The Geneva convention was set to clearly divide militaries from civilians. If there is a double-standard in there, is it that States agreed to follow these rules but not the rebels.
You can't be serious. There hasn't been a functioning government in Afghanistan for years. Who exactly did you expect to sign? The literacy rate in Afghanistan is 28%. How many of them do you think have even heard of Geneva?
If you are wearing a military uniform, using an aircraft with military marking, and target enemy militaries, you are doing war.
If you disguise yourself as a civilian, you are a spy or a terrorist, and outside of the convention.
And that is very convenient for you to say, speaking from a position of strength. How did you expect the weak to fight back? Face to face? Would you do that against a vastly superior foe? Your position, or course, is just another example of a double standard. If we are ever going to end this ongoing cycle of war, we are going to have to come to grips with how we are viewed from around the world. Victory in this War on Terror requires winning hearts and minds, and that cannot happen if there is no sense of even-handedness or justice, regardless of what the Convention says. I in no way condone terrorism, but a lasting peace is going to require a much broader view of the problem than you are advocating.
Although completely unfair, your Afghani rebel is free to openly charge to Vegas in his non-existent plane, wearing his non-existent uniform to kill the remote pilot.
My Afghani rebel? Go fuck yourself.
But he cannot cowardly hide behind a disguise to kill. Maybe unfair to non-States, but those are the rules.
And what would you call piloting a flying killing machine by remote control from thousands of miles away? Heroic?
Sure, they can try to kill the pilot in Vegas... but that's a mainland murder and that's a whole lot easier to solve and capture them here.
So, let me get this straight. If a pilot kills them anonymously with drones from thousands of miles away that's war, but if they somehow get to Vegas and kill that drone pilot it's murder? Huh. My double-standard sense is tingling.
You presume way too much. I was a reservist for 10 years, and have known lots of soldiers, young and old. I have a friend serving in Haiti -- surely not the happiest place -- right now. If you think that I don't value my friends who serve, you are way off base. I do, however, deeply resent that people are being sent to wage war in far off lands for dubious reasons.
Most soldiers in a war zone are just regular folks caught up by circumstance. The hero label is applied at the behest of powerful people for their own reasons. Perhaps that is something you ought to think about while you tend your lawn.
You know that the WWW is only a PART of the Internet?
As in: The USA is just a PART of the world.
You know that the Inernet was little-known outside of universities before the Web? You also know that Tim is British, right? And that he invented the WWW while at CERN? You know, the European Organization for Nuclear Research?
Reducing this to some problem you have with the USA only exposes your own ignorance and predjudice.
Are there really that few good people in the world these days?
Maybe. Or at least they are getting harder to identify.
One problem is that the word hero is over-used and abused. For example, anyone from "our side" who gets killed in war is a hero. Sorry -- and this is not a popular position these days -- but that is wrong, despite the families need to justify their horrendous sacrifice. Furthermore, it only perpetuates the never-ending cycle of war we seem to have gotten ourselves into. We don't want to "dishour" their sacrifice by refusing to sacrifice more of our youth.
Nelson Mandella is one of my personal heroes. But would he survive as a hero in this day and age? A lot of effort is spent trying to tear people of accomplishment down. Nobody is perfect.
I have always thought that Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World-Wide-Web, is deserving of a Peace Prize. Communication is the foundation of peace, and it is hard do identify another individual who has done so much for world-wide communications in recent history.
Awarding the Peace Prize to a thing? Ugh. Don't get me started. Awarding the Prize to organizations is silly enough already.
In addition to the defendant's delayed disclosures, Beckerman, defendant's counsel, adopted an unduly contentious approach throughout this litigation (albeit the same can be said of plaintiff's counsel). For that reason alone, his request for attorney's fees and costs is not only denied but is also inappropriate.
Why inappropriate? What does Mr. Beckerman's approach have to do with whether or not his attourney's fees -- presumably to be paid by Ms. Lindor -- are to be covered? Surely whether or not the fees are to be paid is a matter of law, and not at the personal discretion of the judge. That the judge is taking out his frustrations with Mr. Beckerman on Ms. Lindor seems wholly inappropriate to me. What the hell is it with the legal system that results in a defendant having to pay when the incorporated plaintiff requests dismissal of the case?
