Tell me, what are the intentions of the people who those drones are targetting? How many innocents have those men killed this year? How many weddings, funerals, markets, and religious services have they bombed in service to their god of hate and blood? The patriotism of Americans is small potatoes compared to the fervor of these extremists. It's even smaller potatoes compared to =any= country's imperialism over 70 years ago.
We were the ones writing them checks in the 1980's simply because we didn't want a secular yet communist Afghanistan.
Oh... And we overthrew a legally elected socialist government in Iran in the 1950's only to have who we wanted in power replaced with a fanatical religious government and then we paid money and gave weapons to their enemy in Iraq who turned on us with those own weapons we sold them...
And we still prop up a non-democratic kingdom with money and weapons down there who represses any political dissent with prison and whippings! No wonder they hate us!
AND YOU SAY WE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE MIDDLE EAST! We've been mucking around down there for over 50 years!
Just a note, the civilian bombing of German cities did little in the way of affecting German industrial output. German industrial out actually was at it wartime peak 1944 and was still increasing until 1945 during the most intense bombing raids of the war.
The industrial output actually only decreased when the factories were over run by ground troops.
Compared to the *millions* killed by the other participants in that war.
Dropping the a-bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima is akin to dropping nerve gas on Frankfurt and Hamburg. We could have done it, but it would not made a great difference in the military effort of the German war machine.
One could argue that that Japanese military leaders could have written off the civilian loss in those two cities (after all they lost more due to the firebombing of Tokyo) but were more inclined to surrender after hearing the news of the loss of 2 million Japanese troops due to the Soviet invasion in Manchuria.
At that point there was no longer any standing Japanese army worth mentioning nor a Navy to ship them back to Japan for a last ditch defense. So in order to save face they most likely used the pre-tense of the bombs to surrender to the Americans rather than the Soviets.
To be fair... Truman had ordered the bomb dropped without coming to understand what it was or could do (radiological wise). The people who advised him on the matter had no understanding either other than suggesting it as to bring about a quick end to the war for political reasons (namely the Stalin's response leading up to the Postdam conference to how he was going to treat Eastern Europe and the overtones that the Allies might be next on the agenda)
Admiral Nimitz and General Eisenhower were actually critical of its use because they believed the war had already been one in Japan as Japan had no navy as the suicidal attack of the Yamato and that 6 months into 1946 Japan would be critical of food supplies and would simply surrender due to the naval embargo.
They're bad because one of the reasons people, soldiers included, don't like war is due to the risk of being killed.
I've heard this argument time and time again, but its plain BS
If it were true Europe would have stopped at WWI and not did WWII.
People don't mind dying... In fact if you read the memoirs of most WWII US, German, Japanese, Soviet soldiers they have no fear of death after a while and seeing dead bodies doesn't even phase them. Any grunt can have the fear of death beat out of them. Heck, nationalism, religion, and dogma can make any farm boy pick up a bayonet screaming "Urah!" For the motherland/fatherland!", "for the emperor!" into a hail of machine gun fire.
That said... Making people kill each other is a bit harder when it is in person.
Germans used to have a problem with it so badly that they issued orders that anyone caught with a cold gun during a firefight was to be court marshaled in 1945 and summarily hanged or shot. I know there was a study that shown many US soldiers did not fire on the enemy as much as originally thought.
Anyways... Wars will still be fought because politicians will order them and people will still follow them weather or not they have to do it with robots or wooden spears.
Or have you any evidence that genocide and war was any less worse during the Greek and Roman times than now?
...given the serious topic, but this is IMHO another typical case of American fantasy: a war without casualties.
I'm pretty sure that was the intent of all inventions developed for wartime use.
From the spear, the longbow, musket, and machine gun... The intent and purpose was to give your side the benefit of being able to put the enema at "arms length" (so to say) and put you on the side less likely to die.
I mean having people kamikaze their aircraft into targets might be more cost effective in the short term, but the point of making weapons was to kill the other side more effectively by putting your side at less risk.
Just a note...
Its really been the US doctrine since WWII whereas the Russians, Japanese, and Germans generals would still order suicidal attacks on targets for bravery where the US forces would just bomb the crap out of it, shell it with more artillery than needed, call in more air strikes, and then have the infantry move in forward with tanks in front of them. The tactics work.
The machine's software should not be capable of triggering the release of that much radiation; any change in the radiation levels should require some kind of hardware interaction. Even an idiot who did not RTFM should not be able to cause harm with the machine.
I'm not sure what you mean by this? Most hardware is software these days.
