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Documents Reveal US Incompetence with Word, Iraq
notNeilCasey writes "The U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority, which formerly governed Iraq, accidentally published Microsoft Word documents containing information never meant for the public, according to an article in Salon. By viewing the documents using the Track Changes feature in Word (.doc), the author has been able to reconstruct internal discussions from 2004 which reflect the optimism, isolation and incompetence of the American occupation. Download the author's source document or look for more yourself. 'Presumably, staffers at the CPA's Information Management Unit, which produced the weekly reports, were cutting and pasting large sections of text into the reports and then eliminating all but the few short passages they needed. Much of the material they were cribbing seems to have come from the kind of sensitive, security-related documents that were never meant to be available to the public. In fact, about half of the 20 improperly redacted documents I downloaded, including the March 28 report, contain deleted portions that all seem to come from one single, 1,000-word security memo. The editors kept pulling text from a document titled "Why Are the Attacks Down in Al-Anbar Province -- Several Theories." (The security memo and the last page of the March 28 report can be seen here, along with several other CPA documents that can be downloaded.)'"
How ironically appropriate...
Maybe I'm not paying enough attention, but I'm not sure why the musings about why attacks stopped in Al-Anbar in early 2004 are so particularly embarrassing. It seems to me that they were just trying to figure out what happened; I guess it might show some degree of cluelessness on the part of Intelligence, but, uh, they gotta figure stuff out at some point, right?
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Very high competance and ability shown in the Documentation Process! Of course the what is documented might be fiascos, fumbles and general incompetance in other areas. But still it would qualify for the ISO 9007 (or whatever is their latest version) certification.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It just floors me they feel they have to cover up even the signs of progress.
:-(
The level of utter incompetence w.r.t. "controlling the narrative" just terrifies me.
Here are the elusive Microsoft fanboys. We don't notice them because they are so insignifiant and incompetent and unglamorous and dull.
C-A, C-C, C-N, C-V, A-F, A
(create new document that looks like, but is not, the old one)
before sending onward. Otherwise, somebody WILL find something untoward, even if it's not track changes, it could be a now-unused hunk of crap in the OLE2 file, etc.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
This is a great reason to disallow the use of MS Word in government. Does ODF support this change tracking stuff? Or should they stick to ASCII files?
I remember when I had a job offer and could track the changes of the contract they emailed me, was interesting to see the changes they made! (in a good way, suprisingly) Is track changes on by default? I assume so...
This is outstanding news for the F/OSS community! My hope is that the "there's got to be someone else I can blame this on" politicians file charges against Microsoft under provisions of the Patriot Act for leaking vital government secrets. The irony in such a case would be delicious: charges without real justification leveled against a monopolistic company who markets software that doesn't really work. With each side forced to disprove a negative proposition, this should give the F/OSS community a little more time to charge forward while MS pukes all over themselves.
Remember when that Cat Schwartz girl from TV posted a cropped photo that accidentally had her boobs in the embedded Photoshop thumbnail? This is just like that, except Photoshop has been replaced with Word, the TV hostess has been replaced with the US Military, and the sweet sweet woman parts have been replaced with the absolute idiocy of those in charge of an ostensibly conquered nation.
I for one was happier about the tits.
Right now, I've taken a first glance but I don't even want to read this document as it'll just lead to a bad day (I'll read it all later).
But if you're interested in stuff about the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority), I would highly recommend a book I read a few months ago entitled Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Pretty much details what's going on there, doesn't shove a lot of ideas down your throat but does do a good job of selectively relaying details that starts one thinking.
I could rant for hours on the information in this book but I'll try to relay one or two things that stuck with me. My biggest problem with how things were handled out there (one of the many issues the book covers) is that we had people more suitable for the job of handling post war Iraq but either sent them home or blocked their attempts to help because they didn't avidly support the person we wanted to take control of post-war Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi. If anyone was seen as competition for Chalabi, they were replaced with someone who was loyal to the American Republican party. The author reports that interview questions consisted of things like views on abortion or even your voting record. People with little or no past experience were put in charge of insanely high level authority.
We went into Iraq with the only plan to overthrow the government. In my opinion, we have the best army in the world and they did their job better than anyone else could. Unfortunately, in my opinion, we have some of the worst leaders in the world and, as a result, what ensued from overthrowing said government is a pretty bad debacle. I heard this author speak on NPR and was impressed so I hope you read this book to hear what Chandrasekaran experienced visiting Iraq. The information in this Word document doesn't even begin to describe what Chandrasekaran details in his book.
My work here is dung.
Had they not heard of PDF?! Why anyone would publish Word, ODF, or anything like this I don't understand. Convert to PDF, and job done.
of course if you use a format that you can just link the formatting in at the end then you are gold but
all final documents should always be converted to text to break the meta data chain.
even if you have to save the document to a cdrw and then shred the disc when you are done remove the meta data
or replace the meta data with the "correct" public data never have a document with privileged meta data "floating around"
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Any government branch that releases information to the public (both "sensitive" and more mundane information) has a policy for how that information is to be released. That may be a set of instructions for how to make sure you're not unintentionally releasing extra information, or for more secured cases simply that the file must go through a group that does the process for you.
