Bush is running on his Patriotism, and that's with a capital 'P'. A 'P'atriot who was AWOL when his country had called him to serve is just a tad hypocritical. This is the same 'P'atriot who cast aspersions on John McCain's patriotism back in the 2000 primary campaign, and IMHO that's *really* despicable, and that's *recent*.
Everybody would like political 'rules of engagement' that allows facts beneficial to them and facts detrimental to their opponent, and disallow the converse.
I honestly can't recommend a training program, though perhaps others can. I would keep it in line with the Linux your company plans to deploy.
But *in addition* set up a small network at home. Set it up as a mini-professional network, not a slapdash home network. You never learn like you do when you're doing, too.
But managers like Certifications, so I wouldn't suggest shorting out the course. Besides, some problems are related to scale, and you won't touch that on most home LANs. Book learning and practical learning can work together.
I'll second what someone said about Gentoo. While you want to deploy what your company uses, it wouldn't hurt to install a Gentoo box. Gentoo has very little handholding, and the install teaches you more than other installs. I wouldn't make Gentoo your first install, or even a particularly early one, though.
I would argue that bad software engineering has little do to with it.
I belive we need much more to be protected from bad software purchasing decisions. The best-engineered software in the world can be out there, but if that's not what you buy, all of that engineering does you no good.
I have faith in the Linux kernel because I keep tabs on the lkml, and I know that these guys are concerned about doing a good job, and that there are some well-qualified people amoung them. I have faith on other Open Source projects for similar reasons - that even though I'm not qualified to evaluate their security, others who are, do. It is a good idea some time to skim mailing list archives for the software you use, from time to time, just to see the attitudes of developers and contributers.
For proprietary software, you have to have faith in the company that produced it. The issue then becomes how do you achieve reasoned faith in a company's software development process.
And then of course we have the just plain naughty-ware that NOBODY should install. But people do install the stuff, and sometimes they even BUY it.
If it's a fake, does anyone believe Kerry either knew about it or endorsed it? (Yeah, I heard Kerry typed it, himself! Right!)
So we have xx options:
1: It's real, and there's some explanation for the fonts.
2: It's fake, and some overzealous Democrats did it.
3: It's fake, and someone in the Kerry campaign did it.
4: It's OBVIOUSLY fake, and some overzealous Republicans did it, meaning for it to get exposed.
5: It's OBVIOUSLY fake, and someone in the Bush campaign did it, meaning for it to get exposed.
Let's face it, as others have said, this was all 30 years ago. The only options above that are REALLY meaningful are (3) and (5), because those indicate corruption TODAY directly connected to one campaign or the other. These are the LEAST likely possibilities, IMHO.
The next possiblity is (1), and that makes *some* difference. I won't rank it's likelihood.
The most likely possibilities are (2) and (4), and neither of those makes a whit of difference, at all. There are nutcases in the finges of both parties, and neither Bush nor Kerry should be held responsible for them.
The real effect is that this makes so much noise that the real issues get submerged - again.
I'll go for simply *less effective*, at the moment.
I completely agree with you that ground-up reform is needed. IMHO, if the framers of the Constitution were around today, they'd have some sort of Bill of Responsibilities tucked in there with the Bill of Rights. They'd be explicit about the Right to Privacy. Plus they'd not just try to enforce separation of Church and State, they'd try and enforce separation of Church and Corporation. More likely, 'Persistent Legal Entities' composed of people (corporations, etc) would be defined in the constitution, and their rights with respect to people and the government would be clearly defined, too.
But for the moment, neither Left Wing nor Right Wing should have the effectiveness the Bush Administration has now, especially considering that the populace is pretty much split 50-50. As a matter of fact, the fact that one half is running its agenda roughshod over the other half is a large part of what the current tense climate is all about, IMHO.
As for a 'less effective' government during the War on Terror, it's OK. The machinery of government is quite capabable of running well without advocacy at the helm. Real Leadership is not needed right now. Todd Beamer and the others on the fourth flight didn't need to be told what to do. They *knew* what they had to do, and they did it. I suspect that the rest of us would do the same, in the same circumstances. Nobody in the US wants terrorists to Win, though we do differ on how it should be done. The institutions are in place, and they know how to do their jobs.
