There was a story on slashdot, a few years ago, on how tiny space 'masses' with enormous speeds would sometimes fly right through the earth, and they found this out by comparing earthquake measuring equipment from different parts of the globe. So, if there's still any truth to that theory, then, yes.
Well, ideally, distances measured in meters and in feet would be two (sub)classes that, when cast to each other, automatically take care of the conversion. And in C++, you could even add them up, yielding the distance in units of the right hand side (presumably). -pedantic mode off-
As soon as Coca Cola would be the only thing we can drink, and it is made abroad, you can bet your ass that they (that is, any government) would demand the recipe.
No government procuring security devices should allow the procurement of devices that are black-box on any layer. The Chinese government's demands are nothing but realistic and logical, the risks of unfair competition notwithstanding. Oh, and I think that you'll find that many companies are willing to take that risk when they balance it against the Chinese (government) market.
BTW. you didn't think those border confiscations that they're allowed to do in the US now, would have anything to do with the NSA being overly friendly with certain US companies, did you ?
It just dawned on me; the problem with the electronic voting discussion is that we want to go too fast; we want to go from rubbing a red pencil over a printed piece of paper instantly to centralized mainframe and terminal voting. Typical for techies to reason in this way, but 1) We (the people as a whole) are not ready, and 2) the tools to take it more slowly are available and cheap, too. So let's instead automate the red pencil first; voting machine is a stand-alone machine that just prints the ballot, with the one spot of the candidate printed in red. Instantly checkable by the voter, and it can even be corrected with a real red pencil. Next we feed this form into a counting machine; since it's pre-printed (usually) it can easily be read by a machine as well. The form itself is never destroyed (obviously) because it can still be used in a manual, or machine, recount. Statistics about the number of votes can still be kept manually (by the volunteers) and checked against machine statistics.
Do you know whether there are any plans to 'interleave' the gimp with layers that do vector-drawing as well ? It would be so cool to be able to designate a layer for the one purpose or the other. I know that these newfangled text-layers are a step in this direction, but do you know whether they plan on going all the way ?
I'm not taking any chances, but I'm not taking any chances with human-forced change in the other direction either. Chances are that nature already adapted in some way to our CO2 output. Are you willing to take *that* chance ?
My company got the info a while ago under embargo. I don't know much about it, and if I did, I would probably not be allowed to say anything about it. I'll check it out tomorrow, but I believe that indeed, it is some kind of SYN based attack.
But can we really tell inhowfar the damage done by us, isn't already coped with in one way or another ? For example; could the excess CO2 not be responsible for extra resilience in trees, who would otherwise die because of all the sulphur and nitrous molecules we're *also* producing ? Mind you, I'm not saying 'smoke that chimney !' - I'm saying 'be careful how you correct' - we don't want to be playing Australian ecosystem with our atmosphere, do we ?
1) No CO2 causes the heating up of a closed box in a laboratory. It is also a prerequisite for life and gets produced by godknowswhat in our biotope.
2) We don't know that either. It's likely to *change* things, which might be bad.
3) Yes, but is it because we're pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, or because we're removing too many trees ? Because I would surely like to fix things at the source.
As I said, I'm all for putting a filter on the chimney, but I'm not so sure it's a good thing to have near a forest.
I really, really wouldn't do all this 'CO2 from the air removing' until we're 100% sure that 1) it causes global warming, 2) global warming is bad and 3) our natural mechanisms are somehow inadequate at the moment. And even then, I mean, sure - put a filter on that chimney, but don't start removing it from places where trees (or plankton) might be hungry for it, making our ecosystem even more unstable.
Work with whitelisting only; forward everything else to another account that you inspect (and use to maintain the whitelist). It might mean cutting and pasting your own SMTP server together, as I did, because I didn't know of any solution either.
There are about two or three drop-in replacements for exchange these days, more or less open and free, and then there is the outlook plugin for evolution. Which sucks (I use it daily), because the Gods of Gnome have decided that the evolution-'platform' is going to be their next Operating System or something - extremely difficult to fiddle with, both in source and in configuration, because you need to be running two or three CORBA-like services at the same time and have god knows how many libraries in arbitrary places.
What all of these people don't realize is that all that concentration on a single endpoint is nice, but that they really must make *both* client *and* server. They must not only make a drop-in replacement for exchange, they must also make a client-library implementation to fit inside a GUI, so that they control both ends. So you can still be hybrid if you wish (and who wouldn't - no more 2G limits on your mailboxes for starters), but you can also be fully 'in' as it were.
