There is another thing that without any doubt makes Earth unique and that is our huge moon. The formation of that was a total fluke resulting from the collision of earth with a Mars-sized body billions of years ago.
Maybe not that much of a fluke; something similar seems to have happened to Mars and possibly Venus.
Protocol buffers are now Google's lingua franca for data -- at time of writing, there are 48,162 different message types defined in the Google code tree across 12,183.proto files. They're used both in RPC systems and for persistent storage of data in a variety of storage systems.
If you think about it, Protocol Buffers are just about perfect for MapReduce applications. First, Protocol Buffers data streams are "flat" structures, very similar to database tables. If you need hierarchical data, I think that you'd tend to use multiple tables that incorporate foreign keys, rather than embedding the hierarchy every time it's referenced (as XML does).
Second, and again unlike XML, the data serialization is described via a.proto file, which can itself be serialized in exactly the same way as the data stream. It looks fairly easy to write a "Map" or a "Reduce" program that works with any Protocol Buffers data stream.
I suspect that this, rather than SQL compatibility, is the road to success with MapReduce processes.
Could you choose another icon for this section? Thinking about burning books, however bad the books may be, always gives me the creeps and puts you in very bad company. Find a shelf in a dark corner, donate them to charity, send them back but never, ever think about burning. Please.
I agree. Personally, I like to toss them in the shredder and use them for mulch in my tomato garden.
If you're not saying it's all a big joke, respond to my arguments with arguments of your own, not jokes. Quotes from "The Simpsons" are particularly lame.
Are you sure that you're hitting the Reply button on the right posts? I ask because nothing I said in my last post was a joke, and I haven't used any Simpsons quotes anywhere in this thread.
Anyway, now you seem to be saying that all government officials are dishonest, therefore anything they say is true must be false, even if there's physical evidence. I have no idea how to respond to that.
Well, try re-reading what I said, because you seem to have misunderstood.
I expect that most government officials consider themselves honest. However, it's human nature to resist evidence that one has made a mistake. Hillary Clinton blamed "a vast right-wing conspiracy" rather than believe that her husband had cheated on her. Michael Nifong decided that a bunch of Duke Lacrosse players were trying to cover up a crime and tried to suppress all evidence to the contrary. In Boston, the police still use the word "hoax" rather than admit to their misidentification of a guerrilla advertising campaign. The FBI leaked misinformation about Richard Jewell and Steven Hatfill because they thought they had correctly identified perpetrators and just needed more evidence.
In this case, no one has said that anything bad was found. Instead, you find a lot of weasel words being used. Let's go back to the article.
Pamela Wilderman, the code enforcement officer for [the Massachusetts town of] Marlboro stated, 'I think Mr. Deeb has crossed a line somewhere. This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation.'
Not "He admitted that he's keeping explosives/poisons/carcinogens." Mr. Deeb has apparently been cooperating with the investigators, and I have a feeling that he's already told them what was in every container that they found and none of it was all that bad. (And, no, I don't object to the authorities double-checking his chemicals, because I understand that he just might turn out to be a secret admirer of Timothy McVeigh or something.) "Firefighters found more than 1,500 vials, jars, cans, bottles and boxes in the basement", but nary a word about what was contained therein. If it was anything significant, I'm sure that the reporter would have been told, but all we get is innuendo.
I've been to Marlboro before; it seems like a nice town. But the city officials seem to think the hazmat squad was scrambled, damn it, and that means that somebody has to be guilty of something. And that sort of thinking is what I find objectionable.
They said that about VRML replacing HTML, but readers didn't prefer a 3D room over a 2D page.
I think that this was because they were trying to run before they even learned to crawl. I mean they tried to get VRML going back in the mid 90s when most people still didn't know what the Internet was. They needed something simpler to introduce people too. Maybe now VRML would do better if it had some momentum behind it, but it doesn't, and now this is here so tough luck.
