No, it is actually called abuse of power. I wonder why they insist to call it 'democracy'. So they can claim they really care about us?
OK, first of all, they don't call it a plain old "democracy." It's a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. And second of all, how in the hell does this indicate that they must not be a democracy? Democracy just means "majority rules," not "Pecisk is right." Just because they make a law you don't agree with doesn't mean that the majority don't support it (thus, that it isn't a democracy).
And finally, doesn't the US claim to be a democracy? (Answer: no, actually, it doesn't. It's a federal republic) They bandy about the word "democracy" all the time, yet they've passed the CDA-2, the USA PATRIOT act, and the DMCA. And you're picking on the UK over a little law that restricts people from profiting from games that they declined to sponsor?
In a society where factory workers often make less than a dollar a day, that's a lot more than $3000 is worth to an American.
Uhm, no. That 5000 yuan is as valuable to them as $3000 USD would be to a USAmerican. That's why it's called an "exchange rate." $3000 US is the comparable amount, in US dollars, that would be equivalent to the same buying power in the US as 5000 yuan would be in their country.
That would be: [...] "sloppily to use whatever words you feel like".
Uhm, I don't think so. I could be wrong, but your corrected version doesn't sound right to me:
"The fact that languages change is not a license sloppily to use whatever words you feel like, however you want."
I think your "correction" is wrong, but I'm open-minded enough to hear you out. Of course, surely you'll admit that pedantic grammar corrections such as this are on a wholly different level than the point I was making with the blatently incorrect use of "disappear" in the grandparent post.
The fact that languages change is not a license to sloppily use whatever words you feel like, however you want. People won't understand you, and you'll look stupid and ignorant.
Disappear is now a verb that can be used in that way.
No, it's not. Just because you say it is so does not make it so. Do you realize how stupid this sounds?
I think I'll start using "car" as a verb. "I carred to work real hurry this morning, because I breakfasted too slow."
It's dumb. Stop it. You are neither Webster, nor Merriam.
As a kid growing up in London in the 70's I quickly learned that you never say this to one of your Muslim schoolmates unless you are prepared for either a major fight or a debasing apology.
When living in someone else's culture, you do not have the right to NOT be offended. Your Muslim schoolmates had no right demanding apologies. They should have opened their mind and understood that it is a harmless jab in the context of London culture.
This is the reason that our unique cultures are disappearing. This is why every culture in the world is starting to look the same. We're sinking to the lowest common denominator. This is why cities can't put up Christmas trees anymore - they have to call them "Holiday Trees." This "melting pot" attitude of vanilla-ization of our culture under the banner of "tolerance" is eroding away our unique and interesting values. It's sad. When I visit France, I want it to feel like a distinct, unique culture. I don't want it to look and feel like North America, just with a different language.
How come we have to accept and allow all these foreign values to pollute our unique culture, but there's still no Starbucks in Iran? Why are we putting on fake smiles and grinning like idiots during this one-sided attack on our western culture? Remember when lawn darts was a harmless, innocent game you could play at the cottage? You can't buy them anymore because they're "weapons." Remember those toy cars that you could smash into each other, and they had doors with springs inside that would flip over to show crash damage? Remember when cap guns and squirt guns were allowed to be painted black? Remember when paintball guns were paintball guns, instead of "markers?"
Where will all this end? Has any of this dillution of our culture actually saved any lives or done any good?
When the counterrevolution comes they will be turned in to a bankrupt culture chasing the beloved buck, with a Starbucks and McDonalds on every corner, organized crime and exploitation artists dominating the economy and getting rich, while average people struggle to put food on the table, just like all of the other former Communist states.
It's funny, because right up until the end there, I thought you were going to say Capitalist states. Sounds a lot like the US, to me.
Watching this made me think about the calculations involved in estimating the trajectory and how well the human brain does it.
There's an old saying in computer science that one of my professor's passed on to me in my undergraduate studies: "Things that humans find hard, computers find easy, and things that humans find easy, computers find hard."
