And how many people reading slashdot from work right now be out of a job with our friends in Redmond?
Out of a job? How do you figure?
I mean, ignoring for a moment whether the anti-trust trial was fair enough and focusing on your claim that destroying MS would put slashdotters out of a job;
The only reason I use Microsoft is that Linux has poor driver support and because everyone uses MS Office and other programs don't tend to play nice with MS Office. If you destroyed MS, other companies would scramble to give Linux better driver support and open standards would no longer be a problem.
How about, How much productivity is lost trying to find the IT guy?
Or gained. If you could find us, you'd only be asking silly questions anyways. Now leave me alone. I have a..um... server that needs cooling. It's very important.
I hope we go nuclear. Otherwise we're gonna run out of helium. No other way to produce it except through nuclear decay to alpha particles. And what's a birthday party without helium baloons. Reason enough for me.
It's pretty ironic, since now we get most of our helium from oil wells.
Anyone know if the gov makes ANY effort to recover helium from nuclear waste?
Well, you'll slowly expose yourself anyways. Even the Chinese don't actually drink their water without boiling it first. You wouldn't eat a little bit of shit to become immune to it. There's too much risk from getting a disease that wouldn't go away. It'd be better if you could just extract the phages and take exactly the ones you wanted separately. All the benefits. None of the drawbacks.
Anyways, immunity (exposing yourself to a weakened pathogen or its protien coat is not the same as taking the actual pathogen itself. But the idea here is that your immune system is not involved quite as much as the correct phages are.
Incidentally, some phages you don't want. There's some evidence that Fibromyalgia is caused by a lysogenic phage and a bacterium, IIRC. (A lysogenic phage uses its bacterial host but doesn't kill it.) Only obligate lytic phages, i.e. phages which kill their bacterial host are used in phage therapy.
I heard a really interesting theory that locals can cope with the local water because of the bacteriophage in their stomaches. If a local in an area with bad water moves to a far removed area with bad water, they get sick themselves since they don't have the right phage to protect them.
It offers an interesting, as yet unutilized solution for 'montezuma's revenge.' There's a clinic in N. Mexico on the border based on S. Georgian technology from Tblisi which is the closest I've seen to offering this stuff to the US. We really need a worldwide phage network and repository. It would solve so many problems so cheaply.
I've known plenty of environmentalists who aren't communists. The thing is, communism needs a moral justification, so they tend to inflitrate certain groups and use them as cover. During the cold war, labor unions got into huge fights with communists who had successfully subverted their union into propaganda tools. Same with environmentalists and the feminist movement. All of these things are moral philosophies based on very real, serious greivances. But each has seen its rhetoric and movements substantially subverted by communist propaganda.
Brownmiller's comments about all men being rapists and all women being raped only make sense if you consider that she's trying to overthrow a whole system and doesn't want to paint it with any redeeming qualities. This doesn't obscure the fact that rape is a real problem and a crime that, in the past, wasn't taken seriously or was brushed off.
But then, China today is not communist in practice at all. Mildly fascist, perhaps. Besides, the biggest problem in environmentalism is too many damn people. The Native American way of life would be terribly environmentally destructive if everyone practiced it.
If the corporations were willing to provide the service, it'd be a different story here.
But then, supposedly 'privately held' public services like amtrack, which benefit from enormous subsidies, are run just as bad as gov't. services if not worse since public services don't spend millions on their CEOs. There's noone to properly compete with Amtrack or force them out of business. Particularly for those who can't affort cars. No other public trains are going to be built for Amtrack to contend with, and the govt. just bails them out when they go into debt.
How are you going to lay cable anywhere without the government cooperating to help lay the lines? Its not like a truly private individual can go out and do it themselves. In cases like this, I think it's good to have the government setting themselves up as a competitor just so the private companies don't get too complacent.
I am a religious person, though admittedly one who is not particularly into collective worship in public.
The whole 'the government will bar religious shows' sounds bogus.
I'm sure there's a way to fairly auction some channel space to private individuals, and then make it clear that the religious show was put on by the private individuals and does not translate to an endorsement by the government, which is all you really need. As for the internet - there's already a lot of fiber optic cable owned by the gov. and that hasn't made a darn bit of difference what people can put up on the net.
