You've just cited the reason why Obama is very likely to lose in November - he isn't perfect. The people who began as excited about participating in politics and voting, no longer are.
Therefore instead of getting someone who minced words on FISA, and ended up voting unhappily for it, we're going to get someone who is enthusiastic for it.
Besides - there is one way Bush can deliver the November election to McCain - attack Iran. I have this funny feeling that if the nation is going to war, there's no way they will vote for Obama over McCain. If we're at the brink of war, people would likely vote for Obama over McCain, in order to reasonably pull us back. But if we're there, look for McCain to win. Look for an October attack on Iran. (Or - this President would NEVER use any of the government institutions for a purely political reason, would he?) (Note: that's sarcasm.)
Both of these are relatively new projects. From what I've seen, neither has any sort of releases or snapshots, you build from a checkout.
Any idea when I might be able to get a Jocular Jaguar (or Kooky Kangaroo or Languid Lemur) LiveCD and have them part of the base install? Or for that matter, have 'emerge --sync && ARCH="x86" USE="gallium3d" emerge nouveau' install them as "stable".
Nor has anyone mentioned the thing that could keep suburbia practical, telecommuting.
Perhaps one of the best things we could have to solve the energy problem would be advancements in virtual presence, to broaden usage of telecommuting. I've done it some, and while it fits my job occasionally, true presence is necessary too often. Maybe better virtual presence could make telecommuting work more often for people like me.
Sometimes I think your post can be pared down to a few words in the middle, "the United States is insane," and leave it at that.
Incidentally, we took a family vacation to DC last month, and we used the park-and-ride. (I'm a bit too suburban to be comfortable in DC traffic, plus the tour guide books suggested that we'd be touring while people who drove were still looking for a parking space.) For that matter, if there were some sort of mass transit that could get me to and from work without losing too much extra time, I'd go for it in a minute.
Didn't find the executive compensation, but a quick search had some fun...
Consider that in 1997, before the merger, Robert Eaton, the former Chrysler chief executive, earned $16 million in salary, bonus, stock and options, while Mr. Schrempp, then the Daimler-Benz CEO, earned about $2 million (though the company doesn't publish exact figures). And Mr. Eaton, thanks to special conditions of the merger, gained nearly $70 million in cash and stock when it was completed, while Mr. Schrempp got nothing extra because of the deal.
It was from the Wall St Journal, in google's cache. Couldn't get to the original article for a citation.
GM CEO compensation was $8.5e6, but I'm not sure if that was before or after the 50% pay cut he took. I couldn't readily find the CEO compensation for Mercedes, but for Toyota I found $900k.
Maybe if we paid the GM CEO more like the Toyota CEO, GM's business results would be more like Toyota's? Extrapolate that!
Incidentally, GM didn't just fail to foresee it, they denied it. Clinton was pushing US automakers on the efficiency front, and they supposedly had a hybrid plan in place. Bush let the off the hook, with the "late enough to never matter" hydrogen plan. US automakers stunningly, retardedly shut down any sign of vision, and made money today by doing what made money yesterday, with no thought that things might change.
That really sounds like management that is 9 times better than Toyota's, doesn't it?
No, it merely says that the bar was raised. WinOS2 was practically the crudest form of running Windows under a different platform, and Win3.11 appeared to have done only 2 things - fix a calculator math bug and break WinOS2. I'm not familiar with Xen, but last I knew, WinXP under VMWare ran pretty well - unless you wanted 3D graphics.
Perhaps this stuff wasn't done intentionally to foul WinOS2, WINE, and VMWare, but I'll be somewhere somebody said, "We've shipped some pretty cruddy code, but at least we got it out on (the revised) schedule, and if it makes life tough for WinOS2/WINE/etc, great!"
Or to phrase it another way, in the past Microsoft HAS done things to confound interoperability/emulation attempts, several examples of which are very well known. To doubt that the behavior continues is probably too trusting, especially with chair-guy in command.
That one's black and white compared to some of the questions he had. If I had to sum it up on one phrase, "My store, right or wrong!" There was even a question asking essentially that, from what I remember. It was about 5 years ago, after all.
