I really appreciate your thoughtful reply. My response to your original post was a trifle insulting, for lack of a better word, and I want to thank you for the rare grace with which you responded.
I actually think you are correct in your assessment of the current state of private space flight. I also think you underestimate either the power of the profit motive in general or the perceived profit potential in space travel. It's not about tourism, but resources. The initial ventures may be touted for tourism, but I think that's a sideshow. The real money will come later, when Some Bright Lad figures out how to get something valuable from extraterrestial locations, e.g., the moon or Mars.
And I wish I'd had the decency to say it that way.
If you can use embedded tubes for cooling, you can use them for heating, as well. The problem with cold-weather gear is the extremities (that would be feet and hands). Gloves and boots with heat pumped from the torso might work.
I'm interested in any protective armor that I can wear under my civilian clothes, so that when I appear in my true identity as Havoxx, Lord of the Elements, my foes will scatter like vermin before me.
Skin-covering beachwear. It gets so hot at the beach wearing cords and flannel, and this NASA cooling technology sounds like the answer, to me.
Where NASA was in 1950 or so... It will be a while before this is safe enough for companies to ship people for small leaps above the atmosphere without getting sued out of existence at the first accident. [...] While I'm not a particular big fan of governements either, and not particularly the US's,
It's such prudent thinking like that kept your ancestors in Britain.
It's not 1950, and the knowledge required to design and build a space vehicle is no longer in the realm of research, but of engineering. For one thing, my Palm Pilot has many times more computing power than the computers onboard those spacecraft. And a single PC today has more computing power than NASA had for the Apollo missions.
Tourists can be told to sign a waiver:
This trip will cost more than it's worth. You won't get to see much or walk in space. You will probably be sick. There's no shopping. There's no Oprah. This vehicle will probably crash. If it crashes, there won't be any of your DNA left. The risk is yours.
By the way -- if you don't like our government, you're welcome not to move here. Leave the criticism to those who do.
That is so homocentric! They aren't dumb, it's just that their vast intelligence is focused on other things, like eating boots and anchors and stuff.
I think we should embrace our shark friends, and give them the love they never had as... little sharks. Then maybe they wouldn't eat us just for swimming around in their pantry.
It might be interesting to teach the sharks some tricks, like jumping through rings and doing neat flips and stuff. Man, I just love it when the dolphins do that at the zoo. Real heartwarming stuff. Might help the shark image, I'd bet.
But it would be really interesting if the sharks could learn to communicate with us using the technology. Not sure how it would work, but it would be great if the sharks were more than just droids.
He's not supplying his own honeypot servers, and didn't get the University to allow use of campus servers either? I'd think he could sell it to the IT group as a hardening exercise, since students would have to do full disclosure to get credit anyway.
Yup, just goes to show you that "smart" and "fool" aren't antonyms.
I saw plenty of nudie pics and porn as a child and I'm pretty well-adjusted as an adult.
Yeah, me too. Never saw the connection between sicko kiddie porn and being a pervert as an adult. Just a bunch of authoritarian mind control, if you ask me.
Well, now that the intros are over, can I sleep with your girlfriend? Got a cat? Can I watch it pee?
grand-parents right to express his opinion, any opinion, is bigger than any other right you have.
I wasn't talking about his right to his opinion in general. I was just talking about that particular expression of it, which I found ludicrous. He has a right to talk, and I have a right to tell him to shut up. He doesn't have to listen.
The issue is that Google was indexing photos owned by Perfect 10 but made available on pirate sites that had stolen and profited from the prurient material. Another point was that some of the rip-off artists were Google AdSense users, and therefore Google had actually made money, in a roundabout way, from the infringement of Perfect 10's copyrights. The judge also determined that Google's mobile image search was cutting into Perfect 10's business, since the mobile "thumbnail images are essentially the same size and of the same quality as the reduced-size images that (Perfect 10) licenses to Fonestarz," a UK mobile firm, for a subscription-based cell phone service.
Whether the images were pirated or not is not Google's problem. They should inform Google (who would doubtless take down the images) and go after the pirates. Google has no way of knowing who in the slimy world of online porn is the copyright owner, who is licensed, who is using stuff under fair use, and who is a "pirate".
The judge made a mistake. Google's thumbnails were not the same thumbnails. They were a different expression of the same idea. Sleazy, but not illegal.
I believe government exists to defend the liberty of its citizens. Got me? I'm a conservative libertarian, no caps. That means that while I more-or-less agree with the Libertarians, I don't march lockstep with anybody.