Speaking as someone who was there (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Vrmlguy), VRML was indirectly crashed by Microsoft. MS was pushing something, maybe Direct3D, as *the* 3-D technology for the next millennium. In response, SGI started opening up every piece of IP they had, apparently on the theory that a small part of a open-sourced world was better than no part of an MS-controlled one. VRML was written and implemented in no time at all, and yeah, there's a few bugs that got included. As it turned out, the Internet didn't have the supporting infrastructure, so the project wound up being irrelevant, but not before costing SGI a bundle of money.
Looking back, the SGI's effort reminds me a bit of MS's effort wrt OOXML. In each case there was an existing product that was getting a shiny new file format, so any suggested changes to that format, no matter how good, had to be squashed. In the end, the whole mess collapsed under its own weight.
One big difference, though: OOXML had to support decades of backward compatibility. SGI had written their code well, so VRML has a much better base to build from.
I'd like to see VRML get resurrected someday. I remember using it to handcode a bunch of 3-D animations using vi.
Let me get specific: I guy who had an office near where I used to live, pissed somebody off, and got a parcel bomb. He now has no hands. I guess you think that's a big joke. He doesn't.
No, I don't think that it's a big joke, but that doesn't mean that I accept anything that a public official says when someone may have over-reacted to a situation. Well over a hundred death row inmates have been found innocent due to DNA testing that didn't exist at the time of their convictions. In most of those cases, the other evidence didn't fit, either, but the prosecutor's office didn't want to back down after accusing someone. The Moonite bomb scare showed the same pattern of behavior, and this case has some disturbing similarities.
I'll bet there weren't any photos taken of her at rest stops.
No, just the ones that would have been taken when she stopped for gas. Stations on the interstate usually have a lot of security cameras, for obvious reasons.
Yeah, that would explain why she wore the wig. Thanks, I'd always wondered about that.
Huh? What sarcasm? All I've done is recite the published facts. But if you want sarcasm, I can provide that, too.
Despite your contorted logic, all the news reports I've seen indicated that Deeb had a huge number of containers that were manifestly not empty. According to the original story (follow the links in the TFSA) "there were vessels containing chemicals all over the furniture and the floor".
And that's a good reason to call in the hazmat team. But did those firemen who discovered the situation bother to count the number of vessels? I seriously doubt it. They left that for the next team, who (like the officials involved in the Moonite case) might have felt a need to justify their actions by inflating the seriousness of the situation.
There's hysteria here all right: the standard blogosphere kind where one blogger's ill-informed and angry rants get magnified over and over by a lot of other ill-informed, angry bloggers. And yes, the same goes for goes for the Moonite thing too. People get badly injured on a regular basis because of stuff that happens in secret labs. Same goes for mysterious electronic devices that appear out of nowhere. It happens every day. It's happened to people I know.
You forgot to say "Think of the children!"
If the fire department in this case and the cops in the Moonite stunt had underreacted, and those incidents had turned out to be the real deal, people would be demanding their heads — literally. I don't think they overreacted in either case, but if they did, who can blame them?
A bunch of immature, self-righteous bloggers, that's who.
Yeah, you're absolutely right! Under-reacting might let the terrorists win, so it's our patriotic duty to over-react whenever we can.
Nowhere is it stated what proportion of these containers actually contained anything.
Right, they saw hundreds of empty containers and panicked.
No, they justified their response by noting the presence of containers. This is similar to the 2007 Moonite bomb scare, where the police found that the devices shared "some characteristics with improvised explosive devices", and Massachusetts AG Martha Coakley said that one of them "had a very sinister appearance. It had a battery behind it, and wires."
From http://rsyncrypto.lingnu.com/index.php/Algorithm: "The entire rsyncrypto can be summarized with one sentence. Rsyncrypto uses the standard CBC encryption mode, except every time the decision function triggers, it uses the original IV for the file instead of the previous cypher block."
So you're basically dividing each file into chunks and encrypting them separately using the standard algorithm. Seems pretty safe to me. The only obvious leakage is that an attacker can tell if two files are substantially identical. In this, it is similar to ZIP files whose members are encrypted.
The decision function is that used to periodically reset gzip: the sum of the previous 8196 bytes is evenly divisible by 4096. Personally, I'd have used the same Adler-32 algorithm that rsync uses internally.
