Slashdot Mirror

This?

I only remember the book because of that first review.

When an organization doesn't have enough money to do something, that is known as underfunding. When an organization _does_ have the money, but spends it inappropriately so they can't deal with the issues they are responsible for (including their own internal upkeep), then that is known as misappropriation.

The NSA had the money they needed to deal with their infrastructure problems, but did not. Wasn't this the kind of cooperation and organizational problems the whole "post 9-11" reorganization efforts were intended to fix? I will not argue that it is a failure of previous administrations that this did not get fixed earlier - just that these exact kinds of deep organizational failures coming to a dramatic conclusion are exactly in keeping with this administration's practices so far.

For a small sample of supporting evidence for my arguments, assertions and conclusions, see:

The Republican War on Science (Book)
Most of the recent works by John W. Dean (Several books)
One of many powerfully incisive books by George Lackoff
Countless other books, including these ...and most political news appearing outside FOX news for the past 4 years.

Ryan Fenton

When an organization doesn't have enough money to do something, that is known as underfunding. When an organization _does_ have the money, but spends it inappropriately so they can't deal with the issues they are responsible for (including their own internal upkeep), then that is known as misappropriation.

The NSA had the money they needed to deal with their infrastructure problems, but did not. Wasn't this the kind of cooperation and organizational problems the whole "post 9-11" reorganization efforts were intended to fix? I will not argue that it is a failure of previous administrations that this did not get fixed earlier - just that these exact kinds of deep organizational failures coming to a dramatic conclusion are exactly in keeping with this administration's practices so far.

For a small sample of supporting evidence for my arguments, assertions and conclusions, see:

The Republican War on Science (Book)
Most of the recent works by John W. Dean (Several books)
One of many powerfully incisive books by George Lackoff
Countless other books, including these ...and most political news appearing outside FOX news for the past 4 years.

Ryan Fenton

When an organization doesn't have enough money to do something, that is known as underfunding. When an organization _does_ have the money, but spends it inappropriately so they can't deal with the issues they are responsible for (including their own internal upkeep), then that is known as misappropriation.

The NSA had the money they needed to deal with their infrastructure problems, but did not. Wasn't this the kind of cooperation and organizational problems the whole "post 9-11" reorganization efforts were intended to fix? I will not argue that it is a failure of previous administrations that this did not get fixed earlier - just that these exact kinds of deep organizational failures coming to a dramatic conclusion are exactly in keeping with this administration's practices so far.

For a small sample of supporting evidence for my arguments, assertions and conclusions, see:

The Republican War on Science (Book)
Most of the recent works by John W. Dean (Several books)
One of many powerfully incisive books by George Lackoff
Countless other books, including these ...and most political news appearing outside FOX news for the past 4 years.

Ryan Fenton

How does germany plan on enforcing this?

I think he's catching on very well for a big dog. Most of us would be very happy with a boss this open and clued.

The best book I ever read about the CIA is called "The Main enemy" which outlines the final years of spying between the Soviet Union and the CIA. One thing people don't know is that the CIA declassifies a LOT of stuff but does not tell you WHAT is was declassified. Thus you can't request for that which you don't know about.

This book was written by a reporter and a former CIA employee who knew WHAT to request. Of course it was vetted but the things in it are VERY fascinating. From how much the Russians were running circles around our human intelligence operatives to double and triple agents, to what the Russians called the "Miracle Device", which was a device they found on a train car of the Siberian express designed to go back and forth across the country looking for nuclear weapons based on radiation signatures.

http://www.amazon.com/Main-Enemy-Inside-Story-Show down/dp/0345472500

It's one of those rare finds that usually don't make the best sellers and is quite a gem.

