For the most part I agree with what you say. However, I personally feel that extremist islamic movements will find fault with western societies, no matter what we do. The absolute mayhem that erupted in the middle east when western media published cartoons of mohammed illustrates quite clearly how little we have to do in order to be the focus of their ire. Consider the backlash over the knighthood of Salman Rushdie, an indian writing a fictional book which contained references to disputed parts of islamic dogma; resulted in death threats against him condoned and organised by national governments, such as Iran and Pakistan.
What i'm saying is that these people will react with extreme prejudice against any perceived slight against their identity. Thats whats wrong with the situation. If we, as the collective western societies got pissed off any time we felt the islamic nations violated our principles (human rights, treatment of women, right to free speech), the situation would have deteriorated a long time ago. I'm tempted to descend into a vitrolic diatribe against such nations, but I don't want to lose track of point; as along as extremist religious interests have influence in these countries, we're going to have a problem with them.
ah yes, let the derison of yet another microsoft foible begin, I can feel those endorphins already, coupled with the remnants of the Red Hat and Ubuntu defiance of Microsoft patent fud, I've been walking around with a natural high these last few days;), speak my friends, let my minds reward systems be overwhlemed with the resonance induced by our collective anti-microsoft rants, amen;)
absolutely, but theres a considerable group of people out there who view animosity towards Microsoft as part of a broader resistance to big corporations, and as a consequence of this, view this resistance as being naive and unfounded. Unix style systems have been around for a long long time and have a well deserved reputation for stability and security, unlike windows products which I, as a computer scientist and software engineer experience as being badly concieved and poorly executed
who ever said I adhered to those theories?, all I'm saying is that such a claim must be backed up with evidence. Now, I don't have enough knowldege of black holes, dark energy and dark matter to be able to defend their popularity within the science as it stands today, and quite frankly I don't want to, but I can say, with confidence, that tolerence of ambiguities and uncertainties in well established scientific hypotheses should not be used as a basis for accepting newly forged and untested theories.
science is an unforgiving realm to new, shall we say, unpopular theories and there are several examples in the last one hundred years where the accepted science was wrong and the theories of lone voices were right but this has been the exception, rather than the rule.
Science as a whole is successful because it is so dogmatically resistant to all change unless it is undeniably and completely without doubt, relativity was disputed for years, even spurring the invention of laser gyroscopes so as to disprove it, but it consistently predicted phenomenon which completely contradicted the established science, leading eventually to its now hallowed place in the annals of science. So what I'm saying is that even the most prized theories of our time had a difficult gestation characterised by spectacular successes and stubborn resistance in the scientific community, thats just the way it is, and for good reason, otherwise, science would become as fragmented as the christian movement today, consisting of many conflicting unverifiable claims.
well said, I came to this forum scratching my head about the "electrical nature of the universe" statement, why on earth was this allowed on./(????), the internet is full of nuts trying to push their own daft take on reality but as GBS once said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
hmmm, I was under the impression that fusion was meant to be self sustaining, ie once the lasers had fired and the nuclear fire had started to burn, no further external input would be needed. The impression I get from this article is that the z machine would be continuously zapping the fusion core????.
Also, as far as i'm aware, this is just a glorified capcitator circuit, am I wrong?, have I drifted away from reality and crossed into the realm of wild and unsubstansiated claims?
mooooo.
of course, first thing that occured to me, I said, by george, dosen't the new logo of wired obey the laws of optical volumes. I, for one, welcome our new optical overlords.
its not evolution that these people contest, its the suggestion that life started without divine interference that the more well organised religious bigots of our day are protesting against, awful bastards
air bus do have rear view cameras installed in their planes. The purpose of these cameras is to assist with the taxing of the aircraft, makes it easier to spot any russions as well:)
This is pointless nostalgia. In order to store same amount of info on tape as a cd rom / dvd, you'd need close to the capacity of a warehouse.
A cd/dvd is easily copied, imagine the logistics invloved in doing the same operation with your tape reels.