No, my situation is exactly comparable. Read the news report again: "Firefighters found more than 1,500 vials, jars, cans, bottles and boxes in the basement Tuesday afternoon, after they responded to an unrelated fire in an air conditioner on the second floor of the home." Nowhere is it stated what proportion of these containers actually contained anything. Although I must confess that I slightly exaggerated my situation. Most of them are only empty of liquid chemicals; they do contain various sorted nails, screws, nuts and bolts. In bad light, someone picking them up would realize that they contain something, they just might not realize exactly what.
If you are against software patents, the best thing you can do is get your own patents in the current state of things. Then you can choose to not enforce them, while having strong grounds to prevent anyone else from patenting it and suing you despite your work being prior art. (It can and does happen.)
Sometimes an assignment is mandatory, such as where employee inventions are assigned by an employee to the employer, or, in some circumstances, by an employer to an employee, and a license is simply inappropriate.
[...]
In contrast, an assignment is irrevocable.
An assignment involves the sale and transfer of ownership of the patent by the assignor to the assignee.
This transfer of ownership is permanent and irrevocable.
Just as when any other asset or property is sold, its sale results in the former owner being permanently divested of that ownership.
Ah, good idea! Actually the MOSS wiki has this functionality; the "Workflow" feature allows you to do exactly that. I said the MOSS wiki is crippled (and I still stand by that), but that is one of the nice things about it. That would definitely open up the possibility of allowing all users to edit with an approval process in place.
It took me a minute to find (but I learned a lot about Moss, the plant, on various wikis), but I finally identified it as Sharepoint. Yeah, this is probably the way to go if (a) you're a business, (b) you've bought into the whole MS ecosystem, and (c) you want an otherwise crippled wiki that you can't improve.
I dug into Wikimedia's database schemas and it shouldn't be too hard to add an approval mechanism. I'd add just one table with pointers to a particular edit, the approving user, and the date approved; then you could treat it like any other piece of metadata. Beef up a few select statements and you're done. It looks like it could be a standard add-on.
Consider a hypothetical situation in which procedures may be changing semi-frequently in a customer-facing department, such as a call center. You want all procedures to be up-to-date, and it shouldn't take a lot effort to publish and re-publish the content, but you also don't want Joe McNewbie making changes when he may not completely understand what he is talking about. From the time he makes the (poor informed and/or possibly incorrect) change to the time at which someone spots the mistake and corrects it any number of other reps may have read the same material and used it during their calls. So now you have reps who are providing incorrect information, and possibly forcing the company to spend time/money/resources correcting those mistakes.
I'd thinking out loud here, but do any wikis support a policy where anyone can edit, but a one set of users have approval rights on any edits, and a different set can only see approved pages? Or even anyone can approve, but you can't approve your own edits. Wikimedia already supports part of this, where users can watch pages for changes.
Re:Nice review, but I don't understand something.
on
Bash Cookbook
·
· Score: 1
what the hell does I found Chapter 11 to be very useful (pun intended) mean?
Judging from the next sentence, Chapter 11 is about the 'find' command. I agree, not a well-executed joke.
In addition, the fed are painting contradictory pictures of Ivins when it suits them: was he a sorority-obsessed homicidal madman in the middle of a psychiatric breakdown or a meticulous criminal mastermind leaving no detail to chance?
Seriously, though, it's possible that he was an accomplice to the real bad guy. I'm usually the first to quote Hanlon's razor, but Dick Cheney seems to think that he's a character in a Tom Clancy novel and I can see this sort of scenario happening:
Ivey worked late to get the anthrax, took off from work to give it to a "plumber" the next day, and went to his early evening appointment to give himself an alibi. After realizing that he'd been lied to about the real purpose of the anthrax, he spent the next seven years acting quirky. When the FBI finally figured out that he was somehow connected, he decided that telling the truth would be as bad as, if not worse than, the accusations and killed himself.
he probably checked the driving distance and his car's MPG, and bought exactly the amount used on the trip.
Why? In case somebody happened to look at his fuel gauge right before his trip and immediately after, so that they wouldn't suspect he had gone anywhere, despite the odometer change?