Besides, I really don't think Kerry would be an ineffective leader. Though I don't believe he could push any personal agenda like Bush can, having majorities in both Chambers, he could potentially do a better job against Terrorism, because he'd have to work with a hostile Congress, and measure his actions carefully. There might well be *less* partisan bickering under a Kerry Presidency.
If you're heading in the wrong direction, you've got to either stop or turn before you can start going the right way.
As I said elsewhere, it was just an anology. The idea is that when the economy is static or shrinking, money *acts* like a finite resource. Or when the economy is growing slowly, and the wealthy are accumulating faster, it *acts* like the amount of flowing money is shrinking.
The net effect can look like a drought.
BTW, there are theories that say a large part of the Earth's water came from comets. In that scenario, our water *wasn't* fixed.
It's an anology, not a model, so it's far from perfect. I tried to say that sometimes the economy is growing, and it isn't a zero-sum game. The issue is that you have to compare the accumulation rate of the wealthy to the growth rate of the economy.
No, the wealthy can't keep the water to themselves, but it is bound up tighter than if it was being spent. IMHO, most of the stock market isn't really investment, it's a horse race. The money moves during an IPO, or a new issue, or when it's truly leaving the market rather than juggling from one stock to another.
Actually, I'll talk about taxes and wealth distribution, and completely avoid the use of the word, "fair."
It's a somewhat cheesey analogy, I'll admit, but not entirely cheesey.
Consider money as an anology for water. Water flows across the land. People drink it, then p*ss it. They grow crops with it, and those crops eventually end up back in the land. Water evaporates. Water goes into the sea. But through all of this, water just keeps cycling around, and keeps life flowing.
Now add the 'water wealthy' to the mix. The 'water wealthy' could be modeled as an icecap or reservoir. Water goes there, and it stays there, by and large. I know the water is "invested," but in reality ownership of that quantity of water hasn't changed, it isn't doing the same type of work as if it were flowing, irrigating, and being drunk.
The problem comes in when there's only a finite quantity of water. When the wealthy store up too much of it, there isn't enough water flowing in the land. Commonly called a drought.
When the total quantity of water is growing, it's OK for the wealthy to accumulate, because there's still enough to keep the land fertile. That's not where we are, today.
Last I remembered, Clinton was the one who sent cruise missles after bin Laden. He has also said that that was the most he could get away with on the home front. Even with 'just cruise missiles' he was accused of 'wagging the dog'. Curious timing about that movie, wasn't it.
Richard Clark also had an antiterrorism plan drawn up, including nastier plans for Afghanistan. The Clinton administration felt it would be wrong to leave the incoming administration with a War on Day 1, so they left the plan on the shelf, ready to go.
You've hit the crux of the matter. The Republicans are *too effective*. Most of the time, even during Wartime, we don't really need an activist government, left wing or right wing. Most of the time the machinery of the government runs itself quite well, thank you.
We currently have an effective, activist government with no popular mandate pushing its agenda mercilessly over the other half of the country. Talking to some people at work who approve of the current administration, they don't even seem to recognize that meaningful dissent exists, and consider the dissenters to be idiots or others of negligible opinion. That attitude is in itself a problem.
Personally, I like 3 of the Supreme Court Justices, and the other 6 are effectively useless. If I can guess before the case comes up how they will vote, and see no new insight from their deliberation, why bother. I am in no hurry to see the 3 swing Justices replaced by either Left or Right. IMHO it would be best for the country for them to be replaced under a mixed administration, so perhaps we can keep swing Justices, or maybe have more than 3.
In this election I have been Anyone But Bush Again, for the above reasons and others. By the way, I'm a mix between straight-down-the-middle and Contrarian. Right now I feel the whole country is pretty well right of the middle, and my Contrarian instincts are kicking up pretty hard.
I generally haven't held much for Kerry. But just ONCE I saw him unfiltered by the "news organizations" when he gave his acceptance speech at the DNC on C-SPAN, and was quite impressed. There has not been an opportunity for a repeat performance, just more poorly-chosen soundbites. As you say, after 4 years we *know* what Bush has done and presumably will continue to do, regardless of any words. It is much more important to know what Kerry would do. (extra comparison remark removed)
IMHO the News Service is doing a terrible dis-service to our country in the selection of stories they run, and how they run them. THAT statement is non-partisan, by the way.
