what does the technology level of dublin (or ireland) have anything to do with ivy league universities in the united states?
The point is, there's no reason for someone to be overawed by Harvard's reputation simply because he's from Ireland. Or indeed to be ignorant of the reputations of MIT and CalTech. Despite the romantic ideas some Americans might have about it, Ireland is actually an advanced, cosmopolitan country, just like everywhere else in Western Europe.
What a bunch of crap. If you can't see the difference between bein threatened with a gun and NOT being threatened by a gun, there's no helping you.
If you get robbed by a man brandishing a carving knife, is it called "carving knife crime"? No, it isn't. But it can kill you just as dead.
Not to mention the fact that we don't say "bomb crime" either, we say "terrorism", and a bomb can kill many more people than a handgun.
Why are guns a special case? And why are computers a special case? The tools are really irrelevant, since the vast majority of gun and computer owners commit no crimes. The crime itself, and its consequences, are the only things the courts should consider.
Cyber-crime is no different to ordinary crime. If the 15 year old 'cracker' writes his name all over a site (i.e. graffiti) he should get the same as a 15 year-old who scrawls all over his local shopping mall (i.e. fuck all or a safari or something).
The term "cyber crime" is like "gun crime" - it completely misses the point. If a man wears a mask to rob a bank, we don't call it "mask crime". If he makes a getaway by motorcycle, we don't call it "motorcycle crime". If he uses a gun, we do call it "gun crime" for some reason, but that's just silly: it's still a bank robbery, whatever you call it. The mask, the bike and the gun are just tools.
IMHO, it's not like graffiti - it's more like phoning in a bomb scare to a warehouse, in that there's no actual physical damage done, yet the business is unable to function until the issue is resolved (the analogy goes further, searching the building for a bomb is like auditing your network). And it should be treated as such by the courts.
Yes, but he is in Ireland. I'm not entirely sure how aware the average Dublin 17 year-old is of the relative rankings of Ivy League US universities.
He is in Ireland, but Dublin's no tech backwater. Trinity College Dublin is world-renowned for science and maths, and a short flight away are Imperial College and UCL in London, not to mention Oxford and Cambridge. A little further than that is the Sorbonne. There's no reason he shouldn't be as familiar with the rankings as anyone else.
And thanks to the Irish government's very sensible tax policy (i.e. less is better), the country has a sizeable presence of US high-tech firms, like Oracle and Sun.
As others have said, tho', anyone who claims to be able to sustain 1500 LOC/day for 18 months, is probably not to be taken seriously.
780,000 lines of code in 18 months is approximately 1500 lines per day every single day. I'm skeptical.
Indeed. I remember reading that IBM reckon that, including design, coding, testing, debugging and documentation, a programmer's doing well to get 10 lines of code per day, averaged over the life of the project.
Also depends how he's counting lines. In C, because that can vary so much depending on individual formatting style, a good rule of thumb is to count semicolons. And even then it won't tell you if programmer A is writing fast but hard to read code and programmer B is checking the return value of every system call (as you're supposed to but few ever do), adding lines and robustness with no extra actual functionality.
I just had to cart a PC up 3 flights of stairs and down the hall to my dorm room. Moving my PowerMac was a lot easier because of the handles. PC makers still have a lot to learn from Apple IMO
If you can afford both a Mac and PC, surely you can afford a butler to do all that lifting and carrying for you?
don't know if anybody's seen BMW Films, but that's the sort of interesting thing that I think we're heading for. Basically, BMW hired a bunch of film directors (John Frankenheimer, John Woo, Tony Scott, Guy Ritchie
Mercedes did something similar, they made a 2-minute or so ad that played like a trailer for a movie, and showed it in cinemas. Starred Benicio Del Toro from Way Of The Gun, IIRC. They didn't mention themselves at all, but obviously Del Toro drove a Merc. And the thing is, it looked like a great movie too! I was kinda disappointed when I went to the web site (www.luckyluckystar.co.uk, but it's now just a redirect to their homepage) and found that it was an ad. Maybe if there's enough demand they'll actually make it.
The BMW film with Madonna where she spills coffee on her lap is v. funny:-)
How is it that people dont know what Tivo is? Why the hell does anyone who watch TV NOT have a Tivo?