They spent some amount of time and effort on making sure that Windows would not be virtualized under OS/2, and perhaps some effort was spent to make sure it wouldn't under WINE, as well. At this point they may have sunk themselves by making Windows un-virtualizable, at least with reasonable performance levels. In other words, in blocking OS/2 and WINE, they may have blocked that course of action for themselves.
No, not speed, reliability and (startlingly) ease. Yes, you have to wait for the silly thing to compile, but almost without exception, once you've done that, stuff just runs.
Back in my old rpm days, it seemed like I would find an interesting package and find that it has an rpm available. The I'd find that I was missing a library, or had the wrong version, and I'd have to go searching for another rpm. Then another search to find the rpm that would satisfy the requirements for that lib, etc. Every now and then, I'd get to the bottom of my search and find an incompatibility, and it was time to give up, at least for the moment.
Gentoo has a wide range of ebuilds, a wide range of overlays that increase the options, and finally since a complete build environment is part of every system, building a non-ebuild tarball almost always works, too. (./configure --prefix=/usr/local && make , etc )
By far, most of my problems have been with stuff only available in binary form.
Several years ago my son was applying at Wal Mart, and part of the application was an ethics test. He told me some of the questions, and it seemed to me to be more of a no-ethics test. I told him I was proud that he flunked.
Ah, but the decrypter/decoder is from the *same* technology. The point I was trying to make was looking at a greater technology. Modern spread-spectrum communications wouldn't have even registered to a Marconi coherer, much less trying to differentiate between noise and signal. In "The Forever War" Joe Haldeman posited communications through modulated neutrinos. I think we could probably receive such a signal today, possibly tell it was modulated, but not decode it. When "The Forever War" was written, we couldn't have done any of those.
Obviously I've heard of Shannon, but no formal (or really in-depth informal) study. Maybe I'm dating myself, and he's more pervasively taught now, though I'll add that I wasn't even born until almost a decade after 1948.
I have some friends who named their daughter Shannon. I often wondered if it would be come a self-fulfilling prophecy of a noisy child.
Might be interesting - depends on how rare rocky planets with magnetospheres are. Right now at least part of our problem is that our methods of planetary detection don't lend themselves well to small rocky planets. As an aside to your thought, perhaps if we could identify characteristic "signature" differences between radio emissions of Earth vs Jupiter, that might yield a completely different way of searching for Earth-like worlds.
And for the paranoid Beserker fans, the same goes for them.
Obviously a topic ripe with potential for humor, and once again Slashdot has attempted to meet the challenge. Some would say grandly, others would say falling short. It all depends on your sense of humor, of course.
On a more serious note...
There are those who believe that our emissions of radio and TV signals are advertising our presence to book ("To Serve Man") authors everywhere, and that letting our presence be known is a Really Bad Idea. (TM) They should be happy to hear that we're being drowned out quite effectively by the Earth, itself. From what I remember, a really good detector can fish signal out of this much noise, but you also have to have more of an idea what you're looking for.
Which also has implications for SETI and such. Maybe there's more noise out there than we anticipated. We knew that suns make some serious noise, as do Jupiter-type planets. I'm not sure we knew how much noise Earth-style planets make.
Plus there's the nature of "intelligent" signals themselves. You can listen to Morse code and pretty quickly come to the conclusion that it's modulated - not random noise. Even if the concept of a BFO is foreign, you can look at it on an oscilloscope and figure that out. Next would be an AM or FM modulated signal. Even if it's Brittany Spears, as others mention, you can probably figure out that it's a modulated signal. By the time you get to Adolph Hitler opening the Olympic Games it's starting to get rougher. But I guess if you hang a spectrum analyzer on the thing, you can figure out that it's a modulates signal, find the video fields, figure out that there's a second signal (audio) on a subcarrier, etc.
Now from first principles try to intercept and decode an HTDV signal, even without DRM. Or how about spread-spectrum communications, or the various cellphone signaling mechanisms. In fact, good signal compression turns *any* signal into noise. That's because if there were anything in the compressed output that looked regular, then the compression would have been evaluated as lacking. This is even before we try to add any encryption, but in fact some compression/archive programs include password protection, because it does so good a job of de-regularizing data that it practically is encrypted.
