You can imagine that Bin Laden was fond of us when we were supporting him, but he wasn't necessarily. Remember, in his view, the United States did him no favors. He won the war because of his holiness and the holiness of his cause. Bin Laden doesn't appreciate infidels from North America any better than he appreciated infidels from the USSR. We're all infidels to him. If he can get support from one infidel to fight another infidel, then he probably thinks that's funny.
We can stop Bin Laden from attacking America without destroying his organization. That is definitely possible. All we have to do is dismantle our liberal democracy, and institute an Islamic theocracy in its place. We must destroy all our Disneylands, Paramount Pictures, Exxon and Mobil, Microsoft (nobody's ALL bad), and the State Department. Simple. Until we do all that, we are infidels.
The only hope for minimizing the damage here would be for Afghanistan to harshly deal with their terrorists internally, and turn all of them over to us. Same goes for Iran, Libia, Iraq, etc. I wish that would happen, because it would save a lot of innocent and good people.
1) WWII was essentially the second phase of a European Civil War, WWI being the first phase. In both cases, the U.S. kept out of it until attacks upon American interests forced their hand.
2) (one side of mouth) America has stood idly by while terrorism has gripped the rest of the world.
(other side of mouth) United States has been accused of acting like the global police department. Come on, say what you mean. Contradictory statements don't help your point.
Why should America hastily involve itself in every conflict and problem in the world? We run a free society based on liberal values, and thankfully we have avoided the dual curses of a politicized military and nationalism. I fear that with too great of an entanglement in the affairs of others we may degenerate into a nation that holds blood grudges against other nations, much like what you will find in Eastern Europe or the Middle East.
On one hand, many people complain that the terrorist actions were a result of too much US meddling in the affairs of others (going back to the cold war days). Now is your argument that we haven't meddled enough? And if we're not going to meddle for our own purposes, then what purposes should we be meddling for?
I remember the days when Ziff Davis was constantly slamming Linux, publishing stories about how Linux was a toy operating system, and it would never make it in business.
Now they publish an article telling Linux developers what direction they need to be heading? I don't know why we even bother.
When I worked at American Express I wrote a filter to check credit card applications against the OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) database. The database has names (real names) of terrorists and drug dealers who have had their assets seized by the courts to compensate their victims. The joke at the time was "what terrorist is going to use their real name?" The filter I was required to write checked against the real names of the terrorists.
So, perhaps you are another person who thinks that terrorists are too dumb to not give a real name. A bastard like Bin Ladin has more enemies than just the US, believe me.
I am glad that you phrased it that way. The thing about history is that when considering alternatives, we will NEVER know for sure. We might not have lost a single man in the invasion of Japan, and not dropped a bomb. On the other hand, we might have lost half a million men, and then had to drop the bomb anyway.
We cannot second guess history. It unfolded only one way, and that's the history we are stuck with. Debating it doesn't do any good, because there's just no way to sort out all the interpretations of what happened. Condemning people of good character for making the best choice they could with the information they had isn't fair to those people. And we will in turn want to be judged fairly by history.
Saying that the bombing of Japan was completely unjustified is just as wrong as saying that we absolutely had to do it to win the war. All we know is that Truman and others sincerely believed that it was so, and they made a tough decision. If that decision does not sit well with us in our (as of Sept. 10th) comfortable armchairs, then all we can do is make our decisions better ones.
Civilized people insult other's countries (and operating systems) as sport, and the only barbs exchanged are formed as pixels on a screen.
All civilized people have trouble when someone takes the game too seriously and kills someone over something as stupid as a state or religion or language.
The fact that nearly everyone in the world does care when tragedy strikes another country shows just how little those hijacking monsters share with humanity.
The explosions in Kabul were caused by non-Taliban forces taking advantage of the situation to attack the Taliban stronghold. The Taliban does not control the entire country of Afghanistan. Training and equipping these rebels is one possible thing that I think the government will explore, but I fear what we will reap 20 or 30 years from now when the people we helped turn out to be just like the Taliban, but with a different name.
Anyway, these people are STUPID. WHY THE HELL would they decide to attack now and complicate everything. When the situation worldwide is as grim as it is, why the HELL would they pick this moment to light off a string of firecrackers???
I am relatively happy that here in the U.S. calls for blood are relatively scarce (with the exception of the blockheaded defense "expert" I was listening to on MSNBC. He was suggesting that we start assasinating people we identify as threats.)