'not to go to the moon in this decade and not do the other things, not because they are hard, but because not doing so is easy'
A very sad, yet accurate, commentary. I consider the moon landing to be humankind's single greatest achievement. If the most prosperous nation on Earth is not going to lead the charge back to the moon and on to Mars, then greatness is probably behind us.
Perhaps we don't need to go to the moon or Mars, but doing so serves a very important purpose. As has been the case throughout history, traveling to that "undiscovered country" demonstrates that humankind is capable of great things if only we put our minds to it. The human condition seem much more hopeless without it.
Hackingbear, we get that you are upset by this. However, this kind of trolling is not helpful, and only serves to undermine discussion of other topics -- topics that also happen to be of interest to the rest of us. Try this again instead. But don't be surprised if your story gets rejected with the very first link to a page written in Chinese.
No matter how much people hate Microsoft, comments like this may me despise the free software movement.
And comments like this make me despise Microsoft shills. Let's pick apart the argument and see what holds muster.
Somehow, i have this idea that MS providing 50,000 jobs, Microsoft funneling BILLIONS into research and believe it or not, Microsoft making some great products is a *GOOD* thing.
Your presumption here is that these 50,000 jobs, research funding and products would not exist without Microsoft. That's not correct. Microsoft was convicted of abusing their monopoly power which was used to put competitors out of business -- competitors that right now would be employing people, doing research, and producing products. It is generally accepted around here that Mircosoft held back the advancement of IT for some years. Only when Firefox came on the scene did Microsoft start developing IE again. And we should be thankful for this? Sheesh.
The FSF has its merits and should do more to be a leader of what MS could do rather than dividing the community into believers or non believers for all the wrong reasons.
I have never understood the hate-on some people have for Stallman and the FSF. Stallman's accomplishments are really amazing. He's no doubt a mad genius -- but still a genius despite his eccentricity. What he has to say is almost always +5 interesting, whether or not I agree with it or not. It's too bad he doesn't contribute to slashdot.
As far as dividing the community into believers and non-believers, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches".
So, there is plenty of blame to be placed on both sides of the problem. Or is this to be excused as good business in Microsoft's case?
As for codeplex itself, there is some amazing projects in there and i doubt MS is gonna piss away the effort. THey're just like google in many ways with their online presence where they test the waters and see if it sticks, but that *IS* business my friends.
The GP cautions us not to get caught up in the hype. That seems quite sensible given what you just said.
I used to hand out notes for my lectures, but then stopped doing it. Students fall asleep in class if there is no physical activity, and the act of note-taking is very important for keeping the brain engaged -- particularly in a mathematical class. When I first started at the University I was very idealistic and thought I was going to change the way teaching was done. The hard lesson was that there is a reason why professors use chalk and blackboard. It works.
The one thing I don't understand is, why don't we actually see MORE breaches in data security than we do now? I mean like real deal, big time, Italian Job / Oceans 11 type stuff. Yeah a little crime here and there, ok. But with IT pervading every major monetary transaction, people in the know could essentially steal an infinite amount of money.
What we learned during the 2008 financial crisis is that there are plenty of ways for crooks to steal an infinite amount of money legally.
The dead-salmon study has been rejected for publication several times, so I wouldn't take it to discredit the fMRI technique in any way. Some research papers are just plain wrong, or written by the uninformed.
My point is that the fonts in OpenOffice (and elsewhere) are a real stumbling block. Most of the software I use is F/OSS, but when it comes to printing stuff out, it has to look professional. Use Pages, Word, etc. Whatever floats your boat.
I am curious, though. How was PDF output from Pages so unmanageable compared to the others? PDF was designed precisely to allow platform-independent documents, so I'm surprised to hear that Pages (perhaps all of OSX?) creates unmanageable pdfs for you.
Latex has its own font issues too. If you are using the default, then the fact it was typeset in latex is obvious. My opinion is that the medium should not get in between the reader and the information on the page. So, I use Pages for sending letters, and latex for publishing more complex documents since publishers provide their own stylesheets which use nice fonts.
This raises the question: what made you dump an open source app you were using?