Obviously somebody skipped a step. Whats actually in the file is more interesting then how it got there, given that all we're talking about is human error.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Try contoling the Metadata with a tool that even Microsoft provides for free. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA011400341 033.aspx
It can happen with .pdf as well:
http://news.com.com/U.S.+military+security+defeate d+by+copy+and+paste/2100-1002_3-5694982.html
Not sure about .odf
"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains..."
In this excerpt the last bit (Item 2, at the bottom of the page) looks like a pretty good analysis.
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Not everyone has access to MSWord, after all. Meanwhile, PDF readers are free.
Whenever I want to publish something in redacted form, I just change the color of the redacted text to black on black, then export to PDF. Duh!
Volume and quality of information is scarce, often due to decisions from people at the top. Support is never what you expect. Cost overruns across the board. Bloat. Local insurgencies.
So...Iraq has been invaded by MSCEs?
Blank until
Ditto for me! If I had mod points I'd mod down the original for Bozo headline, not meaning to disparage Bozo.
A little vague handwaving can often save hours of tedious explanation.
Busy aligning my non-linear thoughts.
I hate (US/Bush/Republicans/US Military) and I'll believe anything (Iran/Chirac/Democrats/Liberal Reporters) say they reinforces my beliefs without questioning anything. Lots of pinheads write lots of reports for other pinheads while other people do real work.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Fo coruse, I maent "MCSE".
Blank until
An officer is supposed to protect the soldiers under his command. It is the duty of the Generals to make sure that the job given to his division is within the capability of his troops. Just because the civilian authority orders "Find a cure for cancer", they should not embark on ordering their colnels and majors to mess with test tubes.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I actually have mod points, but ddn't notice in my rush to post. At least I didn't say "First!"
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
> So a handful of people don't know about or how to use the track changes features in Word and that
...
> means the "U.S." is incompetent?
No, it just means that *when people care* (i.e., on Wall Street) they know about this feature.
If you're just a drone in the streets of Baghdad - well, who cares
Obviously the *entire* US is incompetent, the evidence being (a) its use of Microsoft Word, and (b) Iraq, *or* (c) both.
/.? The mind boggles.)
Thanks. I understand. Thanks. No need to keep beating the drum. Thanks.
(Where would I be without
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Oh thanks, I just spewed coffee into my keyboard!
I'm all for the Nelson-esque "Ha, Ha!" on this one, but isn't this Salon article revealing state secrets in some way.
I'm not looking to troll here. I'm serious. Wouldn't it have been better to quietly bring it to their attention than to go public. If this is typical government ignorance, who knows how wide-spread the problem is. Could revealing something like this to the public be considered treason?
I don't think the fact that the articles are right out in the open is any defense. Anyone who's close enough to see troops knows where they are, but it could still be considered treason to pick up a phone and call the enemy and tell them where troops are.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
9/11 scared me shitless and I'll believe anything (The Bush administration/DOD/GOP/Rush Limbaugh) says that reinforces my beliefs without questioning anything.
...how previous wars would have fared had they been subjected to the microscopic scrutiny of today...
When I read the title I thought they'd written everything in Comic Sans MS.
"A deadlock has been reached. One task must die. We must now choose between murder and suicide."
...the risk* of finding embarrassing, hidden information by using Word's "track changes" feature wasn't widely known until 2000.
They've only had seven years to address it.
----
*Search on string "nego" for Avi Rubin's posting, "The scary MSWord residue feature"
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Okay, I just did a quick search and found out that you can't really turn off change tracking. You can hide it, of course, but it's still in there tracking. So the only way to get rid of those changes is to accept or reject each one individually. The information is here (this is for Word 2007, but I assume it's the same for previous versions as well). This is a silly and cumbersome thing to have to do, and you're right -- it makes it a bad way to distribute documents.
.doc files (which has never seemed like a good idea in any area of business or government for countless reasons anyway -- why distribute something that can be so easily edited?) is rife with peril.
Now, the suggestions elsewhere around here that they simply standardize on PDF would solve everything, and they could still use Word if they're used to it. But posting
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Exactly! Someone once told me that the US is occupying Iraq, but that's clearly ridiculous. Imagine the *entire* US occupying Iraq! Insane! We wouldn't fit!
I don't even remember how many years ago that there were lots of news stories on how MS Word stores "deleted" text within documents. When the story originally broke, lots of people went looking at company/government Word documents and found all sorts of embarassing stuff.
Those who don't learn from history...
Anyone using Word in any kind of sensitive capacity needs to know how to make sure the changes are all really gone. Training should address this specifically. Other word processors also store deleted text within a document and users of those need to also know how to make sure deleted text is really deleted.
Perhaps it is time that word processors kept twin files - one the actual document, and if the user wants to track changes, another that stores deleted text. Or maybe encrypt the deleted text. It wouldn't keep everyone out of it, but it would keep most people from reading the deleted passages.
That we, the general population, have to endure severe cuts into our civil liberties, up to the point of the creation of a veritable police state, that the US government puts pressure on other countries to release sensitive data for them to peer into, that civilists are being pulled in front of military courts because they might have said or released something, while at the same time the people who beat us with the big bad "loose lips" club are negligent beyond belief when it comes to securing their own information distribution.
