Good point about the Starship Troopers movie. It's one thing to omit some events for the unofficial two-hour limit, but that thing was really untrue to the essence of the book whose title, plot and characters it lifted for a contrary theme and message (or absence of any, which is also contrary to the book's intent).
Good use of the book as analogy, too. Rights logically imply responsibilities. What's the problem?
Using the incompetence of George Walker Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, almost everybody is talented enough to suspect these losers are cheating us. Surveillance is just one possible means. Handing auto workers', and everybody else's income who works for a living, directly to their cronies at AIG and Citi is another, and the latter is a documented fact. Suspicion of other, similar pursuits of the same agenda via other agencies is not paranoia, it's true intelligence. As opposed to the euphemistic language invoked to describe the same incompetents' failure to apprehend terrorists who took flight lessons and skipped landing, more than one month after George Walker Bush was delivered a CIA document titled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike US" and describing the plan to steer airplanes into buildings.
The general bias of this board seems to be anti-process patent. But with a great amount US GDP currently being derived from services and intellectual properties which include such processes, is there no benefit from awarding inventors if the only aspect of their invention is algorithmic in nature?
The general opinion of this board, as I see it, is that process patents retard production, especially but not only innovative production, more than they advance it. Can you quantify the "great amount of US GDP currently derived from services and intellectual properties which include such processes"? Once you have, can you honestly claim that taking all those patent-enforced methodological [I will not call this farce "intellectual"] monopolies off the open market really reduces GDP?
When you try to protect a secret by putting in in a locked box, do you put it in a steel box with a good combination lock? Or do you put it in a cheap transparent plastic box with a lock that can be picked by a safety pin and hundreds of holes and little doors that can be opened even more easily?
The answer really depends on what kind of other security measures you're placing on the box, and how accessible it is. If the transparent plastic box with a lock that can be picked with a safety pin is floating on a rock island in the middle of the caldera of an active volcano...
It isn't. Somebody obviously got in, either by socially engineering a soldier or by being a double agent.
The military networks are most certainly hardened against intrusion.
Hardened? Is this about placing the aforementioned plastic box into a steel vault?
With proper security measures installed, and with decent firewalls and traffic monitoring on both the outbound and the inbound, and with intelligent account restrictions in place,
... including prohibiting external storage devices,
... then Windows can be made just as secure as any other OS.
So because its been used in military applications, you've constructed this elaborate fantasy scenario rather than just researching its actual history?
Not close.
It was developed years ago as a commercial product primarily for the embedded systems market. Military aircraft are just an example of the applications it's been used for after it was already a mature commercial product.
Provide one other "example of the applications it's been used for after it was already a mature commercial product," shit-for-brain. It was developed for my military, after it received a contract from my military. I own it, bitch.
Less finesse? Bush has been caught, repeatedly, and for much worse than Watergate. He has not been prosecuted, not because he has skillfully evaded detection but because his crimes are so terrifying, and his accomplices [Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Perle, PNAC, Sauds] are so shady. Is that what you consider "finesse"?
... used in the B1B bomber and other military aircraft...
Now, do you suppose it was given to my military, as a xmas gift? Do you suppose development even began before a no-bid, cost+plus contract was signed? Like I said, I funded the development as a taxpayer already. I own that. Hand it over.
'The key to a con is not that you trust the con man, but that he shows he trusts you. Con men ply their trade by appearing fragile or needing help, by seeming vulnerable,' writes Zak. 'Because of THOMAS, the human brain makes us feel good when we help others -- this is the basis for attachment to family and friends and cooperation with strangers.'
We all experience greed, but knowing that everybody else does too, we are naturally suspicious of "something for nothing," especially if offered by another human. Plants and animals we expect to be able to eat. Thus, the survival advantage of action based on reciprocal trust. Social conventions complex enough to turn this mechanism to any individual's disadvantage are relatively recent in homo sapiens' time on Earth, thus the yet-unsolved problem of con people.
As a female professor of mine put it, CS is about "using the computer in order to use the computer." Women ask "How long until we do something useful?" Boys ask "How long until we get to video games?" which are less popular among females, last I checked.
This article is about staying close to the ~59% theoretical maximum predicted by Betz' Law over a wide range of incoming wind speeds, not magically eclipsing it. Save your sarcasm until you really know what you're talking about.
Now, they want to sell me the "release version," as if they're suddenly a legitimate, privately funded dot-com startup of yore? I was born at night, but it was not last night. We citizens already own that product. Turn it over.
The problem for a U is that you have the population of a large corp - but 80% turnover, every 3 months! That is an issue in provisioning/de-provisioning and self-service management that AD and Exchange have a tough time with. They are capable - but there's no tool, yet. If you have to pony up for the (now beta) Identity Lifecycle Manager v2, you may no longer be in competitive territory - 'tho the solution is fantastic.
True, but credentials for the university computer network will have to be provisioned/de-provisioned anyway.
Accounts can be provisioned by the same process and personnel that hand out student ID and mealcards!
Gmail can be accessed with both IMAP & POP3 (my personal experience is only with IMAP), so any Linux or BSD infrastructure can be adapted, pretty easily in my opinion, to create and eliminate (or migrate to @collegename.alumni.edu, whatever) e-mail accounts simultaneously with the necessary, unavoidable administrative tasks of doing the same for network credentials. As long as they use a similar solution to my exim/courier mail server which bases e-mail addresses on system usernames, a brief script can create e-mail accounts, random-character passwords, at the same time as another computer lab task they cannot avoid doing, and the provisioning problem can be totally eliminated, or ignored in the choice of vendor by building into existing administrative work, with any vendor, including Gmail.