Fonts. The default fonts for OpenOffice look awful. With Pages (word processor on my Mac), my documents look beautiful with no fuss. I don't require a thousand different features, either.
This page shows the Antarctic ozone history. You can see that there is only a hint of recovery in the past few years, so to say it has been improving since the 1987 Montreal Protocol isn't quite correct. Chemical depletion of the ozone layer is mostly a polar issue, and looking at global ozone trends can be misleading. For example, global ozone is also governed by mid-latitude dynamics. The dynamics of the tropopause (the boundary between the ozone-rich stratosphere and lower atmosphere) is important, and there are some indications of change in stratosphere-troposphere exchange in recent years that is perhaps related to climate.
I'll bite, troll, but only because you have somehow been modded "insightful".
As in any science, there are things we understand well, and those that we don't. A good example is gravity: we can't properly explain it -- there is no quantum theory of gravity -- yet nobody doubts the evidence of it's existence.
Yes, CO2 is important for life on Earth. In fact, the planet would be inhospitably cold without it: CO2 keeps the atmosphere warm, which is something we understand from Physics (specifically, radiative transfer). Measurements show that CO2 has risen dramatically since the industrial revolution, and this can only lead to further warming. No credible scientist that disputes this, and the question really amounts to "how much warming will there be?". For doubled CO2 alone, the warming is expected to be about 2 K. That part is not in dispute. Feedbacks (e.g., the additional uptake of water vapour in the warmer atmosphere) are predicted to amplify the warming to somewhere between 4 and 6 K. This is where the uncertainties lay.
In case you think that 2, 4 or 6 Kelvin isn't a big deal, please understand that the difference in temperatures between now and the last ice age is something like 6 K. Furthermore, the change is expected to occur on a 100 year time scale, rather than the thousand-year timescales of changes past. Insofar as we are dependent on nature for our survival as a species, this poses a real problem: ecosystems have great difficulty adapting so quickly.
Ultimately, climate change will care very little about your willful ignorance.
They seem to concentrate on the userland experience..
Not a bad idea.
There are a variety of kernel issues (think wireless drivers and other hardware support) that have a major impact on the userland experience. I'm not about to say where Canonical should invest their time -- there are more than enough issues to go around, and it isn't shameful for them to concentrate elsewhere as the GP implied -- but what happens with kernel development certainly impacts the Ubuntu userland.
I think that Lenovo is using an argument similar to what Apple uses to prevent Mac clones. Apple
requires acceptance of a software EULA when you "install the software or set up the product".
Apple sued clone-maker Psystar, who are now bankrupt. We discussed Open Tech's approach last year, but their Web site is now vacant. Maybe they moved it here, but this site does not have anything to say about OS X. So, it is not entirely clear to me that Lenovo can't win this argument -- Apple has been very successful with it -- even given that "...MS insists on having a separate EULA between it and you, [and] its product can't be considered an intrinsic part of Lenovo".
Slashdot Mirror
You can't be serious. There hasn't been a functioning government in Afghanistan for years. Who exactly did you expect to sign? The literacy rate in Afghanistan is 28%. How many of them do you think have even heard of Geneva?
And that is very convenient for you to say, speaking from a position of strength. How did you expect the weak to fight back? Face to face? Would you do that against a vastly superior foe? Your position, or course, is just another example of a double standard. If we are ever going to end this ongoing cycle of war, we are going to have to come to grips with how we are viewed from around the world. Victory in this War on Terror requires winning hearts and minds, and that cannot happen if there is no sense of even-handedness or justice, regardless of what the Convention says. I in no way condone terrorism, but a lasting peace is going to require a much broader view of the problem than you are advocating.
My Afghani rebel? Go fuck yourself.
And what would you call piloting a flying killing machine by remote control from thousands of miles away? Heroic?
So, let me get this straight. If a pilot kills them anonymously with drones from thousands of miles away that's war, but if they somehow get to Vegas and kill that drone pilot it's murder? Huh. My double-standard sense is tingling.
You presume way too much. I was a reservist for 10 years, and have known lots of soldiers, young and old. I have a friend serving in Haiti -- surely not the happiest place -- right now. If you think that I don't value my friends who serve, you are way off base. I do, however, deeply resent that people are being sent to wage war in far off lands for dubious reasons.
