This whole military-industrial complex raises serious issues and consequencesthat are all too often overlooked or even willfully ignored. Where will all this lead to?
"Not after we demonstrated the full power of this system. Those pirates are too remote to make an effective demonstration. I have chosen to test this system's destructive power on our broad base of everyday users. It will be as if millions of voices suddenly cired out in terror and suddenly silenced."
True. Technically Ovid was Roman (i.e. Romans were more strict about Morals than Greeks), but he derived most of his stories from Hellenic/Mediterranian hearsay. The Greek gods did smite a little bit, when they felt certain humans didn't show enough respect, but they were generally less 'angry' than the OT god. And even while smiting people they were less serious. Lykaon in most versions was punished for his suberbia by being turned into a wolf (actually pretty cool - think about werewolves/lycanthropes;)
I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a.44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?
Unlike the Jewish (Christian/Muslim) god, the Greek gods didn't really 'smite' the humans or 'taught them a lesson', at least not as often; they more or less fooled around with them. Zeus for example really looved the women, he used all his magic tricks hunting after hot chicks. - To be fair though, if you read Homer et al you will find there were morals, virtues and values, but it was more of a karma/fate thing, not a 'faith' thing.
Polytheists were also naturally more tolerant towards other beliefs as well, compared to quite an amount of monotheists who even resort to waging wars in the name of religion.
I got lots of ponies for you to ride! I look like one of the Backstreet Boys, er.. the cute one.. - Wanna meet up? (Please don't sue slashdot afterwards though, I like this website..;))
"Naive moron"? Now that's original. Have you been to Tibet recently? Have you been to any of the Chinese provinces recently and talked with the local people? You will find there is a difference between the China of the past that you are referring to and the China nowadays.
Since you don't really know me you may call me naive - but it says more about you than about me.
It's obviously the percentage that counts here not the absolute numbers. 10% means for every person below the poverty line there are 9 above it. So I could make a counter-argument by simply inverting the numbers.
If you take the 'actual' numbers then how does Afghanistan stack up here? It has less than half the amount of "poor" people compared to the US - only about 16 million, so how does that make you feel about the Afghan people? (Btw, total Afghan population is 31 million)
rarer are spy planes having to land on enemy territory, but it happened in 2001 to a US spy plane over an un-declared enemy (China, and that's a topic in itself)
What's with all this hate mongering against China? Why was this totally OT snippet even up there anyway? To keep us reminded that there are "bad guys" out there and when we think about harddisks we also should be completely aware that we should be afraid, very afraid of an "undeclared" enemy?
China may have different attitudes and morals standards than the US, but they are doing many things right as well; more than western media tends to portray (e.g. according to the CIA world factbook China has a lower percentage of citizens suffering from poverty than the richest country in the world (namely the US)). I don't want to whitewash anything, but reading things like "undeclared enemy" in a tech article on an international website just pisses me off.
...which is actually very easy to solve thanks to evolution. The ancestors of birds laid eggs too; this means the last representative of reptiles in the chain laid an egg from which the first bird hatched. Ergo the egg was first.
The dilemma that paleontologists face is to define which species was actually the first bird, but that doesn't affect the answer to this question.
Seeing Government and Google in the headline really sent a chill through my spine. I know that Google is supposed to be "not evil" and that it hasn't given us too many reasons to think otherwise. But the fact remains: Google is organizing information; from personal e-mails over weblogs over homepages to corporate and government documents. And more and more of this information is being fed into their own local databases.
What if, for whatever reason, the current 'policy makers' at Google quit their job and somebody else takes over (be it in a few months or in 50 years) - all this accumulated information will then serve what the new Boss decides to be the "best" use for it. Seeing as power has almost always corrupted people in history this makes me quite worried. And this is why I'm not hyping Google just like the next guy.
Yes, exactly! First I read about the article on the digg, then on slashdot and then even on Tom's hardware! How redundant is that?
That's just like Bush's surprise visit; I can read about it on CNN, the BBC, Al Jazeera and on Xinhua. Imho they should all spice up things and report different news, make up stuff if need be...
</sarcasm>
I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of CPUs cryed out in terror and suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible (but predictable) must have happened.
I do not think he need any sympathies and advice from/. crowd
This is slashdot - we love giving advice (on anything to anyone). Here is my advice for the hacker: A minimum security prison is no picnic. - The trick is: kick someone's ass the first day or become someone's bitch. Then everything will be all right.