That irks me. Not the data itself, but the carelessness.
And THOSE people should be entrusted with our personal information? HAH!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
http://kellyanncollins.com/cat_schwartz_nude_photo shop.htm
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I opened up Word 2k3. It seems that under Options -> Security (I know, a crazy place to expect the government to look). There is a checkbox that reads
Warn before printing, saving or sending a file that contains tracked changes or comments.I just tested it, and yes this feature seems to work.
Oh, sorry, what I meant is for a large no-bid contract, I can help the military prevent this in the future via real-time user warnings.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
- Accept whatever the media publishes as gospel
- Believe any negative report about the US government
- Understand that no good whatsoever can come of US involvement in the Middle East
but they still want us to somehow vote for candidates that promise extend government meddling in areas such as retirement and health care.Hm. Not as flexible with these mental gymnastics as I used to be. Request additional kool-aid here.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
lol
I Predicted this sort of thing in 2005.
It's a really stupid feature.
CVS shouldn't be part of the document.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
This is why it's hard to subscribe to these huge conspiracy theories about anything involving the Federal Government. I mean, if you want to successfully lead a conspiracy, you have to be competent and you have to cover your tracks.
This latest example of bumbling incompetence shows us that you cannot trust the Feds to do either.
That's why we should fear the Feds when they want to help us: considering their track records at taking care of their own problems, only a suicidal madman would trust them to manage other people's lives.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
Uh, wow. Just... wow. Feeling a bit defensive, are we? Nobody said anything about the US, Bush, Republicans, or the military. This is just an interesting story about the perils of redacting electronic documents.
I mean, I understand why you'd be feeling so defensive. It must suck, feeling like you have to defend the indefensible just so you don't have to admit that you were taken in by a pack of incompetent con artists.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Along the same lines -- Is it so hard for these guys to use the MS provided plugin?
So...Iraq has been invaded by MSCEs?
Actually, it was liberated by MBAs.
Seems to me what's lacking is security taxonomy overlay for classes of documents. If you assign a document to a class of security then there are certain operations which are required and others which are prohibited.
Notepad.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Hello military, I shall provide my consultancy service at a cost of $0 because I am feeling good today:
Create an email address that it is possible to send Word or PDF (or any other) documents to. The documents are automatically treated and returned instantly, according to:
- Word documents have all comments stripped out
- PDF documents have all the "censored" sections (read: sections where the black text has been made unreadable by adding a black background) be truly removed from the document and replaced by black boxes
The document gets renamed accordingly, e.g. REDACTED-[previous document name].
If you want to be truly generous you could also allow for putting a number in the subject line, where the number allowed different levels of treatment - e.g. for a Word document also stripping out all details of author, last modified, etc.
No, turning off tracking TURNS OFF TRACKING. What it doesn't do is remove the existing tracked changes that were in the document from before you turned off tracking. To get rid of those, you can either accept them one at a time, or do an "Accept all changes."
FWIW, I don't use the Track Changes feature in Word, because it causes problems with Word's already screwed up automatic numbering system.
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
So the only way to get rid of those changes is to accept or reject each one individually.
This is faster: Select All, Copy, Create New Document, Paste, Save. Done.
Tell your friends about xenu.net
The only thing worse than a bad joke is a bad joke bad followup.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
The next time the extremist right wingers get all wordy about how incompetent the United Nations is.
I would like someone, anyone, to show when in the past a country has deposed two governments on the other side of the globe and had as few combat related deaths. The idea that mistakes were made and therefore those running these wars are incompetent completely ignores that mistakes have been made in every war.
Afghanistan has been particularly thorny throughtout history, going back to the Mongols. Saddam Hussein had survived countless wars and uprisings before this one.
I don't mind arguing about the senselessness of the war or the futility of trying to enact democracy in chaos, but don't try to tell me that this war has been waged badly.
That made my day.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Is there really any reason why these simple documents need to be in anything but plain text? In the odd case that figures and tables are required, they can be included as separate files.
Allot of this communication was probably done with email in the first place, so it started out as plain text. ASCII test is readable by anyone, anytime, and everyone gets the same information from it. No information is hidden.
Plain text also looks more professional than a document in large colourfull "puppy" font anyway.
"Knowledge is the only instrument of production that is not subject to diminishing returns" -Journal of Political Econom
Apparently the people who prepared this document didn't graduate to the "Advanced Word for Dummies" course :-)
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Of course the NSA doesn't release MS Word files - they know better. The guidelines are not for the NSA they are for all the other government agencies in the US, most of whose employees are not technical in nature, and certainly not computer security experts. The NSA knows that guidelines that no one will follow are worse than having no guidelines at all.
In the last 10 years, I have never seen a government document, sensitive or not, that wasn't generated in MS word. Given that they are using Word to generate their files, they need to know how to clean them up before distributing them - even internally.
Wouldn't that make the reporter guilty of circumventing an access control mechanism?
That DMCA sure is a versatile tool, isn't it?
Having read my share of int briefs, that's actually a pretty good analysis with what looks to me like an honest attempt at figuring out what is going on.
I see no incompetence there - I see good, honest staffwork. Perhaps a touch informal in places, but that's about it.