I realize that picking on the CIA for what they do is all good fun for many, but the CIA is ultimately a servant of its masters - most often the president, especially before the Church committee which resulted in much more congressional oversight. Not to say the CIA hasn't exceeded its own orders from time to time - it most certainly has, and once is too many times - but instead of saying, "ooh, look what the dirty CIA did!", it may be useful to look at why they did it and where the order came from. Presidents have often used it for their dirty work, particularly prior to 1975 or so when signed directives were not required, which allowed presidents to order the CIA to do their bidding without a paper trail and have plausible deniability otherwise.

An interesting read on this and other espionage/covert action matters is James Olson's Fair Play. After giving a brief overview of what espionage is like, he puts forward 50 or so "hypothetical" situations and collects ethical and other opinions from a wide variety of people. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to look at common ethical questions the intelligence community faces and common pro and con arguments against them, as well as practical looks at how the intelligence gathering is done.

In theory we could have a civilization where people only work if they want to. Isaac Asimov and Roger MacBride Allen explored one possible society in the Caliban trilogy.

We could have robots making our fast food, doing the gardening, mining metal, making robots, maintaining robots.

And what do we do if the star just vanishes from view in an instant?

is a Best Buy or a Barnes 'n Noble. you're going to need to know the tools and procedures of open source development before you can get anything done or changes submitted.

0. Install an Open Source operating system with development tools, such as [Net,Free,Open]BSD or Linux
1. Learn CVS [http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/, http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/systems/cvs-howto.html%5D .
2. Learn the basics of the GNU C Compiler [http://www.faqs.org/docs/learnc/].
3. Learn Automake, Autoconf and Libtool [http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/autobook/autob ook.html, http://autotoolset.sourceforge.net/tutorial.html, http://www.amazon.com/Autoconf-Automake-Libtool-Ga ry-Vaughan/dp/1578701902, http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~iam/docs/tutorial.htm l%5D.
4. Download a tarball of some source code and compile it, learn how to edit Makefiles, etc.
5. Check out the source code of the same application from CVS, mess around with it.

• Average GPA: 2.92
• Average SAT: 1190
• And to back you up a little...90% are college graduates, 52% have advanced degrees

It's not bullshit at all--the telegraph is a poor medium for conducting real-time debates. Joffre couldn't order the British, he had to convince them, and for that he needed to argue back and forth. That required telephone or face-to-face communications.

I'm getting this information from Barbara Tuchmann's 'The Guns of August.' Pick it up, it's a good read and makes World War I make sense, which no amount of schooling I recieved could do.

"I couldn't find any for sale after a quick search"

Your BlackJack cost you more than $50, but some of its actual cost ($500.00) was spread out over the life of your contract and hidden from you by your carrier. Besides, you got ripped off. Everybody else is getting paid $75 to take one of these hunks of junk off their hands.

Your BlackJack cost you more than $50, but some of its actual cost ($500.00) was spread out over the life of your contract and hidden from you by your carrier. Besides, you got ripped off. Everybody else is getting paid $75 to take one of these hunks of junk off their hands.

http://www.amazon.com/American-Connections-Foundin g-Fathers-Networked/dp/0743282264

I picked up a Samsung ML-2510 last April for my taxes. (Pay to efile? Are they nuts?)

CompUSA sells them for $130. But last April there were frequent $60 rebates. $70 for a laser printer seems.... Acceptable... That's less than what an ink refill will cost for my InkJet. Besides, the InkJet takes a couple hours of fussing with to get all its jets unclogged and printing again. (And cleaning up the ink it spills all over the rollers.)

The Samsung ML-2510 is a lot faster (25ppm). More reliable. The jets never clog. Works with USB or Parallel interface. It supports Windows / MacOSX / Linux (SuSE Linux 8.2, Red Hat Linux 9, Red Hat Linux 8.0, Mandrake Linux 9.2, Red Hat Fedora Core 1, Red Hat Fedora Core 2, Mandrake Linux 10.1 Discovery, SuSE Linux 9.2, Red Hat Fedora Core 3) out of the box.

How can anyone justify continuing to use an inkjet for b/w printing, when new laser-printers are cheaper than ink?

"I think you missed the parent thread, where we were talking about a $100 Tivo."