Many potential Tivo customers are people who don't like ads. People who don't like ads don't pay any attention to them. Hence, these people ignore Tivo advertising, and don't know that Tivo can help them avoid ads.
Just don't turn up. After all, if I receive a letter from Uzbekistan telling me I'm due in their courts (I'm British), there's no reason I have to accept their judgement.
That's charmingly naive, and maybe it was true once. But these days, as recent events illustrated, countries don't bother to protect their citizens very much at all from foreign governments. I fully expect that if another country wanted you extradited, the British police will fall over themselves to help. And if you're over there when you are arrested, they won't lift a finger to help you.
which brings us to the delicate question of how did you lose your empire? Bad Rations? Too Much Rock-n-Roll?
At the end of the day, no matter what they had for breakfast, any country can either a) win a world war or b) maintain an empire, but not both at the same time.
When I was in the Army (uh-oh), we'd sometimes not eat but once a day, especially in Ranger school. And a part of that reason was because the meals were so terrible. Oh I hope you never have to eat "Pork, Processed, with Juices" or scrambled eggs and ham that are 5 years old. Now they'll be having soldiers shaving their testicles to apply a food patch. I'll pass on the 're-up', thanks.
It was courtesy of the Army that I learnt it was possible to tin cheese. Who'da thunk it? And "biscuits, brown", specially formulated to constipate the troops, less likelihood of getting attacked while your trousers were round your ankles.
This may have been said jokingly, but it definately isn't what we need. Not only do TNDS' not give you a delicious taste in your mouth, they don't tell your body that you are full either. If we want fatter geeks, this is the way to go. Otherwise, I'll just stick to my perishable food.
Why would it make you fatter? If it's only delivering vitamins and trace compounds, your body will be burning fat for energy, but not suffering from malnutrition.
It's a major design flaw in humans that we can store energy as fat(mass storage) and glycogen (like a proxy cache, keeps fuel close to your muscles) but we cannot store various compounds (mostly vitamins and minerals) that are required to metabolize food and use raw materials (proteins) to perform repairs and maintenance. It is perfectly possible to have ample energy availble but still starve to death!
I just want a caffeine patch. - Well, maybe a junk food patch. I can see this.
Look, I'm a Brit, and if there's one thing we British know, it's how to conquer a planet and rule it for two centuries without really trying. These patches are a bad idea. The British Army marches on fried sausages, fried bacon, black pudding, fried bread, fried tomatoes, fried eggs and Earl Grey tea. The French Army, who also did a fairly good job of conquering things, marched on croissants, black coffee and Gitanes.
Do you really think the American Empire will survive if you make your troops use patches instead of real food? Whoever invented these should be court-martialled.
Memory fails me at the moment, but the man who developed the whole concept of relational databases... worked at IBM as I recall, and cape up with the concept of ACID: Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable.
. Not computer hardware but software. I was thinking Von Neumann, and Linus Torvalds would find a mention
Linus Torvalds should not be on such a list. Tananbaum was wrong to say that Linux is obsolete, but he was correct that it is of little academic interest. Linus' skill is not in innovation, it is in execution and dare I say it, project management.
Von Nuemann and the others you mentioned were theorists, people on the science side of computer science, who developed new theories. They changed the way people think about the whole field.
For starters, it's none of the companies business whom your relatives work for. Second, it is vague as almost *any* company could be considered to potentially have *some* business relationship with your company, especially if you are bug (for example Microsoft). Third, are you personally supposed to keep track of your relatives and their job changes?
Actually, I'm pretty certain that company directors are already bound by such rules to prevent insider trading.
Remember, it doesn't prohibit you from doing business with your brother. It merely forces you to ensure that you don't favour your brother over a better vendor. Everyone wins, apart from nepotists. Worried that your boss will hire his idiot son? Rules like this protect you too.
Then how do you think this country functioned in the decades before corporations were granted the majority of the immunities they currently enjoy?
Well, if someone had something you wanted, you shot them and took it. It's how the West was won, John Wayne. I'll take the present convention of lawyers being rude to one another in court, less messy.
I imagine the real bugger with this, assuming the technology ever works and takes off, would be the cost of the file you print from! Imagine the complexity of the information required to print a working gadget, like that. And there'd also be some charge for the labor needed to design the file in whatever CAD-esque program becomes available for it.
Why? Every industrial product already exists in a CAD file. The process of converting it into a 3D representation is no more complex than your printer converting PostScript to a printed page. The hard part is the actual printing in 3D.