Come on, this is America.. They're not gonna saw your hands off here, all right? The worst thing they'd ever do is to put you for a couple of months into a white-collar minimum security resort! Shit, we should be so lucky! Do you know they have conjugal visits there?
Yes thats right, NOT patching. I mean how do they expect to force anything on anyone using a computer?
1. Hire a hacker to write a worm
2. Persuade MS to release security patch only in bundle with the updated licencing code , maybe put in some Vista eye-candy SFX as well (e.g. disguised as SP3)
3. Profit (since the RIAA/MPAA aren't Underpants Gnomes there's no "???-step" needed)
Ah, here's me going all conspiracy theory again.. (Though - considering previous actions of those involved...)
function addGlobalStyle(css) { var head, style; head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0]; if (!head) { return; } style = document.createElement('style'); style.type = 'text/css'; style.innerHTML = css; head.appendChild(style); }
addGlobalStyle(" body #wrapper { background-color: #bbb; } div div.generalbody form { color: #011; background-color: #bbb; background: #bbb; } ");
This significantly reduces the amount of death rays piercing my eyes in the current version. Obviously this is a very crude version with lots of room for improvement. Maybe you can post your own addGlobalStyle functions and we can have a nice Slashdot CSS-fix contest here;)
As long as it's not as 'in your face' as in recent Bond movies and information-to-ad ratio stays within a certain margin I'm actually ok with it - there are all sorts of marketing people and politicians already trying to mess with my mind; I think it might even help building up an immune system against that sort of thing;)
Actually Marx (who originally termed 'communism') saw many of the flaws of the capitalistic system and thought these would automatically - over time - lead to what he would call 'communism'; with no need for an all-out revolution, because the current system, as he saw it, was bound to smash into the wall in front of it.
The problem was that there were so many people who really liked the 'utopia' he described and didn't want to wait. They wanted it now and saw no problem in using violence to fight the current system and establishing a single government entity (the party) that would help accelerate the change of paradigm among the people, which (according to Marx) would happen anyway. These guys called their system 'communism' using the positive connotations Marx created for it ("cashing in" on Marx so to speak;), though what they created was far from what the original meaning suggested.
The predominantly negative associations in the west, but especially in the US, is caused by cold war propaganda to a great degree in the 50s, which basically created the boogieman 'communism' (McCarthy supplied the citizens with faces for this boogieman) and he is being invoked ever since to emotionalize and scare the people. The US leaders didn't want a revolution like in other parts of the world, so they successfully turned a political debate into an irrational, hyperbolic 'debate'.
Slashdot Mirror
..welcome our new cyborg overlords - NOT!!
This whole military-industrial complex raises serious issues and consequencesthat are all too often overlooked or even willfully ignored. Where will all this lead to?
"Not after we demonstrated the full power of this system. Those pirates are too remote to make an effective demonstration. I have chosen to test this system's destructive power on our broad base of everyday users. It will be as if millions of voices suddenly cired out in terror and suddenly silenced."
True. Technically Ovid was Roman (i.e. Romans were more strict about Morals than Greeks), but he derived most of his stories from Hellenic/Mediterranian hearsay. The Greek gods did smite a little bit, when they felt certain humans didn't show enough respect, but they were generally less 'angry' than the OT god. And even while smiting people they were less serious. Lykaon in most versions was punished for his suberbia by being turned into a wolf (actually pretty cool - think about werewolves/lycanthropes ;)
I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?
Unlike the Jewish (Christian/Muslim) god, the Greek gods didn't really 'smite' the humans or 'taught them a lesson', at least not as often; they more or less fooled around with them. Zeus for example really looved the women, he used all his magic tricks hunting after hot chicks. - To be fair though, if you read Homer et al you will find there were morals, virtues and values, but it was more of a karma/fate thing, not a 'faith' thing.
Polytheists were also naturally more tolerant towards other beliefs as well, compared to quite an amount of monotheists who even resort to waging wars in the name of religion.
"do_file()"??? - I knew geeks were desperate, but THIS desperate?
This should not be moderated 'funny', this should be moderated 'sad'!
Methinks a user triggered the Dell laptop's hardcoded "Do you want to play a game of thermonuclear war?" message and he hit the 'any' key..
I got lots of ponies for you to ride! I look like one of the Backstreet Boys, er.. the cute one.. - Wanna meet up? (Please don't sue slashdot afterwards though, I like this website.. ;))
"Naive moron"? Now that's original. Have you been to Tibet recently? Have you been to any of the Chinese provinces recently and talked with the local people? You will find there is a difference between the China of the past that you are referring to and the China nowadays.