They'll need one heck of a firewall around the US, so we can't just go to European sites for their images of our territory.
This accomplishes nothing, and is therefore obviously silly. There is a mindset back of it that seems to think only the US and US companies have satellite images useful for terrorist purposes. Actually, it's an incredibly close parallel to encryption, in many ways. It's going to hurt US companies, it'll push the supply of that data overseas, and it'll do nothing to stop the bad-guys from getting the data, either.
I should probably write to Bernie tonight, since it's beyond Leahy and Jeffords already.
An "accident" might seem reasonable to a layman, but I suspect not to a pilot, maybe not even at first hearing. But coverage after the fact highlighted that it is *hard* to fly those planes that low - even harder to get down low enough and hit a skyscraper like they did. Heck, back in 1987 I had a darned tough time taking off from Miegs Field in Chicago and hitting the Sears Tower in a Cessna. That was before I learned to land in MS Flight Simulator 1.0, of course. I would think that anyone from the Air Force in the loop would have examined this news quite carefully.
Perhaps another question is when it became apparent that there were multiple hijackings in progress? Remember that in August the intelligence community was picking up quite a bit of chatter, though no sense of direction toward focus inside the US. I also remember seeing that there was some confusion about which airplane was which, and it wasn't clear that this was a multiple hijacking.
Based on the August chatter, if sure knowledge of multiple simultaneous hijackings existed, that should have had major alarm bells ringing throughout the Administration. Combine that with the first strike and that it was an attack would have been readily apparent instead of an accident.
That clarity of information might not have even existed, let alone made it upstairs. I'll grant Bush that.
But I was on Slashdot that day, until someone set up a TV, then I saw the second strike. Even looking at just the first strike, it didn't look like an accident. It was too precise, and besides the word 'attack' was floating around even before the second strike.
BTW, though Bush bothers me some, it's the people he's surrounded himself with that really scare me. (Well, Colin Powell doesn't scare me, I feel sorry for him.)
Stand calmly, announce, "I'm sorry boys and girls, but an urgent matter has come to my attention, and I have to leave. I'll come back another time and we can finish this."
Start getting information. What was the initial communications link that got him the news? Presumably it's sufficiently secure to begin the briefing process. I'm also sure that "daily operations of the President" insure that he has at least some amount of secure communications *always* available. By the way, at this point the Secret Service would have made sure the entire school was secured, before the President ever set foot inside. The Principal's office would make a dandy temporary intelligence post.
Over that reasonably secure line get someone else at the Top into some sort of charge for the interim, at least gathering information and making sure everyone is talking to each other. Perhaps only that one thing, get someone more connected into a coordinating role.
The coverage that came out over 9/11 painted a picture of the FAA, ATC, and the Air Force all pretty confused and stumbling over each other, at least in-part not knowing who was in charge. At a national level things *might* have gotten in-place to stop the 4th plane, but maybe not. Fortunately there were some truly heroic passengers.
IMHO rapid institution of top-level coordination might have helped - it might have gotten those agencies working together more effectively. It might not, but it doesn't appear that it could have hurt. Now imagine that the attack hadn't been *only* 4 planes. Original plans, scrapped for simplicity, called for something more like a dozen planes.
Plus I asked a serious question. Was the plane strike when he was in the classroom the 1st or the 2nd? Was he notified of the first strike in the car on the way to the school? That changes the time-scope of things considerably.
Specifically, the scene of Bush reading to the classroom during the WTC incident(s) and the delay before response:
I had presumed that the delay was after the first incident. Recently I heard that he had been informed of the first incident on the way to the school, and the filmed delay was after the second incident.
Which was it? How long was the delay? (I saw F911, but forget that detail.)
One other thing worth mentioning... One rebuttal for the delay said that the kids drew great comfort from the President being with them through those trying times. At the time the President was with the kids, *they could not have known that they were in trying times, yet.* They were in a classroom with no outside media.