It saddens me to think that people have been conditioned to think this way. Saddens and sickens me.
If you believe that companies should not be allowed to fire workers when times are tough, then you must also believe that employees shouldn't be allowed to quit when they get a better offer. They're two sides of the same coin.
After someone on the NTSysAdmin List suggested trying to set the CPU priority to low from the command line, I investigated and found a small freeware that did the trick: PrioSet.
Type start/? into the prompt - it can start processes at different priorities. So you can replace direct shortcuts to your applications with.bat files that in fact start the application at a different priority.
Employees should be loyal as long as the company is loyal... but if they have layoffs one quarter and then layoffs again the next quarter, its clear they don't know what they are doing.
One company I worked for had layoffs in December one year. The following February, the CEO said in a webcast to the whole company that if business didn't pick up there would be more layoffs the following May. Maybe he intended it to scare everyone into working harder, but the result was productivity went through the floor as most employees did one or both of a) sending out resumes, networking and interviewing full time or b) scheming to get laid off and collect a severance package. Everyone helped themselves to office supplies and used the printers, fax machines and phones for job hunting. Many employees openly referred to the office as "job club" (in the UK that is the term for a government-run employment agency) and getting laid off as "hitting the jackpot".
That round, the second, really broke the back of the company since by happenstance or their own design, most of the "heavy lifters" were gone. Not just the tech elite, but the MBAs too. Next September there was a third, not long after that a fourth, then I stopped bothering to keep track.
Lessons learnt:
There is never only one round. If management tell you there will be only one, they are deluded or lying. Both reasons are just as bad for the employees.
The second round is the best time to be let go - you don't have the stigma of first-round deadwood, and the company probably still has the cash to gice a decent package (the folks after round 4 I believe got statutory minimum).
If you think it's coming, sit tight, no point in resigning if they want to pay you to leave.
Getting laid off is not the black mark on your resume that it once was.
Get a reference from HR in writing, while there's still someone around who remembers you and before the company goes bankrupt.
See if the company will pay for a lawyer to check the T&Cs of the severance agreement - mine said you many not disclose the amount of the settlement, but didn't include a non-compete nor prohibit me from poaching from the remaining staff.
It's funny how things go around. The "vibe" at the time was almost the same as the vibe at the IPO - like a party. People who got kept their jobs were the most depressed, the people who got laid off felt they'd been freed!
Companies aren't and shouldn't be loyal to their employees when times are tough--
Agreed. After all, employees are always disloyal to employers when a better offer comes along. Loyalty only makes sense when the interests of both counterparties are aligned.
First, there is the connection between chipsets on the motherboard. AMD's Hypertransport and others could make big differences on overall motherboard speed.
Second, system memory speeds are getting quite a bit faster, too. Developments in DDR-SDRAM technology could eventually result in throughput 2-3 times what we have now with DDR333 technology.
Third, expansion slots are getting faster, too. There are now standards upcoming for both PCI and AGP that will substantially increase data throughput on expansion slots.
Catching up, you mean. Have a google for words like "xbow" "UPA" and "XIO". The whole x86 architecture is massively unbalanced. That's why for serious computing you still need a proper workstation.
I don't believe that you are actually correct. Not sure though. But I think that the president needs to support the treaty as well as get a 2/3 vote of the senate.
What's interesting is that 34 Senators could vote for Kyoto and get some political mileage for being "green", but there's no real danger of it ever signed into law.
IMHO the Kyoto treaty is flawed. How can Western politicians simultaneously argue that developing nations should get excemptions for economic reasons, yet Western nations will not suffer economically? If Kyoto is to be ratified it must bind not only those nations who are producing pollution but have plateaued, but those whose rate of pollution is lower right now, but accelerating.
I don't see any reason to play diplomatic games with you. I'm the big wheel, and I don't need to be polite
Clinton did try to force Kyoto through, but that's not really possible without a change in the law and maybe the Constitution itself. The Founding Fathers were serious when they created the checks and balances and divided power amongst the branches of government.
OTOH, Bush's internal policy seems a direct attack on the constitution. He seems to be paranoid occilitating between delusions of grandeur and delusions of persecution. This is not good in a head of state. In fact it's mind-bogglingly dangerous.
