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User: j+h+woodyatt

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  1. Re:Irony on The Decline of Science and Technology in America · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Here's the paradox: they want the best and brightest to make life decisions that they themselves saw as foolish.

    I think they honestly believe that the ones who go into management, law and politics are the best and the brightest. They expect the ones who go into science, engineering and technology (not to mention the military service...) to be their oh-so-useful idiots. No paradox there at all.

    What has American elites stressing is the nagging worry that, soon, there might not be enough scientists, engineers and technologists to maintain their historical economic and political advantages over their counterparts in other countries. And they're right to be stressing about that. There are a lot of nice places in the world besides the USA to be a scientist, engineer or a technologist.

    Very few of us techno-geeks are in a hurry to leave the USA over this issue, but I know several people with dual-passports or permanent residency status, with excellent résumés that could put them in the 95th pay percentile practically anywhere in Europe or Asia, and more than half have already moved out of the country or are executing on plans to do so.

  2. Re:Help me out here on Reintroduce Megafauna to North America? · · Score: 1

    so they will be no danger to persistantly encroaching civilization?

    What? You afraid of a little danger?

    Americans could probably benefit from the exercise they'd get running away from the occasional lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

  3. Re:What do you expect? on USA to Pass Science Crown to China · · Score: 1

    We're better at making Treasury bonds, corporate junk bonds, home equity debt and consumer credit debt than anybody else in the world. Nobody can borrow money like Americans. It's mind-boggling how "good for it" we are.

  4. Re:Poster Wrong. on Monad Shell Removed From Vista · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I RTFA and it does not even imply that MONAD will not be included in Windows Vista because of the virus threat. ...which just means that Toulouse isn't a complete wanker. It's pretty obvious why Monad will not be included in Windows Vista. It's a fundamentally bad idea, that's why. Why Microsoft ever thought this crazy plan to pass off a science fair project from their Research department as actual product is a total mystery. But blaming its withdrawal on a supposed "virus threat" is just silly.

    There's a reason the Bourne shell [and its cognates] have been so widely deployed. Microsoft would be well-served if it would think about it for a moment or two before deciding what to do about its command line environment.

  5. Re:Weird timing on U.K. SF Writers Dominate Hugos · · Score: 1

    Infonaut writes: Perhaps yet another part of the bill America must pay for our hamfisted approach is that as we become more militarized, the creative and free-thinking aspects of our society become isolated and minimized.

    Some of my favorite genre fiction when I was growing up was written by famous guys like Joseph Heller and not so famous guys like Brian Daley. Guys who were painfully aware of how much of a price this is to pay.

    Labor Day weekend is the 3-Day Novel Contest, and November is National Novel Writing Month. Do not expect these REMF's to pick up a writing implement and do what must be done. It's simply not in their nature. Most of them were all jingo for kicking the Iraqi collective ass, but they weren't willing to sign up (and go there and do that).

    If they didn't have the stones to make good on their lip-flapping about Iraq, they certainly won't have enough backbone to write a novel. Once again, it falls to you to do what they can only pretend.

  6. Re:What do you expect? on USA to Pass Science Crown to China · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ncmathsadist writes: Hello Bejing.......

    Look on the bright side. America is outsourcing all that science and technology stuff to places where it can be done at substantially lower cost. In return, Americans enjoy lower prices for the things they use and everyone is better off for it. What's not to like about that?

    As another poster below says, the Market Has Spoken, and clearly the market doesn't place a very high value on Americans with an education in science and math. The market is never wrong about such things, you know--it's the most efficient allocator of scarce resources known to man.

    Oh, I know I know. America isn't a libertarian anarcho-capitalist utopia yet, so how can you say the free market wants shitty schools when we don't have a free market in schools in America? Oh but we do. We do. There are plenty of private schools and there are no laws expressly forbidding them, so private entrepreneurs are free to open up competing schools anywhere and any time they think there's money to be made doing it. So why are the shitty public schools complemented by a host of expensive and shitty private schools and a tiny percentage of completely unaffordable and exclusive private schools that actually work? Answer: most Americans don't want to spend money on schools, whether they're public or private, and that's apparent when you look at the market.

    They do seem to like bitching and moaning about the quality of the schools they'd rather someone else were paying to operate.