Can you tell me more about kdrive? After a bit of searching and reading, I see that it's a rename of TinyX, and I get the impression that it's a bit of a RISC philosophy applied to Xlib. In other words, Xlib had lots of primitive capabilities that today are getting bypassed in favor of more sophisticated rendering. So they streamline/speed the render path, then move the old primitive capabilities on top of the new path, giving an overall simplification.
I've also thought of just installing the full X package, then disabling the server. A few things like 'chown nobody X' and 'chmod *-rwx X' would probably be sufficient to "secure" the X server, but I'd have to do that every time an emerge updated X, too. (mumble) I need to check the documentation on Portage, because I could probably protect the defanged server and keep it from getting updated.
Since you're bringing up basic models, what's your opinion on Fresco/Berlin/GGI, etc?
I followed some of this on their pages. One of the other projects seemed to indicate the separation, but it was deprecated in favor of "debrix". But the debrix project said nothing about the separation. To be fair, it looks like Xorg is spending a lot of much-needed time cleaning up the structure and making things so they even CAN work on the code. It has always sounded like the original code base was pretty arcane.
Maybe the next release won't contain API changes, but the simplified build process, repartitioning, and repackaging alone might be significant enough to spring for X11R7.
As for the ".8.0" bit, some time back, someone at the old X oversight group (the name escapes me, now) decided that X11R6 was going to be the *last* X release. So I guess that meant that there wasn't going to be any X11R7, so we started into X11R6.1, X11R6.3, etc. ISTR X11R6.2 had limited enhancements/features, and never really made it to prime-time before X11R6.3 was out.
Somewhere in there the XFree86 project was off on its own numbering scheme. I particularly remember helping beta GLX stuff on 3.3.6, and then we into the 4.x stuff, 4.3 being the last before the license change. ISTR there was some sort of correspondence between the 3.x/4.x numbering and the X11R6.y numbering.
In all of this, the group that said that X11R6 is the *last* X has faded into de-facto insignificance, but we've all apparently stuck by their decision.
Maybe Xorg will get really gutsy at some point, and give us X11R7.
ISTR that one of those things Xorg wanted to do was to separate the X client and server packaging. It's generally frowned on to install an X server on a server machine, but it would be nice to have X client software available there. The current Xorg/XFree packaging isn't friendly to splitting out the X client libs, or making the package control system recognize that so you could install X clients.
Looking at the Xorg release plan (closest I could find to a roadmap) at http://wiki.freedesktop.org/XOrg/XorgReleasePlan I don't see anything about separation of client and server libs and packaging. They have some other projects listed elsewhere, but nothing terribly solid about client/server separation.
Anyone aware?
Another thing that would be neat to see is integration of the GLX/DRM work on the S3 Savage line of chips. According to the DRI page there's some work being done on this, though it's not ready for prime time. My laptop has a Savage, and my Mom's computer uses the Via KM133, which has an imbedded Savage. Of course this is an area where perhaps I *should* be trying to help.
Maybe after people like linuxpowertrekkie have fooled with the new extension for a bit, and it's established as *solid*, then Xorg will turn it on by default. I won't argue that it takes some time, and it's behind. But it's also progressing.
Sometimes it's more difficult being able to see behind the curtain, and see the painful aspects of progress happening than it is to have the curtain suddenly pulled aside, and see a 'technology demo' or a 'release candidate' in full action.
I guess by backwaters I was meaning cultural backwaters. Once modernization gets into gear, China will be its own biggest market, and exports will be cream.
I need to check your CIA references when I get time. I need to get time.
Some of this presumes that China acts wisely, taking the best from the West and avoiding its mistakes. From what I can see, they're not really doing a truly good job of that. Witness that big dam project, for instance. The other thing is that IMHO affluence will eventually bring side-effects with it that will make a totalitarian government uncomfortable. Time will tell. But even if they do a poor job of learning from the West, they have a boom of expansion coming, and can make life very uncomfortable for the rest of the world as they do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Bush is running on his Patriotism, and that's with a capital 'P'. A 'P'atriot who was AWOL when his country had called him to serve is just a tad hypocritical. This is the same 'P'atriot who cast aspersions on John McCain's patriotism back in the 2000 primary campaign, and IMHO that's *really* despicable, and that's *recent*.