No, because the police can and will look at your driving habits. I have a short commute to work, and tend to buy the same amount of gas every week-end. If I filled my tank (paying cash) at the end of a crime spree, I'd actually buy less gas with my credit card that week, which they'd want me to explain.
Your odometer readings, OTOH, are generally only recorded when service is done, mostly oil changes. An extra 600 miles would mean your next oil change would be done 10% earlier than expected, which is easier to explain than a 100% spike in the amount of gas bought in a given week.
A glaring omission, meanwhile, is any evidence placing Ivins in Princeton, New Jersey, on any of the days the envelopes could have been mailed from there.
Personally, I don't see that as such a big deal. I'll assume that there's no evidence that he wasn't in Princeton on those days. Lots of criminals have been caught by credit card receipts from gas stations, but those stories have gotten lots of press over the years. Ivins was at least as smart as Lisa Nowak, who planned her crime attempt meticulously. Sure, people laughed about her using adult diapers, but I'll bet there weren't any photos taken of her at rest stops. I'd bet he not only paid cash for his gasoline, he probably checked the driving distance and his car's MPG, and bought exactly the amount used on the trip.
Slashdot Mirror
That is ridiculous. The law does certainly not say that making money is the only thing that matters.
i agree that it's ridiculous. it is however true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Company
GP is right and you are wrong. Among non-experts, conventional wisdom holds that corporate law requires boards of directors to maximize shareholder wealth. This common but mistaken belief is almost invariably supported by reference to the Michigan Supreme Court's 1919 opinion in Dodge v. Ford Motor Co.
Ok, who switched on the LHC! ... see, its not a black hole making machine, it actually washes whiter than white.
No one's switched it on yet; this is the result of thiotimoline accidentally being used in the superconducting coils.
There is another thing that without any doubt makes Earth unique and that is our huge moon. The formation of that was a total fluke resulting from the collision of earth with a Mars-sized body billions of years ago.
Maybe not that much of a fluke; something similar seems to have happened to Mars and possibly Venus.
http://www.pound360.net/2008/06/mars-appears-home-to-largest-impact-in.html
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,334108,00.html
Anyone remember this story: http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/07/08/201245.shtml? According to Google:
Protocol buffers are now Google's lingua franca for data -- at time of writing, there are 48,162 different message types defined in the Google code tree across 12,183 .proto files. They're used both in RPC systems and for persistent storage of data in a variety of storage systems.
(See http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html.)
If you think about it, Protocol Buffers are just about perfect for MapReduce applications. First, Protocol Buffers data streams are "flat" structures, very similar to database tables. If you need hierarchical data, I think that you'd tend to use multiple tables that incorporate foreign keys, rather than embedding the hierarchy every time it's referenced (as XML does).
Second, and again unlike XML, the data serialization is described via a .proto file, which can itself be serialized in exactly the same way as the data stream. It looks fairly easy to write a "Map" or a "Reduce" program that works with any Protocol Buffers data stream.
I suspect that this, rather than SQL compatibility, is the road to success with MapReduce processes.
Could you choose another icon for this section? Thinking about burning books, however bad the books may be, always gives me the creeps and puts you in very bad company. Find a shelf in a dark corner, donate them to charity, send them back but never, ever think about burning. Please.
I agree. Personally, I like to toss them in the shredder and use them for mulch in my tomato garden.
Don't forget Cory Doctorow: http://craphound.com/?p=187
however just one tip with a warning: "This information is my opinion on April 11, 2007 and will probably change tomorrow"
That would be a good trick, considering the book was published in September, 2005.
Simpson's quote: "Think of the children!"
Ah! I knew that it was a common meme here on Slashdot, but I don't watch the Simpsons and I didn't realize that it originated there.
Bored now.
I fully understand. Lots of people don't like learning something new.
If you're not saying it's all a big joke, respond to my arguments with arguments of your own, not jokes. Quotes from "The Simpsons" are particularly lame.
Are you sure that you're hitting the Reply button on the right posts? I ask because nothing I said in my last post was a joke, and I haven't used any Simpsons quotes anywhere in this thread.
Anyway, now you seem to be saying that all government officials are dishonest, therefore anything they say is true must be false, even if there's physical evidence. I have no idea how to respond to that.