But I used to. I used to march lockstep with my fellow Marines, wanting only a chance to use my rifle, or its bayonet, on some terrorist bent on destroying all I hold dear.
I value my privacy, too. But there's a difference between what I do in private (or even a semi-public area like a restaurant or pseudonominous posting on a blog) and what I do in public.
If someone stands on the corner shouting "Down with America! We will blow up your orphanages, unholy capitalist swine!", I'd like to know who he is and whether he's actually in contact with anyone else. If there's no "we", then he's just a nutcase and can be told so and otherwise ignored.
But if that fellow is in contact with others doing the same thing, I'd like to know about it. I'd like the government to defend my liberty by infringing his.
Similarly, if he's smart enough just to be in contact with his terrorist buddies, I'd like the government to know it so he doesn't get a chance to blow up Disneyworld or something.
I want the government to sift through all publicly available information to find people planning or engaged in activities which would cause me or another 2,966 of my countrymen to be deprived of life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness.
So take your "strike", and your call for people to interfere with government's only legitimate role, and... keep it to yourself.
China seeks not allow its citizens even to know what privacy means, and puts journalists in jail for using the web to speak out.
Something over 90% of the email I get is falsely titled advertising from people I've never met and will never meet trying to sell me products I don't want. And so:
The communications companies want to double-bill for bandwidth.
There is an active market for system exploits, bot armies, and malware-driven popup ads.
The U.S. wants to keep DNS root server rights to itself. This is not such a big deal to me, but other people got worked up over it.
With all of that, the EU wanting to make sure data is kept, not forever, but just long enough for most normal criminal investigations to take place doesn't bother me much. If they did other stuff with it, that would be a problem, but just making sure it's there seems prudent.
He's trying to say that he has culture because people pay money for it.
No, he didn't try to say that he has culture. He was trying to say that his country's culture is valuable, and as evidence of that said that other people wanted a taste of it.
"You have just proven his point - you have no culture, and apparently no idea how to debate."
(The "you" in "you have no culture" may have been either singular or plural, but I'll assume the former. My points would apply in either case.)
There are two related meanings of "culture" at play here: [1] A group's language, religion, art, and customs and [2] familiarity with and sensitivity to the fine points of the culture[1] of your own and other societies.
Saying someone "has no culture" is either a vacuous slap at the entire society in which the person lives ("you have no culture[1]"), or it's a statement that the person lacks culture[2]. The GP was asking about culture[1], not culture[2].
So that means that you, writer of parent, have taken the word "culture" out of its culture[1] context and hurled it as an insult, "no culture[2]". Nothing in GP suggests a lack of civility or learning -- just the opposite, in fact, as he displayed some knowledge of another group's activities. You used that accusation as a springboard to claim he lacked debating technique.
He, at least, dealt with the content of the message to which he was responding. You merely insulted him, while ironically posturing as a debater.
While I more-or-less agree with you, there's a subtlety you may be missing:
If they want to really shake things up, teach them the values that made America be able to unify and work together to become an industrial power.
The values that made America be able to unify came out of centuries of darkness in Europe, followed by something called the Enlightenment. Without that movement, the ideas of natural law, the rule of law, and limited government could not have taken root. That's not quite putting it right, but it's close enough.
We are unified, to the extent that we are, by a cultural viewpoint drawn from that historical context. Africans, by and large, see themselves not as displaced Europeans but as the indigenous people working to undo the wrongs done by European colonialism. At any rate, they mostly don't have that historical and cultural context.
Personally, I hope the world never gets along. It would take about six minutes for someone to take the over the whole thing, without so much as a [air quote] giant laser [/air quote].
is you. Your time, your attention, and your approval. You appear to know all of that, but sometimes we get caught up in being good little consumers and buying "tools" when we should be focusing on the tool wielder.
With kids aged 18, 15, and 14 I have some experience in this. I can view with 20/20 hindsight the mistakes I made and the triumphs, such as they were. Without exception my failures have involved taking my eyes off of them for just a little while.
Play with them. Make them earn everything but love (and what you're required by law to give them). Don't be afraid to punish bad behavior. Don't reward tantrums, whining, or other manipulation, but do reward reasoned persistence.
Reward honesty, so much that if the has a "cherry tree" moment, give praise and forget the misdeed. Punish dishonesty in every form.
Punishment should fit the misdeed, and should be designed to benefit the family in the long run. Reserve corporal punishment for "you ain't the boss of me!". It will come. Whack 'em. They'll get over it.
If you give them a computer, make it known that you can lock them out of it at your slightest whim.
I know this sounds like astroturf, but that's the first site I've gone to that actually listed things near my little town.