Everybody would like political 'rules of engagement' that allows facts beneficial to them and facts detrimental to their opponent, and disallow the converse.
I honestly can't recommend a training program, though perhaps others can. I would keep it in line with the Linux your company plans to deploy.
But *in addition* set up a small network at home. Set it up as a mini-professional network, not a slapdash home network. You never learn like you do when you're doing, too.
But managers like Certifications, so I wouldn't suggest shorting out the course. Besides, some problems are related to scale, and you won't touch that on most home LANs. Book learning and practical learning can work together.
I'll second what someone said about Gentoo. While you want to deploy what your company uses, it wouldn't hurt to install a Gentoo box. Gentoo has very little handholding, and the install teaches you more than other installs. I wouldn't make Gentoo your first install, or even a particularly early one, though.
I would argue that bad software engineering has little do to with it.
I belive we need much more to be protected from bad software purchasing decisions. The best-engineered software in the world can be out there, but if that's not what you buy, all of that engineering does you no good.
I have faith in the Linux kernel because I keep tabs on the lkml, and I know that these guys are concerned about doing a good job, and that there are some well-qualified people amoung them. I have faith on other Open Source projects for similar reasons - that even though I'm not qualified to evaluate their security, others who are, do. It is a good idea some time to skim mailing list archives for the software you use, from time to time, just to see the attitudes of developers and contributers.
For proprietary software, you have to have faith in the company that produced it. The issue then becomes how do you achieve reasoned faith in a company's software development process.
And then of course we have the just plain naughty-ware that NOBODY should install. But people do install the stuff, and sometimes they even BUY it.
If it's a fake, does anyone believe Kerry either knew about it or endorsed it? (Yeah, I heard Kerry typed it, himself! Right!)
So we have xx options:
1: It's real, and there's some explanation for the fonts.
2: It's fake, and some overzealous Democrats did it.
3: It's fake, and someone in the Kerry campaign did it.
4: It's OBVIOUSLY fake, and some overzealous Republicans did it, meaning for it to get exposed.
5: It's OBVIOUSLY fake, and someone in the Bush campaign did it, meaning for it to get exposed.
Let's face it, as others have said, this was all 30 years ago. The only options above that are REALLY meaningful are (3) and (5), because those indicate corruption TODAY directly connected to one campaign or the other. These are the LEAST likely possibilities, IMHO.
The next possiblity is (1), and that makes *some* difference. I won't rank it's likelihood.
The most likely possibilities are (2) and (4), and neither of those makes a whit of difference, at all. There are nutcases in the finges of both parties, and neither Bush nor Kerry should be held responsible for them.
The real effect is that this makes so much noise that the real issues get submerged - again.
I'll go for simply *less effective*, at the moment.
I completely agree with you that ground-up reform is needed. IMHO, if the framers of the Constitution were around today, they'd have some sort of Bill of Responsibilities tucked in there with the Bill of Rights. They'd be explicit about the Right to Privacy. Plus they'd not just try to enforce separation of Church and State, they'd try and enforce separation of Church and Corporation. More likely, 'Persistent Legal Entities' composed of people (corporations, etc) would be defined in the constitution, and their rights with respect to people and the government would be clearly defined, too.
But for the moment, neither Left Wing nor Right Wing should have the effectiveness the Bush Administration has now, especially considering that the populace is pretty much split 50-50. As a matter of fact, the fact that one half is running its agenda roughshod over the other half is a large part of what the current tense climate is all about, IMHO.
As for a 'less effective' government during the War on Terror, it's OK. The machinery of government is quite capabable of running well without advocacy at the helm. Real Leadership is not needed right now. Todd Beamer and the others on the fourth flight didn't need to be told what to do. They *knew* what they had to do, and they did it. I suspect that the rest of us would do the same, in the same circumstances. Nobody in the US wants terrorists to Win, though we do differ on how it should be done. The institutions are in place, and they know how to do their jobs.
Besides, I really don't think Kerry would be an ineffective leader. Though I don't believe he could push any personal agenda like Bush can, having majorities in both Chambers, he could potentially do a better job against Terrorism, because he'd have to work with a hostile Congress, and measure his actions carefully. There might well be *less* partisan bickering under a Kerry Presidency.