Beeeeh. Short variable names are good. The only people who say that short variable names are bad, are those that use more than, say, ten variables in a function, whose bodies are more than, say, twenty lines long. And who don't realize that *that* is their crime. Now, non-static struct members ought to be descriptive, but conventions still apply; so 'id', not 'identifier'. The same goes for 'auto' function names; they should be descriptive; the static ones can be short. Oh, and one 'auto' function per file, please, and don't forget to call all the other ones static. And pre-declare the 'auto' function on top, and document it there. Using multiline commentary.
"But you still don't have any real reason for saying Bush and Blair lied other than a skepticism of governments."
bzzzt. Skepticism of this particular episode of these particular governments, thank you.
I think I've discovered once again during the course of this discussion that I'm actually perhaps more deeply conservative than you. That is to say: the idealism of neoconservatives is really not for me. Nation building, ousting of dictators - it's all the work of idealists, and to my mind, they should take their money spending hobbies elsewhere. Start building model trains or something. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. That sort of thing. Needless to say, I was against invading Iraq, and in spite of it going a bit better now, I'm really quite unconvinced that it was worth the money and the blood and the loss of reputation. As to Georgie's lying, I think history will show that I was at least more than just a little bit right about that. But you're right in that nothing can be said about that, really. Yet.
I'm not saying Saddam was an Ok guy who shouldn't have been removed. I'm not saying that there was a solution to that sentiment other than to invade. I'm saying that the reasons given were (to my mind) bogus, and I have a *terrible* thing against leaders who hide behind executive privilege and lie at the same time. I *hated* it when Clinton bombarded Sudan to get out of Monica-gate, and I *hated* it when George invaded Iraq for reasons that I cannot yet imagine, but I'm fairly certain were different from the actual reasons he gave.
Not because I was in love with Saddam. I didn't really care about Saddam. But because that which was much closer (an allied leader of the free world) *lied*. And these people shouldn't lie. At least not about things that concern enormous costs, both in military equipment en human lives. We expect dictators to lie, not our leaders. And the system that allows for something like that, is rotten.
So I'm not of the mindset 'my country, always wrong'. I don't think so at all. I hope I'm still in charge of my critical faculties. And those critical faculties tend to fire up greater and quicker when things hit closer to home. Yes, I think Western countries should be held to greater scrutiny because that's one of our goals. We (well, I) think harsher of Israel's action than those of Palestinians - why ? Because we think of Israel as a first world democracy and of the Palestinians as subjects of corrupt governments or tyrants. People (soldiers) from democracies who do things, do those things representing the people that chose the executive that sent them out. On the other side we have canon fodder that does the wishes of a single psychopath, and not once, *once* will I want to think that our system can successfully harbour such a psychopath as leader, making us no different from those we find on the other side of the trenches. That is not to say I think of us as 'better', no, the people that live under tyrants are victims, not 'worse'. But I just don't want to be 'worse', and the minute I start feeling like I'm also part of the 'worse', is the minute I start wanting to do something about it. Like calling (perceived) liars on their lies. Or ousting them.
'Overestimating a threat' and 'lying'; the difference is one of degree. An amount of degree we can fight about until infinity. Also 'actively developing WMD' and 'we found some ten year old unusable stuff buried in the sand, but that must have been from after the first gulf war'; again, a question of degree. 'Hans Blix said so. Saddam said so. The intelligence was never conclusive' and 'George and Tony could not have known'. Here I go again. There are no scientific truths in politics. My feeling is, and no argument of yours has yet convinced me, that George needed a case for war, Tony was only too happy to be a lapdog, and the both of them didn't mind stepping onto a few truths along the way. You say: nothing but inference and innocent until proven guilty. I have no rebuttal. The problem with finding these people guilty of lying, is that they have executive power over the evidence used.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that Jupiter (and Saturn) weren't completely 'black' bodies; namely that they radiated in the infrared spectrum ?
I said that I think that it is very probable that George and Tony lied on the topic of Saddam's missile capacity and nuclear threat. About these, they had no information, but, apparently, from their intelligence agencies. That information was forged in plain defiance of Hans Blix' findings. At least, that is my opinion. On the subject of poison gases, they just said that they didn't believe Saddam, who clearly stated (as was later made *very* believable) that he had gotten rid of them. Inhowfar these levels of displayed disbelief by George and Tony were genuine, I don't know. I suspect that, given the other two 'reasons', not so much. But that's just me. Total cynic when it comes to Iraq. And honestly, given the history of it that you know too, can you blame me ?