So, I believe that Google is nothing but a life of frustration
I don't see why Google would add any unique difficulty. I call that a three-way draw, so onto the next factor, in my experience Gmail has by far the best SPAM-detection algorithms of the three choices that the university is willing to consider. Other "functionality" which corporations want to package-deal with their software for handling mail protocols should be left as an exercise for the CS department, and Google Apps lets them either do that, or encourage use of others' work. It is essentially good in that it is a modular software model based on the essence of object-oriented development principles, setting the right example for collaborative software development in an academic setting.
Because Gmail is amenable to traditional e-mail server software, including Courier, Exim4 and Fetchmail in my personal experience, the "calendaring" and other schwag that is recently built-in to those is unnecessary and I see no reason for a monolith like Exchange/Outlook. The same features can be included in the client, where such personal tools belong anyway. I don't know what Zimbra has added to Yahoo's e-mail product line, but it sounds like an all-in-one package deal that I'll dislike, no matter how technically expert their implementation of that sort of architecture.
Finally, the need for calendaring and the like is much more corporate than academic, especially in college. There maybe pop quizzes, but all major homework assignments are announced in the syllabus, handed out the first day of class. So, any faculty or students who "need" calendaring software may use Evolution or Outlook depending on their platform, but that feature is not important enough that it should enter into the decisions about the University-wide e-mail system.
The committee in charge will have to decide whether Gmail's recent reliability problem is the exception or the rule. Which search engine do you recommend they use, to most quickly locate news stories about any other previous, newsworthy Gmail outages? Do you suppose they'll "MSN it"? ;)
Nice try, but the association of the candidates with "corrupt former CEOs" of federally-subsidized lobbying/lending institutions was the first topic you opened as an example of liberal media bias. I only disproved what you said about that topic, with a few pertinent counterexamples.
Ah yes, the Gramm-Leach-Biley law, signed into law by Bill Clinton. Innuendo on your part does not prove any misdeeds on the part of either Gramm or McCain.
I will not take your "Bill Clinton" bait. Gramm-Leach-Biley was a bad bill, and everybody who supported it was wrong to do so, including the self-described "social liberal & fiscal conservative" who was too little of both for my liking. Now, back on-topic, what "innuendo"? Once you introduced the subject of associations of candidates for President with "corrupt former CEOs" of federally-subsidized lobbying/lending institutions the cause of the current financial crisis is 100% apropos. If you have honestly had trouble understanding why my references to Gramm are rebuttal, not diversion, you are an utter moron. The press is right to highlight that scumbag's track record of prioritizing corporatist gluttony over citizens' liberty and the general welfare.
If you think I'm mistaken, that's one thing. If you think I'm deliberately misleading people, that would be a case of lying. You have demonstrated absolutely no evidence to back up your assertion that I'm lying.
Incorrect. You first asserted that the relatively brief press scrutiny of Barack Obama's associations with the two peripheral [to the Obama campaign] supporters, former adviser Johnson, and supporter-of-no-proven-status-whatsoever-in-the-campaign Raines, demonstrate the tired old GOP gripe of a "liberal media bias" in comparison to the relatively long intervals of press scrutiny of McCain's ongoing employment of Rick Davis as his campaign manager while "Davis's lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, also received monthly payments of $15,000 from Freddie Mac as recently as August." Unequal treatment of similar cases would indicate bias, but as I have already explained, and you have not disputed, the unequal scrutiny of the two candidates' associations with "corrupt former CEOs" of federally-subsidized lobbying/lending institutions is due to dissimilarity, not to bias. Now pay attention. I did not waste my time on your tangents about media commentary about racism in McCain's ad about Raines nor about the sex ed program to include "age appropriate" instruction in avoiding pedophilic predators. I went straight to the crux of your whining, "that Obama had 2 corrupt former CEOs of Fannie as economic advisors, one of which was [briefly] the head of his VP search committee. We didn't hear about that until McCain ran ads about it. And then, did the media focus on the story?" Obama promptly severed those two ties, to Raines and Johnson, as I have already explained. McCain was more scrutinized, true, but not because of media bias. He continues to be suspect as a result of his continuing employment of Rick Davis, as vivid summary of McCain's 26-year-long record of unwavering support of voodoo economics: the superstition that in high finance, rule of law equals government abuse of the rights of the wealthy, when in fact it is the valid purpose of the United States government as set forth in its charter documents, protection of the rights of the individual against tyranny, whether by government itself or powerful private parties. To Gramm and McCain and their ilk, "unregulated free markets" are the euphemism for anarchy, dominance by the powerful and lazy, financially elite
Re: James Johnson, it's true he wasn't fined millions like Raines. But neither is he a paragon of virtue.
Neither is that required to contribute to political campaigns. But to treat a person as "guilty," proof is required. Although this is not a court of law, good manners still require telling the truth about people, if you say anything about them at all.
Let's take a deep breath here. No need to go name-calling without cause.
I'm perfectly calm and rational, and I call you "liar" with good cause. You are a liar, as I've explained, and may explain again until you tell the truth or stop speaking. Take your pick.
"If you don't stop lying about me, I may have to start telling the truth about you." ~Abraham Lincoln
We can argue over how bad/close the association with Franklin Raines is.
Anybody may contribute to a political campaign, either money or labor. Receiving a call "from the Obama campaign" by itself implies no closer connection than that Raines first offered his resources or self-described "expertise." No credible evidence has yet been published of any "association" beyond returning a phone call. Another plausible explanation is that, having tarnished his own reputation, Raines sought to improve the public perception of him by seeming to have some "association" with Barack Obama, who among non-bigots is known for his strong character. These scenarios I've concocted are of course no more supported by fact than your sinister assumptions -- but more importantly, no less so, either. The liberal bias of which you whine is a fabrication of corrupt corporatist/fascists and bigots, who pursue a culture in which Liberal values, especially universal individual rights, are replaced by your own biases and insider pull-peddling. Credible journalists let this story rest when they could not find a credible source.