If you're heading in the wrong direction, you've got to either stop or turn before you can start going the right way.
The Pentagon investigation into Kerry's medals is simply a Search for Truth and has nothing to do with election-year politics.
It hits both sides.
It's disgusting from both sides.
It ducks the real issues from both sides.
The press allows it to happen, even fosters it.
As I said elsewhere, it was just an anology. The idea is that when the economy is static or shrinking, money *acts* like a finite resource. Or when the economy is growing slowly, and the wealthy are accumulating faster, it *acts* like the amount of flowing money is shrinking.
The net effect can look like a drought.
BTW, there are theories that say a large part of the Earth's water came from comets. In that scenario, our water *wasn't* fixed.
It's an anology, not a model, so it's far from perfect. I tried to say that sometimes the economy is growing, and it isn't a zero-sum game. The issue is that you have to compare the accumulation rate of the wealthy to the growth rate of the economy.
No, the wealthy can't keep the water to themselves, but it is bound up tighter than if it was being spent. IMHO, most of the stock market isn't really investment, it's a horse race. The money moves during an IPO, or a new issue, or when it's truly leaving the market rather than juggling from one stock to another.
Actually, I'll talk about taxes and wealth distribution, and completely avoid the use of the word, "fair."
It's a somewhat cheesey analogy, I'll admit, but not entirely cheesey.
Consider money as an anology for water. Water flows across the land. People drink it, then p*ss it. They grow crops with it, and those crops eventually end up back in the land. Water evaporates. Water goes into the sea. But through all of this, water just keeps cycling around, and keeps life flowing.
Now add the 'water wealthy' to the mix. The 'water wealthy' could be modeled as an icecap or reservoir. Water goes there, and it stays there, by and large. I know the water is "invested," but in reality ownership of that quantity of water hasn't changed, it isn't doing the same type of work as if it were flowing, irrigating, and being drunk.
The problem comes in when there's only a finite quantity of water. When the wealthy store up too much of it, there isn't enough water flowing in the land. Commonly called a drought.
When the total quantity of water is growing, it's OK for the wealthy to accumulate, because there's still enough to keep the land fertile. That's not where we are, today.
Last I remembered, Clinton was the one who sent cruise missles after bin Laden. He has also said that that was the most he could get away with on the home front. Even with 'just cruise missiles' he was accused of 'wagging the dog'. Curious timing about that movie, wasn't it.
Richard Clark also had an antiterrorism plan drawn up, including nastier plans for Afghanistan. The Clinton administration felt it would be wrong to leave the incoming administration with a War on Day 1, so they left the plan on the shelf, ready to go.
Needless to say...
Thanks for the clarification.
It's good to see this kind of progress happening on X, again.
You've hit the crux of the matter. The Republicans are *too effective*. Most of the time, even during Wartime, we don't really need an activist government, left wing or right wing. Most of the time the machinery of the government runs itself quite well, thank you.
We currently have an effective, activist government with no popular mandate pushing its agenda mercilessly over the other half of the country. Talking to some people at work who approve of the current administration, they don't even seem to recognize that meaningful dissent exists, and consider the dissenters to be idiots or others of negligible opinion. That attitude is in itself a problem.
Personally, I like 3 of the Supreme Court Justices, and the other 6 are effectively useless. If I can guess before the case comes up how they will vote, and see no new insight from their deliberation, why bother. I am in no hurry to see the 3 swing Justices replaced by either Left or Right. IMHO it would be best for the country for them to be replaced under a mixed administration, so perhaps we can keep swing Justices, or maybe have more than 3.
In this election I have been Anyone But Bush Again, for the above reasons and others. By the way, I'm a mix between straight-down-the-middle and Contrarian. Right now I feel the whole country is pretty well right of the middle, and my Contrarian instincts are kicking up pretty hard.
I generally haven't held much for Kerry. But just ONCE I saw him unfiltered by the "news organizations" when he gave his acceptance speech at the DNC on C-SPAN, and was quite impressed. There has not been an opportunity for a repeat performance, just more poorly-chosen soundbites. As you say, after 4 years we *know* what Bush has done and presumably will continue to do, regardless of any words. It is much more important to know what Kerry would do. (extra comparison remark removed)
IMHO the News Service is doing a terrible dis-service to our country in the selection of stories they run, and how they run them. THAT statement is non-partisan, by the way.