The courts have set up some clear workarounds for the whole "do not recognize an establishment of religion" clause so that religious freedom is well and safely preserved and private individuals can worship as they choose. You could go outside my school in the morning and pray around the flagpole, voluntarily, with a group of other kids. But there are some fundies who take not being able to use the classroom as their personal pulpit for their religious beliefs to be a conspiracy against religion.
I'm all for private schools, but the rules for public schools regarding religious practice are good ones.
But there's been a deliberate push by the so-called Christian coalition to misinterpret what the courts have said, specifically because it's devisive and gets votes for their supporters. And because they want to establish a state religion, which is the exact opposite of religious freedom. And the tactic works since people are more likely to vote on issues like this, which are designed to be incendiary, rather than on budget measures where pork is easily softpeddaled as one kind of improvement or another.
People of all races / backgrounds are just as corrupt as each other.
What do you base this on? Is this a belief, or can you cite studies? How have you measured corruption? How? If your interpretation is subjective, how much have you traveled?
I'm suspicious of the notion that all societies are equally corrupt, since it suggests that nothing at all can be done about the problem, which breeds apathy. If societies are not equally corrupt, then there are reasons for this which can be studied and used to help make some small inroads against the problem.
All cultures have some evil people, but they aren't identical in how they are corrupt. The US may have 'campaign donations' but it's a lot harder to bribe the local cops. Corruption in the US is organized and better tucked away and doesn't cripple small businesses the same way it does in some third world nations.
Right now I'm living in Makati, Philippines. Things are reasonably uncorrupt in this city but if you go into the provinces most of the cops are out for bribes.
The government controls the media where you are
I never said otherwise. My point was that censorship in China wasn't a matter of people being executed, which a previous poster implied.
The end result is the same.
Similar, yes. The same? No. On the up side, Americans can go out on the net and find information from contrary sources if they like. These are more likely to be blocked in China, though the censorship didn't seem to be that bad, when you got down to it.
In America, there was more freedom, but also the problem that because people were less likely to realize what was going on, they were more likely to trust the media.
The innovation angle plays a lot better if you're the first to do it.
As far as putting more people to work, if they were really trying to stimulate the economy that way there are plenty of better methods like that damn they're building on the Huang tse river, I thing.
Honestly, Chinese censorship doesn't work that way. Imagine what would happen if an American astronaut made an obscene comment about Bush, how it would be treated.
Chances are he'd be let go and censored.
The thing you have to remember is that while China theoretically has a legal system, things like status and respect, the position of your family, whether you're native to the local area, etc. carry far more weight there than they do in the US. This is especially true regarding the power of your family. You can be arrested simply for looking grungy and hanging around a train station (as one of my Chinese friends was.) Similarly, you can get away with murder if you have the right connections. You'll still be tried and sentanced to death, but they give you, say, a year so that you can work your connections and quietly be declared not guilty.
Yeah, when are they gonna load a lifting body onto a mass driver? That's what I wanna see.:)
With all the shuttles gone, I hope NASA takes the opportunity to rebuild from the ground up on a more assembly-line style module so that we can dominate the chokepoints of space... er I mean more effectivly conduct scientific research and observation.
I didnt say industry. That was a different poster.
And even if you included industry, financial institutions are a far cry from the factories where bombs or poison gas or nuclear weapons are made. If UBL had attacked one of the plants out in Arizona where tomahawk missles were made, I could see that as being a 'millitary' target. But a bank? Money is fungible. Destroying a bank eliminates no tangible assets. It's done purely for the purpose of terrorism. And you know this.
You're really really stretching here.
But of course, that was perpetrated by the good o'le USA, so flag-waving and cheering is supposed to go with that, right?
I'm not flag waving or cheering any loss of human life. But take a look at the situation. Look at some of the atrocities the Japanese committed against Chinese civilians, and civilians in other Asian countries and continued to commit throughout the course of the war. The Japanese were on par with the Nazis in their disregard for civilians. When you calculate your civilian death toll, please consider what a delayed end to the war would have meant in terms of all civilian casualties, not just those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don't believe that bombing Mt. Fugi would have had the same effect.