McCain's ties to the fiend Phil Gramm, of Gramm-Leach-Biley infamy, are documented and proven. I do not gladly suffer fools who slander the best man in this contest, for associating with local campaign personnel who have the decency to return a phone call. You have no proof nor reasonable suspicion of any more relationship with Raines than that, so the unequal treatment of Obama's alleged "association" with corrupt lobbyists compared to McCain's proven, continuing employment of corrupt lobbyists is not a matter of media bias, but of truly unequal moral stature, as proven by the actions of the two candidates. McCain has earned all the bad press he's gotten, and Obama has certainly gotten at least as much scrutiny of his "associations" as warranted by the facts.
Crybaby.
But note that the Washington Post stood by their reporting,
...of Raines' uncorroborated statements. That publication is responsible enough to note the lack of corroboration, and to pursue additional sources for that purpose, and then to drop the story when no corroboration could be found. Fox News does not have nearly such an honest policy.
... and even Raines is not denying,
Given your characterization of Raines as a "shady character," his reputation stands to be improved by any association, or perceived association, with Barack Obama. What motive he might have to definitively and unambiguously disclaim such an association is unclear, even if no association ever existed. The air of ambiguity he has allowed to remain is optimal for keeping his name in the news, and scrutiny about him not directly on him.
that Raines took calls from the Obama campaign to give advice on "general housing, economy issues".
Funny, though, that he won't or can't name an individual who placed phone calls to him, allegedly "from the Obama campaign." As my mother says of 3-ring phone hangups and blank answering machine messages, "It must no
The White House has committed egregious violations of the Constitution and democratic principles vital to the republic including wiretaps without warrants, withholding classified documents attached to those directives from House Congressional representatives including those on the Homeland Security Committee [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ByoqZqDGaA&feature=related], and approval of torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit torture even of terrorists.
[http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-interrogate25-2008sep25,0,1828234.story] The Bush Administration's instructions to commit torture are violations of any participating Executive Branch officials' oaths to uphold the Constitution.
What will you commit to doing to hold Condoleezza Rice, Alberto Gonzales, John Ashcroft, David Addington, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and any other participants accountable for this crime? Will you consider charging any or all with treason?
What about the people who signed up for loans they couldn't afford?
It is the professional duty of loan officers to approve lending that the borrower has the earning power to repay. Write your Congress person and demand that any "bailout" be paid directly to mortgage borrowers, and only for repayment of loans for their primary residence. One man, one vote, no more than one bailed out mortgage. Let the mortgage companies suffer the deflation of the housing bubble they created with their overabundant credit approvals. That is real laissez-faire capitalism, which the wealthiest 1% always whines that it wants. Let them learn that they need regulation as much as the rest of us need regulation, which is really just monied looters' pejorative term for the rule of law, when such is inconvenient to them.
Take, for example, the Fannie/Freddie debacle. Consider that Obama had 2 corrupt former CEOs of Fannie as economic advisors, one of which was the head of his VP search committee.
The truth is that although Jim Johnson was a CEO at Fannie Mae before becoming a leader of Barack Obama's VP search committee, he has not been convicted of any crime, but Obama accepted Johnson's resignation from the Presidential campaign anyway. In June, you hypocrite. Jim Johnson has also not been even accused of any crimes, just smeared for being associated with a corporation which operated in the lawless environment introduced by Gramm-Leach-Biley. Compare to Carly Fiorina, who was personally responsible for making a mess out of Hewlett-Packard. Johnson didn't sign Gramm-Leach-Biley into law. Measured by stock price, Fiorina was, in the eyes of the investors with enough previous financial success to determine stock prices, personally responsible for Hewlett-Packard's problems. If we're going to spend $700 Billion bailing out the country's wealthiest investors, we had better trust their judgment enough to uphold their verdict on Carleton S. Fiorina: as toxic as a portfolio full of foreclosed mortgages.
Former Fannie Mae executive Jim Johnson, who was a leader of the vice presidential search committee for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama, resigned from that unpaid position today amid criticisms that Johnson represented a world of influence and special interests that stood in stark contrast with what Obama's campaign purports to stand for.
...
"We don't need any lectures from a campaign that waited fifteen months to purge the lobbyists from their staff, and only did so because they said it was a 'perception problem,'" said Obama campaign spokesperson Bill Burton.
The Obama campaign issued a statement by Raines on Thursday night insisting, "I am not an advisor to Barack Obama, nor have I provided his campaign with advice on housing or economic matters." Obama spokesman Bill Burton went a little further, saying in an e-mail that the campaign had "neither sought nor received" advice from Raines "on any matter."
[If Raines offered Obama advice that was not sought, a lying sack of excrement might argue that Obama nevertheless "received" that advice, but unless that advice was the basis of subsequent action, we use the colloquialism that the advice was not "taken," thus anybody describing Raines as an advisor to Obama is a lying sack of excrement.]
Unless you have proof that Raines' statement above is a lie, you committed libel by asserting that he had ever been one of Barack Obama's "economic advisors."
So what evidence does the McCain campaign have for the supposed Obama-Raines connection? It is pretty flimsy, but it is not made up completely out of whole cloth.
99% cloth, but not completely whole cloth. The "supposed Obama-Raines connection" is not quite pure fabrication by the same standard that the statement "you are a violin" has a basis in fact, when addressed to a person calling itself "Stradivarius." The only connection to fact is extremely tenuous, and we all know that the statement "you are a violin" is a falsehood. Your accusation is no more honest, just less humorous.
McCain spokesman Brian Rogers points to three items in the Washington Post in July and August. It turns out that
I do not believe Lieberman, McCain, Cheney or any of Bush's henchmen want us to be safe. They want us to be scared. Lieberman is wrong to use his status as a Senator to influence YouTube, but I don't believe he made a mistake. I believe he's a fascist.