I wanted to make more money, but I didn't want to be away from my growing family. I went to indeed.com, and within minutes found a job making $8000 per month, part time without leaving home!
If your opinion is responsible for contributing to the deaths and wounding of American soldiers, our sons and our daughters who are fighting this war for us, as well as innocent Iraqi civilians
There are worse things than death. Living under slavery, or under a dictator, is worse than death. If we fail to defend and advance the ideals of liberty and justice, our children will know that all too well.
Our sons and daughters who have volunteered to defend and advance the cause of liberty know that it puts them in mortal peril to do so. Rather than acknowledge the awesome risk they are taking and applaud them for it, you choose to label one phase of the struggle as unjust.
If you had ever been in the military you'd know that with a divided mind, a soldier will fail. Without the belief in the rightness of his cause, he cannot endure the hardship of war. When soldiers are weak, they die in greater numbers and fail to accomplish their mission.
On the other hand, when our enemies hear about a U.S. divided on the war, they are emboldened. Their cause is winnable, they think. That causes them to go on strapping bombs to their chests and blowing up fruitstands, rather than undertaking a peaceful path.
The blood of our soldiers and Marines is on the hands of those who for cynical political expediency oppose their mission.
, if your opinion caused you to vote for George W. Bush, then we do not have to tolerate it because your opinion is, quite simply, wrong, both morally and according to most reasonable standards.
Huh? Talk about losing sight of your own ideals. Tolerance, as long as everyone agrees.
In response to your assertion that George W. Bush is doing a heck of a job, here is a story from Senator Joe Biden about visiting the white house:
Joe Biden? Come on. The man has only secondhand acquaintance with the truth. He's a pompous, arrogant liar. I know you can find someone better than him to quote.
The Presidency is a position much more easily critiqued than occupied, and Mr. Biden is still bitter about his own failed aspirations.
Find another source. Surely there's a student newspaper, a DNC press release, or a deposed dictator out there who would offer evidence supporting your cause.
I support the Administration. I think Mr. Bush is doing a fine job. No, I'm not joking. I don't think he's Mt. Rushmore material, but I do think the majority opinion of him here is paranoid idiocy tempered only by urban liberal orthodoxy.
As for Slashdot, all opinions are tolerated except those that are conservative, americentric or at odds with the popularly accepted view in a given scientific field.
In other words, if you believe as you suggest that Slashdot is tolerant of all well-expressed views, you may be suffering from craniorectal inversion.
January 24 on C-SPAN there were hearings on Senator Smith's Broadcast Flag bill.
The RIAA spokesman said the Broadcast Flag was needed because with HD radio (which is just digitial radio), now people could record music off the air without paying for it. They want to stop that. They put forth the CD ripping argument, too, saying there was nothing to prevent people from copying songs willy-nilly and sharing them, denying royalties to the struggling artists.
The Senators didn't like his view at all. It seems that many of them have IPods, and like to grab songs, interviews, and other audio so they can listen to them on the plane! They like their Dean Martin as much as the kids like their Ice Masta Jam.
I was pleased to see liberals and conservatives both on the side of fair use, rather than on the side of corporate profit. I think they've been getting mail.
Slashdot Mirror
While I appreciate your loyalty, nameless one, it's "Havoxx, Lord of the Elements", never "Lord Havoxx". Let's watch that.
I really appreciate your thoughtful reply. My response to your original post was a trifle insulting, for lack of a better word, and I want to thank you for the rare grace with which you responded.
I actually think you are correct in your assessment of the current state of private space flight. I also think you underestimate either the power of the profit motive in general or the perceived profit potential in space travel. It's not about tourism, but resources. The initial ventures may be touted for tourism, but I think that's a sideshow. The real money will come later, when Some Bright Lad figures out how to get something valuable from extraterrestial locations, e.g., the moon or Mars.
And I wish I'd had the decency to say it that way.
It's such prudent thinking like that kept your ancestors in Britain.
It's not 1950, and the knowledge required to design and build a space vehicle is no longer in the realm of research, but of engineering. For one thing, my Palm Pilot has many times more computing power than the computers onboard those spacecraft. And a single PC today has more computing power than NASA had for the Apollo missions.
Tourists can be told to sign a waiver:
By the way -- if you don't like our government, you're welcome not to move here. Leave the criticism to those who do.
I was going for funny, actually. Sharks doing flips. Sharks not doing flips, but eating the podium instead.
... or at least, up to the wrist." I guess I should have.
