I still read daily, although my comment frequency has dropped somewhat.
Notwithstanding, I'm not leaving.
Odd how/. has been one of the few constants in my life over the past years. I have read and posted to slashdot from a Solaris machine in my cubicle, from a Linux machine in my house, and from a terminal in Afghanistan.
Back when I was doing the whole pro race driver thing, I'd spend several hours a week on a PS/2 and several different driving games.
It's not *exactly* the same - in particular, a lot of feedback about where the tires are relative to the grip level comes through your ass - but there's enough overlap to make the exercise worthwhile.
And especially for road courses like LeMans, the game (which duplicates the track pretty faithfully) can be a real help trying to memorize where the course goes. Much of road racing is knowing which turn follows which an where the racing line is.
Jacques Villeneuve used to do the same thing.
On the military side of things, AFV simulators like Steel Beasts Pro (which uses the real-life FCS and realistic ballistics) is great turret training. I had to be shown where the various controls were in the real turret, but once my face was in the sight, it was exactly the same. Shocked the hell out of the IG when the "newbie" was putting rounds on target and making the right corrections on his very first live fire.
So yes, for certain skills, simulation games can make a huge difference in Real Life.
1. Knowledge is most decidedly NOT democratic, in that the truth is not determined by whichever idea is most popular at the time. The Truth is the Truth, dammit.
I keep seeing this sneaking into science and engineering all the time. Yes, your mother told you that your were a rare and special guy, and that means it is hard for you to hear that your opinion is actually no-foolin' *wrong* - but the Earth goes around the Sun, and no amount of "democracy" will ever change that.
Granted, more applicable to hard sciences than to literary criticism.
2. Books represent a point in history, written by someone who took the time and effort to contribute his understanding to paper. As such, they may contain errors. But I also find that a person willing to take the time and effort to write a book usually knows a fair amount about the subject matter - it is rare that an idiot writes a treatise on Calculus.
3. He who does not read the Classics misses out on enormous amounts of cultural reference. So many works refer to or allude to classical literature, that to willfully NOT read them is to miss most of the information in more modern works. It'd be like trying to watch Family Guy without having watched any TV, seen any movies, or listened to any music made in the last 30 years - you's miss most of the real material.
4. Awesome idea - until circumstances remove that electronic crutch. What do you do in a power failure, or a natural disaster, or in Afghanistan?
5. What a narrow and short-sighted view of "success"! I'd say "success" is a real-realized life.
Granted, a university degree need not be part of that - I taught myself mechanical engineering (and was employed as an engineer) without taking any University engineering courses. Did it the hard way, through hard-won experience and a whoooooole lot of reading (thank Lob for books!)
This story would ABSOLUTELY have been posted on "Old Slashdot".
It's a NEWS site. While there is a definate Internet / IT geek focus, that which is NEWS has always been fair game, even when it was slightly out of scope for a pure tech site.
Assume the "sterile" gene is carried in the pollen - and we're making a HUGE assumption here; that all GM plants are coded to be sterile. But let's go with it for now.
Let's also assume the sterile gene is recessive.
Assume those plants fertillize 50% of the next crop through cross-pollination, and that the "sterile" gene expresses itself in 50% of those plants. Now 25% of the seed from those plants are sterile, and 50% total carry the "sterile" gene.
Well, the seed from the sterile plants won't grow - so those ones are gone from the gene pool.
Assuming the same proportions each successive year, the "sterile" gene will breed itself out, because the progeny from the an expressed sterile gene don't grow, and so are culled from the pool.
If the "sterile" gene is dominant, it happens even faster - in a single generation, in fact.
This is basic Darwinism - genes with a negative survival value, given sufficient time, breed themselves out. If we assume that your "ice age" (are we done with "Global Warming" and back to the 1970s "Global cooling"?) stops the production of new GM "sterile" seed, the gene pool will purge itself fairly quickly
....EVERY crop grown for human consumption has been generically modified?
EVERY SINGLE ONE.
There is not a single food staple crop that exists in its as-evolved state. Every single crop has been changed by humans to better suit us.
Most of them were done over time, through breeding programs. Recently, it has been possible to speed up the process using more direct methods. But the same process has been going on since the Sumerians discovered agriculture some 6000 years ago,
And you are calling people "morons"? Glass houses, mon ami.
...that most of the technologies used in your "self-sustainable" lifestyle are the result of recent developments and investments in new technologies, most of which have been about pushing down the costs of the tech involved.