  7. Re:"Nonlethal" at the sandia article on Riot Control Ray-Gun for Use in Iraq · · Score: 1
    Someone had a plan when they initated and funded the development of this, and it doesnt look like a good one.

    The important clue in the Sandia writeup is this paragraph:

    Acting on the feasibility study's conclusions, SSA's Carl Pocratsky (SO-20) initiated an effort at Sandia to explore and develop a small Active Denial System (ADS) that is more suitable for DOE fixed-site applications. To date, DoD efforts have focused on larger systems, considered by many to be better suited for military applications at extended ranges.


    No doubt, the military applications involve mounting the weapon on a mobile platform, e.g. an unmanned air vehicle. If these things work as well as their marketing copy says they do, then you can put a couple dozen of these on drones in the air over a big city and pretty much own the streets.

    "No really Joe-- when we say there is a curfew, we fscking mean it."
  8. that hardware/software boundary problem again... on Why Don't Companies Release Specs? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Your basic problem is that you aren't thinking like a hardware person. Hardware people just fundamentally don't get how software people think there is an important distinction to be drawn between the software and the hardware that runs it--and, to be fair to them, they have a point.

    An awful lot of what hardware vendors are selling these days is a hardware platform for their expensive proprietary software. Take wireless network interface cards, for example. When you buy a Wi-Fi AP from some company, e.g. Apple, the price you pay includes the cut they have to pay to the vendor of the wireless interface card they use in their products. What they probably get from the hardware vendor is more than just a steady supply of hardware to its factory line-- it's the chips, plus a code drop for the driver, a maintenance agreement, and a bunch of other goodies that are all rolled up in the contract at once. The price the hardware vendor charges is divided between a per-unit total, a per-calendar-interval total and sometimes an upfront charge. The accountants have a field day.

    Remembering who is paying for what helps here. You are never going to get specifications for the hardware you buy at retail, because the people who make it are never in control of the whole package from sand to plastic wrap-- they have to buy and integrate pieces from other companies, who are providing more than just chips and a few pages of programming guide. As I said, those guys are providing a hardware platform for their proprietary software and they won't let the vendors of retail systems redistribute their crown jewels. It's really that simple.

  9. In The Immortal Words Of Hunter Thompson... on Contrabandwidth · · Score: 1

    If you don't know your dope, then KNOW YOUR DOPE DEALER.

  10. OCaml Evalation Is Strict, Not Lazy on OCaml vs. C++ for Dynamic Programming · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you want to program in a functional style, and you need lazy evaluation, you're going to find the standard library that comes with the compiler somewhat limited.

    I wrote some extensions for programming in OCaml in the functional style. Check out the OCaml NAE project, and look for the Core Foundation (Cf) package.

  11. Re:what if they had managed to attack.... on Militants Planned Attack On Indian Software Firms · · Score: 1

    Gopal.V writes: The point of terrorism is exactly that - terror !. Once people are afraid, they have essentially achieved their target. These people are not just "militants" - but terrorists.

    Um, no. Once people are terrorized, the terrorist is only beginning to get started. This is one of the most pernicious and dangerous myths about terrorism. (I blame the Americans for propagating it.)

    The point of terrorism is to soften up the civilian population and force them to choose between joining either the insurgency or the counter-insurgency. It works as well as it does because civilian-friendly counter-insurgency is so much more expensive than guerilla terrorism.

    It's nearly impossible to completely wipe out a terrorist insurgency by force. The only way to stop one is to get an overwhelming supermajority of the civilian population, i.e. around 95 to 98 percent of them, to stop providing cover for the terrorists and start insisting that they cease operations.

    The problem is that civilian populations usually have to be coerced into mobilizing for that kind of effort, and that only helps further the cause of the insurgency.

  12. Re:A clarification and question on Introducing 802.11s - Wireless Mesh Networking · · Score: 4, Informative

    However, what I read on the IEEE Web site recently made it sound like merely a self-configuring version of WDS (so that only access points participate in the mesh).

    Yes, that's basically the idea behind the 802.11s Task Group-- but the phrase "self-configuring version of WDS" really doesn't quite go far enough in describing the concept. It's sort of like describing the Internet protocol as a "self-configuring version of frame-relay". Probably not helpful.