I wanted to end it with something like "You'd go through a lot of trainers that way
That is so homocentric! They aren't dumb, it's just that their vast intelligence is focused on other things, like eating boots and anchors and stuff.
I think we should embrace our shark friends, and give them the love they never had as ... little sharks. Then maybe they wouldn't eat us just for swimming around in their pantry.
It might be interesting to teach the sharks some tricks, like jumping through rings and doing neat flips and stuff. Man, I just love it when the dolphins do that at the zoo. Real heartwarming stuff. Might help the shark image, I'd bet.
But it would be really interesting if the sharks could learn to communicate with us using the technology. Not sure how it would work, but it would be great if the sharks were more than just droids.
He's not supplying his own honeypot servers, and didn't get the University to allow use of campus servers either? I'd think he could sell it to the IT group as a hardening exercise, since students would have to do full disclosure to get credit anyway.
Yup, just goes to show you that "smart" and "fool" aren't antonyms.
It was just a joke.
Yeah, me too. Never saw the connection between sicko kiddie porn and being a pervert as an adult. Just a bunch of authoritarian mind control, if you ask me.
Well, now that the intros are over, can I sleep with your girlfriend? Got a cat? Can I watch it pee?
I wasn't talking about his right to his opinion in general. I was just talking about that particular expression of it, which I found ludicrous. He has a right to talk, and I have a right to tell him to shut up. He doesn't have to listen.
Whether the images were pirated or not is not Google's problem. They should inform Google (who would doubtless take down the images) and go after the pirates. Google has no way of knowing who in the slimy world of online porn is the copyright owner, who is licensed, who is using stuff under fair use, and who is a "pirate".
The judge made a mistake. Google's thumbnails were not the same thumbnails. They were a different expression of the same idea. Sleazy, but not illegal.
I believe government exists to defend the liberty of its citizens. Got me? I'm a conservative libertarian, no caps. That means that while I more-or-less agree with the Libertarians, I don't march lockstep with anybody.
... keep it to yourself.
But I used to. I used to march lockstep with my fellow Marines, wanting only a chance to use my rifle, or its bayonet, on some terrorist bent on destroying all I hold dear.
I value my privacy, too. But there's a difference between what I do in private (or even a semi-public area like a restaurant or pseudonominous posting on a blog) and what I do in public.
If someone stands on the corner shouting "Down with America! We will blow up your orphanages, unholy capitalist swine!", I'd like to know who he is and whether he's actually in contact with anyone else. If there's no "we", then he's just a nutcase and can be told so and otherwise ignored.
But if that fellow is in contact with others doing the same thing, I'd like to know about it. I'd like the government to defend my liberty by infringing his.
Similarly, if he's smart enough just to be in contact with his terrorist buddies, I'd like the government to know it so he doesn't get a chance to blow up Disneyworld or something.
I want the government to sift through all publicly available information to find people planning or engaged in activities which would cause me or another 2,966 of my countrymen to be deprived of life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness.
So take your "strike", and your call for people to interfere with government's only legitimate role, and
With all of that, the EU wanting to make sure data is kept, not forever, but just long enough for most normal criminal investigations to take place doesn't bother me much. If they did other stuff with it, that would be a problem, but just making sure it's there seems prudent.
No, he didn't try to say that he has culture. He was trying to say that his country's culture is valuable, and as evidence of that said that other people wanted a taste of it.
You made the same mistake again.
"You have just proven his point - you have no culture, and apparently no idea how to debate."
(The "you" in "you have no culture" may have been either singular or plural, but I'll assume the former. My points would apply in either case.)
There are two related meanings of "culture" at play here: [1] A group's language, religion, art, and customs and [2] familiarity with and sensitivity to the fine points of the culture[1] of your own and other societies.
Saying someone "has no culture" is either a vacuous slap at the entire society in which the person lives ("you have no culture[1]"), or it's a statement that the person lacks culture[2]. The GP was asking about culture[1], not culture[2].
So that means that you, writer of parent, have taken the word "culture" out of its culture[1] context and hurled it as an insult, "no culture[2]". Nothing in GP suggests a lack of civility or learning -- just the opposite, in fact, as he displayed some knowledge of another group's activities. You used that accusation as a springboard to claim he lacked debating technique.
He, at least, dealt with the content of the message to which he was responding. You merely insulted him, while ironically posturing as a debater.
The values that made America be able to unify came out of centuries of darkness in Europe, followed by something called the Enlightenment. Without that movement, the ideas of natural law, the rule of law, and limited government could not have taken root. That's not quite putting it right, but it's close enough.