I agree with you here. But defending the Constitution is Job #1 - that's the President's foremost responsibility. The military swear to defend the Constitution against all threats, foreign and domestic. A greater conspiracy theorist than I might suggest Bush and Cheney are making sure the military is busy while they make their changes back home.
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what does the technology level of dublin (or ireland) have anything to do with ivy league universities in the united states?
The point is, there's no reason for someone to be overawed by Harvard's reputation simply because he's from Ireland. Or indeed to be ignorant of the reputations of MIT and CalTech. Despite the romantic ideas some Americans might have about it, Ireland is actually an advanced, cosmopolitan country, just like everywhere else in Western Europe.
What a bunch of crap. If you can't see the difference between bein threatened with a gun and NOT being threatened by a gun, there's no helping you.
If you get robbed by a man brandishing a carving knife, is it called "carving knife crime"? No, it isn't. But it can kill you just as dead.
Not to mention the fact that we don't say "bomb crime" either, we say "terrorism", and a bomb can kill many more people than a handgun.
Why are guns a special case? And why are computers a special case? The tools are really irrelevant, since the vast majority of gun and computer owners commit no crimes. The crime itself, and its consequences, are the only things the courts should consider.
Cyber-crime is no different to ordinary crime. If the 15 year old 'cracker' writes his name all over a site (i.e. graffiti) he should get the same as a 15 year-old who scrawls all over his local shopping mall (i.e. fuck all or a safari or something).
The term "cyber crime" is like "gun crime" - it completely misses the point. If a man wears a mask to rob a bank, we don't call it "mask crime". If he makes a getaway by motorcycle, we don't call it "motorcycle crime". If he uses a gun, we do call it "gun crime" for some reason, but that's just silly: it's still a bank robbery, whatever you call it. The mask, the bike and the gun are just tools.
IMHO, it's not like graffiti - it's more like phoning in a bomb scare to a warehouse, in that there's no actual physical damage done, yet the business is unable to function until the issue is resolved (the analogy goes further, searching the building for a bomb is like auditing your network). And it should be treated as such by the courts.
Yes, but he is in Ireland. I'm not entirely sure how aware the average Dublin 17 year-old is of the relative rankings of Ivy League US universities.
He is in Ireland, but Dublin's no tech backwater. Trinity College Dublin is world-renowned for science and maths, and a short flight away are Imperial College and UCL in London, not to mention Oxford and Cambridge. A little further than that is the Sorbonne. There's no reason he shouldn't be as familiar with the rankings as anyone else.
And thanks to the Irish government's very sensible tax policy (i.e. less is better), the country has a sizeable presence of US high-tech firms, like Oracle and Sun.
As others have said, tho', anyone who claims to be able to sustain 1500 LOC/day for 18 months, is probably not to be taken seriously.
780,000 lines of code in 18 months is approximately 1500 lines per day every single day. I'm skeptical.
Indeed. I remember reading that IBM reckon that, including design, coding, testing, debugging and documentation, a programmer's doing well to get 10 lines of code per day, averaged over the life of the project.
Also depends how he's counting lines. In C, because that can vary so much depending on individual formatting style, a good rule of thumb is to count semicolons. And even then it won't tell you if programmer A is writing fast but hard to read code and programmer B is checking the return value of every system call (as you're supposed to but few ever do), adding lines and robustness with no extra actual functionality.
He never said both were his.
He only explicitly said he owned the PowerMac.
Maybe he was helping a friend...
A friend who shares his dorm room.
I just had to cart a PC up 3 flights of stairs and down the hall to my dorm room. Moving my PowerMac was a lot easier because of the handles. PC makers still have a lot to learn from Apple IMO
If you can afford both a Mac and PC, surely you can afford a butler to do all that lifting and carrying for you?
don't know if anybody's seen BMW Films, but that's the sort of interesting thing that I think we're heading for. Basically, BMW hired a bunch of film directors (John Frankenheimer, John Woo, Tony Scott, Guy Ritchie
:-)
Mercedes did something similar, they made a 2-minute or so ad that played like a trailer for a movie, and showed it in cinemas. Starred Benicio Del Toro from Way Of The Gun, IIRC. They didn't mention themselves at all, but obviously Del Toro drove a Merc. And the thing is, it looked like a great movie too! I was kinda disappointed when I went to the web site (www.luckyluckystar.co.uk, but it's now just a redirect to their homepage) and found that it was an ad. Maybe if there's enough demand they'll actually make it.