You can't prove any of this is the truth. But ah, that's always been the problem, isn't it ? We live in democracies, don't we ? How much time must pass before we can hold our elected executive accountable, even when the information they deal with is highly classified ? This affair hasn't made the answer any clearer, because the answer according to Tony and George obviously is: never.
I'm not within MI5 or the CIA, so I can't assess in any way the validity of these documents. But, ironically, neither can you. These governments are reaping what they have sowed: in a climate of secrecy, only gossip blooms. And my take is that it is all phony, the very scarce public evidence tells only one story: the WMDs you point to, were all rotten beyond use, and Saddam insisted, even when he had nothing to lose anymore, that he had cooperated with Blix et al.
I find going from the (in my mind, invented) casus belli with Iraq to 'islamists taking over' in the same breath a bit of a stretch. But maybe that's just me.
It might have become that way, but it certainly wasn't so initially. After 'Afghanistan', everybody and their camel in the Arabic world realized they could get instant airtime if they just associated their particular set of misgivings to Osama and his cause. Hell, Osama probably isn't even alive anymore, but his 'brand' lives on in spite of him. Go blame lazy journalists or something.
Another thing; you act (in another thread as well) as if I justify the killing of homosexuals or something. I would like to point out to you that my interest lies purely in being accurate, and if you feel that it makes me less politically correct, then I'm sorry for your mentality.
No, there were *three* issues; one (the one that Tony Blair used) was that there were long distance rockets (to deliver a chemical or *normal* payload to Cyprus, for example), the second one was that he had nerve gas (to be delivered on the battlefield). The first one is a threat if you happen to live in Europe, the second one only when you invade his country (or live in it, but that was never really brought up in this context). The third one was that he had Uranium (the Niger letter) - against which there is no real protection on the battlefield. The first and third issues were definitely lied about, the second one was questionable to say the least.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you've been knowing 'the dock' for a very, very long time now.
There was a story on slashdot, a few years ago, on how tiny space 'masses' with enormous speeds would sometimes fly right through the earth, and they found this out by comparing earthquake measuring equipment from different parts of the globe. So, if there's still any truth to that theory, then, yes.
Well, ideally, distances measured in meters and in feet would be two (sub)classes that, when cast to each other, automatically take care of the conversion. And in C++, you could even add them up, yielding the distance in units of the right hand side (presumably). -pedantic mode off-
As soon as Coca Cola would be the only thing we can drink, and it is made abroad, you can bet your ass that they (that is, any government) would demand the recipe.
No government procuring security devices should allow the procurement of devices that are black-box on any layer. The Chinese government's demands are nothing but realistic and logical, the risks of unfair competition notwithstanding. Oh, and I think that you'll find that many companies are willing to take that risk when they balance it against the Chinese (government) market.
BTW. you didn't think those border confiscations that they're allowed to do in the US now, would have anything to do with the NSA being overly friendly with certain US companies, did you ?
It just dawned on me; the problem with the electronic voting discussion is that we want to go too fast; we want to go from rubbing a red pencil over a printed piece of paper instantly to centralized mainframe and terminal voting. Typical for techies to reason in this way, but 1) We (the people as a whole) are not ready, and 2) the tools to take it more slowly are available and cheap, too. So let's instead automate the red pencil first; voting machine is a stand-alone machine that just prints the ballot, with the one spot of the candidate printed in red. Instantly checkable by the voter, and it can even be corrected with a real red pencil. Next we feed this form into a counting machine; since it's pre-printed (usually) it can easily be read by a machine as well. The form itself is never destroyed (obviously) because it can still be used in a manual, or machine, recount. Statistics about the number of votes can still be kept manually (by the volunteers) and checked against machine statistics.
Do you know whether there are any plans to 'interleave' the gimp with layers that do vector-drawing as well ? It would be so cool to be able to designate a layer for the one purpose or the other. I know that these newfangled text-layers are a step in this direction, but do you know whether they plan on going all the way ?
I'm not taking any chances, but I'm not taking any chances with human-forced change in the other direction either. Chances are that nature already adapted in some way to our CO2 output. Are you willing to take *that* chance ?