Well, try re-reading what I said, because you seem to have misunderstood.
I expect that most government officials consider themselves honest. However, it's human nature to resist evidence that one has made a mistake. Hillary Clinton blamed "a vast right-wing conspiracy" rather than believe that her husband had cheated on her. Michael Nifong decided that a bunch of Duke Lacrosse players were trying to cover up a crime and tried to suppress all evidence to the contrary. In Boston, the police still use the word "hoax" rather than admit to their misidentification of a guerrilla advertising campaign. The FBI leaked misinformation about Richard Jewell and Steven Hatfill because they thought they had correctly identified perpetrators and just needed more evidence.
In this case, no one has said that anything bad was found. Instead, you find a lot of weasel words being used. Let's go back to the article.
Pamela Wilderman, the code enforcement officer for [the Massachusetts town of] Marlboro stated, 'I think Mr. Deeb has crossed a line somewhere. This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation.'
Not "He admitted that he's keeping explosives/poisons/carcinogens." Mr. Deeb has apparently been cooperating with the investigators, and I have a feeling that he's already told them what was in every container that they found and none of it was all that bad. (And, no, I don't object to the authorities double-checking his chemicals, because I understand that he just might turn out to be a secret admirer of Timothy McVeigh or something.) "Firefighters found more than 1,500 vials, jars, cans, bottles and boxes in the basement", but nary a word about what was contained therein. If it was anything significant, I'm sure that the reporter would have been told, but all we get is innuendo.
I've been to Marlboro before; it seems like a nice town. But the city officials seem to think the hazmat squad was scrambled, damn it, and that means that somebody has to be guilty of something. And that sort of thinking is what I find objectionable.
They said that about VRML replacing HTML, but readers didn't prefer a 3D room over a 2D page.
I think that this was because they were trying to run before they even learned to crawl. I mean they tried to get VRML going back in the mid 90s when most people still didn't know what the Internet was. They needed something simpler to introduce people too. Maybe now VRML would do better if it had some momentum behind it, but it doesn't, and now this is here so tough luck.
Speaking as someone who was there (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Vrmlguy), VRML was indirectly crashed by Microsoft. MS was pushing something, maybe Direct3D, as *the* 3-D technology for the next millennium. In response, SGI started opening up every piece of IP they had, apparently on the theory that a small part of a open-sourced world was better than no part of an MS-controlled one. VRML was written and implemented in no time at all, and yeah, there's a few bugs that got included. As it turned out, the Internet didn't have the supporting infrastructure, so the project wound up being irrelevant, but not before costing SGI a bundle of money.
Looking back, the SGI's effort reminds me a bit of MS's effort wrt OOXML. In each case there was an existing product that was getting a shiny new file format, so any suggested changes to that format, no matter how good, had to be squashed. In the end, the whole mess collapsed under its own weight.
One big difference, though: OOXML had to support decades of backward compatibility. SGI had written their code well, so VRML has a much better base to build from.
I'd like to see VRML get resurrected someday. I remember using it to handcode a bunch of 3-D animations using vi.
Let me get specific: I guy who had an office near where I used to live, pissed somebody off, and got a parcel bomb. He now has no hands. I guess you think that's a big joke. He doesn't.
And I had just left the Mansion House Garage on October 16, 1981, when âoeSonnyâ Faheen's Volkswagen Beetle blew up. You can still see the soot on the ceiling where he died.
http://www.crimelibrary.com/gangsters_outlaws/family_epics/louis/9.html
No, I don't think that it's a big joke, but that doesn't mean that I accept anything that a public official says when someone may have over-reacted to a situation. Well over a hundred death row inmates have been found innocent due to DNA testing that didn't exist at the time of their convictions. In most of those cases, the other evidence didn't fit, either, but the prosecutor's office didn't want to back down after accusing someone. The Moonite bomb scare showed the same pattern of behavior, and this case has some disturbing similarities.
I'll bet there weren't any photos taken of her at rest stops.
No, just the ones that would have been taken when she stopped for gas. Stations on the interstate usually have a lot of security cameras, for obvious reasons.