Your solar array? Only became feasible at the individual installation level in the last five years (and is improving rapidly) due to heavy R&D investment. Ditto that windmill (arguably, that's more about moving the industrial base to China and the associated cost savings - unless you have carbon fiber blades).
And that's ignoring the effect of cheap and powerful computers on design - affordable solid form CAD, FEA, CFD, and ubiquitous CAM means that anybody can buy Solidworks, MasterCAM, and a HAAS 3-axis mill and start making chips at a startup cost that is a tiny fraction of what that capability cost even 10 years ago.
Unless you are mining your own ore, smelting your own raw materials, logging your own trees, growing your own seed (and your own fertilizer) your are as much a part of "the system" as the rest of us; a couple of solar panels be dammed.
While smallpox is undeniably nasty, it is nowhere near lethal enough to make a decent weapon, and the vaccine is well understood and readily manufactured.
The counter-example of what happened to the Native Americans upon contact with European explorers is an unfortunate - and inevitable - side effect arising out of the fact that smallpox was unknown in the New World and so none of the Native American population had evolved defenses against it like Europeans had.
But now that the human bloodlines are so well mixed, no culture should have that genetic susceptibility to smallpox, so the opportunity for devastating and lethal smallpox plagues should be pretty much gone.
Notwithstanding, smallpox was a nasty disease and an outbreak would be serious stuff, but not "weapons grade" serious stuff. A "weapons grade" biological agent needs to be very lethal and very contagious, but over a very short time frame. Ideally, you'd want the agent to go through its contagious stage and end in death in a couple of hours or so. If death takes longer than that, then the target can still fight when sick, and if the contagious phase is prolonged, you greatly increase the possibility of "blowback" where you infect your own troops or civilians.
The worst case is a highly lethal disease that is highly contagious but takes weeks to present - that's a "The Stand" scenario. And nobody wants that.
As it happens, the agents that were weaponized by the US were abandoned, in no small part because they were insufficiently (which is to say, not very) lethal. They also had very low rates of infection meaning that the logistical requirements for a successful strike were infeasible.
Never mind the scary and evil aspects of germ warfare; as a practical weapon, it just doesn't work. High explosives are far cheaper and work far better.
The decision to go in with a Special Ops team, instead of blasting the compound with a UAV or cruise missile strike, is one of the ballsiest decisions I've seen a commander-in-chief make in a very, very long time.
Notwithstanding their carefully crafted image and SOCOM 3, any time you put men on the ground far away from safety, the level of assumed risk skyrockets. Even this raid lost a helicopter (shades of Carter's attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages in the '70s)
But when it goes right, it allows you to tightly focus the violence to the smallest possible audience, killing the bare minimum necessary to accomplish the mission, and (mostly - even SEALs make mistakes sometimes) ensuring that you get the right target.
Far too many American presidents have taken the safe and expedient COA rather than the risky but more morally justifiable COA.
And the payoff is HUGE. Not only did they get their man, they snagged a treasure trove of intel that will probably prove to be the unraveling of the remnants of the Al-Quaida network. And perhaps more importantly, they did it without killing the dozens of children who were living in the compound.
This whole mission was very, very well done, and I hope it represents a turning point for a lot of US foreign policy.
The best way to generate unbiased and thoughtful discourse? Generate thoughtful and unbiased discourse.
It doesn't hurt either than I'm not 16 and have seen some stuff. I find my opinions get a lot more grey the older I get. The 16 year old me was an asshole.
People are much more willing to share good news than bad news.
Given that this is one of the best bits of news in a very very long time - arguably, the best news since 9/11 - they can be somewhat forgiven for wanting to get it out in a hurry, even if all the details weren't firmed up yet.
One of the things that made Osama so dangerous was that he had set himself up as a kind of religious aesthete who, to his followers, had claimed the moral high ground and was thus an example to be emulated.
He was claiming to be more pious than Islamic religious leaders who were preaching a more moderate course of action.
If his claims of piety can be shown to be demonstrably false; if he can be shown to be as flawed and "sinful" as every other man, much of the righteous indignation that mobilizes his followers can be neutralized.
Having disillusioned former terrorists and jihadists renounce their former ways and return to the Muslim mainstream is a win for everybody - it's a win for Islam, a win for the West - and a win for the former jihadists, who will get to live more normal lives that won't have to end violently.
Killing one's enemy is never the ideal course of action. Sometimes it is necessary. But far better for everyone if they become your friends - or at the very least, renounce being your sworn enemy.
I have worked in a variety of military operations centres.
