself - it contains inproc COM servers. Mozilla certainly loads much quicker once it's in the disk cache, but still, not as quickly as IE.
I've heard this claim of integration before. But how can that be when IE runs under Linux via WINE? IE has a 17MB memory footprint on my machine (and that's before it loads the JVM). Mozilla loads up at 22MB... not enough difference to explain the extra load time and CPU utilisation of Mozilla. I'd like to hear what kind of integration IE has that makes it load faster. Until I'm presented with some concrete evidence, I will continue to believe that the MSFT programmers did a better job.
Quicklaunch is a dirty little hack to get around the real problem: slow start-up time. If Mozilla's state gets screwed up, I now have to go and kill it in task manager as it never exits when Quicklaunch is enabled.
Why's it in the funny section anyway? It's pretty pathetic and unimaginative, and far from funny. It's the same tired old commercialized crap every year. The corporations who so many people seem to want to *give* their money too even have Americans calling Halloween a holiday. In my book, a holiday involves time off work. Talk about being conned. Use some imagination and organize a fancy dress party around your own theme at some other point in the year instead of doing it when corpor^H^H^H^H^H^Hsociety tells you. Why do people need other people dressing up before they'll do it themselves? Pathetic! Now, if you want a good celebration that has some spirit, try the British Guy Fawkes night... you'll get to burn shit!
How the hell did the parent article and several related articles in the thread get moderated as "Offtopic"? The posting is about Fileplanet, which is dicussed in the story. It even gives an alternative link, in line with the story mention hour+ waits at Fileplanet. There are either some really ignorant moderators around, or some moderators who are Fileplanet employees abusing their power. The parent article started a whole thread, with some really interesting comments. Duh! I tried meta-moderation, but didn't get a chance to review the fuckwits.
Quite amusing, but with small problem (besides the car). These weren't used against armies, but rather over the period of many days (or weeks?) to batter walls of castles, etc.
... trebuchet's and siege engines? 3,000 lbs weight? Bah! Those are tiny toys! I would like to see a real one, like they used in the 13th century. In fact, I did see a small one recently although not in action... it had a 6 ton weight on it (by Urquhart Castle, Loch Ness). Edward Longshanks built some (not personally) with 20 ton weights in some of the seiges against the Scots. Now, I would like to see one of those in action! Something that size could hurl a small car some distance!
Re:Are there enough of them?
on
Rent-a-Game
·
· Score: 1
Ack! Half right:( Perhaps my friend thought that the 64 kbs deal was at a good price to make it a good replacement for his dial-up access. I've been dial-up free for 2 years and wouldn't want to go back.
Are there enough of them?
on
Rent-a-Game
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Are there enough broadband users with enough bandwidth in the UK to make this worthwhile? BT's prices for ADSL are shocking... four times what I pay here in Canada for half the speed! I have a friend in Britain considering getting "broadband" from NTL (his cable company), which I find quite amusing as they're only offering 64 kbs... that might be broadband technology, but come on! That's just a bit faster than dialup and only equivalent to a single ISDN channel! I don't think I know anybody in Britain with broadband at home, and I do know quite a few geeky/techie software engineers. Compared with N. America (at least Canada) where I know lots of people with cable or DSL who are down right scared of computers! Besides the later roll-out, I really think broadband is being limited in Britain by costs and especially by the restrictive practises of BT.
You're absolutely right. I saw this interesting story in Canada's National Post newspaper recently. American humour is very different from that of cultures including the British. American comedies work on British TV as it's often simple humour, but the best British comedies rarely work in the other direction as they're just not understood and only found funny by a small minority. Consider Mr. Bean, quite popular in the US, it's actually considered unsophisticated and unlearned across the pond. As the article I linked to mentions, "American jokes reflect a pompous and boastful sensibility, the British and French prefer self-mockery". American humour tends to be much more superficial, which is probably why I can't find much good satire, and why the best satire on American TV (The Simpsons) has been reduced to cartoon form.
"My question is what is the approximate size (diameter) of this black-hole and what is its density. I assume its not particuarly dense just particuarly big."
This article from the BBC's web site is more informative: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid _1 526000/1526724.stm. It claims that the black hole is 150 million kms across.
