It might be retro, but what does it say about open sources ability to compete against closed source?
The concept of Open Source competing with...well anything is pure Slashdot idealistic fantasy. It's really only good for copying what's already out there. Money is obviously a great motivator for innovation.
'Open, distributed projects have the potential to outperform the traditional closed, controlled research model by reducing costs and duplication of effort, making it easy to collect and analyze masses of data from diverse sources, and allowing the best brains to participate no matter where they live.'"
Open and distributed also means 'share this research with everybody outside of the USA'.
Well we do watch a lot of preachy sci-fi. The problem with everybody holding hands and singing songs about peace love and harmony is that the guy with stick gets his way un-challenged. Doctor Who hasn't covered that, yet.
New ways to kill people more efficiently, just what the world needs...
You think you're so creative. You don't know what it's like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death...
No. This is incorrect. This is where I believe you're being disingenuous.
Not intentionally.
Once again, I've never argued that the problems we're still experiencing due to the trigger event on 9/11 aren't real, just that the reaction is overblown and stupid. You don't actually seem to disagree with me on that half the time.
I think a big part of the problem here is I'm not understanding what you mean by this bit. I might be mixing up what you've said with something somebody else said around the same time. I apologize for that.
I think before continuing to the rest of your points I should ask a question first...
I was outright stating that the danger was less than the danger presented by other well known causes and that it's irrational to treat that danger as if it's thousands of times worse than other dangers that cause far more death and destruction.
^^ can you give me an example or two of what you're thinking of while you say this?
I read that too, but it isn't qualified as 'extreme zoom' anywhere. If they're saying 'Google Earth-like' instead of saying "meters per pixel", they're saying it's not that exciting.
I didn't RTFA but the solution is simple: Use a high-res camera (4K maybe?), put a wide angle lens on it, and have a server listen in on the signal and send only the small chunk the user is requesting.
As for the stock market, what I described may be the "nature of how it works" but that doesn't make it less stupid.
It doesn't matter if it's stupid, that's what'll happen. It's stupid that my cats are afraid of flying, there's not one thing I can do about it.
You're clearly arguing that 9/11 is so significant because of the way that people reacted to it, but for some reason, even though that's the argument you keep making, you insist that it isn't what you're saying.
You keep arguing that the danger was 'perceived', the implication being that the danger wasn't there at all. There's definitely an attraction to that line of thought, especially in light of checking an old lady's diaper for explosives, but the reality is that it wasn't like all those people who needed an extra year of unemployment were just sitting in their beds with the covers over their heads. Those problems were real, even if the reasons were dumb.
The actual capacity of both buildings is a little hard to find, but there were about 50,000 people employed there. About 150,000 people used the subway stations there each day, maybe that's where you're getting the 200,000 figure, by adding that to the 50,000 who worked there? In any case, an hour later, it might have been closer to 50,000, but at the time of the first impact it was more like 10,000 to 14,000.
Conceded. My info was coming from the news reports just after the buildings fell. There was no clue for days how many people were actually dead so they were trying to find out. The 200,000 was my misreading of a number, that's by the end of the day not the capacity. I accept fault for this.
However, the 50k number is still important, unless it is your intention to say that Osama was trying to keep the killl count really low. An hour later and that's what the occupancy would have been at the time of impact.
I find it odd that you feel the need to keep creeping up the number of potential victims of the attack. A pretty good estimate of how many people died exists. That's the reality of it. Speculating on possible alternate universes where it went down differently doesn't change what actually happened in reality.
'Speculating on alternative universes' is exactly what defines what the next course of action is. The 'reality of it' is that we got off really lightly compared to what the actual goal of the attack was. The reality of it is that if round two had been attempted, improvements would have been made to increase the amount of destruction. The reality of it is that 9-11 was more than just the sum of the people who died.
Also, the ~3,000 death count is not "disingenuous when describing what happened on 9-11" it's merely descriptive of what actually happened. Are you trying to suggest that ~50,000 people really did die and that I'm trying to somehow deceptively claim that it was only ~3,000?
I'm saying that not understanding the scope of the event is making your judgement erroneous. If we were talking about accidents and not attacks, your point would be a lot stronger.