They'll need one heck of a firewall around the US, so we can't just go to European sites for their images of our territory.
This accomplishes nothing, and is therefore obviously silly. There is a mindset back of it that seems to think only the US and US companies have satellite images useful for terrorist purposes. Actually, it's an incredibly close parallel to encryption, in many ways. It's going to hurt US companies, it'll push the supply of that data overseas, and it'll do nothing to stop the bad-guys from getting the data, either.
I should probably write to Bernie tonight, since it's beyond Leahy and Jeffords already.
An "accident" might seem reasonable to a layman, but I suspect not to a pilot, maybe not even at first hearing. But coverage after the fact highlighted that it is *hard* to fly those planes that low - even harder to get down low enough and hit a skyscraper like they did. Heck, back in 1987 I had a darned tough time taking off from Miegs Field in Chicago and hitting the Sears Tower in a Cessna. That was before I learned to land in MS Flight Simulator 1.0, of course. I would think that anyone from the Air Force in the loop would have examined this news quite carefully.
Perhaps another question is when it became apparent that there were multiple hijackings in progress? Remember that in August the intelligence community was picking up quite a bit of chatter, though no sense of direction toward focus inside the US. I also remember seeing that there was some confusion about which airplane was which, and it wasn't clear that this was a multiple hijacking.
Based on the August chatter, if sure knowledge of multiple simultaneous hijackings existed, that should have had major alarm bells ringing throughout the Administration. Combine that with the first strike and that it was an attack would have been readily apparent instead of an accident.
That clarity of information might not have even existed, let alone made it upstairs. I'll grant Bush that.
But I was on Slashdot that day, until someone set up a TV, then I saw the second strike. Even looking at just the first strike, it didn't look like an accident. It was too precise, and besides the word 'attack' was floating around even before the second strike.
BTW, though Bush bothers me some, it's the people he's surrounded himself with that really scare me. (Well, Colin Powell doesn't scare me, I feel sorry for him.)
Appropriate actions, IMHO:
Stand calmly, announce, "I'm sorry boys and girls, but an urgent matter has come to my attention, and I have to leave. I'll come back another time and we can finish this."
Start getting information. What was the initial communications link that got him the news? Presumably it's sufficiently secure to begin the briefing process. I'm also sure that "daily operations of the President" insure that he has at least some amount of secure communications *always* available. By the way, at this point the Secret Service would have made sure the entire school was secured, before the President ever set foot inside. The Principal's office would make a dandy temporary intelligence post.
Over that reasonably secure line get someone else at the Top into some sort of charge for the interim, at least gathering information and making sure everyone is talking to each other. Perhaps only that one thing, get someone more connected into a coordinating role.
The coverage that came out over 9/11 painted a picture of the FAA, ATC, and the Air Force all pretty confused and stumbling over each other, at least in-part not knowing who was in charge. At a national level things *might* have gotten in-place to stop the 4th plane, but maybe not. Fortunately there were some truly heroic passengers.
IMHO rapid institution of top-level coordination might have helped - it might have gotten those agencies working together more effectively. It might not, but it doesn't appear that it could have hurt. Now imagine that the attack hadn't been *only* 4 planes. Original plans, scrapped for simplicity, called for something more like a dozen planes.
Plus I asked a serious question. Was the plane strike when he was in the classroom the 1st or the 2nd? Was he notified of the first strike in the car on the way to the school? That changes the time-scope of things considerably.
Specifically, the scene of Bush reading to the classroom during the WTC incident(s) and the delay before response:
I had presumed that the delay was after the first incident. Recently I heard that he had been informed of the first incident on the way to the school, and the filmed delay was after the second incident.
Which was it?
How long was the delay? (I saw F911, but forget that detail.)
One other thing worth mentioning...
One rebuttal for the delay said that the kids drew great comfort from the President being with them through those trying times. At the time the President was with the kids, *they could not have known that they were in trying times, yet.* They were in a classroom with no outside media.