But most importantly, if Japan were invaded by the Chinese and Russians, I can promise you that the civilian death toll would have been much higher. There was not a choice between dropping the atomic bombs and not dropping them. The US had a choice between dropping the bombs and conducting a bloody invasion in concert with two other nations which had endured a litany of Japanese atrocities and wanted revenge.
Excoriate the US for the civilians that died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But I can't imagine an ending to the war which ultimately did more to preserve Japanese civilian life than a quick end and an exclusively US occupation.
Of course. That's why my comment focused on Japan.
I'm not sure that the grandparent poster understood that, though, or else he wouldn't have suggested that we might be speaking German without The Bomb.
And maybe we'd all be speaking German and drinking Schnapps. Or sake.
While I'm not going to say that the use of the atomic bomb was immoral, given the circumstances, the construction of the atomic bomb was not what caused Japan or Germany to lose the war. As advanced as it was, I really don't believe that Japan's atomic bomb project would have been able to offer Japan any kind of shot at victory.
Perhaps the bomb ended the war a little faster.
Perhaps if the resources that went into building cyclotrons had gone for conventional bombs and planes instead, the war would have ended quicker.
Probably without nukes at the end of WWII, the cold war would have proceeded differently.
The US would have wanted to enlist the help of the Chineese and Russians in invading Japan, which those nations would have eagerly given after all the death and shame Japan had visited upon them. More than anything, without the bomb the Japanese would probably be speaking Pu Tong Hua or Russian.
Things could have gone differently, sure.
But the bomb was not what made Japan or Germany lose the war.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to use a patch to see the scene.
It would be easier to watch porn using my web browser than it would be using this game.
And how many people reading slashdot from work right now be out of a job with our friends in Redmond?
Out of a job? How do you figure?
I mean, ignoring for a moment whether the anti-trust trial was fair enough and focusing on your claim that destroying MS would put slashdotters out of a job;
The only reason I use Microsoft is that Linux has poor driver support and because everyone uses MS Office and other programs don't tend to play nice with MS Office. If you destroyed MS, other companies would scramble to give Linux better driver support and open standards would no longer be a problem.
How about, How much productivity is lost trying to find the IT guy?
..um... server that needs cooling. It's very important.
Or gained. If you could find us, you'd only be asking silly questions anyways. Now leave me alone. I have a
So are people's immune systems getting tougher, or is phage just getting spread around more or are our diets just better?
Strange that things like deadly flu epidemics seem to be disappearing.
I hope we go nuclear. Otherwise we're gonna run out of helium. No other way to produce it except through nuclear decay to alpha particles. And what's a birthday party without helium baloons. Reason enough for me.
It's pretty ironic, since now we get most of our helium from oil wells.
Anyone know if the gov makes ANY effort to recover helium from nuclear waste?
There are days I've pondered what that would be like.
Gates should outsource his pondering. Or he might start trying to factor prime numbers again.
Well, you'll slowly expose yourself anyways. Even the Chinese don't actually drink their water without boiling it first. You wouldn't eat a little bit of shit to become immune to it. There's too much risk from getting a disease that wouldn't go away. It'd be better if you could just extract the phages and take exactly the ones you wanted separately. All the benefits. None of the drawbacks.
Anyways, immunity (exposing yourself to a weakened pathogen or its protien coat is not the same as taking the actual pathogen itself.
But the idea here is that your immune system is not involved quite as much as the correct phages are.
Incidentally, some phages you don't want. There's some evidence that Fibromyalgia is caused by a lysogenic phage and a bacterium, IIRC. (A lysogenic phage uses its bacterial host but doesn't kill it.) Only obligate lytic phages, i.e. phages which kill their bacterial host are used in phage therapy.
I heard a really interesting theory that locals can cope with the local water because of the bacteriophage in their stomaches. If a local in an area with bad water moves to a far removed area with bad water, they get sick themselves since they don't have the right phage to protect them.
It offers an interesting, as yet unutilized solution for 'montezuma's revenge.' There's a clinic in N. Mexico on the border based on S. Georgian technology from Tblisi which is the closest I've seen to offering this stuff to the US. We really need a worldwide phage network and repository. It would solve so many problems so cheaply.
The solution is to come up with something that does for goats what myxomatosis did for rabbits.