    Wireless mesh networks are multi-hop in a way fundamentally more complicated than the simple access point and a bunch of associated stations. They'll have to run a routing protocol and forward from mesh node to mesh node in an efficient and secure way. They'll have to be robust in the face of individual node failure. They'll have to support stations roaming securely between nodes in the same mesh network. It's a whole lot more then just self-configuring WDS.

    Folks shouldn't get too excited about this standard. There are a lot of obstacles to making large multi-hop 802.11 networks as efficient as similarly wired topologies. The 802.11s task group isn't chartered with fixing the problems in the MAC layer that keep multi-hop networks from scaling up to very large meshes.

    What are the problems? The big one is that they have a profoundly negative effect on TCP fairness. Next up is that multicast is just horrible. Even on regular 802.11 infrastructure networks, it's just horrible. On mesh networks, don't be surprised if it's even worse.

  13. Re:No sensitive information? Re-think that on FBI E-Mail Server Breached · · Score: 1

    Yeah, what flinxmeister said.

    I once posted something here on Slashdot that got me an interview with an FBI Special Agent (I wasn't in trouble--more like: I was a good candidate for a supporting witness). So, out of the blue, I get this email claiming to be from an FBI agent.

    What's the first thing you do when that happens? View the raw source and look at the headers. Start back-tracking the return path and see if it isn't obviously bogus. Eventually, I had to go through this weird game of telephone tag before I could feel confident I wasn't being gamed by someone pretending to be the freaking FBI.

    Would somebody please tell me who is to blame for the fact that the FBI has outsourced its Internet presence to somebody basically indistinguishable from an Al Qaeda front on the first glance at the mail headers? How freaking difficult is it for FBI email to come from a return path terminating in an actual fbi.gov domain MTA? Jeebus!

  14. And This Is BAD THING Why? on Math Skills Survey Shows U.S. Lags Behind · · Score: 1

    I'm trying to figure out the downside here, and it's just not coming to me. So Americans are lousy at math. So what? Why should we care? It's not like we need them to be able to solve math problems.

    The only reason we need Americans is that somebody has to be the first one through the door when the shooting starts. The last thing we need is for them to start learning how to do something useful and productive with their lives. Let other people do the math. Let the Americans be what they were born to be. Door-openers.

  15. Re:What are the possible consequences? on Blackboxvoting.org Raises Vote-Audit FOIA Request · · Score: 1

    Tlosk> Assuming that enough fraud is uncovered that it could have swung the election the other way, what recourse is there?

    Election fraud is a crime. A pretty heinous one too-- think long and hard about what happens when people in a nuclear-armed superpower Federal Republic have a reason to doubt that their votes are being counted in a free and fair process. If we lose confidence in the integrity of our elections, then what else do you think we lose?

  16. Cheeseballing hypocrit! on San Fran Mayor Declares Wireless for All · · Score: 1

    I live in San Francisco. One of the reasons I voted for Gonzales instead of Newsom was that Gonzales supported the creation of a Municipal Utility District, which would have had the authority to build its own central offices for telecom services.

    Does Newsom want to take away the monopoly rents for the telecom and electricity utility companies in San Francisco as the Raker Act requires? No. Now he says I'm going to get "free wireless Internet" service everywhere in San Francisco.

    You know what this really is all about? They want to put up a wireless network for city emergency response teams, and they don't have the technical stones to make it an access-controlled network. That's the only thing that makes sense to me.

    Cheeseballing hypocrit! Grrr.

  17. Re:I won't be extinct on U.S. Programmers An Endangered Species? · · Score: 1

    > There's no way my job or our work will ever be outsourced.

    You don't really understand how outsourcing works, do you?

    Hint. There is no special reason your projects require US citizenship and a clearance from the DIA (or whatever they're calling it now), except this one: your investors are US taxpayers. You, of all people in this thread, should really be thinking about the problem of unsustainable US Federal Budget deficits stretching as far as the forecasters can see into the future.

    The work you do will probably always be in demand. The open question remains how much longer US taxpayers (and their foreign creditors) will continue to pay US citizens with DIA clearances to do it for them. If [when] the Federal Budget collapses, your job and your work will be pressured to migrate over the frontier by the invisible hand of the free market.

    Hey, the GoodNews(TM) is that Global Capitalism Won The Cold War! So don't worry too much, because you'll always have a cushy gig working for some collection of warlords or drug barons somewhere.