We are unified, to the extent that we are, by a cultural viewpoint drawn from that historical context. Africans, by and large, see themselves not as displaced Europeans but as the indigenous people working to undo the wrongs done by European colonialism. At any rate, they mostly don't have that historical and cultural context.
Personally, I hope the world never gets along. It would take about six minutes for someone to take the over the whole thing, without so much as a [air quote] giant laser [/air quote].
The most important thing you can give a give a kid is a happy mom. Don't get so wrapped up in the kid that you stop treating your wife like a woman.
Don't get divorced, unless there's blood. Divorce sucks.
And if you do get divorced, don't remarry until the kids move out. Stepfamilies suck.
is you. Your time, your attention, and your approval. You appear to know all of that, but sometimes we get caught up in being good little consumers and buying "tools" when we should be focusing on the tool wielder.
With kids aged 18, 15, and 14 I have some experience in this. I can view with 20/20 hindsight the mistakes I made and the triumphs, such as they were. Without exception my failures have involved taking my eyes off of them for just a little while.
Play with them. Make them earn everything but love (and what you're required by law to give them). Don't be afraid to punish bad behavior. Don't reward tantrums, whining, or other manipulation, but do reward reasoned persistence.
Reward honesty, so much that if the has a "cherry tree" moment, give praise and forget the misdeed. Punish dishonesty in every form.
Punishment should fit the misdeed, and should be designed to benefit the family in the long run. Reserve corporal punishment for "you ain't the boss of me!". It will come. Whack 'em. They'll get over it.
If you give them a computer, make it known that you can lock them out of it at your slightest whim.
I know this sounds like astroturf, but that's the first site I've gone to that actually listed things near my little town.
I wanted to make more money, but I didn't want to be away from my growing family. I went to indeed.com, and within minutes found a job making $8000 per month, part time without leaving home!
Just kidding with that last paragraph. Nice site.
There are worse things than death. Living under slavery, or under a dictator, is worse than death. If we fail to defend and advance the ideals of liberty and justice, our children will know that all too well.
Our sons and daughters who have volunteered to defend and advance the cause of liberty know that it puts them in mortal peril to do so. Rather than acknowledge the awesome risk they are taking and applaud them for it, you choose to label one phase of the struggle as unjust.
If you had ever been in the military you'd know that with a divided mind, a soldier will fail. Without the belief in the rightness of his cause, he cannot endure the hardship of war. When soldiers are weak, they die in greater numbers and fail to accomplish their mission.
On the other hand, when our enemies hear about a U.S. divided on the war, they are emboldened. Their cause is winnable, they think. That causes them to go on strapping bombs to their chests and blowing up fruitstands, rather than undertaking a peaceful path. The blood of our soldiers and Marines is on the hands of those who for cynical political expediency oppose their mission.
Huh? Talk about losing sight of your own ideals. Tolerance, as long as everyone agrees.
Joe Biden? Come on. The man has only secondhand acquaintance with the truth. He's a pompous, arrogant liar. I know you can find someone better than him to quote.The Presidency is a position much more easily critiqued than occupied, and Mr. Biden is still bitter about his own failed aspirations.
Find another source. Surely there's a student newspaper, a DNC press release, or a deposed dictator out there who would offer evidence supporting your cause.
I support the Administration. I think Mr. Bush is doing a fine job. No, I'm not joking. I don't think he's Mt. Rushmore material, but I do think the majority opinion of him here is paranoid idiocy tempered only by urban liberal orthodoxy.
As for Slashdot, all opinions are tolerated except those that are conservative, americentric or at odds with the popularly accepted view in a given scientific field.
In other words, if you believe as you suggest that Slashdot is tolerant of all well-expressed views, you may be suffering from craniorectal inversion.
Like most other high school dropouts, he'll wind up spending most of his days in jail.
And in fact, RP got it wrong. His basic point, that they were first trying to stop doing harm, may have been correct, though.
January 24 on C-SPAN there were hearings on Senator Smith's Broadcast Flag bill.
The RIAA spokesman said the Broadcast Flag was needed because with HD radio
(which is just digitial radio), now people could record music off the air
without paying for it. They want to stop that. They put forth the CD ripping argument, too, saying there was nothing to prevent people from copying songs willy-nilly and sharing them, denying royalties to the struggling artists.
The Senators didn't like his view at all. It seems that many of them have
IPods, and like to grab songs, interviews, and other audio so they can listen to
them on the plane! They like their Dean Martin as much as the kids like their Ice Masta Jam.
I was pleased to see liberals and conservatives both on the side of fair use,
rather than on the side of corporate profit. I think they've been getting mail.