It really rings true when you think about things like factoring polynomials, solving differential equations, and catching a ball. I thought it was interesting, and the saying has stuck with me all these years.
Assembly language is fantastic for people who actually know their way around their CPU's instruction set.
It just gets a lot of flack from people from IDE-land who can't visualize an enterprise-scale application without their UML diagrams and runtime debugger.
It's not assembly language's fault you can't handle a few registers, folks. People who complain about assembly language's difficulty level are usually the sort of people who think automatic garbage collection is a good programming idea.
Sheesh, what's the world coming to when tobacco is demonised as unsuitable for children to see?
The vast majority of "new" smokers are children. Tobacco companies work very hard to make smoking seem "cool" and "rebellious," while simultaneously trying not to let on that they're targetting children.
The fact is, a 30-year old doesn't just wake up one day and say to themselves, "You know what? I think I'm going to start smoking." People don't start when they're old. They start when they're young.
No, it's not. It's only nonsensical because you want it to be (which, I assume, is because you don't have a good retort which backs up your position.)
But I did have a rational retort. The fact is that people who don't exist don't know they don't exist. You can't ask someone to compare existing and not existing, because "not existing" isn't a state in which they'd have sentience.
You do realize that you *can* ask someone who exists whether or not they'd be happier if they were never born, right? And they can answer?
No, they cannot. It is an invalid question. Asking whether or not they'd be "happier" if they didn't exist implies that they would be capable of sentient thought if they didn't exist. Which they would not be. So there can be no comparison.
It's like suggesting we ask the 30 million fetuses that have been aborted in the US since the 70's whether they'd rather have been born. You can't. Because they never existed. They feel/felt no pain, because they never existed. They don't "regret" not living, because they were never alive. You can't sympathize with them any more than you can sympathize with a seed that didn't germinate, or a baby that wasn't conceived because the woman menstruated instead of having sex.
See, the difference is that when liberals think they know what's best for someone, they don't force them to do it by law, even if they tell you it's bad for you.
Niger, eh? Congratulations, you read cnn.com today. You can clearly speak authoritatively on this topic.
Its not a 'decision' for most of the creatures living on this over-populated planet.
Bullshit. People choose to have kids. They choose to have sex. They choose not to use protection. And then when they get pregnant, they choose not to have an abortion.
My wife and I are 29. We don't want kids. And guess what? We don't have any. No "accidents" or "mistakes," we simply chose not to have any, and take the simple steps to prevent it. People who bring children into a world in which they can't care for them are irresponsible.
Preventative measures are available to people in poverty-ravaged regions of Africa, but they choose not to use them. Whether it's due to culture, family pressures, fear, stigma, or whatever, they instead make the CHOICE to bring a child into a world in which they will surely die.
And I'm supposed to shed a tear and open up my wallet? Send condoms, not cash.
It's not the best thing, either. Lots of people grow up without one parent or the other, and turn out OK. But statistically, they're more likely to have problems. Most of the time, we can't avoid this situation. People die unexpectedly or fall out of love. But in this case, it could have been avoided, but for whatever selfish reason, they decided to have a kid they knew would be fatherless soon, anyway. That's irresponsible.
Before you judge the outcome of this, why don't you wait 15 years and ask his daughter whether or not she'd rather not have been born at all?
That's an utterly nonsensical question, because a person who never existed doesn't know they don't exist. A person who exists cannot compare said existence to what they would have "felt" if they hadn't existed, because people who don't exist don't feel anything. They simply don't exist.
The "stupidity in Iraq" gave millions of people a good chance of better and freer life (and not just in Iraq) -- already.
That might be an acceptable explanation, if that's how the mission had been pitched in the first place. But it wasn't. The war was justified using fabricated claims of WMDs and terrorist strongholds, neither of which were true, it turns out.
My dad, now retired, always talks about when they developed the space shuttle. They were trying to get NASA to go with a solid fuel rocket.
