Firstly, non-UK slashdotters should realise that PlusNet is a pretty lame ISP by most peoples standards, and doesn't have a huge number of users, so can't be taken as a reliable data point.
Secondly, the whole philosophy behind IPlayer is fundamentally flawed. I am a linux user, who pays the three-figure license fee every year. How dare they say I can't use BBC content I have already paid for how I like? I understand that Auntie gets a significant amount of revenue selling its content to overseas networks - but this is unrelated to the Internet. You can't regulate Jonny American downloading the latest episodes of Dr. Who but you can certainly regulate how much an American TV network must pay to show it. The Beeb is listening too much to traditional media types who don't fully grasp how the internet works. They don't understand to have a public TV service (a fantastic thing in my opinion, and most Britons agree with me) you must allow unrestricted downloads.
Britons downloading BBC content are simply utilising what they already pay for. Foreigners downloading the content are extending the reach of British culture. Forcing it through a proprietary system is ridiculous.
How about MI6 workers getting shit faced at lunchtime and leaving a laptop with state secrets in the pub? Not something you'd see James Bond doing is it.
The police will whinge that they don't have the powers to get 'dangerous' individuals convicted, and so ask to be will be able to hold people longer, monitor people without warrants, etc...
And because our neo-fascist government wants to be seen as strong, they will do it all.
Can my fellow UK slashdotters join me in a moment of silence for Amiga Power. The magazine that was smart, funny, and knew how to use a percentage scale properly.
Electromagnetic fields are only mysterious to hacks and quacks. However, understand them and being able to work with them does require a certain level of skill with maths, which this particular aluminium haberdasherer freely admits he doesn't have:
He isn't an engineer. He doesn't have a graduate degrees in physics. He never even finished his electronics program at Heritage College in Gatineau, Quebec. "I have mild dyslexia and don't do well in math, so I didn't do very well in school," he says.
How bad are we talking here? Are we expected to believe in a breakthrough in our understanding of electromagnetism from someone who gets frightened by cross products?
But pay no mind to me, I'm part of the evil mainstream scientific establishment trying to keep this invention secret and maintain the big lie of thermodynamics.
If an autistic person cannot get on with a non-autistic person, why do you assume it is the fault of the autistic person? Perhaps the normal person is just too damn intolerant.
Problem with what you said though is (afaik) that autistic people have just as much problem dealing with other autistic people as they would with normal people, if not more.
You can't generalise about such things; how two people relate is entirely down to those particular two people. Hence crews train together. Trying to turn it into the fucking waltons in space is just petty and reactionary.
From what I read of the article, this is about enforcing societal norms on employees. And that usually entails firing a lot of autistic people.
First it was the IT industry, and now apparently the space industry is getting in on the act. Tired of watching otherwise competent and productive employees fail to give out and respond to conforming body language, managers decide that we need to bring in some people who make eye contact when they speak and understand the latest fashions. That is far more important than technical expertise, after all.
Most of you probably think its fine, but a societies treatment of 'freaks' and 'wierdos' is a good indication of how it will be treating 'normal' people further down the line.
But many women like the, ahem, companionship of other women. If this has a genetic basis (almost certain) then the genetic offspring of two such women is very likely to feel the same way. A female-only subculture is almost certainly on the way.
The depressing thing is, as a man I can't really think of why we should be allowed to stick around.
Except none of what you just said stands up to basic scrutiny. First off, I can't find any evidence Black ever worked for IBM. He has been an author for decades, and wrote another book about the holocaust prior to the one focussing on IBM. Also, IBM themselves admit that the Nazis use hollerith machines in their crimes ( http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss ) their defence being that the German subsidiary was nationalised by the Nazis at the time.
Unlike Black, I suspect you are an employee of IBM
Why would they write about it in history books that weren't concerned with tabulating machines? The book has far from 'dissolved' - its criticisms have never been disproven by IBM and your claim that they have makes me smell a shill.
"long history of dirty tricks" doesn't scratch the fucking surface. IBM committed probably the most heinous crime in corporate history. Ever wondered how the Third Reich managed to find 6 million people and horde them into camps without using computers?
As I have patiently explained many times, America does not lead the world in most areas of science and technology. Or free speech. Or social mobility. Or even per capita wealth. The only thing the US leads the world in is military power, and as Iraq has shown that doesn't seem to help you much anyway.
Ultimately we're in a competitive battle with the rest of the world; a battle where we need to stay the most powerful nation in the world. And the only way our nation stays ahead forever is with superior technology and innovation.
Well, first of all, as I mentioned a moment ago, the way a nation like ours stays ahead permanently from other nations is having superior technology and innovation
Woo! Go USA! Thousand year empire!
I hope you notice that candidates in other countries just don't talk in such belligerent terms about their nations position in the world.