Yeah, that would explain why she wore the wig. Thanks, I'd always wondered about that.
Fix your sarcasm detector.
Huh? What sarcasm? All I've done is recite the published facts. But if you want sarcasm, I can provide that, too.
Despite your contorted logic, all the news reports I've seen indicated that Deeb had a huge number of containers that were manifestly not empty. According to the original story (follow the links in the TFSA) "there were vessels containing chemicals all over the furniture and the floor".
And that's a good reason to call in the hazmat team. But did those firemen who discovered the situation bother to count the number of vessels? I seriously doubt it. They left that for the next team, who (like the officials involved in the Moonite case) might have felt a need to justify their actions by inflating the seriousness of the situation.
There's hysteria here all right: the standard blogosphere kind where one blogger's ill-informed and angry rants get magnified over and over by a lot of other ill-informed, angry bloggers. And yes, the same goes for goes for the Moonite thing too. People get badly injured on a regular basis because of stuff that happens in secret labs. Same goes for mysterious electronic devices that appear out of nowhere. It happens every day. It's happened to people I know.
You forgot to say "Think of the children!"
If the fire department in this case and the cops in the Moonite stunt had underreacted, and those incidents had turned out to be the real deal, people would be demanding their heads — literally. I don't think they overreacted in either case, but if they did, who can blame them?
A bunch of immature, self-righteous bloggers, that's who.
Yeah, you're absolutely right! Under-reacting might let the terrorists win, so it's our patriotic duty to over-react whenever we can.
Nowhere is it stated what proportion of these containers actually contained anything.
Right, they saw hundreds of empty containers and panicked.
No, they justified their response by noting the presence of containers. This is similar to the 2007 Moonite bomb scare, where the police found that the devices shared "some characteristics with improvised explosive devices", and Massachusetts AG Martha Coakley said that one of them "had a very sinister appearance. It had a battery behind it, and wires."
From http://rsyncrypto.lingnu.com/index.php/Algorithm: "The entire rsyncrypto can be summarized with one sentence. Rsyncrypto uses the standard CBC encryption mode, except every time the decision function triggers, it uses the original IV for the file instead of the previous cypher block."
So you're basically dividing each file into chunks and encrypting them separately using the standard algorithm. Seems pretty safe to me. The only obvious leakage is that an attacker can tell if two files are substantially identical. In this, it is similar to ZIP files whose members are encrypted.
The decision function is that used to periodically reset gzip: the sum of the previous 8196 bytes is evenly divisible by 4096. Personally, I'd have used the same Adler-32 algorithm that rsync uses internally.
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/vespasiennes/
Self-cleaning every time it rains.
Most of them, in fact, are empty.
So your situation is not at all comparable.
No, my situation is exactly comparable. Read the news report again: "Firefighters found more than 1,500 vials, jars, cans, bottles and boxes in the basement Tuesday afternoon, after they responded to an unrelated fire in an air conditioner on the second floor of the home." Nowhere is it stated what proportion of these containers actually contained anything. Although I must confess that I slightly exaggerated my situation. Most of them are only empty of liquid chemicals; they do contain various sorted nails, screws, nuts and bolts. In bad light, someone picking them up would realize that they contain something, they just might not realize exactly what.
If you are against software patents, the best thing you can do is get your own patents in the current state of things. Then you can choose to not enforce them, while having strong grounds to prevent anyone else from patenting it and suing you despite your work being prior art. (It can and does happen.)
In this case, that won't work at all. The second thing the company will want is for the patent to be assigned to them. http://www.wipo.int/sme/en/documents/license_assign_patent.htm has this to say on the subject:
Sometimes an assignment is mandatory, such as where employee inventions are assigned by an employee to the employer, or, in some circumstances, by an employer to an employee, and a license is simply inappropriate.
[...]
In contrast, an assignment is irrevocable.
An assignment involves the sale and transfer of ownership of the patent by the assignor to the assignee.
This transfer of ownership is permanent and irrevocable.
Just as when any other asset or property is sold, its sale results in the former owner being permanently divested of that ownership.