Which brings us to "Dpilot's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law" : "Any sufficiently advanced communications technology is indistinguishable from noise."
(Need I state Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.")
Which brings us back to SETI and Drake... Maybe the signals of interstellar communication are all around us - and we're just not smart enough to recognize and decode it - yet.
I phrased my post the way I did, because I knew that there are still people who think that what Clinton did was death-penalty-terrible, and what Dubya has done is heroic. Of course they're the same people who don't realize that the swift-boaters were later proven wrong in their smear campaign against Kerry... The same people who follow chickenhawks as they wave the Patriotism Flag and denigrate real veterans who served in real foreign military service.
Incidentally, it appears that one of the other posts on this thread holds roughly at least part of that view. It's also mentioned elsewhere on the thread that Clinton didn't really "lie", he "parsed heavily." As if the current administration isn't "parsing heavily," but this time with peoples' lives, the national economy, and our standing in the world.
We have one of the countdown clocks on our refrigerator.
I seem to remember hearing that the grand jury decided that Paula Jones had not suffered from the affair with Clinton, at least as far as her career was concerned.
For one, because he was never under oath. Second, he never exactly lied, they merely "selectively observed" some facts, and "selectively neglected" others. Obviously completely different from lying, and completely out of the realm of lying under oath.
More seriously, IMHO the Administration's problem is that they believe that they can force their wished version of reality into the world, and make is to, evidently by sheer force of will and political determination. Disagree with the facts? Reinterpret them until they agree with you!
The real and impeachable crime here is misfeasance - sheer incompetence.
My kill-a-watt can also display the power factor. That doesn't say anything about how accurate it is, but it does say that it knows something about non-resistive loads. Incidentally, the switching supplies in the PCs I've measured have a power factor of about 67%.
Slashdot Mirror
You've just cited the reason why Obama is very likely to lose in November - he isn't perfect. The people who began as excited about participating in politics and voting, no longer are.
Therefore instead of getting someone who minced words on FISA, and ended up voting unhappily for it, we're going to get someone who is enthusiastic for it.
Besides - there is one way Bush can deliver the November election to McCain - attack Iran. I have this funny feeling that if the nation is going to war, there's no way they will vote for Obama over McCain. If we're at the brink of war, people would likely vote for Obama over McCain, in order to reasonably pull us back. But if we're there, look for McCain to win. Look for an October attack on Iran. (Or - this President would NEVER use any of the government institutions for a purely political reason, would he?) (Note: that's sarcasm.)
Hopefully one of these many solar power improvements will make it to market some time before fusion power.
Of course you mean a Silver Bullet! What other kind would management want?
I seem to remember hearing a while back about the search for "naked Truth" or "naked beauty".
Both of these are relatively new projects. From what I've seen, neither has any sort of releases or snapshots, you build from a checkout.
Any idea when I might be able to get a Jocular Jaguar (or Kooky Kangaroo or Languid Lemur) LiveCD and have them part of the base install? Or for that matter, have 'emerge --sync && ARCH="x86" USE="gallium3d" emerge nouveau' install them as "stable".
Was it possible for the Windows side to set the dose/duration of the X Rays without those settings being readily apparent on the hardware side?
Nor has anyone mentioned the thing that could keep suburbia practical, telecommuting.
Perhaps one of the best things we could have to solve the energy problem would be advancements in virtual presence, to broaden usage of telecommuting. I've done it some, and while it fits my job occasionally, true presence is necessary too often. Maybe better virtual presence could make telecommuting work more often for people like me.
Sometimes I think your post can be pared down to a few words in the middle, "the United States is insane," and leave it at that.
Incidentally, we took a family vacation to DC last month, and we used the park-and-ride. (I'm a bit too suburban to be comfortable in DC traffic, plus the tour guide books suggested that we'd be touring while people who drove were still looking for a parking space.) For that matter, if there were some sort of mass transit that could get me to and from work without losing too much extra time, I'd go for it in a minute.
Didn't find the executive compensation, but a quick search had some fun...