Most soldiers in a war zone are just regular folks caught up by circumstance. The hero label is applied at the behest of powerful people for their own reasons. Perhaps that is something you ought to think about while you tend your lawn.
You know that the Inernet was little-known outside of universities before the Web? You also know that Tim is British, right? And that he invented the WWW while at CERN? You know, the European Organization for Nuclear Research?
Reducing this to some problem you have with the USA only exposes your own ignorance and predjudice.
Maybe. Or at least they are getting harder to identify.
One problem is that the word hero is over-used and abused. For example, anyone from "our side" who gets killed in war is a hero. Sorry -- and this is not a popular position these days -- but that is wrong, despite the families need to justify their horrendous sacrifice. Furthermore, it only perpetuates the never-ending cycle of war we seem to have gotten ourselves into. We don't want to "dishour" their sacrifice by refusing to sacrifice more of our youth.
Nelson Mandella is one of my personal heroes. But would he survive as a hero in this day and age? A lot of effort is spent trying to tear people of accomplishment down. Nobody is perfect.
I have always thought that Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World-Wide-Web, is deserving of a Peace Prize. Communication is the foundation of peace, and it is hard do identify another individual who has done so much for world-wide communications in recent history.
Awarding the Peace Prize to a thing? Ugh. Don't get me started. Awarding the Prize to organizations is silly enough already.
Why inappropriate? What does Mr. Beckerman's approach have to do with whether or not his attourney's fees -- presumably to be paid by Ms. Lindor -- are to be covered? Surely whether or not the fees are to be paid is a matter of law, and not at the personal discretion of the judge. That the judge is taking out his frustrations with Mr. Beckerman on Ms. Lindor seems wholly inappropriate to me. What the hell is it with the legal system that results in a defendant having to pay when the incorporated plaintiff requests dismissal of the case?
A very sad, yet accurate, commentary. I consider the moon landing to be humankind's single greatest achievement. If the most prosperous nation on Earth is not going to lead the charge back to the moon and on to Mars, then greatness is probably behind us.
Perhaps we don't need to go to the moon or Mars, but doing so serves a very important purpose. As has been the case throughout history, traveling to that "undiscovered country" demonstrates that humankind is capable of great things if only we put our minds to it. The human condition seem much more hopeless without it.
True enough. If there was a spam moderation, I would have suggested that instead.
Please mod off-topic.
Look at hackingbear's comment history. He is repeatedly posting this comment, often to completely unrelated stories.
Hackingbear, we get that you are upset by this. However, this kind of trolling is not helpful, and only serves to undermine discussion of other topics -- topics that also happen to be of interest to the rest of us. Try this again instead. But don't be surprised if your story gets rejected with the very first link to a page written in Chinese.
And comments like this make me despise Microsoft shills. Let's pick apart the argument and see what holds muster.
Your presumption here is that these 50,000 jobs, research funding and products would not exist without Microsoft. That's not correct. Microsoft was convicted of abusing their monopoly power which was used to put competitors out of business -- competitors that right now would be employing people, doing research, and producing products. It is generally accepted around here that Mircosoft held back the advancement of IT for some years. Only when Firefox came on the scene did Microsoft start developing IE again. And we should be thankful for this? Sheesh.
I have never understood the hate-on some people have for Stallman and the FSF. Stallman's accomplishments are really amazing. He's no doubt a mad genius -- but still a genius despite his eccentricity. What he has to say is almost always +5 interesting, whether or not I agree with it or not. It's too bad he doesn't contribute to slashdot.
As far as dividing the community into believers and non-believers, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches". So, there is plenty of blame to be placed on both sides of the problem. Or is this to be excused as good business in Microsoft's case?
The GP cautions us not to get caught up in the hype. That seems quite sensible given what you just said.
I used to hand out notes for my lectures, but then stopped doing it. Students fall asleep in class if there is no physical activity, and the act of note-taking is very important for keeping the brain engaged -- particularly in a mathematical class. When I first started at the University I was very idealistic and thought I was going to change the way teaching was done. The hard lesson was that there is a reason why professors use chalk and blackboard. It works.
What we learned during the 2008 financial crisis is that there are plenty of ways for crooks to steal an infinite amount of money legally.