Unstable?, sure digital media suffers from corruption (very very occasionally) but there exist protocols for encoding the data which make it resistant to corruption and even if there weren't, simply copying the data and storing it in mutitple servers around the world would solve the prolem
I completely agree, while its unconstructive to sit back and simply criticise the man, its hard to give him a great deal of credit for redressing functionality that's long established. Fair play for giving it a shot but I think this system will suffer from complexity when they start to scale up, particularly on their method for representing sequences of events, which seemed very sketchy in the white papers. Fair enough, if the sequence a->b->c exists then the occuence of a infers the occurence of c. However, say these sequences exist :
a -> b -> c
a -> d -> e
a -> r -> f
Then prediction becomes inaccurate unless some sort of contextual support is built into the system and I haven't seen any mechanism to support that in the documentation, believe me, I looked.
Does anyone have any operating system usage statisitcs that are actually reliable. It seems that any pro - windows site (www.microsoft.com) would have you believe that the windows monopoly is as healthy as ever whilst we also hear news like this showing systemic adoption of Linux based operating systems across multiple sovereign nations.
"(Quote marks around "poor" because you can't speak about poor Americans and poor Africans in the same sentence, the situations are utterly incomparable.)"
As an aside poor people in America suffer from far more health problems than those in similar social deliniations in other countries. Its not known exactly why but scientists have the hypothesis that simply the stress of being poor amid such decadent wealth incurs a heavy toll for their well-being, unlike other countries where the wealth difference isn't so starkly evident.
i find the reaction among american media sources stunning, Its as tho the chinese premier had taken a shit in the white house garden. American military spending approaches 500 billion dollars a year. Chinese military spending verges on 90 billion. While it was irresponsible for the chinese to have endangered orbital vehicles, it is nowhere near the chest beating call to war that some of the linked articles have made it out to be.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah buddy, just look at the high civilian death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan and its pretty obvious how trigger happy the US army is
For the most part I agree with what you say. However, I personally feel that extremist islamic movements will find fault with western societies, no matter what we do. The absolute mayhem that erupted in the middle east when western media published cartoons of mohammed illustrates quite clearly how little we have to do in order to be the focus of their ire. Consider the backlash over the knighthood of Salman Rushdie, an indian writing a fictional book which contained references to disputed parts of islamic dogma; resulted in death threats against him condoned and organised by national governments, such as Iran and Pakistan. What i'm saying is that these people will react with extreme prejudice against any perceived slight against their identity. Thats whats wrong with the situation. If we, as the collective western societies got pissed off any time we felt the islamic nations violated our principles (human rights, treatment of women, right to free speech), the situation would have deteriorated a long time ago. I'm tempted to descend into a vitrolic diatribe against such nations, but I don't want to lose track of point; as along as extremist religious interests have influence in these countries, we're going to have a problem with them.
ah yes, let the derison of yet another microsoft foible begin, I can feel those endorphins already, coupled with the remnants of the Red Hat and Ubuntu defiance of Microsoft patent fud, I've been walking around with a natural high these last few days ;), speak my friends, let my minds reward systems be overwhlemed with the resonance induced by our collective anti-microsoft rants, amen ;)
bloviating; to speak pompusly, i thought thats what slashdot discussions were for ;)
absolutely, but theres a considerable group of people out there who view animosity towards Microsoft as part of a broader resistance to big corporations, and as a consequence of this, view this resistance as being naive and unfounded. Unix style systems have been around for a long long time and have a well deserved reputation for stability and security, unlike windows products which I, as a computer scientist and software engineer experience as being badly concieved and poorly executed
who ever said I adhered to those theories?, all I'm saying is that such a claim must be backed up with evidence. Now, I don't have enough knowldege of black holes, dark energy and dark matter to be able to defend their popularity within the science as it stands today, and quite frankly I don't want to, but I can say, with confidence, that tolerence of ambiguities and uncertainties in well established scientific hypotheses should not be used as a basis for accepting newly forged and untested theories. science is an unforgiving realm to new, shall we say, unpopular theories and there are several examples in the last one hundred years where the accepted science was wrong and the theories of lone voices were right but this has been the exception, rather than the rule. Science as a whole is successful because it is so dogmatically resistant to all change unless it is undeniably and completely without doubt, relativity was disputed for years, even spurring the invention of laser gyroscopes so as to disprove it, but it consistently predicted phenomenon which completely contradicted the established science, leading eventually to its now hallowed place in the annals of science. So what I'm saying is that even the most prized theories of our time had a difficult gestation characterised by spectacular successes and stubborn resistance in the scientific community, thats just the way it is, and for good reason, otherwise, science would become as fragmented as the christian movement today, consisting of many conflicting unverifiable claims.