Intelligence is a slippery fish, not an exact science. It is normal to have a great deal of uncertainty.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Think about how much they'd save on software!
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
Depends on how you define "need". They probabbly don't need to be written using a computer. But it makes it easier. Likewise, depending on the nature of the document, it may easier to do things like auto numbering, indenting, tracking changes (on purpose), reviewing, and so on using a more sophisticated file format. I cannot speak for the people doing this work, of course.
Kind of like how I'm using "rich text" (i.e., HTML) to format this post to be more useful. I could just type the text. But adding some quotes improves the context in the discussion. Needed? No. Useful? I'd say yes.
You also have to consider that most Windows systems don't have a decent text editor. (You can sort-of use Word, by saving as plain text, but that tends to loose a lot of the stuff you were trying to do.)
You've obviously never worked in a large organization where everyone is using email systems with "rich text" (e.g., Exchange/Outlook, Lotus Notes, even HTML mail in Thunderbird).
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
need to see documents to figure this out? -- And doesn't using the word "reveal" imply that our government's gross incompetence has been a big secret until now? Debacles and massive failures aside, how about our civil rights? Wiretaps, secret prisons, censorship, gun laws, intermingling of religion and government, the complete trouncing of the tenth amendment (powers not specifically named to the feds are powers of the states and/or people)... There was a time in my life when I was proud to be an American-- Now I just feel like the embarrassed dinner companion of the US in the restaurant of the world, as Uncle Sam walks around spewing tourettes outbursts, and shitting on the tables of the other patrons.
!#&*
Ah, yet another agency that did not read NSA's guide to publishing "Sanitized" reports. Read it here.
I am on the road crew. This is my stop sign.
Yes, there are a lot of ignorant people who are not Bush supporters. However, I am not sure how many hard-core Bush supporters are not either quite ignorant or extremely self-serving. Just to be clear, "hard-core Bush supporters" does not include people who don't like Bush, but think he was a better choice than Kerry.
Mainly, it was a joke. Don't take it too seriously.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
No need for kool-aid. Facts objectively show that government sponsored health care systems (as they have in Canada, the UK, and most of Europe) are more efficient than our private/public amalgamation here in the US.
Now, the real question is what you seek from your health care system. My goal is to see that people get the care they need without regard to their ability to pay. I hear concerns about waiting lists. Waiting lists are fine when you have to choose between waiting 2 weeks to see a doctor and not seeing him at all. Perhaps your goals are different than mine. Perhaps you enjoy the liberty of choosing your health insurance plan or have constitutional objections to universal health care. These are valid concerns.
What is not valid is the idea that the government cannot run health care programs when most other governments in the industrialized world have such programs and run them comparatively well.
You have an excellent point. My first drafts, first versions, are not intended for external view. Note, however, that when I do release something to "the world" (usually co-workers), I've made sure to dot the I's and cross the T's. This includes making sure that documents contain what I intended. The author of the Word document in question did not finish the job.
The embarrassment here is that someone with serious responsibility failed to finish the job correctly.
Back then, we could only hope that others with greater responsibility were doing their jobs. As far as I can tell from the news, there are too many cases where people did a slapdash job, with "life changing effects" for too many. A nice euphemism there: "Life changing"... like "life ending", or "no more legs", or "no more father", things like that.
This stuff is very very important to large numbers of people. This is one of those examples where we expect people to get the bloody details right.
So...Iraq has been invaded by MSCEs?
Yes, actually. They outfitted entire trailers full of Windows networks and shipped them over there to fight the war. The MCSE's who built them were stateside contractors, but I'm sure there are military or civie MCSE's over there to keep them patched and reboot things.
To paraphrase what another commenter said, this is the kind of war you get when it's run by MBA's and MCSE's.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Hm. Not as flexible with these mental gymnastics as I used to be. Request additional kool-aid here.
In the New Regime, re-education centers will be a free benefit for you (after your wages are garnished by 85%).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Not only that, but they're actually so good in their disinformation-game that they succeeded in convincing the american, nay, the world-public at large to believe they've lost the war in Vietnam, while, in fact, it was a huge successtory!
They also want you to believe the insurgency in Iraq is due to their incompetence, but in reality they wanted Abu Graib and the Sadr-uprising to happen! That's how unbelievably smart they are! And you are *all* falling for their little game!
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
2. A federal healthcare system would be more efficient than a patchwork of private insurers. Additionally, a person could lose his job without worrying that a serious injury/illness would bankrupt his entire family.
You may disagree with the factual validity of those arguments, but there is no logical inconsistency between them.
For all we know the moon may be as conscious as a poet or a realtor, and extremely weary of its monotonous round. - HLM
Google shows 60 other MS Word files which aren't press releases or "Daily Power System Highlights" (60+ of the latter): http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=utf-8&safe=o ff&rls=GGGL%2CGGGL%3A2006-18%2CGGGL%3Aen&q=inurl%3 A.doc+-inurl%3Aarabic+-inurl%3Apressreleases+-%22D aily+Power+System%22+site%3Acpa-iraq.org+&btnG=Sea rch
Didn't Comey give enough evidence for impeachment already yesterday?
but they still want us to somehow vote for candidates that promise extend government meddling in areas such as retirement and health care.