While stirring up this latest uproar, it turns out that Lily Allen was at the same time distributing illegal mix tapes on her Web site.
Hypocrite.
The dead-salmon study has been rejected for publication several times, so I wouldn't take it to discredit the fMRI technique in any way. Some research papers are just plain wrong, or written by the uninformed.
s/Pages/Word/g
My point is that the fonts in OpenOffice (and elsewhere) are a real stumbling block. Most of the software I use is F/OSS, but when it comes to printing stuff out, it has to look professional. Use Pages, Word, etc. Whatever floats your boat.
I am curious, though. How was PDF output from Pages so unmanageable compared to the others? PDF was designed precisely to allow platform-independent documents, so I'm surprised to hear that Pages (perhaps all of OSX?) creates unmanageable pdfs for you.
The problem for me is more often with the kerning (space between letters), which I have often found to be quite jarring with OpenOffice.
Latex has its own font issues too. If you are using the default, then the fact it was typeset in latex is obvious. My opinion is that the medium should not get in between the reader and the information on the page. So, I use Pages for sending letters, and latex for publishing more complex documents since publishers provide their own stylesheets which use nice fonts.
Fonts. The default fonts for OpenOffice look awful. With Pages (word processor on my Mac), my documents look beautiful with no fuss. I don't require a thousand different features, either.
This appears to be more about the development of a hypersonic cruise missile than an actual aircraft.
It would appear from the other comments that the test is failing under Windows but succeeding under linux. Can anyone test on both systems?
This page shows the Antarctic ozone history. You can see that there is only a hint of recovery in the past few years, so to say it has been improving since the 1987 Montreal Protocol isn't quite correct. Chemical depletion of the ozone layer is mostly a polar issue, and looking at global ozone trends can be misleading. For example, global ozone is also governed by mid-latitude dynamics. The dynamics of the tropopause (the boundary between the ozone-rich stratosphere and lower atmosphere) is important, and there are some indications of change in stratosphere-troposphere exchange in recent years that is perhaps related to climate.
I'll bite, troll, but only because you have somehow been modded "insightful".
As in any science, there are things we understand well, and those that we don't. A good example is gravity: we can't properly explain it -- there is no quantum theory of gravity -- yet nobody doubts the evidence of it's existence.
Yes, CO2 is important for life on Earth. In fact, the planet would be inhospitably cold without it: CO2 keeps the atmosphere warm, which is something we understand from Physics (specifically, radiative transfer). Measurements show that CO2 has risen dramatically since the industrial revolution, and this can only lead to further warming. No credible scientist that disputes this, and the question really amounts to "how much warming will there be?". For doubled CO2 alone, the warming is expected to be about 2 K. That part is not in dispute. Feedbacks (e.g., the additional uptake of water vapour in the warmer atmosphere) are predicted to amplify the warming to somewhere between 4 and 6 K. This is where the uncertainties lay.
In case you think that 2, 4 or 6 Kelvin isn't a big deal, please understand that the difference in temperatures between now and the last ice age is something like 6 K. Furthermore, the change is expected to occur on a 100 year time scale, rather than the thousand-year timescales of changes past. Insofar as we are dependent on nature for our survival as a species, this poses a real problem: ecosystems have great difficulty adapting so quickly.
Ultimately, climate change will care very little about your willful ignorance.
There are a variety of kernel issues (think wireless drivers and other hardware support) that have a major impact on the userland experience. I'm not about to say where Canonical should invest their time -- there are more than enough issues to go around, and it isn't shameful for them to concentrate elsewhere as the GP implied -- but what happens with kernel development certainly impacts the Ubuntu userland.
I think that Lenovo is using an argument similar to what Apple uses to prevent Mac clones. Apple requires acceptance of a software EULA when you "install the software or set up the product". Apple sued clone-maker Psystar, who are now bankrupt. We discussed Open Tech's approach last year, but their Web site is now vacant. Maybe they moved it here, but this site does not have anything to say about OS X. So, it is not entirely clear to me that Lenovo can't win this argument -- Apple has been very successful with it -- even given that "...MS insists on having a separate EULA between it and you, [and] its product can't be considered an intrinsic part of Lenovo".