The issue is whether or not the money and effort being used on one cause is wasted or not compared to putting it into another cause. Both things that have intent behind them and things that are simply accidents may be preventable.
The money that's been spent on things like the current incarnation of the TSA and the war in Iraq etc has been a waste. I have never argued or intended to argue anything but that. It was not handled competently. I want to be clear about that for this next bit I'm about to say: We should not put all our eggs in one basket. You actually do agree with me on this, but it won't seem that way because I think it sounds like I'm endorsing events as they're happening now. I'm not. The fact that both are preventable, as you say, suggests exactly the same course of acti
What we knew, even on on the day of the event, is that it was extremely unlikely that another attack like that could be pulled off any time soon, but it was extremely likely that people would keep dying of other known causes at a fairly consistent rate.
We knew they would try again and we had already seen first hand how much disruption it caused. Knowing it wouldn't be soon also meant knowing we had time to mobilize and prepare for round 2.
We also didn't know that it was unlikely they'd try again. That's why all airplanes were instantly grounded and why we went into Afghanistan so quickly.
You cannot apply hindsight to the way the gov't responded.
But, once again, just a feedback loop based on people speculating and predicting how the event would be received and operating in line with those predictions, resulting in self-fulfilling prophecies of doom.
Right, it happens, it would happen again. What you're describing is the nature of how it works. You can call it 'perceived' if you like, it's still a reality and has to be counted.
As such, we can be pretty sure that there will be another large terrorist attack someday, but our best guess at the size and frequency of such events puts them way down on the list of causes of death, injury and destruction.
We failed to do that extrapolation with the earlier bombing of the towers. Look what it bought us. There's no way that will be ignored.
The World Trade Center towers could hold upwards of 50,000 people, true.
No. The capacity of both buildings is upwards of 200,000. There were 50,000 at the moment of impact. An hour or so later it would have been closer to 100,000. That's the score Osama was aiming for.
The nature of the attacks made it unlikely that the planes could have hit lower than about halfway up, and the fact that the planes hit about 17 minutes apart gave a fair amount of time to evacuate the second tower so (making certain reasonable assumptions about distribution of people within the towers and how speedily the buildings could be evacuated) it's unlikely the attacks, as performed, would have gotten more than 13,000 or so even if the buildings had been filled to capacity when the first plane struck. For that matter, the first strike came before 9:00 AM. A lot of people don't start work until 9:00, so it's unlikely that the buildings were filled to capacity at the time anyway.
These were hijacked planes flown by barely-experienced pilots carrying terrified passengers over a skyscraper-laden city, not state-of-the-art missiles they could fire on a whim. If the second plane had impacted before the first, the 13,000 count could easily have happened only it would have been closer to 25k. It struck the lower quarter of the building. The first happened in the upper floors. The ~3,000 death count is disingenuous when describing what happened on 9-11. We were incredibly lucky.
You can say what if, and decide that, since fifty thousand _could_, maybe, have died on 9/11 that it's as if fifty thousand really did die. Why not go whole hog and declare that 6+ billion people could have died, so the events of 9/11 were as bad as killing the entire world?
Because there were 50,000 people in the buildings. The buildings were the target. The people in the buildings were the target. The intent was to destroy the buildings and everybody in them. Car crashes have no such intent *and* since they happen frequently we can measure their averages. Car accidents do not aspire to create more death.
The argument that since something potentially could have been worse that it somehow _is_ worse is disingenuous when you're comparing it against other that also could have been worse.
Not really. You're talking about an accident and I'm talking about an intentional act of murder. If somebody set
Your comment about the number of the guns in the US was in the wrong context and your response didn't exonerate you. Sorry. I suggest you bow out gracefully.
Speaking of reality distortion, you basically believe that Steve Jobs is a master of mass-mind control. That's more believable than 'Apple had their shit together', right?
But saying that it was worse because of how long it took to recover from it (personally, I don't see where you get the two year figure, it seems that the country still hasn't recovered) doesn't work
The two year figure is about how long it took for things like the stock market and employment to re-stabilize. It's not a scientific number, really, it's what I remember from that time period. As for it not working, well that brings us to this point...