No, I didn't miss the thread, but you WERE NOT talking about a $100 TiVo, you were throwing estimates around and 100 was the number you used. Please show me the quote where you clearly specify that the only TiVo you were discussing was the 100 dollar one.

"I couldn't find any for sale after a quick search"

Uh, WHAT?

http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-SD-H400-Combination- Progressive-Scan-Digital/dp/B0000AA9E8

There's one right there.

No, what really happens is that you thought TiVo didn't have a free service, and when shown to be wrong, you rushed to find qualifiers to discount what you had overlooked.

You were wrong. Be a fucking man and admit it, instead of making up silly caveats to try and weasel out.

"And that Phillips player is illegal, under their licensing agreement. All region players have been subject to more than one crackdown, with the threat of pulling their license to manufacture in the balance."

Well, I suppose I'd better order THIS as soon as possible before the DVD CCA shuits down Amazon.com and/or Phillips!

Uh...cite a source? I've searched the web and can't seem to find your source for Soviet shoot-down attempts

Source: Mig Pilot by John Barron

For those interested in the subject, I found this book pretty decent:
http://www.amazon.com/Skunk-Works-Personal-Memoir- Lockheed/dp/0316743003

I have been listening to the Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe.
(obligitory amazon link -> Einstein: His Life and Universe )

This new theory fits easily.
CD7 tracks 6 and 7 talk about information transforming based on frame of refere4nce but still staying the same.
CD9 track 2 starts to bring up descriptions of the universe and time and defines a black hole and describes time dialation. the author makes a callout to the 60s and Hawking.
CD9 track 3 goes into some detail of how Einsteins relativity theory fits so well.

While vertical factory farms would be pretty nifty, how useful would they really be?

• Let's consider a medium-sized produce farm parcel as 640 acres (one square mile) and should be able to feed around 1000 people (order of magnitude estimate). To get that amount of space, Manhattan would need to sacrifice a square block and build to 100 stories. This seems to fail the cost-benefit test unless they can produce orders of magnitude more food/acre than traditional farming.
• How many do you need? Let's look at Manhattan (population 1.5M). Assuming that a vertical farm is 10 times as productive as a traditional farm, you need around 150 of them to support the island. This would be around 1.5 square miles of building footprint (about 15% of the island).
• Livestock produce less food/acre than plants unless you truck in all of the food. Using it for animal "crops" (as the article suggested) seems to be a worse idea than just growing fresh green stuff and trucking the meat in.
• "All of the water in the entire complex would be recycled" isn't possible. A bunch of that water is being turned into food and shipped outside the farm. Remeber the Lunar Revolution? Presumably, they are expecting to process the urban sewage and use that for water and fertilizer.
• No diseases or parasites? BioSphere2 didn't manage to stay that isolated. Besides, where do they expect to get the seeds/grafts, fertilizers, water, and staff? Do they expect the entire facility to operate as a clean-room?

Ultimately, if you want to reduce transport costs (money, fuel, etc.) the people need to be closer to the food production. This seems like an idea better suited to lower-density, urban sprawl (where you can grab relatively large areas without consuming a large percentage of the available space) rather than in the middle of compact urban areas.

On a different take, in the book Rocheworld, Robert Forward imagines the first spaceship to another start with barely better than now technology. Meaning it's a one-way trip. The important thing is that the life-support system is meant to keep running longer than the natural extension of their life, so it's not strictly a suicide mission. Also in Red Mars, the 2nd team is sent 'until the next mission'...

I found one in two seconds on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Apple-Mac-Tiger-10-4-6-DVD/d p/B000BWZZLG/ref=pd_bbs_2/104-1269793-1120768?ie=U TF8&s=software&qid=1182355173&sr=8-2

of a certain couple of movies that deal with a similar-ish thing.

We also know how insane even scientists and researchers get during a several-month physical isolation from the rest of the world.

I'm hoping that Red Mars was required reading before they designed this kind of an experiment... I would assume that a similar level of precise requirements are being put into place here, as were found in that book.