Ah, good idea! Actually the MOSS wiki has this functionality; the "Workflow" feature allows you to do exactly that. I said the MOSS wiki is crippled (and I still stand by that), but that is one of the nice things about it. That would definitely open up the possibility of allowing all users to edit with an approval process in place.
It took me a minute to find (but I learned a lot about Moss, the plant, on various wikis), but I finally identified it as Sharepoint. Yeah, this is probably the way to go if (a) you're a business, (b) you've bought into the whole MS ecosystem, and (c) you want an otherwise crippled wiki that you can't improve.
I dug into Wikimedia's database schemas and it shouldn't be too hard to add an approval mechanism. I'd add just one table with pointers to a particular edit, the approving user, and the date approved; then you could treat it like any other piece of metadata. Beef up a few select statements and you're done. It looks like it could be a standard add-on.
Consider a hypothetical situation in which procedures may be changing semi-frequently in a customer-facing department, such as a call center. You want all procedures to be up-to-date, and it shouldn't take a lot effort to publish and re-publish the content, but you also don't want Joe McNewbie making changes when he may not completely understand what he is talking about. From the time he makes the (poor informed and/or possibly incorrect) change to the time at which someone spots the mistake and corrects it any number of other reps may have read the same material and used it during their calls. So now you have reps who are providing incorrect information, and possibly forcing the company to spend time/money/resources correcting those mistakes.
I'd thinking out loud here, but do any wikis support a policy where anyone can edit, but a one set of users have approval rights on any edits, and a different set can only see approved pages? Or even anyone can approve, but you can't approve your own edits. Wikimedia already supports part of this, where users can watch pages for changes.
what the hell does I found Chapter 11 to be very useful (pun intended) mean?
Judging from the next sentence, Chapter 11 is about the 'find' command. I agree, not a well-executed joke.
Bourne Again Shell, not Borne.
Do we need to issue an ultimatum concerning this betrayal? The supremacy of that identity is vital, and I'll sanction anyone disrespecting its legacy.
In addition, the fed are painting contradictory pictures of Ivins when it suits them: was he a sorority-obsessed homicidal madman in the middle of a psychiatric breakdown or a meticulous criminal mastermind leaving no detail to chance?
What? There's some reason he couldn't be both?
Seriously, though, it's possible that he was an accomplice to the real bad guy. I'm usually the first to quote Hanlon's razor, but Dick Cheney seems to think that he's a character in a Tom Clancy novel and I can see this sort of scenario happening:
Ivey worked late to get the anthrax, took off from work to give it to a "plumber" the next day, and went to his early evening appointment to give himself an alibi. After realizing that he'd been lied to about the real purpose of the anthrax, he spent the next seven years acting quirky. When the FBI finally figured out that he was somehow connected, he decided that telling the truth would be as bad as, if not worse than, the accusations and killed himself.
he probably checked the driving distance and his car's MPG, and bought exactly the amount used on the trip.
Why? In case somebody happened to look at his fuel gauge right before his trip and immediately after, so that they wouldn't suspect he had gone anywhere, despite the odometer change?
No, because the police can and will look at your driving habits. I have a short commute to work, and tend to buy the same amount of gas every week-end. If I filled my tank (paying cash) at the end of a crime spree, I'd actually buy less gas with my credit card that week, which they'd want me to explain.
Your odometer readings, OTOH, are generally only recorded when service is done, mostly oil changes. An extra 600 miles would mean your next oil change would be done 10% earlier than expected, which is easier to explain than a 100% spike in the amount of gas bought in a given week.
A glaring omission, meanwhile, is any evidence placing Ivins in Princeton, New Jersey, on any of the days the envelopes could have been mailed from there.
Personally, I don't see that as such a big deal. I'll assume that there's no evidence that he wasn't in Princeton on those days. Lots of criminals have been caught by credit card receipts from gas stations, but those stories have gotten lots of press over the years. Ivins was at least as smart as Lisa Nowak, who planned her crime attempt meticulously. Sure, people laughed about her using adult diapers, but I'll bet there weren't any photos taken of her at rest stops. I'd bet he not only paid cash for his gasoline, he probably checked the driving distance and his car's MPG, and bought exactly the amount used on the trip.