well said, I came to this forum scratching my head about the "electrical nature of the universe" statement, why on earth was this allowed on ./(????), the internet is full of nuts trying to push their own daft take on reality but as GBS once said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
hmmm, I was under the impression that fusion was meant to be self sustaining, ie once the lasers had fired and the nuclear fire had started to burn, no further external input would be needed. The impression I get from this article is that the z machine would be continuously zapping the fusion core????. Also, as far as i'm aware, this is just a glorified capcitator circuit, am I wrong?, have I drifted away from reality and crossed into the realm of wild and unsubstansiated claims? mooooo.
of course, first thing that occured to me, I said, by george, dosen't the new logo of wired obey the laws of optical volumes. I, for one, welcome our new optical overlords.
its not evolution that these people contest, its the suggestion that life started without divine interference that the more well organised religious bigots of our day are protesting against, awful bastards
thats probably the best slash dot comment I've ever read.
air bus do have rear view cameras installed in their planes. The purpose of these cameras is to assist with the taxing of the aircraft, makes it easier to spot any russions as well :)
This is pointless nostalgia. In order to store same amount of info on tape as a cd rom / dvd, you'd need close to the capacity of a warehouse. A cd/dvd is easily copied, imagine the logistics invloved in doing the same operation with your tape reels. Unstable?, sure digital media suffers from corruption (very very occasionally) but there exist protocols for encoding the data which make it resistant to corruption and even if there weren't, simply copying the data and storing it in mutitple servers around the world would solve the prolem
I completely agree, while its unconstructive to sit back and simply criticise the man, its hard to give him a great deal of credit for redressing functionality that's long established. Fair play for giving it a shot but I think this system will suffer from complexity when they start to scale up, particularly on their method for representing sequences of events, which seemed very sketchy in the white papers. Fair enough, if the sequence a->b->c exists then the occuence of a infers the occurence of c. However, say these sequences exist : a -> b -> c a -> d -> e a -> r -> f Then prediction becomes inaccurate unless some sort of contextual support is built into the system and I haven't seen any mechanism to support that in the documentation, believe me, I looked.
Does anyone have any operating system usage statisitcs that are actually reliable. It seems that any pro - windows site (www.microsoft.com) would have you believe that the windows monopoly is as healthy as ever whilst we also hear news like this showing systemic adoption of Linux based operating systems across multiple sovereign nations.
"(Quote marks around "poor" because you can't speak about poor Americans and poor Africans in the same sentence, the situations are utterly incomparable.)" As an aside poor people in America suffer from far more health problems than those in similar social deliniations in other countries. Its not known exactly why but scientists have the hypothesis that simply the stress of being poor amid such decadent wealth incurs a heavy toll for their well-being, unlike other countries where the wealth difference isn't so starkly evident.
i find the reaction among american media sources stunning, Its as tho the chinese premier had taken a shit in the white house garden. American military spending approaches 500 billion dollars a year. Chinese military spending verges on 90 billion. While it was irresponsible for the chinese to have endangered orbital vehicles, it is nowhere near the chest beating call to war that some of the linked articles have made it out to be.