Geek power unite! We've already been shown how to colonize space... just read the extensive manuals published by Issac Asimov, James Blish, and Robert A. Henlien!

I'm someone who's family and friends respect when it comes to my knowledge of technology. I take every opportunity to recommend Linux and moving away from Microsoft products. I take the time to show them how to use Linux. I help install and setup systems. I have converted over half of my employer's systems over to Linux and ported some of our mission critical software over to Linux as well. The only thing preventing us from going 100% Linux at my job is management's huge mistake of buying MAS90 from Sage Software. MAS90 isn't entirely Linux friendly, but with recent advances in the Wine project, that may become a non-issue as well.

Fuck MSFT. Their business practices are deplorable. Take a look at some of those internal MSFT memos circulating the internet if you don't know what I'm talking about. Besides that, who wants to use shitty software written by an army of H1Bs anyway? Ever try to get support from MSFT? Good luck. Linux support is outstanding, in my opinion. And besides that, if you aren't getting the support you need, and you have the programming chops (or know someone who does), the source code is right there for you to fix it yourself.

If this is just mental masturbation then I guess we'll see what happens in another 10-15 years, maybe I'll finally get my nut.

The defense should show video 3 of this series to the judge when Microsoft finally brings their patent lawsuit against Linux vendors:
http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-Nerds-Robert-X-Cring ely/dp/B00006FXQO

Okay, so check out the FBI Uniform Crime Report numbers for 2005.

http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/offenses/expanded_in formation/data/shrtable_07.html

I commend to your attention the number of homicides committed with hands and feet: 892

So, more people were beaten to death with hands and feet in the USA than were murdered with all weapons in England and Wales in 2005. Do you suppose that hands and feet are somehow more available in the USA than they are in England?

If you were hoping to imply that the increased availability of firearms in the USA is a cause of the increased number of homicides, you haven't convinced me.

Also check out the studies from professor Gary Kleck. He provides hard numbers that show that legal firearms in the hands of citizens stop more crimes than are committed using firearms; in other words, his numbers show that firearms are a net benefit to American society. If you hope to convince me that a total ban on firearms is a good idea, you will need to explain why professor Kleck is wrong.

http://www.amazon.com/Point-Blank-Violence-America -Institutions/dp/0202304191

English did make it a bit confusing by also using in- as a negative. The two in- prefixes have different etymologies.

Not that this helps much. Pity the poor foreigner trying to learn our insane language. ;-)

English, as such a Crazy Language, may be the hardest language for nonspeakers to learn. Afterall if the pural of "tooth" is "teeth" then why isn't the plural of "booth" "beeth"? Then again Chinese is pretty difficult as well, as is Japanese. Written Chinese has more than 66,000 ideograms representing words. Then there are 3 major methods of Romanizatization, writing Chinese with the Roman alphabet, Pinyin, Wade Giles, and Yale. And that's just for written Chinese, spoken is totally different. There isn't 1 spoke Chinese. There are a number of different ones, the two most common are Mandarin and Cantonese, with Mandarin the official spoken language in China and Formosa, often called Tiawan. And while Japanese has one spoken language, it has at least two written systems, though I don't recall what they are now.

Falcon

Oh, in going back to English some have noticed my spelling of "time" as "tyme", this spelling is an Old English spelling.

I've always thought Gaiman's Coraline to be his more Alice-in-Wonderland-style work, even though it's a children's book. Neverwhere strikes me as more of an "Odyssey" type of novel.

Anyone who enjoys Alice-in-Wonderland type stories, the book Neverwhere by Gaiman is probably one of my favorite books ever.

Does an excellent job of telling a Wonderland type story where the protagonist is thrown into a totally different world, fairly close to this one. It is certainly my favorite work by Gaiman (much more so than American Gods, which seemed to be more 'critically acclaimed')

Amazon page: http://www.amazon.com/Neverwhere-Novel-Neil-Gaiman /dp/0060557818/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/103-3732875-4118235 ?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182206627&sr=8-2

Author: Same guy who wrote Sandman and American Gods (and its sequel), among many others, these being the most popular.