I believe in protecting freedom of speech, but I also agree with youtube's decision to remove terrorist training videos and instructions on making bombs.
Of course. YouTube has the right to prohibit whatever they want to prohibit from being stored on their servers. They're well within their property rights. My only objection is to the government "urging" this action, on what looks to me like little or no evidence that any strategic advantage is at stake -- other than in upcoming elections.
Some excerpts from the article, added emphasis:
A year ago, a Homeland Security Department intelligence assessment said: "The availability of easily accessible messages with targeted language may speed the radicalisation process in the homeland for those already susceptible to violent extremism." ...
By banning these videos on YouTube, "Google will make a singularly important contribution to this important national effort," Lieberman wrote to Google's chairman and chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in May.
Ahem, Senator, the DHS intelligence assessment did not say that reducing the prevalence of terrorist videos would definitely matter at all. It said only that the "availability of easily accessible messages with targeted language may speed the radicalisation process." Literate people notice that this means it's also possible that the effect is negligible.
Despite the move there is a debate among radicalisation experts of whether shutting down extremist sites is the most effective way to counter the threat.
They say keeping them online allows analysts and investigators to monitor what is being said and in some cases who is saying it.
"The reality is by shutting it down, it is more or less a game of whack-a-mole: it pops up somewhere else," said Frank Ciluffo, homeland security director at George Washington University.
However, he said, forcing extremists to find other ways to post videos could give officials a better opportunity to monitor them.
Anything is possible, but I would like more than a vague possibility before a US Senator starts exhorting private companies to censor their content in the interest of the War on Terror(TM), because such action is very likely to result in erroneous removal of videos based on malicious, false reports of "terrorist" content, for personal, corporate or pseudo-religious reasons, or whatever.
We could estimate the likely success of this plan by considering the years, and millions of dollars, spent by the software and recording industries, and comparing to their impact on the activities they term "piracy." The problem with Senators' recommendations is that too few voters are middle-management or higher, and trust government to be better-informed than we are instead of expecting them to prove their plans are likely to be effective, and at reasonable cost. If Lieberman had to put together his own.ppt's for his little militaristic, authoritarian pet projects, his boss would have told him his involves a relatively major disruption to routine business activities, in pursuit of a course of action that's less likely to be effective than alternatives of equal or lesser cost, such as using the same videos to locate and apprehend terrorist conspirators who post them. Being in jail should be enough to disrupt whatever they're plotting.
Whereas single-process browsers such as Firefox aim for lean, efficient browsing experiences, Chrome and IE 8 are all about delivering a robust platform for reliably running multiple Web apps in a tabbed format in answer to the Web's evolving needs. To do this, Chrome takes a 'purist' approach, launching multiple, discrete processes to isolate and protect each tab's contents. IE 8, on the other hand, goes hybrid, creating multiple instances of the iexplore.exe process without specifically assigning each tab to its own instance. 'Google's purist approach will ultimately prove more robust,' Kennedy argues, 'but at a cost in terms of resource consumption.'
As another Slashdot reader already observed in this or another recent 'Chrome' discussion, 'consumption' is an inappropriately derogatory term. We should be talking about memory use or resource use , not 'consumption' because (1) memory is released when the program closes, not destroyed or converted to a different, unusable form (such as food post-digestion or gasoline post-combustion), and (2) although the 200MB - 400MB used by browsers is a significant fraction of system memory for low-end computers with just 1GB of memory, these browsers do not exceed available RAM, except for very old computers which should probably be de-commissioned anyway. So, the 'cost in terms of resource consumption' for a multiprocess app is well worth paying, because it is only relevant on systems that are terribly underpowered, as defined by the industry's pace car; they would certainly not be rated 'Vista Ready' or 'Vista Capable.'
Their staffing and other financial records are available for inspection;
As a former customer, I'd have more appreciation for the opportunity to inspect their source code.
lookup their annual reports to see massive spending & staffing in research; there can be no doubts there.
The SEC exists because unsuccessful corporations have been known to lie, and caught at it. Only a fool has "no doubts" about corporate self-reporting.
I base this on the existence of Fortune-100 companies whose reason for existence is to deliver security solutions, and have multi-billion$ security budgets to that effect.
Symantec, is "only" #461, and (AFAIK) it's the largest corp. whose primary product is computer security. This is not nit-picking; your entire argument is based on scale, and the largest of the companies of the type you're discussing, is barely in the Fortune 500, not the 100.
Speaking of which, have Symantec and McAfee made the Internet safe yet? No. How many more billions of dollars do they want before providing the "security" they've been advertising for
over a decade, anyway? Looks exactly like a protection racket to me.
Keeping consumer product information freely available is always better for the customer. In the specific case of computer security, publishing information about the relative strengths of competing products' access controls allows people to learn better how to "roll our own" solutions, or if we buy corporate security products, more information allows us to choose better purchases. For everybody, and therefore for society as a whole, more available information is better. Deciding what information we want and need, and learning where to get it, is the individual's responsibility. This is existential fact, which means it will not be altered by your acknowledgment, nor by your refusal to acknowledge truth. Agree, or let me decide what information to not allow you to have, about whatever consumer product category I choose.
The protection of the First Amendment is not limited to speech that you approve.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point about the Starship Troopers movie. It's one thing to omit some events for the unofficial two-hour limit, but that thing was really untrue to the essence of the book whose title, plot and characters it lifted for a contrary theme and message (or absence of any, which is also contrary to the book's intent).
Good use of the book as analogy, too. Rights logically imply responsibilities. What's the problem?