Or are you talking about having a red button with a safety lock on it that has to be pushed in order to work?
Either way, people still bypass hardware solutions.
In other words, money is information. So what sets its limits? The stuff that it represents. Which nowadays is most commonly... more information!
Good point. I suppose if one wanted you could put an infinity symbol in people's balances of their accounts and just say they can't withdraw physical paper money anymore.
Though I don't think that would work for inflation...
and no exponential growth can go on for just a comparatively very short time. This should be self-evident, but for some reason, people seem to ignore that. Especially people who call themselves journalists or economists.
As far as we know the expansion of the universe and entropy will go on forever.
I doubt that is what you mean though...
Self contained systems do have limits unless of course they are self recursive and halo-graphic.
Solar is great as a suppliment, but you need to still provide a steady, reliable base load to the public as a whole. Some buildings stay in operation 24 hours a day, and I don't just mean businesses: hospitals, police stations for example.
To be fair, using solar power on home rooftops most likely won't take people off the grid any time soon but it will mitigate the power grid strain they do provide so that the large facilities like hospitals and factories (who can't reasonably use solar power for the needs) won't suffer during the summer noon brownouts caused by AC grid strain.
Maybe one day my electric bill will go down and I can leave all of my computers running... By then SRP will have raised the rates anyway.
See. This is why I still prefer a solar revolution than a nuclear one.
There is nothing wrong with nuclear and I'll be happy the day they get a viable fusion reactor up and running, but you still have to pay someone for that power and generally utility companies always raise rates rather than lower them because they are public companies.
The only way to offset that is to make your own power and the government isn't going to let me build my own breeder reactor anytime soon so I'm more likely to either lower my rates or get off the grid with solar.
And then I don't worry about the grid going out either.
Seriously...WTF is wrong with people...why don't they consider nuclear power?
I don't see anything wrong with it, but Uncle Sam won't let me build a breeder reactor in my back yard and go off grid.
I think the real benefit of solar power is that it removes you from the already over taxed grid which is more likely to still fail even if we have more nuclear power in place.
If power is produced locally then you avoid having to use the grid and paying the power company in the first place.
The only way I could see it being fun is dreaming about winning big and fooling yourself into thinking it might happen.
Gambling sells hope and dreams.
Albeit false hope and delusional dreams but some people like that.
I mean I still play the office pool lotto even though I know I am more statistically more likely to die in a freak accident than win, but it gives us something to talk about "What would you do with your money?" around the office. I suppose the conversation is worth the $1.
When I'm using my computer, I don't want to spend time fiddling with the OS and desktop environment. So I'm happy using Windows at work, and Mac OS X at home.
I don't know about you, but I often have to fiddle with both WinXP and Vista to get things to work.
I mean its not something a 30 second Google query couldn't fix, but issues with both the UAC and the auto rebooting on updates without asking or warning when running a full screen game basically made me go "UNGGGGGH!"
As far as fiddling with OS X... Not so much. I fiddled with the X11 to get it working the way I wanted out of the box.
Just like people lose their stuff on personal hard drives when not backed up, they will lose cloud data when not backed up. Both kinds of computing have merits, and long term persistence of data is not automatic with either.
Neither RAID or Cloud Computing is a backup solution. Its merely a way for more uptime and availability of data.
If by chance the user overwrites or deletes the data on a RAID or an online storage service... Then you've lost your data just the same as if the server crashed.
If you can't trust your outsourcing partner, replace them or bring the work in-house.
Trust? I don't think the upper management trusts local IT either.
Really, I don't think it matters who runs the servers or what they call them as long as it is run well.
Just because its outsourced or inhouse or its gold big iron or cloud computinhg doesn't make it good or bad because either way can be run poorly with the wrong administration.
Personally I think things should be done in house merely for moral issues bit business speaking an incompetent admin is going to mess up things whether he works for the outsource company or directly for you.
At this moment in time, there is not a single fusion reactor anywhere in the world that produces net energy.
As others have set JET did get fusion to have a net gain in energy output.
That said, they could only get it to go for a few seconds (or fractions of a second I can't remember) at a time so wasn't exactly a solution to the world's energy needs.
It's another to decontaminate the livingroom, car, Starbucks counter the guy stopped at for his coffee, etc, because he got liquid radioactive semiconductor on his fingers and wiped it on his pants.
These things are isostopes, not Chernobyl like reactors.
Otherwise terrorists would already be kidnapping Grandpa to cut his pacemaker out to make dirty bombs.
Yes, obviously if you break one open and stick it in your mouth, you aren't living healthy, but the same can be said about any battery.