Hm. Not as flexible with these mental gymnastics as I used to be. Request additional kool-aid here. Extend government medling in health care?
This from the country that spends the most per-capita on healthcare in the entire world, yet still has 20% uninsured?
Maybe if you spent your taxes on healthcare instead of on no-bid contracts to haliburton? No? That's not an option?
You can't take the sky from me...
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
See, this is one of the reasons I keep my resume in RTF.
(On a quick survey of the last three resumes I received from job candidates, none of them dropped the ball. Bravo!)
Actually, I think that'd increase his popularity - as a percentage of people who support him, that is. I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of people who would be upset by Roe v. Wade being overturned already don't like him. However, there are several people who think he isn't conservative enough, and would therefore begin to like him if he overturned Roe v. Wade.
Those might cut into his popularity. Of course, on that last one, it might depend on who that someone is.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I'm not a frequent MS Word user, and I almost never send docs in Word format -- for this reason, among others. But, I sometimes work with other people who prefer Word. Anyone got good links explaining how to make sure I'm not exposing more than I want to?
I think newer versions have more features around warning you about this. But, I primarily use Office 2004 for Mac OS X, is there a way to clean files in that version? How about Office 2000 for Windows? That's the version I have in my Parallels VM, for emergency use.
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Your use of the word "current" in this context is interesting.
It's all one giant blob of government, with a wee ice-berg tip coming up for public review at election time.
For an amusing take on a government across the pond that reveals why hope for change is rather optimistic, see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080306/ and the sequel, Yes Prime Minister.
While you'll readily show that your point #2 is indeed true (economies of scale being a no-brainer), think about the tight coupling with your government, and both the explicit and implicit loss of personal sovereignty involved.
Hence the stiff resistance to the idea, especially at the federal level, where too much power is concentrated in the hands of the few, which point I think you were making in #1.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Oh, and start with the kids. Pills for the little ones. Mwahahahahaha.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
My grumble is that, note, CPA only cared about attacks on Coalition troops, not about attacks on Iraqis, which were steadily increasing the whole time. I mean, generally speaking, the point of an occupation isn't just to have lots of annoying foreign troops arround, but to KEEP THE OCCUPIED PEOPLE SECURE.
And this shows in the document. Lots of speculation and thought about ATTACKS ON THE COALITION. You can't even begin to guess what the security situation for Iraqis on the street is from this document.
To be exact, I meant that you can get more care with the same amount of money by switching to a government-sponsored system. Our overhead with Medicare is, IIRC, about 3%. Most private insurers have overheads in the 20% range (again IIRC).
Numerous studies show that if we adopted a Canadian-style health care plan, we could cover everyone at a cost less than what we pay for Medicare now.
A company I worked with had decided to switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice to save money instead of upgrading to the new version of MS Office. A week later everyone was running MS Office again. Apparently one of the executives sent out a Word document that had some embarrassing comments he made "deleted", but they were still there because of "Track Changes". When you opened up the document in OpenOffice, you could see them easily. I was just a peon, or I would have tried to explain that if he had been using OpenOffice himself it wouldn't have happened, and that someone knowledgeable could have viewed them in MS Office anyway. Instead they decided to spend tens of thousands on new licenses to go back to MS Office...
I work as a defense contractor in safety engineering. In these parts, we refer to this process as "sailor-proofing". The joke is that every time you think you've got your system sailor-proofed, they come up with a better sailor!
Lest anyone think I'm bashing the fine members of the USN, it should be noted that I was a sailor myself for some 20 years.
... at least, not completely. The US Armed Forces are very good at winning battles and fighting wars. They are also pretty good at doing humanitarian service and peace enforcement (although some others are better; Canada comes to mind). However, no one is very good at fighting a war and doing peace enforcement/humanitarian service at the same time. The problem is that because of political considerations, there were never enough troops alloted to Iraq to provide basic security, and that means it's never been possible for the humanitarian service aspect of the operation to be effective. And now, it's more or less too late.
The fact that X -- the most powerful person on the planet -- was able to accomplish some snazzy things does not argue for X's creativity or intelligence. If someone with tremendous power "pulls one over" on the whole world, it's usually on account of great wickedness, not wicked greatness.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
A lot of us don't think the supposedly democratic congress is doing enough, so those numbers don't mean what you imply they mean.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I have no problem writing documents in a simple text editor. And you don't even need to wed yourself to Microsoft, either, to have decent security. Want the text gone? Yep - gone.
And you technically don't even need Windows as an OS.
The old adage comes to mind: "The more complex things are, the easier they are to break." Perhaps our Government and Military should invest in some older, more secure technology?
Got it -- thanks. I'm on deadline, so I (of course) spent the past hour fiddling with it to test it (after I did the dishes and ran the vacuum and pet the cat). And indeed, you are right.
Track Changes has seemed to me for several versions of Word to be very confusing to the vast majority of people. But then I'm mostly a graphic designer (web for eleven years, print for twenty, doing all the IT stuff for the family publishing business on the side) and deal with Word myself as little as possible. Mostly I deal with authors and copywriters who are more focused on the current words than the past words, and get very confused when they find out they're both in there somewhere.