I have a better suggestion. Assasination might be something we have to do in the future, but right now we must realize that the difference between us and the hijacking monsters is that we are like those who built the Library at Alexandria, and the monsters are like those who sacked and burned it. That means we pursue justice, not revenge. That means that we don't cheer in the streets when people die (shame on a few idiots in Palistine and Pakistan). That means that we pursue justice once evidence has been collected. So I agree with you. It's too soon to be bombing anyone.
Absolutely. Babylon 5 was the 5th of the stations to be built. The others were lost in various acts of sabotage or distortions of time and space.
The point? Well, Cmdr. Sinclair explained that when we humans value something we build it again and again until we get it right. That's a nice sentiment.
I didn't mean that the black hole would be compressed, I meant that a star could be compressed enough so that it forms a black hole. If you compress our sun enough, you'll end up with a 1 solar mass black hole.
I'll leave the engineering details to somebody else...
The sun could not turn itself into a black hole, that is true, but black holes much smaller than the sun exist.
All you need to do is increase the density by compression and you'd have a black hole. It is not unthinkable that a far future hypothetical civilization could compress a small star into a black hole if they wanted to.
I've noticed that some people have a bit of confusion here about exactly what the effects of a black hole are. Here's are examples:
Q: What would happen to the orbit of the earth if all the matter in the sun were suddenly compacted into a black hole?
A: Absolutely nothing. A black hole which contains the mass of the sun would still also have the same gravity as the sun. The earth would continue to orbit as it always has.
Q: The galaxies stars orbit around the black hole.
A: This isn't proven. Some galaxies don't have any evidence of a black hole, yet theirorbit around a center of mass. In any case, the black hole at the center of our galaxy is 2.6million solar masses. This is NOTHING compared to the billions of stars in the galaxy, so the effect of the black hole of the actual shape and orbit of the stars is not significant.
Q: Doesn't it sound like someone has pulled the stats on this black hole out of their arse?
A: Not really, the size of this black hole has been measured in several ways, including observing very high velocity stars near the black hole. The motion of these stars betrays the existence and size of the massive object at the galaxy's center.
Q: Aren't black holes required for the formation of galaxies?
A: We don't know for sure yet. There are galaxies without black holes, so it might not be required. Of course, we might just not be detecting the black holes that are in those galaxies.
One problem with the premise of the article
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 2
I agree that software should be beautiful. The real problem is that the judges of the computer program beauty pageant also think that this truck is beautiful. Seriously...if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then why is it news that we should write beautiful software? Somebody should start a school where they teach nothing but artistic value in programming and post it on Slashdot. That would be real news.
On the bright side, archiving this ever increasing amount of material is very expensive, and the size of the archive is increasing faster than the size and sophistication of our army. Mankind will indeed live in a machine imposed era of peace, except instead of holding us hostage with our own weapons, we will be forced to use the resources formerly dedicated to making war for the preservation of the machine records.
Yes I agree. When we hear of a new idea, we must ask ourselves "Who would have the most to gain by this?" The answer in this case is Stephen Hawking! Brain implants would certainly level the playing field.
I urge all of you not to get brain implants. It's all part of the master plan to make every person in the human race into Stephen Hawking's personal slave.
And let me add that America is not a democracy. We're a representative republic. This is any government can protect the rights of the majority. Even Afghanistan can protect the rights of the muslim majority there with great success. The true mark of a good government is how well they protect the rights of the minorities. Democracy just cannot do that efficiently.
Bill Gates never said that, and the 640K limit was not because of DOS.
IBM build the hardware with the various devices occupying memory locations above 640K. The whole machine could only have 1 megabyte of memory, and the devices needed to go somewhere.
The 640K limitation is because of the design of the hardware, not anything Microsoft did.
Get Mozilla and put in the special configuration line that disables the javascript open window function. Everything else works, but you don't get any popups at all.
Great googly moogly, I also hope so. I used to be a conservative back then, arguing with liberals on the internet since 1988. Well, they convinced me, and I don't really want to be reminded of just how dumb I was when I was 20.
Slashdot Mirror
The world lived for millenia without a policeman and it will continue to do so in the future. It may even be better
How many more libraries of Alexandra will be burned by illiberal barbarians before we all realize that's not true?
You can imagine that Bin Laden was fond of us when we were supporting him, but he wasn't necessarily. Remember, in his view, the United States did him no favors. He won the war because of his holiness and the holiness of his cause. Bin Laden doesn't appreciate infidels from North America any better than he appreciated infidels from the USSR. We're all infidels to him. If he can get support from one infidel to fight another infidel, then he probably thinks that's funny.