Can you tell me more about kdrive? After a bit of searching and reading, I see that it's a rename of TinyX, and I get the impression that it's a bit of a RISC philosophy applied to Xlib. In other words, Xlib had lots of primitive capabilities that today are getting bypassed in favor of more sophisticated rendering. So they streamline/speed the render path, then move the old primitive capabilities on top of the new path, giving an overall simplification.
Is that close?
And since "hiatus" was mentioned in the story header, and to remain in-character, shouldn't it be, "Put into suspended animation," rather than, "Die?"
Yep.
I've also thought of just installing the full X package, then disabling the server. A few things like 'chown nobody X' and 'chmod *-rwx X' would probably be sufficient to "secure" the X server, but I'd have to do that every time an emerge updated X, too. (mumble) I need to check the documentation on Portage, because I could probably protect the defanged server and keep it from getting updated.
Since you're bringing up basic models, what's your opinion on Fresco/Berlin/GGI, etc?
I followed some of this on their pages. One of the other projects seemed to indicate the separation, but it was deprecated in favor of "debrix". But the debrix project said nothing about the separation. To be fair, it looks like Xorg is spending a lot of much-needed time cleaning up the structure and making things so they even CAN work on the code. It has always sounded like the original code base was pretty arcane.
Maybe the next release won't contain API changes, but the simplified build process, repartitioning, and repackaging alone might be significant enough to spring for X11R7.
As for the ".8.0" bit, some time back, someone at the old X oversight group (the name escapes me, now) decided that X11R6 was going to be the *last* X release. So I guess that meant that there wasn't going to be any X11R7, so we started into X11R6.1, X11R6.3, etc. ISTR X11R6.2 had limited enhancements/features, and never really made it to prime-time before X11R6.3 was out.
Somewhere in there the XFree86 project was off on its own numbering scheme. I particularly remember helping beta GLX stuff on 3.3.6, and then we into the 4.x stuff, 4.3 being the last before the license change. ISTR there was some sort of correspondence between the 3.x/4.x numbering and the X11R6.y numbering.
In all of this, the group that said that X11R6 is the *last* X has faded into de-facto insignificance, but we've all apparently stuck by their decision.
Maybe Xorg will get really gutsy at some point, and give us X11R7.
ISTR that one of those things Xorg wanted to do was to separate the X client and server packaging. It's generally frowned on to install an X server on a server machine, but it would be nice to have X client software available there. The current Xorg/XFree packaging isn't friendly to splitting out the X client libs, or making the package control system recognize that so you could install X clients.
I don't see anything about separation of client and server libs and packaging. They have some other projects listed elsewhere, but nothing terribly solid about client/server separation.
Looking at the Xorg release plan (closest I could find to a roadmap) at http://wiki.freedesktop.org/XOrg/XorgReleasePlan
Anyone aware?
Another thing that would be neat to see is integration of the GLX/DRM work on the S3 Savage line of chips. According to the DRI page there's some work being done on this, though it's not ready for prime time. My laptop has a Savage, and my Mom's computer uses the Via KM133, which has an imbedded Savage. Of course this is an area where perhaps I *should* be trying to help.
Maybe after people like linuxpowertrekkie have fooled with the new extension for a bit, and it's established as *solid*, then Xorg will turn it on by default. I won't argue that it takes some time, and it's behind. But it's also progressing.
Sometimes it's more difficult being able to see behind the curtain, and see the painful aspects of progress happening than it is to have the curtain suddenly pulled aside, and see a 'technology demo' or a 'release candidate' in full action.
I guess by backwaters I was meaning cultural backwaters. Once modernization gets into gear, China will be its own biggest market, and exports will be cream.
I need to check your CIA references when I get time. I need to get time.
Some of this presumes that China acts wisely, taking the best from the West and avoiding its mistakes. From what I can see, they're not really doing a truly good job of that. Witness that big dam project, for instance. The other thing is that IMHO affluence will eventually bring side-effects with it that will make a totalitarian government uncomfortable. Time will tell. But even if they do a poor job of learning from the West, they have a boom of expansion coming, and can make life very uncomfortable for the rest of the world as they do so.
With the spirit of the GPL in mind, we can refuse to accept software from China which was derived from GPL and source not returned.
In other words, I can't fix it, so I'm not going to use it.
Not much, I know.