My company got the info a while ago under embargo. I don't know much about it, and if I did, I would probably not be allowed to say anything about it. I'll check it out tomorrow, but I believe that indeed, it is some kind of SYN based attack.
But can we really tell inhowfar the damage done by us, isn't already coped with in one way or another ? For example; could the excess CO2 not be responsible for extra resilience in trees, who would otherwise die because of all the sulphur and nitrous molecules we're *also* producing ? Mind you, I'm not saying 'smoke that chimney !' - I'm saying 'be careful how you correct' - we don't want to be playing Australian ecosystem with our atmosphere, do we ?
1) No CO2 causes the heating up of a closed box in a laboratory. It is also a prerequisite for life and gets produced by godknowswhat in our biotope.
2) We don't know that either. It's likely to *change* things, which might be bad.
3) Yes, but is it because we're pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, or because we're removing too many trees ? Because I would surely like to fix things at the source.
As I said, I'm all for putting a filter on the chimney, but I'm not so sure it's a good thing to have near a forest.
I really, really wouldn't do all this 'CO2 from the air removing' until we're 100% sure that 1) it causes global warming, 2) global warming is bad and 3) our natural mechanisms are somehow inadequate at the moment. And even then, I mean, sure - put a filter on that chimney, but don't start removing it from places where trees (or plankton) might be hungry for it, making our ecosystem even more unstable.
Work with whitelisting only; forward everything else to another account that you inspect (and use to maintain the whitelist). It might mean cutting and pasting your own SMTP server together, as I did, because I didn't know of any solution either.
There are about two or three drop-in replacements for exchange these days, more or less open and free, and then there is the outlook plugin for evolution. Which sucks (I use it daily), because the Gods of Gnome have decided that the evolution-'platform' is going to be their next Operating System or something - extremely difficult to fiddle with, both in source and in configuration, because you need to be running two or three CORBA-like services at the same time and have god knows how many libraries in arbitrary places.
What all of these people don't realize is that all that concentration on a single endpoint is nice, but that they really must make *both* client *and* server. They must not only make a drop-in replacement for exchange, they must also make a client-library implementation to fit inside a GUI, so that they control both ends. So you can still be hybrid if you wish (and who wouldn't - no more 2G limits on your mailboxes for starters), but you can also be fully 'in' as it were.
If you earn that much, it's a programming language. Really.
*cough* SMTP *cough*
Beeeeh. Short variable names are good. The only people who say that short variable names are bad, are those that use more than, say, ten variables in a function, whose bodies are more than, say, twenty lines long. And who don't realize that *that* is their crime. Now, non-static struct members ought to be descriptive, but conventions still apply; so 'id', not 'identifier'. The same goes for 'auto' function names; they should be descriptive; the static ones can be short. Oh, and one 'auto' function per file, please, and don't forget to call all the other ones static. And pre-declare the 'auto' function on top, and document it there. Using multiline commentary.
"But you still don't have any real reason for saying Bush and Blair lied other than a skepticism of governments."
bzzzt. Skepticism of this particular episode of these particular governments, thank you.
I think I've discovered once again during the course of this discussion that I'm actually perhaps more deeply conservative than you. That is to say: the idealism of neoconservatives is really not for me. Nation building, ousting of dictators - it's all the work of idealists, and to my mind, they should take their money spending hobbies elsewhere. Start building model trains or something. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. That sort of thing. Needless to say, I was against invading Iraq, and in spite of it going a bit better now, I'm really quite unconvinced that it was worth the money and the blood and the loss of reputation. As to Georgie's lying, I think history will show that I was at least more than just a little bit right about that. But you're right in that nothing can be said about that, really. Yet.
I'm not saying Saddam was an Ok guy who shouldn't have been removed. I'm not saying that there was a solution to that sentiment other than to invade. I'm saying that the reasons given were (to my mind) bogus, and I have a *terrible* thing against leaders who hide behind executive privilege and lie at the same time. I *hated* it when Clinton bombarded Sudan to get out of Monica-gate, and I *hated* it when George invaded Iraq for reasons that I cannot yet imagine, but I'm fairly certain were different from the actual reasons he gave.
Not because I was in love with Saddam. I didn't really care about Saddam. But because that which was much closer (an allied leader of the free world) *lied*. And these people shouldn't lie. At least not about things that concern enormous costs, both in military equipment en human lives. We expect dictators to lie, not our leaders. And the system that allows for something like that, is rotten.