What you are seeing is likely not willful deception, but rather a common phenomenon that "The first report is never right".
When people are under stress, they report the details wrong, or they mis-hear, or they make assumptions to fill in gaps in knowledge, or there or misunderstandings, etc etc.
So the details in an initial report are almost always wrong. You learn to not leap into action based on an initial report, but to be patient and wait for follow-up reports, because they tend to be more accurate. As time goes by and people calm down, the true details start to resolve.
So for example, if the operative on the ground reported that Osama was "resisting" (by which, he meant that he did not immediately surrender) the next guy up the chain may have interpreted "resisting" to mean "armed and shooting" - and that's what he reported. Later debriefs would reveal what actually happened, and the story would change.
That's nothing nefarious; that's just the nature of crisis reporting.
If you are old enough to remember 9/11, for the first few hours of the attacks, all kinds of crazy crap was being reported. It wasn't until later in the day the the actual nature of what had happened had resolved itself.
By the way, Bin Laden's standing amongst the world's Muslims is not very high, and never was. His standing amongst the worlds Jihadist Terrorists was much higher. Please don't confuse the two.
So you pay a little more for the compact form factor and the associated cost with miniaturization.
There is value to smaller. Maybe not enough value to justify the price premium and lack of physical media for you... but hey, that's a design tradeoff and not everybody has the same wants and needs.
The tradeoffs can certainly influence the decision to purchase one model over the other - but HATE? That's just silly.
Slashdot Mirror
It's "military-grade" because it is a military encrypted fax machine.
For obvious reasons, I'm not going to discuss the encryption technology involved - save to say that it is very secure.
DG
We have military-grade encrypted fax machines.
They are by far the best way to send sensitive documents quickly and securely.
DG
Way to skew the curve, n00b.
DG
I prefer "tribal elder", myself, over "ancients".
DG
I still read daily, although my comment frequency has dropped somewhat.
Notwithstanding, I'm not leaving.
Odd how /. has been one of the few constants in my life over the past years. I have read and posted to slashdot from a Solaris machine in my cubicle, from a Linux machine in my house, and from a terminal in Afghanistan.
Good luck Rob. You did good here.
DG
Back when I was doing the whole pro race driver thing, I'd spend several hours a week on a PS/2 and several different driving games.
It's not *exactly* the same - in particular, a lot of feedback about where the tires are relative to the grip level comes through your ass - but there's enough overlap to make the exercise worthwhile.
And especially for road courses like LeMans, the game (which duplicates the track pretty faithfully) can be a real help trying to memorize where the course goes. Much of road racing is knowing which turn follows which an where the racing line is.
Jacques Villeneuve used to do the same thing.
On the military side of things, AFV simulators like Steel Beasts Pro (which uses the real-life FCS and realistic ballistics) is great turret training. I had to be shown where the various controls were in the real turret, but once my face was in the sight, it was exactly the same. Shocked the hell out of the IG when the "newbie" was putting rounds on target and making the right corrections on his very first live fire.
So yes, for certain skills, simulation games can make a huge difference in Real Life.
DG
...who hears the Star Trek - The Motion Picture "Enterprise in Dock Fly-by" music in my head when I look at those pictures?
The Blue Danube would also be an acceptable answer.
DG
1. Knowledge is most decidedly NOT democratic, in that the truth is not determined by whichever idea is most popular at the time. The Truth is the Truth, dammit.
I keep seeing this sneaking into science and engineering all the time. Yes, your mother told you that your were a rare and special guy, and that means it is hard for you to hear that your opinion is actually no-foolin' *wrong* - but the Earth goes around the Sun, and no amount of "democracy" will ever change that.
Granted, more applicable to hard sciences than to literary criticism.
2. Books represent a point in history, written by someone who took the time and effort to contribute his understanding to paper. As such, they may contain errors. But I also find that a person willing to take the time and effort to write a book usually knows a fair amount about the subject matter - it is rare that an idiot writes a treatise on Calculus.
3. He who does not read the Classics misses out on enormous amounts of cultural reference. So many works refer to or allude to classical literature, that to willfully NOT read them is to miss most of the information in more modern works. It'd be like trying to watch Family Guy without having watched any TV, seen any movies, or listened to any music made in the last 30 years - you's miss most of the real material.
4. Awesome idea - until circumstances remove that electronic crutch. What do you do in a power failure, or a natural disaster, or in Afghanistan?