"...all I meant was that the United States has long prided itself, rightly (WWII)"
They needed a bit of coercion there. I don't recall them promising to go to war with Germany in the name of Poland's freedom, like some other countries did. And unlike others, the US didn't have to worry so much about being invaded or having their cities levelled by daily bombing when they finally did make the belated decision.
The US didn't come to anybody's rescue, as Americans seem to like everybody. Britain and its allies was already beating the Germans and Italians in North Africa, and Hitler had waited too long for Operation Sealion, making a successful invasion of Britain rather difficult. Even in the Pacific, the Antipodean allies were the first to beat the Japanese. That's not to say that the rest of the world wasn't grateful for the American contribution, they are: it helped save a lot lives, but please, don't put put things out of perspective.
Just the like certain dickheads in Britain need to stop going on about beating the Germans, so Americans need to stop smugly patting themselves on their backs for coming to the rescue. As far as I'm concerned, it's water under the bridge, the world has changed, and we should move on (just like we have with other wars, e.g. Napoleonic).
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds to me like the US needs an open investigation into what happened in Somalia, just like what the Canadians did. Yes, it will be painful bringing the truth out in public. The American military won't like and it will surely tarnish their image and honour. However, they are their to serve and represent the people, and so the people have a right to know what they're doing, and that they act in an appropriate manner that doesn't dishonour America. The Canadian military was serverly embarrased and humbled by their Somalia investigation, but real measures have been put inplace to ensure they repeat themselves - can the same be said for the US?
That must be like Coyote Linux. What a great solution! Even if it does get rooted, one doesn't have to worry about trojans after rebooting.
> > The loss of American business to foreign
> > countries will hurt you more than any system
> > of immigration ever will.
>
> The world wasn't a dead piece of rock before the
> Internet boom, though. Sure, we didn't have this
> "wonderful" global village thing going on, but
> we did have stability and we knew what was
> important. I can't believe I'm thinking this
> way, anti-technology, but tech and tariff games
> and global trade has made the the USA sell out
> its own people.
Stability? Good lord man! Don't you remember the recession in the early 90's right before the internet boom? You know, images of union workers on strike, la-dee-da-dee-dah. Before that, there was Reagan calling USSR the "evil empire". There have been many many nasty recessions, just like this one or worse. There's been lots of instability, such as the 70's oil crisis, or the Cuban missile crisis, or Pearl Harbour. Get with the programme: things are bad for you right now and you're staring down the barrel, but really, is this bigotry and small-mindedness really necessary? You could have been in this situation many a time before the internet boom. Nothing has changed. If you don't want this to happen again, pay more taxes and get a goverment that will provide a safety net for it's citizens instead of options for going of to war.
Now you're experiencing the bad side of the USA. Why do you think other western countries such those in Europe or Canada expend so much effort on building a more caring society (at the expense of higher taxes)? That's right, to provide a welfare safety net that ensures that your family is provided for. If you don't like your current situation, vote for a governement that will fix this situation, or move your family to a more caring country that places human needs above greed and money.
BTW, I might sound unsympathetic... I'm not. I understand your situation: I have a friend in Denver who was unemployed for a similar length of time until a couple of months ago. His wife was an intern, and he has three children. I've never seen a man get so desparate. He ended up accepting a huge paycut.
The USA is a great country if you're wealthy. It sucks if you're not, and it's a downright disgrace if you're unemployed and low on funds.
I guess the moderator disagreed with the parent posting and all its replies, and moderated them all "off-topic". I think that the moderator needs to go and read the moderation rules. I tried to meta-moderate the ignoramus, but unfortunately I didn't get a chance to comment on this thread :( This moderator has abused the moderation system. Moderation isn't about trying to hide posts that one disagrees with. None of the posts were above 1, so why moderate them down? Sure, the posts were offtopic to the original post, but they were ON-TOPIC to the post that they were replying to further up the thread. If we tried to maintain such tunnel vision with our posts, the discussion and debate in this forum would be very dull indeed.