I guess there are people who know its intricacies and use it well, but it sure seems to confuse some and strike fear into others. In fact, I can see how one would expect that turning off tracking would indeed flush all previous versions -- it's not outside the realm of logic. So while I don't condone more flippin' zero-efficiency popups in Word ("You are viewing a popup message. [OK]"), some type of indication at the point of deactivation that there are still changes being stored might be good.
On that subject, I don't envy the developers of the Office suite (in fact, I have a buddy on the Office team, and while he tells me about a lot of the BS that goes on, he also tells me of some of the really fascinating challenges they face). The range of users they have to anticipate for Word, for example, is ridiculous. Total newbies who use it as a typewriter and don't even save documents all the way up to power users who (now) are building their own OpenXML files on the fly from custom apps. Still, this one seems like a case where you err on the side of caution and somehow indicate that there are stored changes. Don't know how to do it (again, I don't use Word much, and I also am not as good an interface designer as I'd like to be), but there must be a way to make this more clear to the typical user.
Anyhow, thanks again for the clarification -- good points. My wife made the same points moments ago while reading your post (yeah, we have a real firecracker time around here).
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Sorry to have caused any infuriation. I don't easily get upset over posts on /. Please don't consider my following comments as an attack or meant to upset you:
:-) I bet we would agree that having the Supreme Court rule correctly about when human life begins would be a good thing. We just may not agree about what that correct answer is. Unfortunately, it's not an easy area to find agreement, and it's probably more productive to collaborate on reducing unwanted pregnancies, which is probably common ground.
- "Concerns over global warming are frequently overblown" - To me, the scary part about global warming is the massive and highly successful campaign by Bush and friends to convince us that it's a) not happening, and b) we're not causing it. For example, his efforts to corrupt and/or bury the results of his own scientific inquiry scare the heck out of me. Humans making the Earth warmer is just one of the truly scary hurdles in front of us. The Middle East building nukes is another one, as is controlling the world's population before we strip it of all it's resources. From that point of view, I agree, it is sometimes overblown. If that's you're position, it's reasonable. If you think we're not causing it, you should become better informed.
- Almost nobody at this point that I run across thinks that things are rosy over in Iraq. Anyone who thinks we've handled Iraq well should become better informed. If you hold out hope that the world will be a better place than if we'd not invaded Iraq, then I'd say your an optimist, though not unreasonable. If you feel we should stay and try to complete the mission, even if Iraq is a mess, then you agree with many other reasonable people, just not most.
- All the government has to do to keep the Internet neutral is nothing. Even better would be a law enforcing no change. If it meddles with what has been working for over 10 years, the value of the Internet could drastically fall. In particular, we need to insure that ISPs do not discriminate against packets based on their origin. That's all. They can still do traffic shaping, charge more for higher levels of service, etc. But, if they want to block all the Democrat web sites, and only allow through the Republican ones, that's a problem. That's exactly what will happen if Murdoch gets control, and packet origin discrimination is allowed. I find that a compelling argument for keeping the status quo, which has been working so well.
- Are you also upset that the Supreme Court ended segregation? It's the court's job to fill in context when laws are unclear. In Rowe v Wade, they tackled the toughest issue: defining when human life begins. It's a slippery area to rule in, and highly contentious, since many of us believe God gives us a soul at conception, while others of us believe that we gain our humanity as our brain develops and we become conscious of our environment. Jews traditionally believed that God gives us a soul at the quickening. I believe life begins when my kids go to college
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
The parent post does not deserve to be at zero. Also, the grandparent posters reply is childish and unreasonable (see response #5).
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fa milyid=144e54ed-d43e-42ca-bc7b-5446d34e5360&displa ylang=en
"The Remove Hidden Data Tool"
One of the girls upstairs in the PR department ran into the same problem today. It took all of three minutes on Google to find the solution to the problem.
This would not have happened if presidential staffers were using Linux.
Linux=security
Microsoft=(inadvertent)transparency
I'm just here for the sigs
People who complain about this remind me of whiny sports fans who blame the refs every time they lose a game. First off, let's be perfectly clear on one thing--most law is case law, i.e. law that is made by the precedent of judicial rulings. This allows the law to grow organically from case analysis rather than simply being handed down from Congress every so often. This is a vital feature of the system of common law we inherited from Great Britain, so if you have a problem with it, take it up with them.
It also protects us from the tyranny of the majority. The civil rights rulings of the 1960's are a perfect example of this--the "will of the people", the laws Congress did pass, all this stuff you people claim to protect, were in this case part of a horrifically evil system that oppressed people for no reason other than their racial origin. It was the Supreme Court, upholding the principles of the Constitution, which stopped this.
I'm not saying the Court never makes bad rulings--they clearly do, particularly in cases like Kelo. But majority rule makes bad decisions far more often, and it's vital that there be some way to put majority rule in check in situations where it is clearly acting unjustly. And that will necessarily involve overturning what Congress and the President do from time to time.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
This is why, in Dungeons and Dragons, Intelligence and Wisdom are separate statistics.