We can stop Bin Laden from attacking America without destroying his organization. That is definitely possible. All we have to do is dismantle our liberal democracy, and institute an Islamic theocracy in its place. We must destroy all our Disneylands, Paramount Pictures, Exxon and Mobil, Microsoft (nobody's ALL bad), and the State Department. Simple. Until we do all that, we are infidels.
The only hope for minimizing the damage here would be for Afghanistan to harshly deal with their terrorists internally, and turn all of them over to us. Same goes for Iran, Libia, Iraq, etc. I wish that would happen, because it would save a lot of innocent and good people.
1) WWII was essentially the second phase of a European Civil War, WWI being the first phase. In both cases, the U.S. kept out of it until attacks upon American interests forced their hand.
2) (one side of mouth) America has stood idly by while terrorism has gripped the rest of the world.
(other side of mouth) United States has been accused of acting like the global police department. Come on, say what you mean. Contradictory statements don't help your point.
Why should America hastily involve itself in every conflict and problem in the world? We run a free society based on liberal values, and thankfully we have avoided the dual curses of a politicized military and nationalism. I fear that with too great of an entanglement in the affairs of others we may degenerate into a nation that holds blood grudges against other nations, much like what you will find in Eastern Europe or the Middle East.
On one hand, many people complain that the terrorist actions were a result of too much US meddling in the affairs of others (going back to the cold war days). Now is your argument that we haven't meddled enough? And if we're not going to meddle for our own purposes, then what purposes should we be meddling for?
I remember the days when Ziff Davis was constantly slamming Linux, publishing stories about how Linux was a toy operating system, and it would never make it in business.
Now they publish an article telling Linux developers what direction they need to be heading? I don't know why we even bother.
How quickly we go from shock to callousness. Yes, everybody dies. But we'd all prefer to die somewhere OFF CAMERA or at least I would.
When I worked at American Express I wrote a filter to check credit card applications against the OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) database. The database has names (real names) of terrorists and drug dealers who have had their assets seized by the courts to compensate their victims. The joke at the time was "what terrorist is going to use their real name?" The filter I was required to write checked against the real names of the terrorists.
So, perhaps you are another person who thinks that terrorists are too dumb to not give a real name. A bastard like Bin Ladin has more enemies than just the US, believe me.
Pentagon ground was broken in 1941.
Today is International World Peace day.
it may have even been the better choice.
I am glad that you phrased it that way. The thing about history is that when considering alternatives, we will NEVER know for sure. We might not have lost a single man in the invasion of Japan, and not dropped a bomb. On the other hand, we might have lost half a million men, and then had to drop the bomb anyway.
We cannot second guess history. It unfolded only one way, and that's the history we are stuck with. Debating it doesn't do any good, because there's just no way to sort out all the interpretations of what happened. Condemning people of good character for making the best choice they could with the information they had isn't fair to those people. And we will in turn want to be judged fairly by history.
Saying that the bombing of Japan was completely unjustified is just as wrong as saying that we absolutely had to do it to win the war. All we know is that Truman and others sincerely believed that it was so, and they made a tough decision. If that decision does not sit well with us in our (as of Sept. 10th) comfortable armchairs, then all we can do is make our decisions better ones.
Civilized people insult other's countries (and operating systems) as sport, and the only barbs exchanged are formed as pixels on a screen.
All civilized people have trouble when someone takes the game too seriously and kills someone over something as stupid as a state or religion or language.
The fact that nearly everyone in the world does care when tragedy strikes another country shows just how little those hijacking monsters share with humanity.
The explosions in Kabul were caused by non-Taliban forces taking advantage of the situation to attack the Taliban stronghold. The Taliban does not control the entire country of Afghanistan. Training and equipping these rebels is one possible thing that I think the government will explore, but I fear what we will reap 20 or 30 years from now when the people we helped turn out to be just like the Taliban, but with a different name.
Anyway, these people are STUPID. WHY THE HELL would they decide to attack now and complicate everything. When the situation worldwide is as grim as it is, why the HELL would they pick this moment to light off a string of firecrackers???
I am relatively happy that here in the U.S. calls for blood are relatively scarce (with the exception of the blockheaded defense "expert" I was listening to on MSNBC. He was suggesting that we start assasinating people we identify as threats.)