The response was disproportionate because the event was perceived as worse, not because it actually was worse than an equivalent number of fatal auto accidents. People who lost loved ones in the 9/11 incident were surely profoundly affected by it, but surely no more so than those who lost loved ones in auto accidents.
The whole world was affected. Besides scaring the shit out of everybody, the economy tanked, travel was severely disrupted, and there's a world of difference between people dying by accident and people being brutally murdered. The area I was in, its job availability plummeted. The state extended unemployment insurance from 6 months all the way to 18. When I finally got laid off (unrelated to 9-11, although the direction that company took was a direct result of it...) I took the risk of looking for a job in another state instead. Lucky for me it played out. I work in entertainment, now. Which... is scary, too. Entertainment was the first thing to go out for two to three months when the planes hit. Several movies were shifted to turn away from the general direction of that event, some flat out canceled along with several games. Lots of people who do the sort of work I do were out of a job, and that took months to re-stabilize. If this sort of event happens again it's possible I'll have to figure out how to survive long-term unemployment.
I lost no-one on 9-11. I was affected by it pretty seriously, and I had it light compared to lots of people. It was an era, not an event.
Slashdot Mirror
It might be retro, but what does it say about open sources ability to compete against closed source?
The concept of Open Source competing with .. .well anything is pure Slashdot idealistic fantasy. It's really only good for copying what's already out there. Money is obviously a great motivator for innovation.
Read it again.
'Open, distributed projects have the potential to outperform the traditional closed, controlled research model by reducing costs and duplication of effort, making it easy to collect and analyze masses of data from diverse sources, and allowing the best brains to participate no matter where they live.'"
Open and distributed also means 'share this research with everybody outside of the USA'.
When has Apple not abused their position as the 800-pound gorilla on the block?
When did that happen? According the the commenters here on Slashdot, Apple's marketshare is only 3%!
There's a difference between giving people technical options, and having a controlled App Store serve as the primary software source./quote.
That difference mainly being that we don't have a weekly story on Slashdot about how 10's of apps were pulled for being malicious.
I think that's overly simplistic.
Well we do watch a lot of preachy sci-fi. The problem with everybody holding hands and singing songs about peace love and harmony is that the guy with stick gets his way un-challenged. Doctor Who hasn't covered that, yet.
I will finally have sharks with friggen laser beams mounted on their heads.
Haww haw hawww hoo hoo hooooo heee heee hee!! GIGGLE!! SNORT!!!
Has Dreamworks approached you to write another Shrek sequel?
New ways to kill people more efficiently, just what the world needs...
You think you're so creative. You don't know what it's like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death...
No. This is incorrect. This is where I believe you're being disingenuous.
Not intentionally.
Once again, I've never argued that the problems we're still experiencing due to the trigger event on 9/11 aren't real, just that the reaction is overblown and stupid. You don't actually seem to disagree with me on that half the time.
I think a big part of the problem here is I'm not understanding what you mean by this bit. I might be mixing up what you've said with something somebody else said around the same time. I apologize for that.
I think before continuing to the rest of your points I should ask a question first...
I was outright stating that the danger was less than the danger presented by other well known causes and that it's irrational to treat that danger as if it's thousands of times worse than other dangers that cause far more death and destruction.
^^ can you give me an example or two of what you're thinking of while you say this?
I read that too, but it isn't qualified as 'extreme zoom' anywhere. If they're saying 'Google Earth-like' instead of saying "meters per pixel", they're saying it's not that exciting.
I wonder how many "Prohibited" areas will be input into the cameras control software.
Zero. This is for orbital views, it doesn't have a super zoom lens.
I didn't RTFA but the solution is simple: Use a high-res camera (4K maybe?), put a wide angle lens on it, and have a server listen in on the signal and send only the small chunk the user is requesting.
As for the stock market, what I described may be the "nature of how it works" but that doesn't make it less stupid.
It doesn't matter if it's stupid, that's what'll happen. It's stupid that my cats are afraid of flying, there's not one thing I can do about it.
You're clearly arguing that 9/11 is so significant because of the way that people reacted to it, but for some reason, even though that's the argument you keep making, you insist that it isn't what you're saying.