NASA did go with a solid fuel rocket. 2 of them, actually. That's what the booster rockets are. SRBs. Solid Rocket Boosters. Once they're lit, there's no way to turn them off.
I saw a program on rocket science, and they indicated that the use of solid fuel is virtually mandatory in order to achieve the fuel energy density required to lift the fuel itself plus a payload into space. Almost every launch program out there relies on solid fuel for at least part of the launch. Those that don't either don't need to reach the higher altitudes, don't weigh much, or are experiments in how to shake the dependence on solid fuel (mainly due to its rather significant drawback of not being able to be turned "off" once lit).
I seriously doubt there are windshield wipers due to the extream speed.
No, above a certain speed, windshield wipers are both ineffective and unnecessary. Airplanes have them, but they only use them at low speeds or while taxiing. Above a couple hundred miles an hour, the rain just blows right off the windsheild anyway.
I would imagine that the effects from being in space traveling with little particles going 5 miles per second
According to a documentary I saw on the Discovery channel, the shuttle's windows aren't vulnerable to space debris while in orbit, because the shuttle positions itself such that that bottom or side of the craft is facing in the direction of orbit. Ever notice how whenever you see a picture of the shuttle in orbit, its always upside-down (that is, with the "top" of the shuttle facing the Earth below)? It's so that the windows won't be in the path of any space debris.
A particle the size of a BB, traveling at orbital velocities (5-7 miles per second) impacting a solid chunk of aluminum would blow a crater in it the size of a grapefruit.
Why not have some emergency landing capsules already in the orbit? Nothing fancy, just a capsule with minimal electronics that can land in the ocean. Proven technology from many years ago. Leave enough fuel so the capsules can stay for a decade in desired orbit.
If you left a car in a parking garage for 10 years, then came back and tried to start it, do you think it would work? No. The tires would be flat on the bottom. The fuel would have separated. The fuel and brake lines would likely be dried and cracked. There would be rust. The battery would be dead. It would not work.
Now, imagine that instead of being parked in a nice, protected garage, it was instead in outer space, at roughly -170 degrees Celcius, being bombarded with harsh solar radiation and tiny space debris traveling at 18,000 mph for 10 years. Would it work? Would you bet your life on it?
Well, that's the death of the US manned spaceflight effort right there. The strange thing is, I'll bet the astronauts themselves would willingly take risks
Stop right there, it isn't fair to blame NASA for this. I'll bet the administration is just as keen as the astronauts to explore the vast reaches of space, regardless of the risks. But NASA isn't financially self-sustaining. They require funding from congresscritters. And congress is elected by Joe and Jane Sixpack, who are a little averse to seeing astronaut coffins on the 6 o'clock news week after week. So NASA keeps the risk down to keep the money coming in. Regardless of whether or not they agree with it, they have no discretion in the matter. Their mandate is "no deaths if at all avoidable," directly from those paying the bills. So they do what they're told, so they can keep doing something they love.
Wait... what? Who said there are no more winter launches? First of all "winter" in Florida is pretty much meaningless. It's still warmer than "summer" in Canada. Those O-rings froze because of overnight frost, plus the fact that they were on a giant tube of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. They have launched in the winter since Challenger, and according to every schedule I could find, they plan on doing it again, too. They may be a little more cautious about checking for overnight frost, but there certainly is no systematic, NASA-wide ban on winter launches.
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No, it is actually called abuse of power. I wonder why they insist to call it 'democracy'. So they can claim they really care about us?
OK, first of all, they don't call it a plain old "democracy." It's a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. And second of all, how in the hell does this indicate that they must not be a democracy? Democracy just means "majority rules," not "Pecisk is right." Just because they make a law you don't agree with doesn't mean that the majority don't support it (thus, that it isn't a democracy).