I have a better suggestion. Assasination might be something we have to do in the future, but right now we must realize that the difference between us and the hijacking monsters is that we are like those who built the Library at Alexandria, and the monsters are like those who sacked and burned it. That means we pursue justice, not revenge. That means that we don't cheer in the streets when people die (shame on a few idiots in Palistine and Pakistan). That means that we pursue justice once evidence has been collected. So I agree with you. It's too soon to be bombing anyone.
Absolutely. Babylon 5 was the 5th of the stations to be built. The others were lost in various acts of sabotage or distortions of time and space.
The point? Well, Cmdr. Sinclair explained that when we humans value something we build it again and again until we get it right. That's a nice sentiment.
I didn't mean that the black hole would be compressed, I meant that a star could be compressed enough so that it forms a black hole. If you compress our sun enough, you'll end up with a 1 solar mass black hole.
I'll leave the engineering details to somebody else...
The sun could not turn itself into a black hole, that is true, but black holes much smaller than the sun exist.
All you need to do is increase the density by compression and you'd have a black hole. It is not unthinkable that a far future hypothetical civilization could compress a small star into a black hole if they wanted to.
I've noticed that some people have a bit of confusion here about exactly what the effects of a black hole are. Here's are examples:
Q: What would happen to the orbit of the earth if all the matter in the sun were suddenly compacted into a black hole?
A: Absolutely nothing. A black hole which contains the mass of the sun would still also have the same gravity as the sun. The earth would continue to orbit as it always has.
Q: The galaxies stars orbit around the black hole.
A: This isn't proven. Some galaxies don't have any evidence of a black hole, yet theirorbit around a center of mass. In any case, the black hole at the center of our galaxy is 2.6million solar masses. This is NOTHING compared to the billions of stars in the galaxy, so the effect of the black hole of the actual shape and orbit of the stars is not significant.
Q: Doesn't it sound like someone has pulled the stats on this black hole out of their arse?
A: Not really, the size of this black hole has been measured in several ways, including observing very high velocity stars near the black hole. The motion of these stars betrays the existence and size of the massive object at the galaxy's center.
Q: Aren't black holes required for the formation of galaxies?
A: We don't know for sure yet. There are galaxies without black holes, so it might not be required. Of course, we might just not be detecting the black holes that are in those galaxies.
I agree that software should be beautiful. The real problem is that the judges of the computer program beauty pageant also think that this truck is beautiful. Seriously...if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then why is it news that we should write beautiful software? Somebody should start a school where they teach nothing but artistic value in programming and post it on Slashdot. That would be real news.
On the bright side, archiving this ever increasing amount of material is very expensive, and the size of the archive is increasing faster than the size and sophistication of our army. Mankind will indeed live in a machine imposed era of peace, except instead of holding us hostage with our own weapons, we will be forced to use the resources formerly dedicated to making war for the preservation of the machine records.
Anyone have the newest Creative Computing?
Now that's a blast from the past. Used to love that old mag. That and 80 Micro.
Anyway, I'm waiting for IBM to come out with the IBM Personal Computer code named "We really mean it this time."
Yes I agree. When we hear of a new idea, we must ask ourselves "Who would have the most to gain by this?" The answer in this case is Stephen Hawking! Brain implants would certainly level the playing field.
I urge all of you not to get brain implants. It's all part of the master plan to make every person in the human race into Stephen Hawking's personal slave.
And let me add that America is not a democracy. We're a representative republic. This is any government can protect the rights of the majority. Even Afghanistan can protect the rights of the muslim majority there with great success. The true mark of a good government is how well they protect the rights of the minorities. Democracy just cannot do that efficiently.
Well, since the end of the war, Paris has had a schnitzel shortage. Always look on the bright side.
Dammit, that's completely wrong.
Bill Gates never said that, and the 640K limit was not because of DOS.
IBM build the hardware with the various devices occupying memory locations above 640K. The whole machine could only have 1 megabyte of memory, and the devices needed to go somewhere.
The 640K limitation is because of the design of the hardware, not anything Microsoft did.
Idiot.
Get Mozilla and put in the special configuration line that disables the javascript open window function. Everything else works, but you don't get any popups at all.
Great googly moogly, I also hope so. I used to be a conservative back then, arguing with liberals on the internet since 1988. Well, they convinced me, and I don't really want to be reminded of just how dumb I was when I was 20.
It is not OK to go out and kill people to ensure an adequate supply of cadavers.
It's not? oops