You keep arguing that the danger was 'perceived', the implication being that the danger wasn't there at all. There's definitely an attraction to that line of thought, especially in light of checking an old lady's diaper for explosives, but the reality is that it wasn't like all those people who needed an extra year of unemployment were just sitting in their beds with the covers over their heads. Those problems were real, even if the reasons were dumb.
The actual capacity of both buildings is a little hard to find, but there were about 50,000 people employed there. About 150,000 people used the subway stations there each day, maybe that's where you're getting the 200,000 figure, by adding that to the 50,000 who worked there? In any case, an hour later, it might have been closer to 50,000, but at the time of the first impact it was more like 10,000 to 14,000.
Conceded. My info was coming from the news reports just after the buildings fell. There was no clue for days how many people were actually dead so they were trying to find out. The 200,000 was my misreading of a number, that's by the end of the day not the capacity. I accept fault for this.
However, the 50k number is still important, unless it is your intention to say that Osama was trying to keep the killl count really low. An hour later and that's what the occupancy would have been at the time of impact.
I find it odd that you feel the need to keep creeping up the number of potential victims of the attack. A pretty good estimate of how many people died exists. That's the reality of it. Speculating on possible alternate universes where it went down differently doesn't change what actually happened in reality.
'Speculating on alternative universes' is exactly what defines what the next course of action is. The 'reality of it' is that we got off really lightly compared to what the actual goal of the attack was. The reality of it is that if round two had been attempted, improvements would have been made to increase the amount of destruction. The reality of it is that 9-11 was more than just the sum of the people who died.
Also, the ~3,000 death count is not "disingenuous when describing what happened on 9-11" it's merely descriptive of what actually happened. Are you trying to suggest that ~50,000 people really did die and that I'm trying to somehow deceptively claim that it was only ~3,000?
I'm saying that not understanding the scope of the event is making your judgement erroneous. If we were talking about accidents and not attacks, your point would be a lot stronger.
The issue is whether or not the money and effort being used on one cause is wasted or not compared to putting it into another cause. Both things that have intent behind them and things that are simply accidents may be preventable.
The money that's been spent on things like the current incarnation of the TSA and the war in Iraq etc has been a waste. I have never argued or intended to argue anything but that. It was not handled competently. I want to be clear about that for this next bit I'm about to say: We should not put all our eggs in one basket. You actually do agree with me on this, but it won't seem that way because I think it sounds like I'm endorsing events as they're happening now. I'm not. The fact that both are preventable, as you say, suggests exactly the same course of acti
"...a laser that can vaporise rocks at seven meters..."
Everybody making a hilarious post about sharks can press ALT+F4 to skip the 20 second limit!
...a laser that can vaporise rocks at seven meters...
I soooo want this on my car.
What we knew, even on on the day of the event, is that it was extremely unlikely that another attack like that could be pulled off any time soon, but it was extremely likely that people would keep dying of other known causes at a fairly consistent rate.
We knew they would try again and we had already seen first hand how much disruption it caused. Knowing it wouldn't be soon also meant knowing we had time to mobilize and prepare for round 2.
We also didn't know that it was unlikely they'd try again. That's why all airplanes were instantly grounded and why we went into Afghanistan so quickly.
You cannot apply hindsight to the way the gov't responded.
But, once again, just a feedback loop based on people speculating and predicting how the event would be received and operating in line with those predictions, resulting in self-fulfilling prophecies of doom.
Right, it happens, it would happen again. What you're describing is the nature of how it works. You can call it 'perceived' if you like, it's still a reality and has to be counted.
As such, we can be pretty sure that there will be another large terrorist attack someday, but our best guess at the size and frequency of such events puts them way down on the list of causes of death, injury and destruction.
We failed to do that extrapolation with the earlier bombing of the towers. Look what it bought us. There's no way that will be ignored.
The World Trade Center towers could hold upwards of 50,000 people, true.
No. The capacity of both buildings is upwards of 200,000. There were 50,000 at the moment of impact. An hour or so later it would have been closer to 100,000. That's the score Osama was aiming for.