And finally, doesn't the US claim to be a democracy? (Answer: no, actually, it doesn't. It's a federal republic) They bandy about the word "democracy" all the time, yet they've passed the CDA-2, the USA PATRIOT act, and the DMCA. And you're picking on the UK over a little law that restricts people from profiting from games that they declined to sponsor?
Get a grip.
In a society where factory workers often make less than a dollar a day, that's a lot more than $3000 is worth to an American.
Uhm, no. That 5000 yuan is as valuable to them as $3000 USD would be to a USAmerican. That's why it's called an "exchange rate." $3000 US is the comparable amount, in US dollars, that would be equivalent to the same buying power in the US as 5000 yuan would be in their country.
That would be: [...] "sloppily to use whatever words you feel like".
Uhm, I don't think so. I could be wrong, but your corrected version doesn't sound right to me:
"The fact that languages change is not a license sloppily to use whatever words you feel like, however you want."
I think your "correction" is wrong, but I'm open-minded enough to hear you out. Of course, surely you'll admit that pedantic grammar corrections such as this are on a wholly different level than the point I was making with the blatently incorrect use of "disappear" in the grandparent post.
Languages change, deal with it.
The fact that languages change is not a license to sloppily use whatever words you feel like, however you want. People won't understand you, and you'll look stupid and ignorant.
Disappear is now a verb that can be used in that way.
No, it's not. Just because you say it is so does not make it so. Do you realize how stupid this sounds?
I think I'll start using "car" as a verb. "I carred to work real hurry this morning, because I breakfasted too slow."
It's dumb. Stop it. You are neither Webster, nor Merriam.
As a kid growing up in London in the 70's I quickly learned that you never say this to one of your Muslim schoolmates unless you are prepared for either a major fight or a debasing apology.
When living in someone else's culture, you do not have the right to NOT be offended. Your Muslim schoolmates had no right demanding apologies. They should have opened their mind and understood that it is a harmless jab in the context of London culture.
This is the reason that our unique cultures are disappearing. This is why every culture in the world is starting to look the same. We're sinking to the lowest common denominator. This is why cities can't put up Christmas trees anymore - they have to call them "Holiday Trees." This "melting pot" attitude of vanilla-ization of our culture under the banner of "tolerance" is eroding away our unique and interesting values. It's sad. When I visit France, I want it to feel like a distinct, unique culture. I don't want it to look and feel like North America, just with a different language.
How come we have to accept and allow all these foreign values to pollute our unique culture, but there's still no Starbucks in Iran? Why are we putting on fake smiles and grinning like idiots during this one-sided attack on our western culture? Remember when lawn darts was a harmless, innocent game you could play at the cottage? You can't buy them anymore because they're "weapons." Remember those toy cars that you could smash into each other, and they had doors with springs inside that would flip over to show crash damage? Remember when cap guns and squirt guns were allowed to be painted black? Remember when paintball guns were paintball guns, instead of "markers?"
Where will all this end? Has any of this dillution of our culture actually saved any lives or done any good?
When the counterrevolution comes they will be turned in to a bankrupt culture chasing the beloved buck, with a Starbucks and McDonalds on every corner, organized crime and exploitation artists dominating the economy and getting rich, while average people struggle to put food on the table, just like all of the other former Communist states.
It's funny, because right up until the end there, I thought you were going to say Capitalist states. Sounds a lot like the US, to me.
Watching this made me think about the calculations involved in estimating the trajectory and how well the human brain does it.
There's an old saying in computer science that one of my professor's passed on to me in my undergraduate studies: "Things that humans find hard, computers find easy, and things that humans find easy, computers find hard."
It really rings true when you think about things like factoring polynomials, solving differential equations, and catching a ball. I thought it was interesting, and the saying has stuck with me all these years.
I only said Big Bro would disappear the website.
Please stop using "disappear" like that. "Disappear" should always appear after the subject it describes, never before it.
Assembly language is fantastic for people who actually know their way around their CPU's instruction set.
It just gets a lot of flack from people from IDE-land who can't visualize an enterprise-scale application without their UML diagrams and runtime debugger.