The solution is to come up for somthing that does to people what Calicivirus did for rabbits. I think the Australians are working on it.
I've known plenty of environmentalists who aren't communists. The thing is, communism needs a moral justification, so they tend to inflitrate certain groups and use them as cover. During the cold war, labor unions got into huge fights with communists who had successfully subverted their union into propaganda tools. Same with environmentalists and the feminist movement. All of these things are moral philosophies based on very real, serious greivances. But each has seen its rhetoric and movements substantially subverted by communist propaganda.
Brownmiller's comments about all men being rapists and all women being raped only make sense if you consider that she's trying to overthrow a whole system and doesn't want to paint it with any redeeming qualities. This doesn't obscure the fact that rape is a real problem and a crime that, in the past, wasn't taken seriously or was brushed off.
But then, China today is not communist in practice at all. Mildly fascist, perhaps. Besides, the biggest problem in environmentalism is too many damn people. The Native American way of life would be terribly environmentally destructive if everyone practiced it.
If the corporations were willing to provide the service, it'd be a different story here.
But then, supposedly 'privately held' public services like amtrack, which benefit from enormous subsidies, are run just as bad as gov't. services if not worse since public services don't spend millions on their CEOs. There's noone to properly compete with Amtrack or force them out of business. Particularly for those who can't affort cars. No other public trains are going to be built for Amtrack to contend with, and the govt. just bails them out when they go into debt.
How are you going to lay cable anywhere without the government cooperating to help lay the lines? Its not like a truly private individual can go out and do it themselves. In cases like this, I think it's good to have the government setting themselves up as a competitor just so the private companies don't get too complacent.
... wiki link karma whore;
Free Music
Has some good free labels. Could probably stand some improvements by the slashdot crowd.
I am a religious person, though admittedly one who is not particularly into collective worship in public.
The whole 'the government will bar religious shows' sounds bogus.
I'm sure there's a way to fairly auction some channel space to private individuals, and then make it clear that the religious show was put on by the private individuals and does not translate to an endorsement by the government, which is all you really need. As for the internet - there's already a lot of fiber optic cable owned by the gov. and that hasn't made a darn bit of difference what people can put up on the net.
The courts have set up some clear workarounds for the whole "do not recognize an establishment of religion" clause so that religious freedom is well and safely preserved and private individuals can worship as they choose. You could go outside my school in the morning and pray around the flagpole, voluntarily, with a group of other kids.
But there are some fundies who take not being able to use the classroom as their personal pulpit for their religious beliefs to be a conspiracy against religion.
I'm all for private schools, but the rules for public schools regarding religious practice are good ones.
But there's been a deliberate push by the so-called Christian coalition to misinterpret what the courts have said, specifically because it's devisive and gets votes for their supporters. And because they want to establish a state religion, which is the exact opposite of religious freedom. And the tactic works since people are more likely to vote on issues like this, which are designed to be incendiary, rather than on budget measures where pork is easily softpeddaled as one kind of improvement or another.
This tactic only works in places with a significant religious base.
Particularly a sufficiently gullible or paranoid religious base.
People of all races / backgrounds are just as corrupt as each other.
What do you base this on? Is this a belief, or can you cite studies? How have you measured corruption? How? If your interpretation is subjective, how much have you traveled?
I'm suspicious of the notion that all societies are equally corrupt, since it suggests that nothing at all can be done about the problem, which breeds apathy. If societies are not equally corrupt, then there are reasons for this which can be studied and used to help make some small inroads against the problem.
All cultures have some evil people, but they aren't identical in how they are corrupt. The US may have 'campaign donations' but it's a lot harder to bribe the local cops. Corruption in the US is organized and better tucked away and doesn't cripple small businesses the same way it does in some third world nations.
Right now I'm living in Makati, Philippines. Things are reasonably uncorrupt in this city but if you go into the provinces most of the cops are out for bribes.
The government controls the media where you are
I never said otherwise. My point was that censorship in China wasn't a matter of people being executed, which a previous poster implied.
The end result is the same.
Similar, yes. The same? No. On the up side, Americans can go out on the net and find information from contrary sources if they like. These are more likely to be blocked in China, though the censorship didn't seem to be that bad, when you got down to it.