Using the incompetence of George Walker Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, almost everybody is talented enough to suspect these losers are cheating us. Surveillance is just one possible means. Handing auto workers', and everybody else's income who works for a living, directly to their cronies at AIG and Citi is another, and the latter is a documented fact. Suspicion of other, similar pursuits of the same agenda via other agencies is not paranoia, it's true intelligence. As opposed to the euphemistic language invoked to describe the same incompetents' failure to apprehend terrorists who took flight lessons and skipped landing, more than one month after George Walker Bush was delivered a CIA document titled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike US" and describing the plan to steer airplanes into buildings.
The general bias of this board seems to be anti-process patent. But with a great amount US GDP currently being derived from services and intellectual properties which include such processes, is there no benefit from awarding inventors if the only aspect of their invention is algorithmic in nature?
The general opinion of this board, as I see it, is that process patents retard production, especially but not only innovative production, more than they advance it. Can you quantify the "great amount of US GDP currently derived from services and intellectual properties which include such processes"? Once you have, can you honestly claim that taking all those patent-enforced methodological [I will not call this farce "intellectual"] monopolies off the open market really reduces GDP?
When you try to protect a secret by putting in in a locked box, do you put it in a steel box with a good combination lock? Or do you put it in a cheap transparent plastic box with a lock that can be picked by a safety pin and hundreds of holes and little doors that can be opened even more easily?
The answer really depends on what kind of other security measures you're placing on the box, and how accessible it is. If the transparent plastic box with a lock that can be picked with a safety pin is floating on a rock island in the middle of the caldera of an active volcano...
It isn't. Somebody obviously got in, either by socially engineering a soldier or by being a double agent.
The military networks are most certainly hardened against intrusion.
Hardened? Is this about placing the aforementioned plastic box into a steel vault?
With proper security measures installed, and with decent firewalls and traffic monitoring on both the outbound and the inbound, and with intelligent account restrictions in place,
... including prohibiting external storage devices,
... then Windows can be made just as secure as any other OS.
So because its been used in military applications, you've constructed this elaborate fantasy scenario rather than just researching its actual history?
Not close.
It was developed years ago as a commercial product primarily for the embedded systems market. Military aircraft are just an example of the applications it's been used for after it was already a mature commercial product.
Provide one other "example of the applications it's been used for after it was already a mature commercial product," shit-for-brain. It was developed for my military, after it received a contract from my military. I own it, bitch.
Less finesse? Bush has been caught, repeatedly, and for much worse than Watergate. He has not been prosecuted, not because he has skillfully evaded detection but because his crimes are so terrifying, and his accomplices [Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Perle, PNAC, Sauds] are so shady. Is that what you consider "finesse"?
... used in the B1B bomber and other military aircraft...
Now, do you suppose it was given to my military, as a xmas gift? Do you suppose development even began before a no-bid, cost+plus contract was signed? Like I said, I funded the development as a taxpayer already. I own that. Hand it over.
'The key to a con is not that you trust the con man, but that he shows he trusts you. Con men ply their trade by appearing fragile or needing help, by seeming vulnerable,' writes Zak. 'Because of THOMAS, the human brain makes us feel good when we help others -- this is the basis for attachment to family and friends and cooperation with strangers.'
We all experience greed, but knowing that everybody else does too, we are naturally suspicious of "something for nothing," especially if offered by another human. Plants and animals we expect to be able to eat. Thus, the survival advantage of action based on reciprocal trust. Social conventions complex enough to turn this mechanism to any individual's disadvantage are relatively recent in homo sapiens' time on Earth, thus the yet-unsolved problem of con people.
As a female professor of mine put it, CS is about "using the computer in order to use the computer." Women ask "How long until we do something useful?" Boys ask "How long until we get to video games?" which are less popular among females, last I checked.
This article is about staying close to the ~59% theoretical maximum predicted by Betz' Law over a wide range of incoming wind speeds, not magically eclipsing it. Save your sarcasm until you really know what you're talking about.
http://www.windpower.org/en/tour/wres/betz.htm
Now, they want to sell me the "release version," as if they're suddenly a legitimate, privately funded dot-com startup of yore? I was born at night, but it was not last night. We citizens already own that product. Turn it over.
The problem for a U is that you have the population of a large corp - but 80% turnover, every 3 months! That is an issue in provisioning/de-provisioning and self-service management that AD and Exchange have a tough time with. They are capable - but there's no tool, yet. If you have to pony up for the (now beta) Identity Lifecycle Manager v2, you may no longer be in competitive territory - 'tho the solution is fantastic.
True, but credentials for the university computer network will have to be provisioned/de-provisioned anyway.
Accounts can be provisioned by the same process and personnel that hand out student ID and mealcards!
Gmail can be accessed with both IMAP & POP3 (my personal experience is only with IMAP), so any Linux or BSD infrastructure can be adapted, pretty easily in my opinion, to create and eliminate (or migrate to @collegename.alumni.edu, whatever) e-mail accounts simultaneously with the necessary, unavoidable administrative tasks of doing the same for network credentials. As long as they use a similar solution to my exim/courier mail server which bases e-mail addresses on system usernames, a brief script can create e-mail accounts, random-character passwords, at the same time as another computer lab task they cannot avoid doing, and the provisioning problem can be totally eliminated, or ignored in the choice of vendor by building into existing administrative work, with any vendor, including Gmail.
So, I believe that Google is nothing but a life of frustration
I don't see why Google would add any unique difficulty. I call that a three-way draw, so onto the next factor, in my experience Gmail has by far the best SPAM-detection algorithms of the three choices that the university is willing to consider. Other "functionality" which corporations want to package-deal with their software for handling mail protocols should be left as an exercise for the CS department, and Google Apps lets them either do that, or encourage use of others' work. It is essentially good in that it is a modular software model based on the essence of object-oriented development principles, setting the right example for collaborative software development in an academic setting.