It's not assembly language's fault you can't handle a few registers, folks. People who complain about assembly language's difficulty level are usually the sort of people who think automatic garbage collection is a good programming idea.
Yeah... automatic garbage collection. Duh.
Sheesh, what's the world coming to when tobacco is demonised as unsuitable for children to see?
The vast majority of "new" smokers are children. Tobacco companies work very hard to make smoking seem "cool" and "rebellious," while simultaneously trying not to let on that they're targetting children.
The fact is, a 30-year old doesn't just wake up one day and say to themselves, "You know what? I think I'm going to start smoking." People don't start when they're old. They start when they're young.
Some temporary suffering of the mother is preferable to a lifetime of suffering of an unwanted child, in my opinion.
And all things considered I would bet that Sarah Doohan doesn't mind the fact that she exists.
A completely pointless statement, since if she hadn't existed, she'd never have known it or regretted it.
No, it's not. It's only nonsensical because you want it to be (which, I assume, is because you don't have a good retort which backs up your position.)
But I did have a rational retort. The fact is that people who don't exist don't know they don't exist. You can't ask someone to compare existing and not existing, because "not existing" isn't a state in which they'd have sentience.
You do realize that you *can* ask someone who exists whether or not they'd be happier if they were never born, right? And they can answer?
No, they cannot. It is an invalid question. Asking whether or not they'd be "happier" if they didn't exist implies that they would be capable of sentient thought if they didn't exist. Which they would not be. So there can be no comparison.
It's like suggesting we ask the 30 million fetuses that have been aborted in the US since the 70's whether they'd rather have been born. You can't. Because they never existed. They feel/felt no pain, because they never existed. They don't "regret" not living, because they were never alive. You can't sympathize with them any more than you can sympathize with a seed that didn't germinate, or a baby that wasn't conceived because the woman menstruated instead of having sex.
See, the difference is that when liberals think they know what's best for someone, they don't force them to do it by law, even if they tell you it's bad for you.
I've got two words for you: Sarah Brady.
Apply that in Niger and there'd be nobody.
Niger, eh? Congratulations, you read cnn.com today. You can clearly speak authoritatively on this topic.
Its not a 'decision' for most of the creatures living on this over-populated planet.
Bullshit. People choose to have kids. They choose to have sex. They choose not to use protection. And then when they get pregnant, they choose not to have an abortion.
My wife and I are 29. We don't want kids. And guess what? We don't have any. No "accidents" or "mistakes," we simply chose not to have any, and take the simple steps to prevent it. People who bring children into a world in which they can't care for them are irresponsible.
Preventative measures are available to people in poverty-ravaged regions of Africa, but they choose not to use them. Whether it's due to culture, family pressures, fear, stigma, or whatever, they instead make the CHOICE to bring a child into a world in which they will surely die.
And I'm supposed to shed a tear and open up my wallet? Send condoms, not cash.
It's cold, but it's true, and you know it.
This girl will grow up without a father.
Which isn't the worst thing in the world.
It's not the best thing, either. Lots of people grow up without one parent or the other, and turn out OK. But statistically, they're more likely to have problems. Most of the time, we can't avoid this situation. People die unexpectedly or fall out of love. But in this case, it could have been avoided, but for whatever selfish reason, they decided to have a kid they knew would be fatherless soon, anyway. That's irresponsible.
Before you judge the outcome of this, why don't you wait 15 years and ask his daughter whether or not she'd rather not have been born at all?
That's an utterly nonsensical question, because a person who never existed doesn't know they don't exist. A person who exists cannot compare said existence to what they would have "felt" if they hadn't existed, because people who don't exist don't feel anything. They simply don't exist.
But enough existentialism for today.
Look at it this way. It tends to indicate that you're at least getting some.
Not for the next couple of days, it doesn't.
The "stupidity in Iraq" gave millions of people a good chance of better and freer life (and not just in Iraq) -- already.