"A war without sacrifice is definitely a 21st century idea. Why should citizens of any country hesitate to wage such a war if they have the machinery? War has recently seemed so terrible that civilized societies view it as a last resort. But American history is crammed with technological innovations that are neither discussed nor much thought out. Drone Wars might not appear so terrible. They might even become irresistible. "
Technology isn't making the sacrifices go away. In recent years, America has been distancing herself from the risks. I don't see America making much effort to contribute to the UN forces in Afghanistan. No, America wants their troops out and let other countries take the real risks. The US should take responsibility for its actions and contribute to the repair work. If it wants to bomb the crap out of other countries, it should be willing to accept the risks involved in fixing the mess it has made.
Other examples of avoiding risk are the bombing campaigns. Sure, no Americans get hurt, but there are still huge numbers of other people maimed, killed or suffering because of their actions. In Kosovo, the American ground commitment is a joke because of their fear of taking risks - they forces are in huge fortresses and only venture out for inneffective patrols in large heavily armoured groups. They're certainly not doing the job properly.
Americans are more and more distanced from the horrors of war. Those horrors are still there, but the American people just don't hear about them anymore. This is bad! This emboldens the US and causes more death and destruction in the world, albeit to non-Americans. How is this right? Just because it doesn't effect you, doesn't make it right. Whenever there's war, there's sacrifice by somebody, thus making war easier to wage is not good at all.
"I hate it when my new toy doesn't even support "yet-to-be-defined enhanced DVDs ""
I don't know why the article says "yet to be defined" when it's already here! DVD-Videos are already shipping with "settop" folders in the ROM content for use with InterActual API devices. So far, the only device is the Win32 InterActual Player (replacement of PCFriendly). The demo described in the article that I linked to is obviously the first public implementation of a device that supports the existing ROM content of many DVDs. I will much prefer using my interactive DVDs on a set-top box instead of my PC!
Also at CES is a demo of interactive DVD set top boxes. All this convergence and integration, and this Moxi box doesn't even offer this feature. For now I think I shall keep my money for other things until the market matures... I'll let those people with more money than sense be guinnea pigs for this kind of technology.
You seem to imply that it is bad for a currency's exchange rate to constantly drift lower. It could be argued that from a European perspective that it is VERY GOOD. Their exports have become cheaper making them more desirable and thus generating jobs. It has also made imports more expensive thus encouraging local solutions and generating jobs. For some reason, people seem to think their nationalistic pride is hurt when a currency's exchange rate drops. This is missplaced pride.
I deliberately didn't pick on that point: I assumed it was written by an American, and they don't seem to like adding "ly" when they create adverbs from adjectives. It makes them sound "real" stupid... but we'll laugh amongst ourselves about that. Side-note: my British dictionary notes that "real" is used in as an informal adverb in Scotland (!) and America.
"The drives use Fluid drive bearings which make the drive run very silent."
How can one improve on silence? Isn't silence the complete lack of sound that a quiet PC strives for? If one machine is silent, another machine can't be very silent and be better (i.e. quieter).
MSHTML.DLL might be loaded be loaded by other processes at startup. The only benefit that that gives to IE is that it is already in the disk cache when IE comes to load. However, IE does have to load it's own copy of this file for itself - it contains inproc COM servers. Mozilla certainly loads much quicker once it's in the disk cache, but still, not as quickly as IE.
I've heard this claim of integration before. But how can that be when IE runs under Linux via WINE? IE has a 17MB memory footprint on my machine (and that's before it loads the JVM). Mozilla loads up at 22MB... not enough difference to explain the extra load time and CPU utilisation of Mozilla. I'd like to hear what kind of integration IE has that makes it load faster. Until I'm presented with some concrete evidence, I will continue to believe that the MSFT programmers did a better job.
Has there ever been any talk of support for multi-part binaries in the news client? All self-respecting dedicated news clients have this feature.
Quicklaunch is a dirty little hack to get around the real problem: slow start-up time. If Mozilla's state gets screwed up, I now have to go and kill it in task manager as it never exits when Quicklaunch is enabled.
I'd be more interested in a goup buy of Xenon HIDs for my '99 Passat.
Who cares what you want? This is a discussion about the LOTR film. Don't be so self-centred.