Consider that in 1997, before the merger, Robert Eaton, the former Chrysler chief executive, earned $16 million in salary, bonus, stock and options, while Mr. Schrempp, then the Daimler-Benz CEO, earned about $2 million (though the company doesn't publish exact figures). And Mr. Eaton, thanks to special conditions of the merger, gained nearly $70 million in cash and stock when it was completed, while Mr. Schrempp got nothing extra because of the deal.
It was from the Wall St Journal, in google's cache. Couldn't get to the original article for a citation.
That's why we pay them the big bucks.
GM CEO compensation was $8.5e6, but I'm not sure if that was before or after the 50% pay cut he took. I couldn't readily find the CEO compensation for Mercedes, but for Toyota I found $900k.
Maybe if we paid the GM CEO more like the Toyota CEO, GM's business results would be more like Toyota's? Extrapolate that!
Incidentally, GM didn't just fail to foresee it, they denied it. Clinton was pushing US automakers on the efficiency front, and they supposedly had a hybrid plan in place. Bush let the off the hook, with the "late enough to never matter" hydrogen plan. US automakers stunningly, retardedly shut down any sign of vision, and made money today by doing what made money yesterday, with no thought that things might change.
That really sounds like management that is 9 times better than Toyota's, doesn't it?
No, it merely says that the bar was raised. WinOS2 was practically the crudest form of running Windows under a different platform, and Win3.11 appeared to have done only 2 things - fix a calculator math bug and break WinOS2. I'm not familiar with Xen, but last I knew, WinXP under VMWare ran pretty well - unless you wanted 3D graphics.
Perhaps this stuff wasn't done intentionally to foul WinOS2, WINE, and VMWare, but I'll be somewhere somebody said, "We've shipped some pretty cruddy code, but at least we got it out on (the revised) schedule, and if it makes life tough for WinOS2/WINE/etc, great!"
Or to phrase it another way, in the past Microsoft HAS done things to confound interoperability/emulation attempts, several examples of which are very well known. To doubt that the behavior continues is probably too trusting, especially with chair-guy in command.
That one's black and white compared to some of the questions he had. If I had to sum it up on one phrase, "My store, right or wrong!" There was even a question asking essentially that, from what I remember. It was about 5 years ago, after all.
They spent some amount of time and effort on making sure that Windows would not be virtualized under OS/2, and perhaps some effort was spent to make sure it wouldn't under WINE, as well. At this point they may have sunk themselves by making Windows un-virtualizable, at least with reasonable performance levels. In other words, in blocking OS/2 and WINE, they may have blocked that course of action for themselves.
> Speed.
No, not speed, reliability and (startlingly) ease. Yes, you have to wait for the silly thing to compile, but almost without exception, once you've done that, stuff just runs.
Back in my old rpm days, it seemed like I would find an interesting package and find that it has an rpm available. The I'd find that I was missing a library, or had the wrong version, and I'd have to go searching for another rpm. Then another search to find the rpm that would satisfy the requirements for that lib, etc. Every now and then, I'd get to the bottom of my search and find an incompatibility, and it was time to give up, at least for the moment.
Gentoo has a wide range of ebuilds, a wide range of overlays that increase the options, and finally since a complete build environment is part of every system, building a non-ebuild tarball almost always works, too. ( ./configure --prefix=/usr/local && make , etc )
By far, most of my problems have been with stuff only available in binary form.
> At least Netcraft doesn't confirm it yet.
Don't forget, there is a Gentoo-BSD branch of ebuilds. Wonder what Netcraft says about that!
Several years ago my son was applying at Wal Mart, and part of the application was an ethics test. He told me some of the questions, and it seemed to me to be more of a no-ethics test. I told him I was proud that he flunked.
> 3. If I were this lady I'd see a shrink, and file lawsuit against the labels for metal distress
Metallica's got that one covered, and they're on the RIAA's side.
Ah, but the decrypter/decoder is from the *same* technology. The point I was trying to make was looking at a greater technology. Modern spread-spectrum communications wouldn't have even registered to a Marconi coherer, much less trying to differentiate between noise and signal. In "The Forever War" Joe Haldeman posited communications through modulated neutrinos. I think we could probably receive such a signal today, possibly tell it was modulated, but not decode it. When "The Forever War" was written, we couldn't have done any of those.