;)
Because Gmail is amenable to traditional e-mail server software, including Courier, Exim4 and Fetchmail in my personal experience, the "calendaring" and other schwag that is recently built-in to those is unnecessary and I see no reason for a monolith like Exchange/Outlook. The same features can be included in the client, where such personal tools belong anyway. I don't know what Zimbra has added to Yahoo's e-mail product line, but it sounds like an all-in-one package deal that I'll dislike, no matter how technically expert their implementation of that sort of architecture.
Finally, the need for calendaring and the like is much more corporate than academic, especially in college. There maybe pop quizzes, but all major homework assignments are announced in the syllabus, handed out the first day of class. So, any faculty or students who "need" calendaring software may use Evolution or Outlook depending on their platform, but that feature is not important enough that it should enter into the decisions about the University-wide e-mail system.
The committee in charge will have to decide whether Gmail's recent reliability problem is the exception or the rule. Which search engine do you recommend they use, to most quickly locate news stories about any other previous, newsworthy Gmail outages? Do you suppose they'll "MSN it"?
If you want to go into guilt-by-association
Nice try, but the association of the candidates with "corrupt former CEOs" of federally-subsidized lobbying/lending institutions was the first topic you opened as an example of liberal media bias. I only disproved what you said about that topic, with a few pertinent counterexamples.
Ah yes, the Gramm-Leach-Biley law, signed into law by Bill Clinton. Innuendo on your part does not prove any misdeeds on the part of either Gramm or McCain.
I will not take your "Bill Clinton" bait. Gramm-Leach-Biley was a bad bill, and everybody who supported it was wrong to do so, including the self-described "social liberal & fiscal conservative" who was too little of both for my liking. Now, back on-topic, what "innuendo"? Once you introduced the subject of associations of candidates for President with "corrupt former CEOs" of federally-subsidized lobbying/lending institutions the cause of the current financial crisis is 100% apropos. If you have honestly had trouble understanding why my references to Gramm are rebuttal, not diversion, you are an utter moron. The press is right to highlight that scumbag's track record of prioritizing corporatist gluttony over citizens' liberty and the general welfare.
If you think I'm mistaken, that's one thing. If you think I'm deliberately misleading people, that would be a case of lying. You have demonstrated absolutely no evidence to back up your assertion that I'm lying.
Incorrect. You first asserted that the relatively brief press scrutiny of Barack Obama's associations with the two peripheral [to the Obama campaign] supporters, former adviser Johnson, and supporter-of-no-proven-status-whatsoever-in-the-campaign Raines, demonstrate the tired old GOP gripe of a "liberal media bias" in comparison to the relatively long intervals of press scrutiny of McCain's ongoing employment of Rick Davis as his campaign manager while "Davis's lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, also received monthly payments of $15,000 from Freddie Mac as recently as August." Unequal treatment of similar cases would indicate bias, but as I have already explained, and you have not disputed, the unequal scrutiny of the two candidates' associations with "corrupt former CEOs" of federally-subsidized lobbying/lending institutions is due to dissimilarity, not to bias. Now pay attention. I did not waste my time on your tangents about media commentary about racism in McCain's ad about Raines nor about the sex ed program to include "age appropriate" instruction in avoiding pedophilic predators. I went straight to the crux of your whining, "that Obama had 2 corrupt former CEOs of Fannie as economic advisors, one of which was [briefly] the head of his VP search committee. We didn't hear about that until McCain ran ads about it. And then, did the media focus on the story?" Obama promptly severed those two ties, to Raines and Johnson, as I have already explained. McCain was more scrutinized, true, but not because of media bias. He continues to be suspect as a result of his continuing employment of Rick Davis, as vivid summary of McCain's 26-year-long record of unwavering support of voodoo economics: the superstition that in high finance, rule of law equals government abuse of the rights of the wealthy, when in fact it is the valid purpose of the United States government as set forth in its charter documents, protection of the rights of the individual against tyranny, whether by government itself or powerful private parties. To Gramm and McCain and their ilk, "unregulated free markets" are the euphemism for anarchy, dominance by the powerful and lazy, financially elite
Re: James Johnson, it's true he wasn't fined millions like Raines. But neither is he a paragon of virtue.
Neither is that required to contribute to political campaigns. But to treat a person as "guilty," proof is required. Although this is not a court of law, good manners still require telling the truth about people, if you say anything about them at all.
Let's take a deep breath here. No need to go name-calling without cause.
I'm perfectly calm and rational, and I call you "liar" with good cause. You are a liar, as I've explained, and may explain again until you tell the truth or stop speaking. Take your pick.
"If you don't stop lying about me, I may have to start telling the truth about you." ~Abraham Lincoln
We can argue over how bad/close the association with Franklin Raines is.
Anybody may contribute to a political campaign, either money or labor. Receiving a call "from the Obama campaign" by itself implies no closer connection than that Raines first offered his resources or self-described "expertise." No credible evidence has yet been published of any "association" beyond returning a phone call. Another plausible explanation is that, having tarnished his own reputation, Raines sought to improve the public perception of him by seeming to have some "association" with Barack Obama, who among non-bigots is known for his strong character. These scenarios I've concocted are of course no more supported by fact than your sinister assumptions -- but more importantly, no less so, either. The liberal bias of which you whine is a fabrication of corrupt corporatist/fascists and bigots, who pursue a culture in which Liberal values, especially universal individual rights, are replaced by your own biases and insider pull-peddling. Credible journalists let this story rest when they could not find a credible source.