5. What a narrow and short-sighted view of "success"! I'd say "success" is a real-realized life.
Granted, a university degree need not be part of that - I taught myself mechanical engineering (and was employed as an engineer) without taking any University engineering courses. Did it the hard way, through hard-won experience and a whoooooole lot of reading (thank Lob for books!)
DG
I've been here since the start.
This story would ABSOLUTELY have been posted on "Old Slashdot".
It's a NEWS site. While there is a definate Internet / IT geek focus, that which is NEWS has always been fair game, even when it was slightly out of scope for a pure tech site.
Goodbye, AC. We won't miss you.
DG
1 goal, 130 assists.
What, too soon?
DG
That's a self-rectifying problem.
Assume the "sterile" gene is carried in the pollen - and we're making a HUGE assumption here; that all GM plants are coded to be sterile. But let's go with it for now.
Let's also assume the sterile gene is recessive.
Assume those plants fertillize 50% of the next crop through cross-pollination, and that the "sterile" gene expresses itself in 50% of those plants. Now 25% of the seed from those plants are sterile, and 50% total carry the "sterile" gene.
Well, the seed from the sterile plants won't grow - so those ones are gone from the gene pool.
Assuming the same proportions each successive year, the "sterile" gene will breed itself out, because the progeny from the an expressed sterile gene don't grow, and so are culled from the pool.
If the "sterile" gene is dominant, it happens even faster - in a single generation, in fact.
This is basic Darwinism - genes with a negative survival value, given sufficient time, breed themselves out. If we assume that your "ice age" (are we done with "Global Warming" and back to the 1970s "Global cooling"?) stops the production of new GM "sterile" seed, the gene pool will purge itself fairly quickly
DG
Well said.
DG
....EVERY crop grown for human consumption has been generically modified?
EVERY SINGLE ONE.
There is not a single food staple crop that exists in its as-evolved state. Every single crop has been changed by humans to better suit us.
Most of them were done over time, through breeding programs. Recently, it has been possible to speed up the process using more direct methods. But the same process has been going on since the Sumerians discovered agriculture some 6000 years ago,
And you are calling people "morons"? Glass houses, mon ami.
DG
I digest cow's milk just fine, thank you.
Is there a correlation between lactose intolerance and an inability to process logic?
DG
...that most of the technologies used in your "self-sustainable" lifestyle are the result of recent developments and investments in new technologies, most of which have been about pushing down the costs of the tech involved.
Your solar array? Only became feasible at the individual installation level in the last five years (and is improving rapidly) due to heavy R&D investment. Ditto that windmill (arguably, that's more about moving the industrial base to China and the associated cost savings - unless you have carbon fiber blades).
And that's ignoring the effect of cheap and powerful computers on design - affordable solid form CAD, FEA, CFD, and ubiquitous CAM means that anybody can buy Solidworks, MasterCAM, and a HAAS 3-axis mill and start making chips at a startup cost that is a tiny fraction of what that capability cost even 10 years ago.
Unless you are mining your own ore, smelting your own raw materials, logging your own trees, growing your own seed (and your own fertilizer) your are as much a part of "the system" as the rest of us; a couple of solar panels be dammed.
DG
1/666 - Numerator of the Beast.
34B - Number of the Breast
DG
EVERYBODY knows that God is on Atlanta time.
DG
Smallpox makes a poor biological weapon.
While smallpox is undeniably nasty, it is nowhere near lethal enough to make a decent weapon, and the vaccine is well understood and readily manufactured.
The counter-example of what happened to the Native Americans upon contact with European explorers is an unfortunate - and inevitable - side effect arising out of the fact that smallpox was unknown in the New World and so none of the Native American population had evolved defenses against it like Europeans had.
Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus for more detail.
But now that the human bloodlines are so well mixed, no culture should have that genetic susceptibility to smallpox, so the opportunity for devastating and lethal smallpox plagues should be pretty much gone.
Notwithstanding, smallpox was a nasty disease and an outbreak would be serious stuff, but not "weapons grade" serious stuff. A "weapons grade" biological agent needs to be very lethal and very contagious, but over a very short time frame. Ideally, you'd want the agent to go through its contagious stage and end in death in a couple of hours or so. If death takes longer than that, then the target can still fight when sick, and if the contagious phase is prolonged, you greatly increase the possibility of "blowback" where you infect your own troops or civilians.
The worst case is a highly lethal disease that is highly contagious but takes weeks to present - that's a "The Stand" scenario. And nobody wants that.