Capitalism isn't voluntary association. It is the involuntary imposition of a property system on the entire population, one which is proven to impoverish people. You can continue to ignorantly throw around words like 'big government' and 'socialism' like you actually know what they mean, but it won't make you any less of a complete moron.
Utter crap. What in capitalism makes people act humane? Nothing. The west doesn't succeed because of greed, it succeeds despite it. Capitalism takes juvenile selfishness to be the sum of human experience and disregards the rest and that is why you get so many 19 year old Ayn Rand fanboys.
The 'victories' of capitalism have not been supplied by capitalism at all, in fact. This can be demonstrated from conditions where pure capitalism has been implemented without any restrained. Russia after the fall of the USSR. 19th and early 20th century Britain and America. Chile under Pinochet. The result is universal - the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and society crumbles into a fist fight for the next loaf of bread. Nothing that capitalism claims to provide would ever have materialised for the masses if it weren't for socialist policies. Universal literacy, clean water and decent wages are all contrary to capitalism.
Agreed - it doesn't add anything except a toy for people with more money than sense.
Worse, it's hype causes more important projects to be overlooked. There is almost a media conspiracy to make the phrase 'private spaceflight' mean 'corporate spaceflight'. In my opinion, the following two projects were of far more importance to mankind and to private spaceflight than SpacShipOne:
A robot is not a scientist. The result of each experiment informs scientists how to construct the next experiment. This is easy if they live on the moon, it can take a decade if they don't.
Why is there no scientific value in sending people to the moon? Its not like NASA explored the whole thing in the 1960s. We don't know much at all about the levels of water and helium-3 in the surface, both of which are important. Furthermore, seeing as the Earth and Moon seemed to have formed at the same time, investigating the moon can tell us more about the Earth. There is loads more to learn.
There is still plenty we do not know about the moon, seeing as we have sent precisely one real scientist there in all of human history. The moon is also a far more practical setting for a manned base, which is ultimately the point of expanding into space. But, hey, like I said I'm sure you can tag along with the Chinese or Russians.
Manned asteroid missions have little if anything to do with asteroid deflection strategies. If you want to keep the Earth safe from big nasty dinosaur-killers, you spend money on tracking every Earth crossing Asteroid in the sky, not on sending people to 1 or 2 of them. Early detection of potential dangers makes any deflection strategy (almost certainly unmanned, despite what your favourite movies might tell you) more plausible
The purpose of visiting asteroids is looking for something to mine or doing science to investigate the origins of the solar system.
Slashdot Mirror
Firstly, non-UK slashdotters should realise that PlusNet is a pretty lame ISP by most peoples standards, and doesn't have a huge number of users, so can't be taken as a reliable data point.
Secondly, the whole philosophy behind IPlayer is fundamentally flawed. I am a linux user, who pays the three-figure license fee every year. How dare they say I can't use BBC content I have already paid for how I like? I understand that Auntie gets a significant amount of revenue selling its content to overseas networks - but this is unrelated to the Internet. You can't regulate Jonny American downloading the latest episodes of Dr. Who but you can certainly regulate how much an American TV network must pay to show it. The Beeb is listening too much to traditional media types who don't fully grasp how the internet works. They don't understand to have a public TV service (a fantastic thing in my opinion, and most Britons agree with me) you must allow unrestricted downloads. Britons downloading BBC content are simply utilising what they already pay for. Foreigners downloading the content are extending the reach of British culture. Forcing it through a proprietary system is ridiculous.
Rubbish. The US has less freedom of speech than most European countries. Don't just take my word for it though:
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=24025
The fact you think you are freer just makes it even more disturbing.
NO, ITS SHIT!
Sorry, had to be done.
Well, the UK just slashed the physics research budget by £80 million, so why not cripple the Internet as well?
How about MI6 workers getting shit faced at lunchtime and leaving a laptop with state secrets in the pub? Not something you'd see James Bond doing is it.
The police will whinge that they don't have the powers to get 'dangerous' individuals convicted, and so ask to be will be able to hold people longer, monitor people without warrants, etc...
And because our neo-fascist government wants to be seen as strong, they will do it all.
Can my fellow UK slashdotters join me in a moment of silence for Amiga Power. The magazine that was smart, funny, and knew how to use a percentage scale properly.
Electromagnetic fields are only mysterious to hacks and quacks. However, understand them and being able to work with them does require a certain level of skill with maths, which this particular aluminium haberdasherer freely admits he doesn't have:
How bad are we talking here? Are we expected to believe in a breakthrough in our understanding of electromagnetism from someone who gets frightened by cross products?
But pay no mind to me, I'm part of the evil mainstream scientific establishment trying to keep this invention secret and maintain the big lie of thermodynamics.