So I'm not of the mindset 'my country, always wrong'. I don't think so at all. I hope I'm still in charge of my critical faculties. And those critical faculties tend to fire up greater and quicker when things hit closer to home. Yes, I think Western countries should be held to greater scrutiny because that's one of our goals. We (well, I) think harsher of Israel's action than those of Palestinians - why ? Because we think of Israel as a first world democracy and of the Palestinians as subjects of corrupt governments or tyrants. People (soldiers) from democracies who do things, do those things representing the people that chose the executive that sent them out. On the other side we have canon fodder that does the wishes of a single psychopath, and not once, *once* will I want to think that our system can successfully harbour such a psychopath as leader, making us no different from those we find on the other side of the trenches. That is not to say I think of us as 'better', no, the people that live under tyrants are victims, not 'worse'. But I just don't want to be 'worse', and the minute I start feeling like I'm also part of the 'worse', is the minute I start wanting to do something about it. Like calling (perceived) liars on their lies. Or ousting them.
'Overestimating a threat' and 'lying'; the difference is one of degree. An amount of degree we can fight about until infinity. Also 'actively developing WMD' and 'we found some ten year old unusable stuff buried in the sand, but that must have been from after the first gulf war'; again, a question of degree. 'Hans Blix said so. Saddam said so. The intelligence was never conclusive' and 'George and Tony could not have known'. Here I go again. There are no scientific truths in politics. My feeling is, and no argument of yours has yet convinced me, that George needed a case for war, Tony was only too happy to be a lapdog, and the both of them didn't mind stepping onto a few truths along the way. You say: nothing but inference and innocent until proven guilty. I have no rebuttal. The problem with finding these people guilty of lying, is that they have executive power over the evidence used.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that Jupiter (and Saturn) weren't completely 'black' bodies; namely that they radiated in the infrared spectrum ?
I said that I think that it is very probable that George and Tony lied on the topic of Saddam's missile capacity and nuclear threat. About these, they had no information, but, apparently, from their intelligence agencies. That information was forged in plain defiance of Hans Blix' findings. At least, that is my opinion. On the subject of poison gases, they just said that they didn't believe Saddam, who clearly stated (as was later made *very* believable) that he had gotten rid of them. Inhowfar these levels of displayed disbelief by George and Tony were genuine, I don't know. I suspect that, given the other two 'reasons', not so much. But that's just me. Total cynic when it comes to Iraq. And honestly, given the history of it that you know too, can you blame me ?
You can't prove any of this is the truth. But ah, that's always been the problem, isn't it ? We live in democracies, don't we ? How much time must pass before we can hold our elected executive accountable, even when the information they deal with is highly classified ? This affair hasn't made the answer any clearer, because the answer according to Tony and George obviously is: never.
I'm not within MI5 or the CIA, so I can't assess in any way the validity of these documents. But, ironically, neither can you. These governments are reaping what they have sowed: in a climate of secrecy, only gossip blooms. And my take is that it is all phony, the very scarce public evidence tells only one story: the WMDs you point to, were all rotten beyond use, and Saddam insisted, even when he had nothing to lose anymore, that he had cooperated with Blix et al.
I find going from the (in my mind, invented) casus belli with Iraq to 'islamists taking over' in the same breath a bit of a stretch. But maybe that's just me.
It might have become that way, but it certainly wasn't so initially. After 'Afghanistan', everybody and their camel in the Arabic world realized they could get instant airtime if they just associated their particular set of misgivings to Osama and his cause. Hell, Osama probably isn't even alive anymore, but his 'brand' lives on in spite of him. Go blame lazy journalists or something.
Another thing; you act (in another thread as well) as if I justify the killing of homosexuals or something. I would like to point out to you that my interest lies purely in being accurate, and if you feel that it makes me less politically correct, then I'm sorry for your mentality.
No, there were *three* issues; one (the one that Tony Blair used) was that there were long distance rockets (to deliver a chemical or *normal* payload to Cyprus, for example), the second one was that he had nerve gas (to be delivered on the battlefield). The first one is a threat if you happen to live in Europe, the second one only when you invade his country (or live in it, but that was never really brought up in this context). The third one was that he had Uranium (the Niger letter) - against which there is no real protection on the battlefield. The first and third issues were definitely lied about, the second one was questionable to say the least.