In America, there was more freedom, but also the problem that because people were less likely to realize what was going on, they were more likely to trust the media.
The innovation angle plays a lot better if you're the first to do it.
As far as putting more people to work, if they were really trying to stimulate the economy that way there are plenty of better methods like that damn they're building on the Huang tse river, I thing.
Yeah, I know your comment was a joke. But still, I think that there's a serious misunderstanding in the West of China's political situation.
Honestly, Chinese censorship doesn't work that way.
Imagine what would happen if an American astronaut made an obscene comment about Bush, how it would be treated.
Chances are he'd be let go and censored.
The thing you have to remember is that while China theoretically has a legal system, things like status and respect, the position of your family, whether you're native to the local area, etc. carry far more weight there than they do in the US. This is especially true regarding the power of your family. You can be arrested simply for looking grungy and hanging around a train station (as one of my Chinese friends was.) Similarly, you can get away with murder if you have the right connections. You'll still be tried and sentanced to death, but they give you, say, a year so that you can work your connections and quietly be declared not guilty.
This isn't redundant. It's a joke. And appropriate given these sudden dearth of Chinese space missions while most of their people languish.
Yeah, when are they gonna load a lifting body onto a mass driver? That's what I wanna see. :)
With all the shuttles gone, I hope NASA takes the opportunity to rebuild from the ground up on a more assembly-line style module so that we can dominate the chokepoints of space... er I mean more effectivly conduct scientific research and observation.
I didnt say industry. That was a different poster.
And even if you included industry, financial institutions are a far cry from the factories where bombs or poison gas or nuclear weapons are made. If UBL had attacked one of the plants out in Arizona where tomahawk missles were made, I could see that as being a 'millitary' target. But a bank? Money is fungible. Destroying a bank eliminates no tangible assets. It's done purely for the purpose of terrorism. And you know this.
You're really really stretching here.
But of course, that was perpetrated by the good o'le USA, so flag-waving and cheering is supposed to go with that, right?
I'm not flag waving or cheering any loss of human life. But take a look at the situation. Look at some of the atrocities the Japanese committed against Chinese civilians, and civilians in other Asian countries and continued to commit throughout the course of the war. The Japanese were on par with the Nazis in their disregard for civilians. When you calculate your civilian death toll, please consider what a delayed end to the war would have meant in terms of all civilian casualties, not just those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don't believe that bombing Mt. Fugi would have had the same effect.
But most importantly, if Japan were invaded by the Chinese and Russians, I can promise you that the civilian death toll would have been much higher. There was not a choice between dropping the atomic bombs and not dropping them. The US had a choice between dropping the bombs and conducting a bloody invasion in concert with two other nations which had endured a litany of Japanese atrocities and wanted revenge.
Excoriate the US for the civilians that died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But I can't imagine an ending to the war which ultimately did more to preserve Japanese civilian life than a quick end and an exclusively US occupation.
"You don't want a city hit, keep your military and industry elsewhere."
You just legitimized the attacks against the WTC, with that single comment.
Care to explain how the WTC was a millitary target?
Of course. That's why my comment focused on Japan.
I'm not sure that the grandparent poster understood that, though, or else he wouldn't have suggested that we might be speaking German without The Bomb.
And maybe we'd all be speaking German and drinking Schnapps. Or sake.
While I'm not going to say that the use of the atomic bomb was immoral, given the circumstances, the construction of the atomic bomb was not what caused Japan or Germany to lose the war. As advanced as it was, I really don't believe that Japan's atomic bomb project would have been able to offer Japan any kind of shot at victory.
Perhaps the bomb ended the war a little faster.
Perhaps if the resources that went into building cyclotrons had gone for conventional bombs and planes instead, the war would have ended quicker.
Probably without nukes at the end of WWII, the cold war would have proceeded differently.
The US would have wanted to enlist the help of the Chineese and Russians in invading Japan, which those nations would have eagerly given after all the death and shame Japan had visited upon them.
More than anything, without the bomb the Japanese would probably be speaking Pu Tong Hua or Russian.
Things could have gone differently, sure.
But the bomb was not what made Japan or Germany lose the war.
The grandparent was not talking about web sites. He was talking about flyers being handed out, and using that as a model for websites.