Could be amusing for automatically writing in caps when you get ANGRY, and handy for running in oldskool FPS games that don't support the full analog range of the buttons - which could be easily supported right now in any game that already supports analog games controllers.
I'm thinking a game like Assasins Creed or Thief where you tap the key lightly and get a quick slash versus where you hit it hard and it does a powerful stab.
My bank doesn't do that anymore. They like to be "paperless" since electronic is cheap.
My bank(s) do that too but they only link to the statements rather than posting them in the email.
Which is retarded because it should say in the email that you should open your browser and type the following url in the url field because that closes an open hole for phishing.
*sigh* Until you teach everyone in the world to type the url or use a known good bookmark, email will never be a method to link to secure sites.
Interesting that inmates have access to computers and TV. I'm glad we pay for that for them while normal citizens are having a hard time finding a job...
Considering most of them are in their for minor drug charges and are no more evil than you or me...
And that most of the tax money goes into the hands of the private corporations running the prisons and use the inmates for sub minimum wage labor at a profit which none goes back to the tax payers.
So simple solution... Reform the laws and decriminalize these minor offenses and revoke the contracts with the private corporations running these prisions.
How many times did someone asked you about a certain subject, and you can't quite figure out how much you should talk?
Until you've adequately brought across your points and that you've provided enough material that you think the audience has understood the topic.
Giving someone an arbitrary 15 minutes to talk or 500 word limit may not be able to get across what they really want to get across to the audience.
Some topics may only need 10 minutes and 250 words of course, but sometimes in order for the audience to understand in any great detail we need an hour lecture and a 50 page handout.
If a student can't create a convincing and well thought out essay without such a restriction, then I would think that it shows a flaw in their writing ability.
Why would an arbitrary word count show how skillful an essay writer talents are?
Why just not make them write a haiku and be done with it?
I mean some people can write great 1000 page novels while others who good at short stories are horrible at it and vice versa. Arbitrarily confining it to any particular container regardless of subject really doesn't make sense.
Slashdot Mirror
I logged over 500 hours developing that game and haven't received anything for it.
Well... What's it called?
I mean obviously if you don't name drop exactly what the game everywhere no one will buy it ;)
Tell me, what are the intentions of the people who those drones are targetting? How many innocents have those men killed this year? How many weddings, funerals, markets, and religious services have they bombed in service to their god of hate and blood? The patriotism of Americans is small potatoes compared to the fervor of these extremists. It's even smaller potatoes compared to =any= country's imperialism over 70 years ago.
We were the ones writing them checks in the 1980's simply because we didn't want a secular yet communist Afghanistan.
Oh... And we overthrew a legally elected socialist government in Iran in the 1950's only to have who we wanted in power replaced with a fanatical religious government and then we paid money and gave weapons to their enemy in Iraq who turned on us with those own weapons we sold them...
And we still prop up a non-democratic kingdom with money and weapons down there who represses any political dissent with prison and whippings! No wonder they hate us!
AND YOU SAY WE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE MIDDLE EAST! We've been mucking around down there for over 50 years!
i guess you forget the allies raids over Germany.
Just a note, the civilian bombing of German cities did little in the way of affecting German industrial output. German industrial out actually was at it wartime peak 1944 and was still increasing until 1945 during the most intense bombing raids of the war.
The industrial output actually only decreased when the factories were over run by ground troops.
Compared to the *millions* killed by the other participants in that war.
Dropping the a-bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima is akin to dropping nerve gas on Frankfurt and Hamburg. We could have done it, but it would not made a great difference in the military effort of the German war machine.
One could argue that that Japanese military leaders could have written off the civilian loss in those two cities (after all they lost more due to the firebombing of Tokyo) but were more inclined to surrender after hearing the news of the loss of 2 million Japanese troops due to the Soviet invasion in Manchuria.
At that point there was no longer any standing Japanese army worth mentioning nor a Navy to ship them back to Japan for a last ditch defense. So in order to save face they most likely used the pre-tense of the bombs to surrender to the Americans rather than the Soviets.
To be fair... Truman had ordered the bomb dropped without coming to understand what it was or could do (radiological wise). The people who advised him on the matter had no understanding either other than suggesting it as to bring about a quick end to the war for political reasons (namely the Stalin's response leading up to the Postdam conference to how he was going to treat Eastern Europe and the overtones that the Allies might be next on the agenda)
Admiral Nimitz and General Eisenhower were actually critical of its use because they believed the war had already been one in Japan as Japan had no navy as the suicidal attack of the Yamato and that 6 months into 1946 Japan would be critical of food supplies and would simply surrender due to the naval embargo.