As it happens, the agents that were weaponized by the US were abandoned, in no small part because they were insufficiently (which is to say, not very) lethal. They also had very low rates of infection meaning that the logistical requirements for a successful strike were infeasible.
Never mind the scary and evil aspects of germ warfare; as a practical weapon, it just doesn't work. High explosives are far cheaper and work far better.
DG
The decision to go in with a Special Ops team, instead of blasting the compound with a UAV or cruise missile strike, is one of the ballsiest decisions I've seen a commander-in-chief make in a very, very long time.
Notwithstanding their carefully crafted image and SOCOM 3, any time you put men on the ground far away from safety, the level of assumed risk skyrockets. Even this raid lost a helicopter (shades of Carter's attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages in the '70s)
But when it goes right, it allows you to tightly focus the violence to the smallest possible audience, killing the bare minimum necessary to accomplish the mission, and (mostly - even SEALs make mistakes sometimes) ensuring that you get the right target.
Far too many American presidents have taken the safe and expedient COA rather than the risky but more morally justifiable COA.
And the payoff is HUGE. Not only did they get their man, they snagged a treasure trove of intel that will probably prove to be the unraveling of the remnants of the Al-Quaida network. And perhaps more importantly, they did it without killing the dozens of children who were living in the compound.
This whole mission was very, very well done, and I hope it represents a turning point for a lot of US foreign policy.
DG
Thanks.
I'm a big fan of "lead by example".
The best way to generate unbiased and thoughtful discourse? Generate thoughtful and unbiased discourse.
It doesn't hurt either than I'm not 16 and have seen some stuff. I find my opinions get a lot more grey the older I get. The 16 year old me was an asshole.
DG
People are much more willing to share good news than bad news.
Given that this is one of the best bits of news in a very very long time - arguably, the best news since 9/11 - they can be somewhat forgiven for wanting to get it out in a hurry, even if all the details weren't firmed up yet.
DG
You're right that some will assume it was planted, some will assume that it wasn't his, some will rationalize it away, and so on.
But some won't. Some will realize that Osama wasn't the saint he made himself out to be, and will leave the network because of it.
And every one of those is a fighter lost who didn't have to be killed - a win for everyone.
A course of action need not have a 100% success rate to make it worth following.
DG
One of the things that made Osama so dangerous was that he had set himself up as a kind of religious aesthete who, to his followers, had claimed the moral high ground and was thus an example to be emulated.
He was claiming to be more pious than Islamic religious leaders who were preaching a more moderate course of action.
If his claims of piety can be shown to be demonstrably false; if he can be shown to be as flawed and "sinful" as every other man, much of the righteous indignation that mobilizes his followers can be neutralized.
Having disillusioned former terrorists and jihadists renounce their former ways and return to the Muslim mainstream is a win for everybody - it's a win for Islam, a win for the West - and a win for the former jihadists, who will get to live more normal lives that won't have to end violently.
Killing one's enemy is never the ideal course of action. Sometimes it is necessary. But far better for everyone if they become your friends - or at the very least, renounce being your sworn enemy.
DG
I have worked in a variety of military operations centres.
What you are seeing is likely not willful deception, but rather a common phenomenon that "The first report is never right".
When people are under stress, they report the details wrong, or they mis-hear, or they make assumptions to fill in gaps in knowledge, or there or misunderstandings, etc etc.
So the details in an initial report are almost always wrong. You learn to not leap into action based on an initial report, but to be patient and wait for follow-up reports, because they tend to be more accurate. As time goes by and people calm down, the true details start to resolve.
So for example, if the operative on the ground reported that Osama was "resisting" (by which, he meant that he did not immediately surrender) the next guy up the chain may have interpreted "resisting" to mean "armed and shooting" - and that's what he reported. Later debriefs would reveal what actually happened, and the story would change.
That's nothing nefarious; that's just the nature of crisis reporting.
If you are old enough to remember 9/11, for the first few hours of the attacks, all kinds of crazy crap was being reported. It wasn't until later in the day the the actual nature of what had happened had resolved itself.
By the way, Bin Laden's standing amongst the world's Muslims is not very high, and never was. His standing amongst the worlds Jihadist Terrorists was much higher. Please don't confuse the two.
DG
So you pay a little more for the compact form factor and the associated cost with miniaturization.
There is value to smaller. Maybe not enough value to justify the price premium and lack of physical media for you... but hey, that's a design tradeoff and not everybody has the same wants and needs.
The tradeoffs can certainly influence the decision to purchase one model over the other - but HATE? That's just silly.
DG