McCain's ties to the fiend Phil Gramm, of Gramm-Leach-Biley infamy, are documented and proven. I do not gladly suffer fools who slander the best man in this contest, for associating with local campaign personnel who have the decency to return a phone call. You have no proof nor reasonable suspicion of any more relationship with Raines than that, so the unequal treatment of Obama's alleged "association" with corrupt lobbyists compared to McCain's proven, continuing employment of corrupt lobbyists is not a matter of media bias, but of truly unequal moral stature, as proven by the actions of the two candidates. McCain has earned all the bad press he's gotten, and Obama has certainly gotten at least as much scrutiny of his "associations" as warranted by the facts.
Crybaby.
But note that the Washington Post stood by their reporting,
...of Raines' uncorroborated statements. That publication is responsible enough to note the lack of corroboration, and to pursue additional sources for that purpose, and then to drop the story when no corroboration could be found. Fox News does not have nearly such an honest policy.
... and even Raines is not denying,
Given your characterization of Raines as a "shady character," his reputation stands to be improved by any association, or perceived association, with Barack Obama. What motive he might have to definitively and unambiguously disclaim such an association is unclear, even if no association ever existed. The air of ambiguity he has allowed to remain is optimal for keeping his name in the news, and scrutiny about him not directly on him.
that Raines took calls from the Obama campaign to give advice on "general housing, economy issues".
Funny, though, that he won't or can't name an individual who placed phone calls to him, allegedly "from the Obama campaign." As my mother says of 3-ring phone hangups and blank answering machine messages, "It must no
The White House has committed egregious violations of the Constitution and democratic principles vital to the republic including wiretaps without warrants, withholding classified documents attached to those directives from House Congressional representatives including those on the Homeland Security Committee [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ByoqZqDGaA&feature=related], and approval of torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit torture even of terrorists. [http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-interrogate25-2008sep25,0,1828234.story] The Bush Administration's instructions to commit torture are violations of any participating Executive Branch officials' oaths to uphold the Constitution.
What will you commit to doing to hold Condoleezza Rice, Alberto Gonzales, John Ashcroft, David Addington, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and any other participants accountable for this crime? Will you consider charging any or all with treason?
What about the people who signed up for loans they couldn't afford?
It is the professional duty of loan officers to approve lending that the borrower has the earning power to repay. Write your Congress person and demand that any "bailout" be paid directly to mortgage borrowers, and only for repayment of loans for their primary residence. One man, one vote, no more than one bailed out mortgage. Let the mortgage companies suffer the deflation of the housing bubble they created with their overabundant credit approvals. That is real laissez-faire capitalism, which the wealthiest 1% always whines that it wants. Let them learn that they need regulation as much as the rest of us need regulation, which is really just monied looters' pejorative term for the rule of law, when such is inconvenient to them.
Take, for example, the Fannie/Freddie debacle. Consider that Obama had 2 corrupt former CEOs of Fannie as economic advisors, one of which was the head of his VP search committee.
The truth is that although Jim Johnson was a CEO at Fannie Mae before becoming a leader of Barack Obama's VP search committee, he has not been convicted of any crime, but Obama accepted Johnson's resignation from the Presidential campaign anyway. In June, you hypocrite. Jim Johnson has also not been even accused of any crimes, just smeared for being associated with a corporation which operated in the lawless environment introduced by Gramm-Leach-Biley. Compare to Carly Fiorina, who was personally responsible for making a mess out of Hewlett-Packard. Johnson didn't sign Gramm-Leach-Biley into law. Measured by stock price, Fiorina was, in the eyes of the investors with enough previous financial success to determine stock prices, personally responsible for Hewlett-Packard's problems. If we're going to spend $700 Billion bailing out the country's wealthiest investors, we had better trust their judgment enough to uphold their verdict on Carleton S. Fiorina: as toxic as a portfolio full of foreclosed mortgages.
Former Fannie Mae executive Jim Johnson, who was a leader of the vice presidential search committee for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama, resigned from that unpaid position today amid criticisms that Johnson represented a world of influence and special interests that stood in stark contrast with what Obama's campaign purports to stand for.
...
"We don't need any lectures from a campaign that waited fifteen months to purge the lobbyists from their staff, and only did so because they said it was a 'perception problem,'" said Obama campaign spokesperson Bill Burton.
And Franklin Raines was never any kind of adviser to Obama at all.
The Obama campaign issued a statement by Raines on Thursday night insisting, "I am not an advisor to Barack Obama, nor have I provided his campaign with advice on housing or economic matters." Obama spokesman Bill Burton went a little further, saying in an e-mail that the campaign had "neither sought nor received" advice from Raines "on any matter."
[If Raines offered Obama advice that was not sought, a lying sack of excrement might argue that Obama nevertheless "received" that advice, but unless that advice was the basis of subsequent action, we use the colloquialism that the advice was not "taken," thus anybody describing Raines as an advisor to Obama is a lying sack of excrement.]
Unless you have proof that Raines' statement above is a lie, you committed libel by asserting that he had ever been one of Barack Obama's "economic advisors."
So what evidence does the McCain campaign have for the supposed Obama-Raines connection? It is pretty flimsy, but it is not made up completely out of whole cloth.
99% cloth, but not completely whole cloth. The "supposed Obama-Raines connection" is not quite pure fabrication by the same standard that the statement "you are a violin" has a basis in fact, when addressed to a person calling itself "Stradivarius." The only connection to fact is extremely tenuous, and we all know that the statement "you are a violin" is a falsehood. Your accusation is no more honest, just less humorous.
McCain spokesman Brian Rogers points to three items in the Washington Post in July and August. It turns out that
The best source I found is this reply to a curious supporter. I followed a link from the recipient's 'blog to the above e-mail.
I do not believe Lieberman, McCain, Cheney or any of Bush's henchmen want us to be safe. They want us to be scared. Lieberman is wrong to use his status as a Senator to influence YouTube, but I don't believe he made a mistake. I believe he's a fascist.