They're bad because one of the reasons people, soldiers included, don't like war is due to the risk of being killed.
I've heard this argument time and time again, but its plain BS
If it were true Europe would have stopped at WWI and not did WWII.
People don't mind dying... In fact if you read the memoirs of most WWII US, German, Japanese, Soviet soldiers they have no fear of death after a while and seeing dead bodies doesn't even phase them. Any grunt can have the fear of death beat out of them. Heck, nationalism, religion, and dogma can make any farm boy pick up a bayonet screaming "Urah!" For the motherland/fatherland!", "for the emperor!" into a hail of machine gun fire.
That said... Making people kill each other is a bit harder when it is in person.
Germans used to have a problem with it so badly that they issued orders that anyone caught with a cold gun during a firefight was to be court marshaled in 1945 and summarily hanged or shot. I know there was a study that shown many US soldiers did not fire on the enemy as much as originally thought.
Anyways... Wars will still be fought because politicians will order them and people will still follow them weather or not they have to do it with robots or wooden spears.
Or have you any evidence that genocide and war was any less worse during the Greek and Roman times than now?
...given the serious topic, but this is IMHO another typical case of American fantasy: a war without casualties.
I'm pretty sure that was the intent of all inventions developed for wartime use.
From the spear, the longbow, musket, and machine gun... The intent and purpose was to give your side the benefit of being able to put the enema at "arms length" (so to say) and put you on the side less likely to die.
I mean having people kamikaze their aircraft into targets might be more cost effective in the short term, but the point of making weapons was to kill the other side more effectively by putting your side at less risk.
Just a note...
Its really been the US doctrine since WWII whereas the Russians, Japanese, and Germans generals would still order suicidal attacks on targets for bravery where the US forces would just bomb the crap out of it, shell it with more artillery than needed, call in more air strikes, and then have the infantry move in forward with tanks in front of them. The tactics work.
The machine's software should not be capable of triggering the release of that much radiation; any change in the radiation levels should require some kind of hardware interaction. Even an idiot who did not RTFM should not be able to cause harm with the machine.
I'm not sure what you mean by this? Most hardware is software these days.
Or are you talking about having a red button with a safety lock on it that has to be pushed in order to work?
Either way, people still bypass hardware solutions.
In other words, money is information. So what sets its limits? The stuff that it represents. Which nowadays is most commonly... more information!
Good point. I suppose if one wanted you could put an infinity symbol in people's balances of their accounts and just say they can't withdraw physical paper money anymore.
Though I don't think that would work for inflation...
and no exponential growth can go on for just a comparatively very short time. This should be self-evident, but for some reason, people seem to ignore that. Especially people who call themselves journalists or economists.
As far as we know the expansion of the universe and entropy will go on forever.
I doubt that is what you mean though...
Self contained systems do have limits unless of course they are self recursive and halo-graphic.
Like fractals and information...
Economies and ecosystems are not.
Well you could have just linked the Wikipedia article instead of copying and pasting it ;)
Solar is great as a suppliment, but you need to still provide a steady, reliable base load to the public as a whole. Some buildings stay in operation 24 hours a day, and I don't just mean businesses: hospitals, police stations for example.
To be fair, using solar power on home rooftops most likely won't take people off the grid any time soon but it will mitigate the power grid strain they do provide so that the large facilities like hospitals and factories (who can't reasonably use solar power for the needs) won't suffer during the summer noon brownouts caused by AC grid strain.
Maybe one day my electric bill will go down and I can leave all of my computers running... By then SRP will have raised the rates anyway.
See. This is why I still prefer a solar revolution than a nuclear one.
There is nothing wrong with nuclear and I'll be happy the day they get a viable fusion reactor up and running, but you still have to pay someone for that power and generally utility companies always raise rates rather than lower them because they are public companies.
The only way to offset that is to make your own power and the government isn't going to let me build my own breeder reactor anytime soon so I'm more likely to either lower my rates or get off the grid with solar.
And then I don't worry about the grid going out either.
Seriously...WTF is wrong with people...why don't they consider nuclear power?
I don't see anything wrong with it, but Uncle Sam won't let me build a breeder reactor in my back yard and go off grid.
I think the real benefit of solar power is that it removes you from the already over taxed grid which is more likely to still fail even if we have more nuclear power in place.
If power is produced locally then you avoid having to use the grid and paying the power company in the first place.
The only way I could see it being fun is dreaming about winning big and fooling yourself into thinking it might happen.