Since you don't really know me you may call me naive - but it says more about you than about me.
It's obviously the percentage that counts here not the absolute numbers. 10% means for every person below the poverty line there are 9 above it. So I could make a counter-argument by simply inverting the numbers.
If you take the 'actual' numbers then how does Afghanistan stack up here? It has less than half the amount of "poor" people compared to the US - only about 16 million, so how does that make you feel about the Afghan people? (Btw, total Afghan population is 31 million)
China may have different attitudes and morals standards than the US, but they are doing many things right as well; more than western media tends to portray (e.g. according to the CIA world factbook China has a lower percentage of citizens suffering from poverty than the richest country in the world (namely the US)). I don't want to whitewash anything, but reading things like "undeclared enemy" in a tech article on an international website just pisses me off.
...which is actually very easy to solve thanks to evolution. The ancestors of birds laid eggs too; this means the last representative of reptiles in the chain laid an egg from which the first bird hatched. Ergo the egg was first.
The dilemma that paleontologists face is to define which species was actually the first bird, but that doesn't affect the answer to this question.
Seeing Government and Google in the headline really sent a chill through my spine. I know that Google is supposed to be "not evil" and that it hasn't given us too many reasons to think otherwise. But the fact remains: Google is organizing information; from personal e-mails over weblogs over homepages to corporate and government documents. And more and more of this information is being fed into their own local databases.
What if, for whatever reason, the current 'policy makers' at Google quit their job and somebody else takes over (be it in a few months or in 50 years) - all this accumulated information will then serve what the new Boss decides to be the "best" use for it. Seeing as power has almost always corrupted people in history this makes me quite worried. And this is why I'm not hyping Google just like the next guy.
Grammar-nazis
Yes, exactly! First I read about the article on the digg, then on slashdot and then even on Tom's hardware! How redundant is that?
That's just like Bush's surprise visit; I can read about it on CNN, the BBC, Al Jazeera and on Xinhua. Imho they should all spice up things and report different news, make up stuff if need be...
</sarcasm>
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those.
You forgot to add "The horror! The horror!" (with Marlon Brando's voice from Apocalyps Now)
I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of CPUs cryed out in terror and suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible (but predictable) must have happened.
I do not think he need any sympathies and advice from /. crowd
This is slashdot - we love giving advice (on anything to anyone). Here is my advice for the hacker: A minimum security prison is no picnic. - The trick is: kick someone's ass the first day or become someone's bitch. Then everything will be all right.
You may repent by watching Office Space ;)
Come on, this is America.. They're not gonna saw your hands off here, all right? The worst thing they'd ever do is to put you for a couple of months into a white-collar minimum security resort! Shit, we should be so lucky! Do you know they have conjugal visits there?
Yes thats right, NOT patching. I mean how do they expect to force anything on anyone using a computer?
1. Hire a hacker to write a worm
2. Persuade MS to release security patch only in bundle with the updated licencing code , maybe put in some Vista eye-candy SFX as well (e.g. disguised as SP3)
3. Profit (since the RIAA/MPAA aren't Underpants Gnomes there's no "???-step" needed)
Ah, here's me going all conspiracy theory again.. (Though - considering previous actions of those involved...)
As long as it's not as 'in your face' as in recent Bond movies and information-to-ad ratio stays within a certain margin I'm actually ok with it - there are all sorts of marketing people and politicians already trying to mess with my mind; I think it might even help building up an immune system against that sort of thing ;)
The problem was that there were so many people who really liked the 'utopia' he described and didn't want to wait. They wanted it now and saw no problem in using violence to fight the current system and establishing a single government entity (the party) that would help accelerate the change of paradigm among the people, which (according to Marx) would happen anyway. These guys called their system 'communism' using the positive connotations Marx created for it ("cashing in" on Marx so to speak ;), though what they created was far from what the original meaning suggested.
The predominantly negative associations in the west, but especially in the US, is caused by cold war propaganda to a great degree in the 50s, which basically created the boogieman 'communism' (McCarthy supplied the citizens with faces for this boogieman) and he is being invoked ever since to emotionalize and scare the people. The US leaders didn't want a revolution like in other parts of the world, so they successfully turned a political debate into an irrational, hyperbolic 'debate'.