The BMW film with Madonna where she spills coffee on her lap is v. funny
How is it that people dont know what Tivo is? Why the hell does anyone who watch TV NOT have a Tivo?
Many potential Tivo customers are people who don't like ads. People who don't like ads don't pay any attention to them. Hence, these people ignore Tivo advertising, and don't know that Tivo can help them avoid ads.
Deliciously ironic, isn't it?
Just don't turn up. After all, if I receive a letter from Uzbekistan telling me I'm due in their courts (I'm British), there's no reason I have to accept their judgement.
That's charmingly naive, and maybe it was true once. But these days, as recent events illustrated, countries don't bother to protect their citizens very much at all from foreign governments. I fully expect that if another country wanted you extradited, the British police will fall over themselves to help. And if you're over there when you are arrested, they won't lift a finger to help you.
which brings us to the delicate question of how did you lose your empire? Bad Rations? Too Much Rock-n-Roll?
At the end of the day, no matter what they had for breakfast, any country can either a) win a world war or b) maintain an empire, but not both at the same time.
When I was in the Army (uh-oh), we'd sometimes not eat but once a day, especially in Ranger school. And a part of that reason was because the meals were so terrible. Oh I hope you never have to eat "Pork, Processed, with Juices" or scrambled eggs and ham that are 5 years old. Now they'll be having soldiers shaving their testicles to apply a food patch. I'll pass on the 're-up', thanks.
It was courtesy of the Army that I learnt it was possible to tin cheese. Who'da thunk it? And "biscuits, brown", specially formulated to constipate the troops, less likelihood of getting attacked while your trousers were round your ankles.
This may have been said jokingly, but it definately isn't what we need. Not only do TNDS' not give you a delicious taste in your mouth, they don't tell your body that you are full either. If we want fatter geeks, this is the way to go. Otherwise, I'll just stick to my perishable food.
Why would it make you fatter? If it's only delivering vitamins and trace compounds, your body will be burning fat for energy, but not suffering from malnutrition.
It's a major design flaw in humans that we can store energy as fat(mass storage) and glycogen (like a proxy cache, keeps fuel close to your muscles) but we cannot store various compounds (mostly vitamins and minerals) that are required to metabolize food and use raw materials (proteins) to perform repairs and maintenance. It is perfectly possible to have ample energy availble but still starve to death!
I just want a caffeine patch. - Well, maybe a junk food patch. I can see this.
Look, I'm a Brit, and if there's one thing we British know, it's how to conquer a planet and rule it for two centuries without really trying. These patches are a bad idea. The British Army marches on fried sausages, fried bacon, black pudding, fried bread, fried tomatoes, fried eggs and Earl Grey tea. The French Army, who also did a fairly good job of conquering things, marched on croissants, black coffee and Gitanes.
Do you really think the American Empire will survive if you make your troops use patches instead of real food? Whoever invented these should be court-martialled.
Memory fails me at the moment, but the man who developed the whole concept of relational databases... worked at IBM as I recall, and cape up with the concept of ACID: Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable.
Ted Codd.
We spend most of our lives either at work or laying in bed, so why not put a littl effort into having a nice bed?
Absolutely. You should spend your money on your bed and your boots because if you're not in one you'll be in the other. And the rest on beer.
. Not computer hardware but software. I was thinking Von Neumann, and Linus Torvalds would find a mention
Linus Torvalds should not be on such a list. Tananbaum was wrong to say that Linux is obsolete, but he was correct that it is of little academic interest. Linus' skill is not in innovation, it is in execution and dare I say it, project management.
Von Nuemann and the others you mentioned were theorists, people on the science side of computer science, who developed new theories. They changed the way people think about the whole field.
For starters, it's none of the companies business whom your relatives work for. Second, it is vague as almost *any* company could be considered to potentially have *some* business relationship with your company, especially if you are bug (for example Microsoft). Third, are you personally supposed to keep track of your relatives and their job changes?
Actually, I'm pretty certain that company directors are already bound by such rules to prevent insider trading.
Remember, it doesn't prohibit you from doing business with your brother. It merely forces you to ensure that you don't favour your brother over a better vendor. Everyone wins, apart from nepotists. Worried that your boss will hire his idiot son? Rules like this protect you too.