Seriously, it really shouldn't surprise people when someone who has passed through academia, or life for that matter, turn out to be complete bone heads. This is how middle management happens in the first place. Wisdom, or whatever you want to call it, is really the ability to generalize knowledge from the specific. I constantly deal with mathematicians who cannot construct a valid argument from basic statistics and so on.
To para-quote Men In Black: "A person can be smart, but people are dumb panicky animals who are much happier when they don't have to know what is really happening."
The ability to follow a cogent argument through to its rational conclusion is damn rare. The ability to form a cogent argument that is rational through to its conclusion is even more rare.
I am _never_ surprised by the unwisdom of people, even when I find myself doing it... Humanity is not wired for smart, its only wired for short-term cleverness and evasion. Being smart takes a lot of work, and constant vigilance of ones self.
So when people get lazy, they get stupid. If you catch my drift. Always remember to factor in the laziness...
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
It really is a pity Bush, Cheney et al did not pay attention during the Vietnam war
Oh they paid attention all right, they did everything they could to ensure they didn't get sent to serve there.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
By no means is the Canadian system perfect. I just think it's better.
And by your comment you seem to imply that there is no parallel private system. I would certainly not put private practice out of business. Those who want better care or to bypass the waiting lines can use their money to do so. I don't have any problem with that. What I have a problem with is people who get sick and have to declare bankruptcy.
Similarly, people who can't afford to see a doctor, so they wait until their condition is an emergency and then are forced to go to the emergency room. Obviously they can't pay so those people who do have insurance (and can pay) bear the costs.
If we're going to require hospitals to treat people without regard to their ability to pay, the cost is going to be socialized in one way or another. I happen to be of the opinion that we should use preventative care to lower the total cost of health care. A government sponsored system is the best way to do that.
This information was already out there, and we don't know if somebody on the real 'enemies of America' list already knew this trick. But we know there's computer-savvy people in terrorist organisations already. It's safer to assume that they already know this trick - in which case publishing it to call attention to the problem might save considerably more damaging information from being released later.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
To respond with a little less venom.
Global Warming - The far right is just as dangerous as the far left because they have both managed to turn this into an economic or emotional issue that nothing progressive will ever be seen. Dubya n crew burying evidence isn't much worse than the tree huggers drumming up stupid scenarios. Both are unbelievably dangerous to reason. Most of the neutral scientific minds I have read on the subject basically say this. "Its a real problem, we should start looking for solutions, but its not a doomsday scenario anytime soon and we have plenty of time to enact sane policy that won't destroy our economy or way of life" Too bad the knee jerk reactionary crowd has pretty much drowned out the sanity of that.
Iraq - Its too late to quit now. Hopefully the lesson we learn in vietnam is that when politicians run the war instead of the military there is no possible good outcome. The reasons for being there are sketchy at best. Saddam was a murderous asshat, and the delivering freedom lines are all well n good, except that Rummy was kinda in charge, and Rummy was kinda the one that supported Saddam, so it stands to reason that the locals would be a little confused and distrusting, unfortunately the American people are woefully ignorant of even the most recent past and no one seemed to catch that. In the mean time we have both parties once again playing politics with the war, trying to attach stupidity to funding, and then vetoing funding over said stupidity. The Republicans have the PERFECT scapegoat by letting the Democrats fuck this all up, because now they can say it all fell apart because of the Democrats, and not because of their piss poor planning and execution in the early days of this mess. I'm glad so many lefties are supporting giving the Republicans the free and clear exit strategy on their responsibility but not the war itself. Once again, the knee jerk reactionary crap takes over any rational thought processes and solutions.
Net Neutrality - Honestly I don't even know what to say here. Both sides of this trainwreck are such a mess that its pretty much impossible to sort out in any sane fashion. Personally I figure the best thing to do is stay hands off and let the cable and telephone companies murder each other while various RF technologies advance and eventually negate their stranglehold on things. In the mean time we just have to hope the various "intellectual property" crap doesn't get to far and that Senator "Internet Tubes" and his ilk don't legislate too much other stupidity into the mix. Incidentally I am thinking of a previously undocumented number that if you happen to use any portion of I will sue the shit out of you. Please discontinue the use of the following symbols representing a part of my intellectual property, 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 and 9, thank you.
Supreme Court - This is another one of those things have gotten too stupid to have a simple fix. The belief that the constitution is a living document is dangerous at best. Yes it says "constitutional right to amend it" so yeah, you can change it...BUT it also says "any powers not enumerated here are reserved for the people"...so very simply put this means that you can change it, but only to remove more powers of government, not add them. The government does not have the power to add more powers, it only has the power to remove powers. The arguments that the founding fathers had no idea how technology or whatever would change are irrelevant because they DID know how government would change, it would attempt to grow its powers as every government does. The additions that ended things like slavery or gave the women the right to vote are stupid because all they basically say is "Yeah, we were confused by that 'all men are created equal' bit, sorry" This is why many of the founding fathers did not want a Bill of Rights, because they feared that eventually it would be used to justify the idea that we only have rights that the constitution spells out, when the truth is only the
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
we agree, that showing the world, that despite the Vietnam catastrophe, America is willing and able to sometimes (not often enough, perhaps) go after vicious tyrants;
Is that worth it? Is throwing away thousands of american lives and seriously wounding tens of thousands of soilders worth it? Is it that important that the world knows we are willing and able? What kind of cock waving bullshit is that? Who the fucfk cares what the world thinks we are capable of, i dont give a damn what the world thinks about us, all i care about is american lives and american freedom, my civil liberties are more important to me than the foolish pride of feeling like a powerful country.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
If they believe Powell was fired then you're merely arguing that a stopped clock is right twice a day.