Obviously I've heard of Shannon, but no formal (or really in-depth informal) study. Maybe I'm dating myself, and he's more pervasively taught now, though I'll add that I wasn't even born until almost a decade after 1948.
I have some friends who named their daughter Shannon. I often wondered if it would be come a self-fulfilling prophecy of a noisy child.
Might be interesting - depends on how rare rocky planets with magnetospheres are. Right now at least part of our problem is that our methods of planetary detection don't lend themselves well to small rocky planets. As an aside to your thought, perhaps if we could identify characteristic "signature" differences between radio emissions of Earth vs Jupiter, that might yield a completely different way of searching for Earth-like worlds.
And for the paranoid Beserker fans, the same goes for them.
Obviously a topic ripe with potential for humor, and once again Slashdot has attempted to meet the challenge. Some would say grandly, others would say falling short. It all depends on your sense of humor, of course.
On a more serious note...
There are those who believe that our emissions of radio and TV signals are advertising our presence to book ("To Serve Man") authors everywhere, and that letting our presence be known is a Really Bad Idea. (TM) They should be happy to hear that we're being drowned out quite effectively by the Earth, itself. From what I remember, a really good detector can fish signal out of this much noise, but you also have to have more of an idea what you're looking for.
Which also has implications for SETI and such. Maybe there's more noise out there than we anticipated. We knew that suns make some serious noise, as do Jupiter-type planets. I'm not sure we knew how much noise Earth-style planets make.
Plus there's the nature of "intelligent" signals themselves. You can listen to Morse code and pretty quickly come to the conclusion that it's modulated - not random noise. Even if the concept of a BFO is foreign, you can look at it on an oscilloscope and figure that out. Next would be an AM or FM modulated signal. Even if it's Brittany Spears, as others mention, you can probably figure out that it's a modulated signal. By the time you get to Adolph Hitler opening the Olympic Games it's starting to get rougher. But I guess if you hang a spectrum analyzer on the thing, you can figure out that it's a modulates signal, find the video fields, figure out that there's a second signal (audio) on a subcarrier, etc.
Now from first principles try to intercept and decode an HTDV signal, even without DRM. Or how about spread-spectrum communications, or the various cellphone signaling mechanisms. In fact, good signal compression turns *any* signal into noise. That's because if there were anything in the compressed output that looked regular, then the compression would have been evaluated as lacking. This is even before we try to add any encryption, but in fact some compression/archive programs include password protection, because it does so good a job of de-regularizing data that it practically is encrypted.
Which brings us to "Dpilot's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law" :
"Any sufficiently advanced communications technology is indistinguishable from noise."
(Need I state Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.")
Which brings us back to SETI and Drake... Maybe the signals of interstellar communication are all around us - and we're just not smart enough to recognize and decode it - yet.
I phrased my post the way I did, because I knew that there are still people who think that what Clinton did was death-penalty-terrible, and what Dubya has done is heroic. Of course they're the same people who don't realize that the swift-boaters were later proven wrong in their smear campaign against Kerry... The same people who follow chickenhawks as they wave the Patriotism Flag and denigrate real veterans who served in real foreign military service.
Incidentally, it appears that one of the other posts on this thread holds roughly at least part of that view. It's also mentioned elsewhere on the thread that Clinton didn't really "lie", he "parsed heavily." As if the current administration isn't "parsing heavily," but this time with peoples' lives, the national economy, and our standing in the world.
We have one of the countdown clocks on our refrigerator.
I seem to remember hearing that the grand jury decided that Paula Jones had not suffered from the affair with Clinton, at least as far as her career was concerned.
For one, because he was never under oath.
Second, he never exactly lied, they merely "selectively observed" some facts, and "selectively neglected" others. Obviously completely different from lying, and completely out of the realm of lying under oath.
More seriously, IMHO the Administration's problem is that they believe that they can force their wished version of reality into the world, and make is to, evidently by sheer force of will and political determination. Disagree with the facts? Reinterpret them until they agree with you!
The real and impeachable crime here is misfeasance - sheer incompetence.
My kill-a-watt can also display the power factor. That doesn't say anything about how accurate it is, but it does say that it knows something about non-resistive loads. Incidentally, the switching supplies in the PCs I've measured have a power factor of about 67%.