Then how do you think this country functioned in the decades before corporations were granted the majority of the immunities they currently enjoy?
Well, if someone had something you wanted, you shot them and took it. It's how the West was won, John Wayne. I'll take the present convention of lawyers being rude to one another in court, less messy.
I imagine the real bugger with this, assuming the technology ever works and takes off, would be the cost of the file you print from! Imagine the complexity of the information required to print a working gadget, like that. And there'd also be some charge for the labor needed to design the file in whatever CAD-esque program becomes available for it.
Why? Every industrial product already exists in a CAD file. The process of converting it into a 3D representation is no more complex than your printer converting PostScript to a printed page. The hard part is the actual printing in 3D.
It saddens me to think that people have been conditioned to think this way. Saddens and sickens me.
If you believe that companies should not be allowed to fire workers when times are tough, then you must also believe that employees shouldn't be allowed to quit when they get a better offer. They're two sides of the same coin.
After someone on the NTSysAdmin List suggested trying to set the CPU priority to low from the command line, I investigated and found a small freeware that did the trick: PrioSet.
/? into the prompt - it can start processes at different priorities. So you can replace direct shortcuts to your applications with .bat files that in fact start the application at a different priority.
Type start
One company I worked for had layoffs in December one year. The following February, the CEO said in a webcast to the whole company that if business didn't pick up there would be more layoffs the following May. Maybe he intended it to scare everyone into working harder, but the result was productivity went through the floor as most employees did one or both of a) sending out resumes, networking and interviewing full time or b) scheming to get laid off and collect a severance package. Everyone helped themselves to office supplies and used the printers, fax machines and phones for job hunting. Many employees openly referred to the office as "job club" (in the UK that is the term for a government-run employment agency) and getting laid off as "hitting the jackpot".
That round, the second, really broke the back of the company since by happenstance or their own design, most of the "heavy lifters" were gone. Not just the tech elite, but the MBAs too. Next September there was a third, not long after that a fourth, then I stopped bothering to keep track.
Lessons learnt:
It's funny how things go around. The "vibe" at the time was almost the same as the vibe at the IPO - like a party. People who got kept their jobs were the most depressed, the people who got laid off felt they'd been freed!
Companies aren't and shouldn't be loyal to their employees when times are tough--
Agreed. After all, employees are always disloyal to employers when a better offer comes along. Loyalty only makes sense when the interests of both counterparties are aligned.
First, there is the connection between chipsets on the motherboard. AMD's Hypertransport and others could make big differences on overall motherboard speed.
Second, system memory speeds are getting quite a bit faster, too. Developments in DDR-SDRAM technology could eventually result in throughput 2-3 times what we have now with DDR333 technology.
Third, expansion slots are getting faster, too. There are now standards upcoming for both PCI and AGP that will substantially increase data throughput on expansion slots.
Catching up, you mean. Have a google for words like "xbow" "UPA" and "XIO". The whole x86 architecture is massively unbalanced. That's why for serious computing you still need a proper workstation.
I don't believe that you are actually correct. Not sure though. But I think that the president needs to support the treaty as well as get a 2/3 vote of the senate.
What's interesting is that 34 Senators could vote for Kyoto and get some political mileage for being "green", but there's no real danger of it ever signed into law.
IMHO the Kyoto treaty is flawed. How can Western politicians simultaneously argue that developing nations should get excemptions for economic reasons, yet Western nations will not suffer economically? If Kyoto is to be ratified it must bind not only those nations who are producing pollution but have plateaued, but those whose rate of pollution is lower right now, but accelerating.
I don't see any reason to play diplomatic games with you. I'm the big wheel, and I don't need to be polite
Clinton did try to force Kyoto through, but that's not really possible without a change in the law and maybe the Constitution itself. The Founding Fathers were serious when they created the checks and balances and divided power amongst the branches of government.
OTOH, Bush's internal policy seems a direct attack on the constitution. He seems to be paranoid occilitating between delusions of grandeur and delusions of persecution. This is not good in a head of state. In fact it's mind-bogglingly dangerous.
I agree with you here. But defending the Constitution is Job #1 - that's the President's foremost responsibility. The military swear to defend the Constitution against all threats, foreign and domestic. A greater conspiracy theorist than I might suggest Bush and Cheney are making sure the military is busy while they make their changes back home.