First, it is Roe v Wade, not Rowe.
Second, not on your life! I believe in democracy and freedom, not dictated law by appointed-for-life jurists with delusions of godhood. The tragedy of Roe v Wade was that it took a politically contentious issue out of the public arena, where debate and compromise have worked so well on so many similarly divisive issues, and replaced it with a "because we said so" legal ruling.
You had me until that point. What you suggest is downright inhuman. Suggesting that killing somebody might be the solution to family problems is more than just stupid.
I'm a little surprised here. First, my only real point is that the government has basically made it impossible to discipline your kids. If you even so much as yell at them in public these days the cops are likely to show up. The whole kids going wild with crime comes from 1. Parents not actually raising their kids, and the ones that DO are frequently hampered by the government (discipline and abuse are two VERY different things, and its typically only the people without kids or with unholy terror children that confuse the two, if you smack a kid on the ass to hurt him you are wrong, if you smack a kid on the ass to scare the crap out of them and get their immediate undivided attention you are getting it right). and 2. Kids knowing that they can literally get away with murder with little more than a slap on the wrist.
,6 ,7, 8 and 9, I fail to see why this part would suddenly be taken so seriously.
More importantly I'm a little confused as to your upset here. Unless you really believe that I can sue you for the use of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Operational Pause: A boring theory is that the terrorists are in an operational pause, needing to regroup after the recent spate of roundups. There are very few persons we have met who subscribe to this.
The one realistic (albeit pessimistic) option gets sluffed off. Every (EVERY) other plausible explanation was given entire paragraphs to back them up. This one gets dispelled in two lines without any real cause.
The whole document is a bunch of shoulder-patting a la "Mission Accomplished!" and doesn't really serve for much except for a false sense of hope.
Best part is the one that got the least attention and evaluation was the one that was actually right. The writer assumes that because the majority of people don't ascribe to it then he shouldn't either. And when you assume.....
Karma: Non-Heinous
Here's the document the excerpt came from:
a q/2004/02/administrators_weekly_economic_report_fe bruary_15_2004.doc
r esearch-often-results-in-poor.html
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/ir
It's no big deal. Everyone has their panties in a wad over nothing.
Here's the whole debunking:
http://lamplighternews.blogspot.com/2007/05/poor-
The Western civilization claims to hail from Greeks, Romans, and Jews — Romans being the most recent major force.
Yet it Ancient Rome a male child remained his father's property until the father's death. A female child — until marriage. It was perfectly legal for the father to kill the child at any moment. Obviously, this was not practiced often, but it remained legal.
See, we know history. Do you?..
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This is interesting (from this article)...
Medicare describes administrative costs as a ratio of processing costs divided by claims. In 2003, says the study, the average medical cost for a Medicare beneficiary per year was $6,600. The average medical cost for someone with employer-sponsored health insurance was $2,700. "Because of the higher cost per beneficiary," writes Matthews, Medicare's method of calculation makes administrative costs, albeit unintentionally, appear to be lower than they really are."
Also, I've heard that part of the reason that (for example) drug costs are higher in the U.S. is that in other countries there are price caps, so that the U.S. is effectively subsidizing foreign health care systems. If the U.S. also enforced price caps, the drug companies may decide to abandon some drug research because they don't think they will recover the research cost.
As I see it, free market competition almost always works best for the most people. The best way to "fix" health care in this country might be to introduce some competition.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Check out the British Incopetence and coruption in the lead up to the Iraq war here www.thetruthaboutweaponsofmassdestruction.com
www.thetruthaboutweaponsofmassdestruction.com
First of all, even in the time of the Romans (the late republic) the 'pater familias'-rights were already being weakened.
Secondly, the parent poster made the assertion that it was 'inhumane' (I suppose he means not technically, but morally) or 'stupid'...both have not been disproven by the fact such practises once existed.
I mean, during the time of the Romans, pedofile relationships/acts were not deemed illegal neither - but is this an indication we should re-introduce it? What about slavery?
Mind you, I leave all these questions open and I do not want to debate the merrits of this or that with you, but I do not think one can imply say that because something was there in the past, it was the correct way to do it. Suggesting things would be become better if we introduced the pater familias again, is the same as saying things would be better if we introduced pedofilia as a mentoring tool again. In fact, in that case, the latter would make more logical sense, since in the time of the romans (and the ancient greeks), those pedofilic relationships were often in the form of a mentorship (with he explicit goal of teaching the pupil in all matters by the mentor), and were in those instances, non-violent. The pater familias never had any explicit educational goals.
Yet, I still doubt many of those things - deemed common in that time - would be welcomed back in our current civilisation, and are generally seen as corrupt, immoral, inhumane, or stupid. And maybe rightfully so (though it is extremely difficult and maybe unwarranted to pass judgement on another people in another time).
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---