Novel: From the summary, UPCOMING. As in, not yet released.

Author: Same guy who wrote Sandman and American Gods (and its sequel), among many others, these being the most popular.

Novel: From the summary, UPCOMING. As in, not yet released.

Author: Same guy who wrote Sandman and American Gods (and its sequel), among many others, these being the most popular.

Novel: From the summary, UPCOMING. As in, not yet released.

Fog of War

The Corporation

Why We Fight

The Persuaders

Fog of War

The Corporation

Why We Fight

The Persuaders

Fog of War

The Corporation

Why We Fight

The Persuaders

Fog of War

The Corporation

Why We Fight

The Persuaders

http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20021119.html - here you go. Educate yourself on the man.

Note: These are the same people who wrote this - no fans of the current president.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5335853/site/newsweek/

Michael Isikoff, co-writer of the MSNBC piece, also wrote this.

There're your specifics, sir. The man is not a true documentarian, and makes the whole practice look worse than Geraldo Rivera journalism.

http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20021119.html - here you go. Educate yourself on the man.

Note: These are the same people who wrote this - no fans of the current president.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5335853/site/newsweek/

Michael Isikoff, co-writer of the MSNBC piece, also wrote this.

There're your specifics, sir. The man is not a true documentarian, and makes the whole practice look worse than Geraldo Rivera journalism.

The actual answer is in this book(among others):

http://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-R egime-Change/dp/0805078614

Countries South of the US have had to lock down their countries to keep the US from infiltrating the governments with pro-US business and military leaders. Many of the current leaders down South have a mindset of doing whatever it takes to never let the US do what it has done in the past to their countries.

Burn the village to save the village ala Vietnam or the current destruction of the US rights and liberties to save the population from terrorism are in the same spirit.

And of course nutty Floridian election politics play a role too.

You should check out this book: Blindsight, by Peter Watts

Hard sci fi that plays along the lines you're referencing.

Now what if some species has sent us a container of bios mass...and it just hasn't arrived yet? Or perhaps they did some 750,000 years ago...

Love your (perhaps unintentional) typo.

Brings the wonderful image of aliens sending nanomachines to take over the indigent population and begin setting up shop for their arrival. Somewhat like the crab parasites described in "Parasite Rex", which destroy and replace the crab's testicles with their own self-propagating machinery, and "wire up" the crab and take over its movements to suit their own purposes.

Like smallpox blankets, but on a planetary scale, and with intelligent blankets.

You should read a novella called The Fourth Profession by Larry Niven. A very interesting exploration of how interstellar colonization might work using sub-c vessels.

Consider also that sub-light travel (and concomitant lightspeed communications) would be practical if the human lifespan were on the order of a few thousand years. That's not beyond the realm of possibility, and medical advances in life extension are probably more likely than the discovery of an FTL drive, at least in the near-term. In that vein, Orson Scott Card's Hot Sleep: The Worthing Chronicle goes into what might happen to a technologically-advanced interstellar civilization when suspended animation techniques become well-advanced and readily available, both for interstellar travel and for those who simply wish to skip a few decades ... or centuries.

Even if we never do achieve the ability to colonize other star systems (always assuming that they're there for the taking), we should at least begin to develop significant nearspace assets. There have been many stories written about space colonies surviving after Earthbound civilization wipes itself out or otherwise makes the planet uninhabitable for a while. It would grant human life some redundancy that it doesn't currently have.

The roll-up keyboard.... easy to clean too.

the voting populace can post questions directly. You and I... can ask questions ourselves, not just a reporter in a crowd. Candidates won't know which questions they are being asked, and the video selection process will remain a complete secret.

I don't even know where to start with this. You read a book which is clearly anti-china, and a defense journal, and you somehow think you understand the big picture of what's going on in China? Then when anyone tries to disagree with you, you say, "by disagreeing with me, you have thereby proved my point."