That might be an acceptable explanation, if that's how the mission had been pitched in the first place. But it wasn't. The war was justified using fabricated claims of WMDs and terrorist strongholds, neither of which were true, it turns out.
My dad, now retired, always talks about when they developed the space shuttle. They were trying to get NASA to go with a solid fuel rocket.
NASA did go with a solid fuel rocket. 2 of them, actually. That's what the booster rockets are. SRBs. Solid Rocket Boosters. Once they're lit, there's no way to turn them off.
I saw a program on rocket science, and they indicated that the use of solid fuel is virtually mandatory in order to achieve the fuel energy density required to lift the fuel itself plus a payload into space. Almost every launch program out there relies on solid fuel for at least part of the launch. Those that don't either don't need to reach the higher altitudes, don't weigh much, or are experiments in how to shake the dependence on solid fuel (mainly due to its rather significant drawback of not being able to be turned "off" once lit).
I seriously doubt there are windshield wipers due to the extream speed.
No, above a certain speed, windshield wipers are both ineffective and unnecessary. Airplanes have them, but they only use them at low speeds or while taxiing. Above a couple hundred miles an hour, the rain just blows right off the windsheild anyway.
I would imagine that the effects from being in space traveling with little particles going 5 miles per second
According to a documentary I saw on the Discovery channel, the shuttle's windows aren't vulnerable to space debris while in orbit, because the shuttle positions itself such that that bottom or side of the craft is facing in the direction of orbit. Ever notice how whenever you see a picture of the shuttle in orbit, its always upside-down (that is, with the "top" of the shuttle facing the Earth below)? It's so that the windows won't be in the path of any space debris.
A particle the size of a BB, traveling at orbital velocities (5-7 miles per second) impacting a solid chunk of aluminum would blow a crater in it the size of a grapefruit.
I can not think of a single time where /. had stories that couldn't be found anywhere else. /. only article?
Care to point to a single
Sure. Every single book review, interview, and "Ask Slashdot." How'd I do?
Why not have some emergency landing capsules already in the orbit? Nothing fancy, just a capsule with minimal electronics that can land in the ocean. Proven technology from many years ago. Leave enough fuel so the capsules can stay for a decade in desired orbit.
If you left a car in a parking garage for 10 years, then came back and tried to start it, do you think it would work? No. The tires would be flat on the bottom. The fuel would have separated. The fuel and brake lines would likely be dried and cracked. There would be rust. The battery would be dead. It would not work.
Now, imagine that instead of being parked in a nice, protected garage, it was instead in outer space, at roughly -170 degrees Celcius, being bombarded with harsh solar radiation and tiny space debris traveling at 18,000 mph for 10 years. Would it work? Would you bet your life on it?
"NASA wants to avoid any risk"
Well, that's the death of the US manned spaceflight effort right there. The strange thing is, I'll bet the astronauts themselves would willingly take risks
Stop right there, it isn't fair to blame NASA for this. I'll bet the administration is just as keen as the astronauts to explore the vast reaches of space, regardless of the risks. But NASA isn't financially self-sustaining. They require funding from congresscritters. And congress is elected by Joe and Jane Sixpack, who are a little averse to seeing astronaut coffins on the 6 o'clock news week after week. So NASA keeps the risk down to keep the money coming in. Regardless of whether or not they agree with it, they have no discretion in the matter. Their mandate is "no deaths if at all avoidable," directly from those paying the bills. So they do what they're told, so they can keep doing something they love.
After Challenger... No more winter launches.
... what? Who said there are no more winter launches? First of all "winter" in Florida is pretty much meaningless. It's still warmer than "summer" in Canada. Those O-rings froze because of overnight frost, plus the fact that they were on a giant tube of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. They have launched in the winter since Challenger, and according to every schedule I could find, they plan on doing it again, too. They may be a little more cautious about checking for overnight frost, but there certainly is no systematic, NASA-wide ban on winter launches.
Wait