Speak for yourself.
I believe in protecting freedom of speech, but I also agree with youtube's decision to remove terrorist training videos and instructions on making bombs.
Of course. YouTube has the right to prohibit whatever they want to prohibit from being stored on their servers. They're well within their property rights. My only objection is to the government "urging" this action, on what looks to me like little or no evidence that any strategic advantage is at stake -- other than in upcoming elections.
Some excerpts from the article, added emphasis:
A year ago, a Homeland Security Department intelligence assessment said: "The availability of easily accessible messages with targeted language may speed the radicalisation process in the homeland for those already susceptible to violent extremism."
...
By banning these videos on YouTube, "Google will make a singularly important contribution to this important national effort," Lieberman wrote to Google's chairman and chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in May.
Ahem, Senator, the DHS intelligence assessment did not say that reducing the prevalence of terrorist videos would definitely matter at all. It said only that the "availability of easily accessible messages with targeted language may speed the radicalisation process." Literate people notice that this means it's also possible that the effect is negligible.
Despite the move there is a debate among radicalisation experts of whether shutting down extremist sites is the most effective way to counter the threat.
They say keeping them online allows analysts and investigators to monitor what is being said and in some cases who is saying it.
"The reality is by shutting it down, it is more or less a game of whack-a-mole: it pops up somewhere else," said Frank Ciluffo, homeland security director at George Washington University.
However, he said, forcing extremists to find other ways to post videos could give officials a better opportunity to monitor them.
Anything is possible, but I would like more than a vague possibility before a US Senator starts exhorting private companies to censor their content in the interest of the War on Terror(TM), because such action is very likely to result in erroneous removal of videos based on malicious, false reports of "terrorist" content, for personal, corporate or pseudo-religious reasons, or whatever.
.ppt's for his little militaristic, authoritarian pet projects, his boss would have told him his involves a relatively major disruption to routine business activities, in pursuit of a course of action that's less likely to be effective than alternatives of equal or lesser cost, such as using the same videos to locate and apprehend terrorist conspirators who post them. Being in jail should be enough to disrupt whatever they're plotting.
We could estimate the likely success of this plan by considering the years, and millions of dollars, spent by the software and recording industries, and comparing to their impact on the activities they term "piracy." The problem with Senators' recommendations is that too few voters are middle-management or higher, and trust government to be better-informed than we are instead of expecting them to prove their plans are likely to be effective, and at reasonable cost. If Lieberman had to put together his own
Bottom line: multiprocessed and multithreaded programming are strictly equivalent.
Not close. Operating system control is a crucial difference. I can close one process without affecting another. The only way to control a specific thread is to have written the app that spawned it. A multithreaded browser is not nearly equivalent to one that starts a separate process for each tab.
Whereas single-process browsers such as Firefox aim for lean, efficient browsing experiences, Chrome and IE 8 are all about delivering a robust platform for reliably running multiple Web apps in a tabbed format in answer to the Web's evolving needs. To do this, Chrome takes a 'purist' approach, launching multiple, discrete processes to isolate and protect each tab's contents. IE 8, on the other hand, goes hybrid, creating multiple instances of the iexplore.exe process without specifically assigning each tab to its own instance. 'Google's purist approach will ultimately prove more robust,' Kennedy argues, 'but at a cost in terms of resource consumption.'
As another Slashdot reader already observed in this or another recent 'Chrome' discussion, 'consumption' is an inappropriately derogatory term. We should be talking about memory use or resource use , not 'consumption' because (1) memory is released when the program closes, not destroyed or converted to a different, unusable form (such as food post-digestion or gasoline post-combustion), and (2) although the 200MB - 400MB used by browsers is a significant fraction of system memory for low-end computers with just 1GB of memory, these browsers do not exceed available RAM, except for very old computers which should probably be de-commissioned anyway. So, the 'cost in terms of resource consumption' for a multiprocess app is well worth paying, because it is only relevant on systems that are terribly underpowered, as defined by the industry's pace car; they would certainly not be rated 'Vista Ready' or 'Vista Capable.'
Yeah, you might as well ban legal discussions on /. if you do that.
Then our only option will be to have illegal discussions in dark alleys.
What were we talking about again?
The story is about /.'s moderation system. Low-karma-having people claim it unfairly discriminates against shitheads.
Their staffing and other financial records are available for inspection;
As a former customer, I'd have more appreciation for the opportunity to inspect their source code.
lookup their annual reports to see massive spending & staffing in research; there can be no doubts there.
The SEC exists because unsuccessful corporations have been known to lie, and caught at it. Only a fool has "no doubts" about corporate self-reporting.
I base this on the existence of Fortune-100 companies whose reason for existence is to deliver security solutions, and have multi-billion$ security budgets to that effect.
Symantec, is "only" #461, and (AFAIK) it's the largest corp. whose primary product is computer security. This is not nit-picking; your entire argument is based on scale, and the largest of the companies of the type you're discussing, is barely in the Fortune 500, not the 100.
Speaking of which, have Symantec and McAfee made the Internet safe yet? No. How many more billions of dollars do they want before providing the "security" they've been advertising for over a decade, anyway? Looks exactly like a protection racket to me.
Keeping consumer product information freely available is always better for the customer. In the specific case of computer security, publishing information about the relative strengths of competing products' access controls allows people to learn better how to "roll our own" solutions, or if we buy corporate security products, more information allows us to choose better purchases. For everybody, and therefore for society as a whole, more available information is better. Deciding what information we want and need, and learning where to get it, is the individual's responsibility. This is existential fact, which means it will not be altered by your acknowledgment, nor by your refusal to acknowledge truth. Agree, or let me decide what information to not allow you to have, about whatever consumer product category I choose.
The protection of the First Amendment is not limited to speech that you approve.