The nature of the attacks made it unlikely that the planes could have hit lower than about halfway up, and the fact that the planes hit about 17 minutes apart gave a fair amount of time to evacuate the second tower so (making certain reasonable assumptions about distribution of people within the towers and how speedily the buildings could be evacuated) it's unlikely the attacks, as performed, would have gotten more than 13,000 or so even if the buildings had been filled to capacity when the first plane struck. For that matter, the first strike came before 9:00 AM. A lot of people don't start work until 9:00, so it's unlikely that the buildings were filled to capacity at the time anyway.
These were hijacked planes flown by barely-experienced pilots carrying terrified passengers over a skyscraper-laden city, not state-of-the-art missiles they could fire on a whim. If the second plane had impacted before the first, the 13,000 count could easily have happened only it would have been closer to 25k. It struck the lower quarter of the building. The first happened in the upper floors. The ~3,000 death count is disingenuous when describing what happened on 9-11. We were incredibly lucky.
You can say what if, and decide that, since fifty thousand _could_, maybe, have died on 9/11 that it's as if fifty thousand really did die. Why not go whole hog and declare that 6+ billion people could have died, so the events of 9/11 were as bad as killing the entire world?
Because there were 50,000 people in the buildings. The buildings were the target. The people in the buildings were the target. The intent was to destroy the buildings and everybody in them. Car crashes have no such intent *and* since they happen frequently we can measure their averages. Car accidents do not aspire to create more death.
The argument that since something potentially could have been worse that it somehow _is_ worse is disingenuous when you're comparing it against other that also could have been worse.
Not really. You're talking about an accident and I'm talking about an intentional act of murder. If somebody set
Things like the stock market and the economy are feedback loops that are very, very heavily by perception of reality rather than reality itself.
It's dependent on the fact that we are four dimensional beings that don't know the future. That bit will never change.
There are differences between people dying by accident and being murdered. The victims are just as dead either way, however.
One of the differences between accident and murder is in the case of murder, it can and probably will be attempted again.
In any case, there were about 16,000 other murders in the US that year, so 9/11 would still just be a statistical blip against that.
Again, 50,000 people in the buildings at the time of impact.
You're making my point for me.
How does 9 million North Korean troops sitting in N Korea prove N Korea has more guns than the U.S.?
We're not going to invade NK with 200 million guns.
Forgive my ignorance, but why do we have domains like .co.uk out there then?
Your comment about the number of the guns in the US was in the wrong context and your response didn't exonerate you. Sorry. I suggest you bow out gracefully.
All I can say is: Which country popularized the phrase "Stetsons are cool"?
Speaking of reality distortion, you basically believe that Steve Jobs is a master of mass-mind control. That's more believable than 'Apple had their shit together', right?
But saying that it was worse because of how long it took to recover from it (personally, I don't see where you get the two year figure, it seems that the country still hasn't recovered) doesn't work
The two year figure is about how long it took for things like the stock market and employment to re-stabilize. It's not a scientific number, really, it's what I remember from that time period. As for it not working, well that brings us to this point...
The response was disproportionate because the event was perceived as worse, not because it actually was worse than an equivalent number of fatal auto accidents. People who lost loved ones in the 9/11 incident were surely profoundly affected by it, but surely no more so than those who lost loved ones in auto accidents.
The whole world was affected. Besides scaring the shit out of everybody, the economy tanked, travel was severely disrupted, and there's a world of difference between people dying by accident and people being brutally murdered. The area I was in, its job availability plummeted. The state extended unemployment insurance from 6 months all the way to 18. When I finally got laid off (unrelated to 9-11, although the direction that company took was a direct result of it...) I took the risk of looking for a job in another state instead. Lucky for me it played out. I work in entertainment, now. Which... is scary, too. Entertainment was the first thing to go out for two to three months when the planes hit. Several movies were shifted to turn away from the general direction of that event, some flat out canceled along with several games. Lots of people who do the sort of work I do were out of a job, and that took months to re-stabilize. If this sort of event happens again it's possible I'll have to figure out how to survive long-term unemployment.
I lost no-one on 9-11. I was affected by it pretty seriously, and I had it light compared to lots of people. It was an era, not an event.
That's really interesting, man.
Does anyone know what happened in 1990 in the US to change the patent application rate?
Isn't that about the time LCD displays and 16-bit processors were starting to become ubiquitous?