  18. Re:Test your connection... on You Don't Know Jack about VoIP · · Score: 1

    Why yes, as a matter of fact, we have... and it didn't work. So, again--where is the lawful contract that authorizes the spending of ammo on the problem? Or does the issue actually require more nuance that a cheap epigram?

    (Sorry, man. People telling me I need to arm up if I don't get my way through the judicial process really push my hot buttons. I'm just gonna shut up about this now.)

  19. "counterfeit media" on Whois Record Falsification Closer To Illegality · · Score: 1

    > ...penalties for promoting counterfeit music, computer programs, and other media...

    Oh, I think I'm going to just love seeing this language frame the intellectual property debate. Let's nip this one in the bud people--it is not the music that's counterfeit; it's the digital "right to use" that is counterfeit.

    Never forget it.

  20. Re:Test your connection... on You Don't Know Jack about VoIP · · Score: 1

    > How about give the info to the [CPUC]...

    Wow, wouldn't that be a good idea? I'm sure an investigation into that will go right to the top of the stack investigations already underway into how SBC is in violation of the regulations. Why is it so hard to understand that SBC can ignore the regulations and get away with it because the power of the CPUC has been horribly emasculated by cronyism and years of underfunding.

    > soap, ballot, jury, ammo...

    soap, ballot and jury didn't work. where do i go to get a uniform and lawful orders to spend ammo?

  21. Re:Test your connection... on You Don't Know Jack about VoIP · · Score: 1

    + POTS carriers are REQUIRED to have backup power for their equipment to supply phone service even if the power goes out

    Yeah, I know what they're required to do. Who's gonna make 'em? Seriously.

    (I know where the failure was in this latest power failure: it was in the substation in the Mission district. My central office is way the hell over on the other side of Twin Peaks. SBC is clearly not doing what they are "required" by law to do. Hold on while I call the cops... they say they'll send someone around to take a report.)

  22. Re:Test your connection... on You Don't Know Jack about VoIP · · Score: 1

    > ...what happens during a power outage? You're POTS line will still work, but...

    The last time the power went out in my neighborhood (in downtown San Francisco), the POTS line went completely dead. The cellular network remained up, however...

    Just because your incumbent telephone provider can light up the power line on your telephone system with a separate power distribution system does not mean they actually do so.

  23. Re:Is Apple listening? on The Cost of Computer Naivete · · Score: 1

    It would certainly turn one of the persistent criticisms of the Macintosh on its head: that there isn't as much software for the Mac as there is for Windows. But I doubt it will work well.

    Authors of malware target Windows because the users they most want to reach are the ones who are 1) the least technology savvy; and 2) the least willing to risk using an unconventional operating environment. The reason there is such a dearth of high-quality malware available for the Macintosh has much less to with the architecture of Mac OS X than people here think. It has a lot more in common with the reason there aren't very many good games for Mac OS X: there isn't very much money to be made in writing them.

    For the message to work, Apple would have to communicate somehow to risk-averse, technically-unsavvy people that a new computer won't be any less prone to malware unless it isn't a Windows computer.

    I don't think you can do that. I think you have to persuade people to switch for other reasons and just nod sagely at them when they "discover" how much less malware they have to endure.

  24. Now, I have another reason to hate editors. on It's Just the 'internet' Now? · · Score: 1

    I remember when I could use the plural form of the word and nobody would look at me funny.

    I have a presence on several internets, and it has always been convenient to be able to refer to the current internet I am working with as "the internet" and distinguish that from the public internet by using the traditional form of capitalizing the 'I' when we are talking about the public, global internet.

    If WIRED is successful in propagating this new convention, then I will have to start calling it The Globally Public Internet to distinguish it from all the other internets I use.

    I hate editors. They are a lot less useful most times than they are supposed to be.

  25. Re:IPv6 address per-connection? on IPv6 is Here · · Score: 3, Informative

    Does anyone have a link to this information?

    Look at the latest draft of RFC 2462. Nodes are allowed to use a EUI-64 address for the host number, but the recommendation for stateless autoconfiguration is to generate a unique number and test for duplicates with neighbor solicitation. You don't have to use a MAC address with stateless autoconfiguration, and furthermore you don't have to use stateless autoconfiguration if you use a DHCP server on your IPv6 network.

    On the other hand, some of the docs I've read say the IPv6 address is based on your MAC.

    You haven't read the docs in a long time...

    --