Why's it in the funny section anyway? It's pretty pathetic and unimaginative, and far from funny. It's the same tired old commercialized crap every year. The corporations who so many people seem to want to *give* their money too even have Americans calling Halloween a holiday. In my book, a holiday involves time off work. Talk about being conned. Use some imagination and organize a fancy dress party around your own theme at some other point in the year instead of doing it when corpor^H^H^H^H^H^Hsociety tells you. Why do people need other people dressing up before they'll do it themselves? Pathetic! Now, if you want a good celebration that has some spirit, try the British Guy Fawkes night... you'll get to burn shit!
How the hell did the parent article and several related articles in the thread get moderated as "Offtopic"? The posting is about Fileplanet, which is dicussed in the story. It even gives an alternative link, in line with the story mention hour+ waits at Fileplanet. There are either some really ignorant moderators around, or some moderators who are Fileplanet employees abusing their power. The parent article started a whole thread, with some really interesting comments. Duh! I tried meta-moderation, but didn't get a chance to review the fuckwits.
Quite amusing, but with small problem (besides the car). These weren't used against armies, but rather over the period of many days (or weeks?) to batter walls of castles, etc.
... trebuchet's and siege engines? 3,000 lbs weight? Bah! Those are tiny toys! I would like to see a real one, like they used in the 13th century. In fact, I did see a small one recently although not in action... it had a 6 ton weight on it (by Urquhart Castle, Loch Ness). Edward Longshanks built some (not personally) with 20 ton weights in some of the seiges against the Scots. Now, I would like to see one of those in action! Something that size could hurl a small car some distance!
Ack! Half right :( Perhaps my friend thought that the 64 kbs deal was at a good price to make it a good replacement for his dial-up access. I've been dial-up free for 2 years and wouldn't want to go back.
Are there enough broadband users with enough bandwidth in the UK to make this worthwhile? BT's prices for ADSL are shocking... four times what I pay here in Canada for half the speed! I have a friend in Britain considering getting "broadband" from NTL (his cable company), which I find quite amusing as they're only offering 64 kbs... that might be broadband technology, but come on! That's just a bit faster than dialup and only equivalent to a single ISDN channel! I don't think I know anybody in Britain with broadband at home, and I do know quite a few geeky/techie software engineers. Compared with N. America (at least Canada) where I know lots of people with cable or DSL who are down right scared of computers! Besides the later roll-out, I really think broadband is being limited in Britain by costs and especially by the restrictive practises of BT.
You're absolutely right. I saw this interesting story in Canada's National Post newspaper recently. American humour is very different from that of cultures including the British. American comedies work on British TV as it's often simple humour, but the best British comedies rarely work in the other direction as they're just not understood and only found funny by a small minority. Consider Mr. Bean, quite popular in the US, it's actually considered unsophisticated and unlearned across the pond. As the article I linked to mentions, "American jokes reflect a pompous and boastful sensibility, the British and French prefer self-mockery". American humour tends to be much more superficial, which is probably why I can't find much good satire, and why the best satire on American TV (The Simpsons) has been reduced to cartoon form.
"My question is what is the approximate size (diameter) of this black-hole and what is its density. I assume its not particuarly dense just particuarly big."
d _1 526000/1526724.stm. It claims that the black hole is 150 million kms across.
This article from the BBC's web site is more informative:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsi
"...all I meant was that the United States has long prided itself, rightly (WWII)"
They needed a bit of coercion there. I don't recall them promising to go to war with Germany in the name of Poland's freedom, like some other countries did. And unlike others, the US didn't have to worry so much about being invaded or having their cities levelled by daily bombing when they finally did make the belated decision.
The US didn't come to anybody's rescue, as Americans seem to like everybody. Britain and its allies was already beating the Germans and Italians in North Africa, and Hitler had waited too long for Operation Sealion, making a successful invasion of Britain rather difficult. Even in the Pacific, the Antipodean allies were the first to beat the Japanese. That's not to say that the rest of the world wasn't grateful for the American contribution, they are: it helped save a lot lives, but please, don't put put things out of perspective.
Just the like certain dickheads in Britain need to stop going on about beating the Germans, so Americans need to stop smugly patting themselves on their backs for coming to the rescue. As far as I'm concerned, it's water under the bridge, the world has changed, and we should move on (just like we have with other wars, e.g. Napoleonic).