Gambling sells hope and dreams.
Albeit false hope and delusional dreams but some people like that.
I mean I still play the office pool lotto even though I know I am more statistically more likely to die in a freak accident than win, but it gives us something to talk about "What would you do with your money?" around the office. I suppose the conversation is worth the $1.
Does this remind anyone of the Shadowrunner decks?
Maybe if I get this, Vuzix Wrap Eyewear, a neon green mohawk, and leather jacket I can start calling myself a "Decker" ;)
When I'm using my computer, I don't want to spend time fiddling with the OS and desktop environment. So I'm happy using Windows at work, and Mac OS X at home.
I don't know about you, but I often have to fiddle with both WinXP and Vista to get things to work.
I mean its not something a 30 second Google query couldn't fix, but issues with both the UAC and the auto rebooting on updates without asking or warning when running a full screen game basically made me go "UNGGGGGH!"
As far as fiddling with OS X... Not so much. I fiddled with the X11 to get it working the way I wanted out of the box.
Just like people lose their stuff on personal hard drives when not backed up, they will lose cloud data when not backed up. Both kinds of computing have merits, and long term persistence of data is not automatic with either.
Neither RAID or Cloud Computing is a backup solution. Its merely a way for more uptime and availability of data.
If by chance the user overwrites or deletes the data on a RAID or an online storage service... Then you've lost your data just the same as if the server crashed.
If you can't trust your outsourcing partner, replace them or bring the work in-house.
Trust? I don't think the upper management trusts local IT either.
Really, I don't think it matters who runs the servers or what they call them as long as it is run well.
Just because its outsourced or inhouse or its gold big iron or cloud computinhg doesn't make it good or bad because either way can be run poorly with the wrong administration.
Personally I think things should be done in house merely for moral issues bit business speaking an incompetent admin is going to mess up things whether he works for the outsource company or directly for you.
At this moment in time, there is not a single fusion reactor anywhere in the world that produces net energy.
As others have set JET did get fusion to have a net gain in energy output.
That said, they could only get it to go for a few seconds (or fractions of a second I can't remember) at a time so wasn't exactly a solution to the world's energy needs.
It's another to decontaminate the livingroom, car, Starbucks counter the guy stopped at for his coffee, etc, because he got liquid radioactive semiconductor on his fingers and wiped it on his pants.
These things are isostopes, not Chernobyl like reactors.
Otherwise terrorists would already be kidnapping Grandpa to cut his pacemaker out to make dirty bombs.
Yes, obviously if you break one open and stick it in your mouth, you aren't living healthy, but the same can be said about any battery.
Could be amusing for automatically writing in caps when you get ANGRY, and handy for running in oldskool FPS games that don't support the full analog range of the buttons - which could be easily supported right now in any game that already supports analog games controllers.
I'm thinking a game like Assasins Creed or Thief where you tap the key lightly and get a quick slash versus where you hit it hard and it does a powerful stab.
My bank doesn't do that anymore. They like to be "paperless" since electronic is cheap.
My bank(s) do that too but they only link to the statements rather than posting them in the email.
Which is retarded because it should say in the email that you should open your browser and type the following url in the url field because that closes an open hole for phishing.
*sigh* Until you teach everyone in the world to type the url or use a known good bookmark, email will never be a method to link to secure sites.
Interesting that inmates have access to computers and TV. I'm glad we pay for that for them while normal citizens are having a hard time finding a job...
Considering most of them are in their for minor drug charges and are no more evil than you or me...
And that most of the tax money goes into the hands of the private corporations running the prisons and use the inmates for sub minimum wage labor at a profit which none goes back to the tax payers.
So simple solution... Reform the laws and decriminalize these minor offenses and revoke the contracts with the private corporations running these prisions.
How many times did someone asked you about a certain subject, and you can't quite figure out how much you should talk?
Until you've adequately brought across your points and that you've provided enough material that you think the audience has understood the topic.
Giving someone an arbitrary 15 minutes to talk or 500 word limit may not be able to get across what they really want to get across to the audience.
Some topics may only need 10 minutes and 250 words of course, but sometimes in order for the audience to understand in any great detail we need an hour lecture and a 50 page handout.
If a student can't create a convincing and well thought out essay without such a restriction, then I would think that it shows a flaw in their writing ability.
Why would an arbitrary word count show how skillful an essay writer talents are?
Why just not make them write a haiku and be done with it?
I mean some people can write great 1000 page novels while others who good at short stories are horrible at it and vice versa. Arbitrarily confining it to any particular container regardless of subject really doesn't make sense.