If an autistic person cannot get on with a non-autistic person, why do you assume it is the fault of the autistic person? Perhaps the normal person is just too damn intolerant.
From what I read of the article, this is about enforcing societal norms on employees. And that usually entails firing a lot of autistic people.
First it was the IT industry, and now apparently the space industry is getting in on the act. Tired of watching otherwise competent and productive employees fail to give out and respond to conforming body language, managers decide that we need to bring in some people who make eye contact when they speak and understand the latest fashions. That is far more important than technical expertise, after all.
Most of you probably think its fine, but a societies treatment of 'freaks' and 'wierdos' is a good indication of how it will be treating 'normal' people further down the line.
But many women like the, ahem, companionship of other women. If this has a genetic basis (almost certain) then the genetic offspring of two such women is very likely to feel the same way. A female-only subculture is almost certainly on the way.
The depressing thing is, as a man I can't really think of why we should be allowed to stick around.
Boingboing is already down... they haven't got to the PDF yet so if that goes down I shall redistribute it. See you all it Gitmo.
Except none of what you just said stands up to basic scrutiny. First off, I can't find any evidence Black ever worked for IBM. He has been an author for decades, and wrote another book about the holocaust prior to the one focussing on IBM. Also, IBM themselves admit that the Nazis use hollerith machines in their crimes ( http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/1388.wss ) their defence being that the German subsidiary was nationalised by the Nazis at the time.
Unlike Black, I suspect you are an employee of IBM
Why would they write about it in history books that weren't concerned with tabulating machines? The book has far from 'dissolved' - its criticisms have never been disproven by IBM and your claim that they have makes me smell a shill.
"long history of dirty tricks" doesn't scratch the fucking surface. IBM committed probably the most heinous crime in corporate history. Ever wondered how the Third Reich managed to find 6 million people and horde them into camps without using computers?
As I have patiently explained many times, America does not lead the world in most areas of science and technology. Or free speech. Or social mobility. Or even per capita wealth. The only thing the US leads the world in is military power, and as Iraq has shown that doesn't seem to help you much anyway.
Woo! Go USA! Thousand year empire!
I hope you notice that candidates in other countries just don't talk in such belligerent terms about their nations position in the world.
And one of the ayn rand fanboys turns right up.
Capitalism isn't voluntary association. It is the involuntary imposition of a property system on the entire population, one which is proven to impoverish people. You can continue to ignorantly throw around words like 'big government' and 'socialism' like you actually know what they mean, but it won't make you any less of a complete moron.
Utter crap. What in capitalism makes people act humane? Nothing. The west doesn't succeed because of greed, it succeeds despite it. Capitalism takes juvenile selfishness to be the sum of human experience and disregards the rest and that is why you get so many 19 year old Ayn Rand fanboys.
The 'victories' of capitalism have not been supplied by capitalism at all, in fact. This can be demonstrated from conditions where pure capitalism has been implemented without any restrained. Russia after the fall of the USSR. 19th and early 20th century Britain and America. Chile under Pinochet. The result is universal - the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and society crumbles into a fist fight for the next loaf of bread. Nothing that capitalism claims to provide would ever have materialised for the masses if it weren't for socialist policies. Universal literacy, clean water and decent wages are all contrary to capitalism.
Agreed - it doesn't add anything except a toy for people with more money than sense.
Worse, it's hype causes more important projects to be overlooked. There is almost a media conspiracy to make the phrase 'private spaceflight' mean 'corporate spaceflight'. In my opinion, the following two projects were of far more importance to mankind and to private spaceflight than SpacShipOne:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos_1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Space_eXploration_Team
Yet they have been largely ignored in favour of flashy expensive vehicles.
A robot is not a scientist. The result of each experiment informs scientists how to construct the next experiment. This is easy if they live on the moon, it can take a decade if they don't.
Why is there no scientific value in sending people to the moon? Its not like NASA explored the whole thing in the 1960s. We don't know much at all about the levels of water and helium-3 in the surface, both of which are important. Furthermore, seeing as the Earth and Moon seemed to have formed at the same time, investigating the moon can tell us more about the Earth. There is loads more to learn.
There is still plenty we do not know about the moon, seeing as we have sent precisely one real scientist there in all of human history. The moon is also a far more practical setting for a manned base, which is ultimately the point of expanding into space. But, hey, like I said I'm sure you can tag along with the Chinese or Russians.
Manned asteroid missions have little if anything to do with asteroid deflection strategies. If you want to keep the Earth safe from big nasty dinosaur-killers, you spend money on tracking every Earth crossing Asteroid in the sky, not on sending people to 1 or 2 of them. Early detection of potential dangers makes any deflection strategy (almost certainly unmanned, despite what your favourite movies might tell you) more plausible
The purpose of visiting asteroids is looking for something to mine or doing science to investigate the origins of the solar system.