Reasons China is not communist:
- Most of the farmers own their own land, and can sell it if they want to.
- Most of the companies are privately owned, and there is PLENTY of competition (check out this month's national geographic for a clear picture of the competition.)
- The government has been selling off the businesses they do own.
- If you actually go there, you may get the feeling all anyone cares about is money.

Your issue is not that China is communist, it is that China is authoritarian. You can't even get your terms straight (communism is not necessarily authoritarian at all). No one disagrees that an authoritarian China is a bad thing, however, you cannot deny that the situation is much better than it was in 1979 (read Wild Swans and you will see how much better it has gotten). The hope is that with prosperity the situation will ease, and the Chinese will become more free and less authoritarian in a peaceful manner, much like what happened in Taiwan and South Korea in the 80s.

In the end, China IS going to become an international power, that cannot be stopped anymore than a center break can be stopped in chess when it is ripe. Of course they want a strong military to match the US. No one in the world likes to be pushed around by us. But what are we going to do to stop it? Bomb them? Bad idea. Stop trading with them? That will slow them down, but they have enough other trading partners that they would still grow rapidly, and it would hurt us more than them.

The only thing we can do is accept the fact that China is going to become a world power in the next few decades, and adjust our strategy appropriately. For better or for worse China is coming, and we are much better off spending our energy preparing for it than wasting our time in a hopeless effort to try to prevent it.

Stop. Just - stop.

China is not a communist nation. Communism is a Marxist system of economics and government in which the state owns the goods and means of production and (in theory) distributes the goods equally to all people.

Starting with Deng in 1976, the economic reforms pushed through the Chinese state have transformed it into a authoritarian capitalist society. There is no communism, and little socialism left. These are not little Soviet robots trying to insert sleeper cells so they can rise up and conquer us with their ideograms. The Chinese people are going through their version of our Industrial Revolution, except with the firm hand of government directing it (as much as they are able). 70% of the Chinese GDP is private, not state-owned.

There is/was a political slogan in China concerning those economic reforms: "Mao gave us liberation -- Deng gave us food."

You throw the words Marxism-Leninism and Communism around pretty carelessly. Marx proscribed a very specific version of economics and government (and the path to achieve those) that was eventually *rejected* by Mao. A major reason of this rejection is that Marx saw the proletarian revolution as being primarily focused on the industrial workers in the cities (which was the case in Russia). China had a much more agrarian society, and the Chinese had to revise the Marxist ideology to focus on the peasants. Mao was only able to win the Chinese Civil War because he had the support of the peasantry.

(I would also like to point out that my views on what China is and is not do not come from journalists who want to play armchair general - in addition to reading, I spend a lot of time with Chinese immigrants and first and second generation Chinese-Americans. I've spoken with former Communist Party members about politics and with Chinese intellectuals about economics.)

As for the further materials you referenced: Bill Gertz reports for the Washington Times (a conservative newspaper) and FOX News. So, I'd take his opinions (particularly his 2005 WT article "The Chinese Dragon Awakens") with a grain of salt. Your bias is showing.

(FULL DISCLOSURE: My company has a branch office in Beijing. I have studied Chinese modern history and philosophy. I am currently studying Mandarin. I do not give in to fear mongering that America has to have an enemy and that all countries that do not pander to us but instead actively look out for their own self-interests are inherently evil.)

Good Reference Material:
China: A Century of Revolution (Hard to come by, though)

I once spent a summer (ok, a month) in Yorkshire with the SO, a pile of books and a German Shepherd for company. We did a lots of long walks, and I never felt the need for any gadgets whatsoever (we did have a portable CD player, though, and I checked my email twice that month when I was in town).

You really don't need digg, Slashdot, or the usually IT industry inanity fed intravenously to you 24x7. Like Taleb said his book, Fooled by Randomness, most up-to-the-minute information is just noise.