Actually, in all seriousness, why should the United States want to even be allied to France and Germany? Russia has proven herself as repeatedly clever, tough, and capable over the last 60 years. What have the French proven? Or the Germans? Russia has a huge landmass, a large and bright population, a stupendous record of military and scientific achievement despite extreme poverty. I'd say the Russians have it all over the Europeans. If we in the USA have to be allied to anybody overseas, I'd say we should hop into bed with the Russians. Scrap NATO, let's have US + Russia!
Let me run some names past you and see if you get it: Kursk, Stalingrad, Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev. In each of those places and countless others Russia lost more men and continued fighting the Nazis than France did prior to its surrender.
The Soviet alliance with the Nazis at the beginning of the war, a temporary affair by any historical record, is completely forgiven by the twenty million russian men and women that died fighting the Nazis during World War II. In nearly every unit of military measure the Russians bore the greatest brunt and made the deepest sacrifices in fighting the Nazis.
At the end of the day, the Russians were with the US fighting the Nazis, and the French were not. The French may have a heritage of liberty, but, the Russians, because of their sacrifices and courage, their scientific achievement, offer the potential to be a better ally and better friend than any western european power.
The point that I am trying to make, is that, having fought the cold war with the russians we as Americans learned a lot about them and in many ways have come to love them. While western Europe is barely capable of American respect (with the notable exception of the UK), the Russians have earned American respect in spades. Given that the United States and Russia were able to be fairly effective allies in World War II, one has to think, as an American, if Russia is the place for the Americans to make true alliances with, rather than the French and Germans.
It's not really about efficiency per se, it's more the raw $/mwhr cost of a gas plant tends to be better than an oil plant. Natural gas tends to be fairly cheap and oil is expensive. At some point, efficiencies give way to the raw cost of the fuel. Nuclear power plants are still the best though.
Let Brussels do its own security and get US troops out of NATO. Instead of constantly trying to make the French happy, form a new military alliance consisting of Russia, Great Britian, and probably Poland. By the way, we'll sell Poland the h-bomb.
Rumsfeld makes one comment about "old Europe", which is entirely accurate because of falling french and german populations, and it causes a transatlantic uproar. Meanwhile, Chirac and Shroeder criss cross the globe bashing America at every possible opportunity, and we're supposed to take that. It's total BS. The best thing for America to do would be to completely withdraw from NATO and announce to the world that European security is no longer a priority, then, hop into bed with Russia. You know, that country that actually didn't cave into the Nazis the way the France did.
The only reason to read a newspaper is read the columnists and local sports, and those you can get online.
The actual news is Associated Press anyway (look at the bylines) and so often the same story just gets repeated. Those same feeds are also picked up by the TV syndicates, and they are doing a great job on the web. For real news, Fox, CNN, MSNBC web sites are just killing print. If I want diversity, I can check out the web sites for anything from Al Jazeera to the Wall Street Journal. The automotive section of most newspapers fails compared to dedicated content like C&D, Motortrend, or Autoweek online.
I have a client that is a very large utility, and the engineers that work the plants are old school, by the book, calculators for woosies I can take a derivitive in my head types. They don't compromise safety and they go by the -book- on everything. Every time I talk to these guys I'm filled with the greatest of admiration.
The real question is, how many effective words does that add to a language? We can, as an attacker, build a grammar generator and acronym extractor.
Let's say you already have a dictionary, as an attacker. You've got all the words already and hopefully you have them coded by part of speech. Then, from there, you can apply some common grammatical rules to generate sentences.
S -> I Verb a Noun S -> Noun Verb Adverb
This does explode the amount of searching an attacker must do, but the attacker could do some human engineering and weight the search towards common forms first. The resulting attack would be much, much less than just iterating through every combination of character in an 8 character string.
Telling people to not use whole words as passwords because they might be included in dictionary searches seems like it might be a good idea, but the problem is that you usually wind up giving people an algorithm for password generation that might actually yield an even worse password. Where I work at, for example, the suggested practice is to use acronyms followed by numbers. You remember a pet phrase and extract out the acronym. "Eagles Will Beat the Cowboys on Sunday" might become ewbtcos42, some random number after that. Sounds good, but what's to stop an attacker from including acronyms based on common english phrases in an attack dictionary?
The 1917 telegram was a forgery, I do believe, or, in the very least, it was well done leak by the British. Chirac and Schroeder were both criticizing the USA before Bush was even elected, and he only served to reinforce their own message that America is a threat so that they can have their own brand of nationalism. It's laughable when you think about it, like, geez, what are we going to do do, conquer Europe? We already did and our troops are still there, and we're actually trying to -get out-.
England, UK, GB? Yeah, mixing England and the UK is bad but it is often American slang to use English to describe the whole island and then take Ireland as a separate entity, all of this despite having many people in the USA who are adamantly of scottish descent and have very mixed feelings about that, as if it mattered. But conversely most Europeans mix up the states a lot as well. They form their perceptions about America as if it were all a subset of New York.
Counterweight means rival. That's just the way it is. It doesn't mean that there has to be some sort of a stupid showdown, but the Euros need to stop mincing words and admit that they are rivals.
In my mind, it's simple enough. If Germany and France were American allies, they would be with us in Iraq, and they are not. You can say Iraq is an American mistake, and Europe doesn't need to participate, but, by the same token, World War I and World War II were European mistakes and the USA still participated. So I would say that the British are American allies, as are the Australian and other members of the coalition, but, the Germans and the French are not allies, just close friends.
Saying Chirac is not running on an anti-american platform in France is ridiculous. When he went on an Asian tour, he said that American culture is polluting the world. He then went further, and demanded that weapons sanctions be lifted off of China. That really helps us out in the States, since we're on the hook to defend Taiwan and Japan. And now Germany too has said that it wants to sell weapons to China. Thank god for the Dutch and British putting the kaibosh on that in the EU.
Well, in fairness, it was a bidirectional thing. Basically, what happened was that after World War I, the Grand Fleet was being cut down while at the same time the Americans embarked on a huge battleship construction program. This in turn led the British to revise their own building schedule and resume building battleships of their own.
The British jealously guarded their right to be on the high seas, saw an expanding America as a threat. Both the USA and UK were putting together war plans. Yes, the USA was thinking about invading Canada as an opening move in a war with Britian.
Fortunately for both Amerians and British alike, cooler heads realized that a battleship race between Britian and Germany was an underlying cause of World War I, and so it seemed awefully silly to repeat the same mistakes. So the Americans and British sat down and came up with the Washington Treaty, which limited the number of battleships in both navies.
After World War II, NATO, which, with respect to the Navy, was basically just the USA, with the UK as a vital but junior partner, embarked on a policy to ensure that no nation actually owned the seas. Eventually the British downsized their navy as a result of a famous 1960s paper that said the H-bomb made Navy's obsolete, but the USA did not. So right now the world's right to trade on the high seas is essentially the result of Pax Americana.
I read somewhere once that the original arctic explorers had to consume 10-15kcal/day simply because it was so cold that their bodies were on overdrive to stay warm.
A couple of quick disagreements. First off, you can't say that sex doesn't have societal consequences. In fact, if there is any single activity that does have societal implications, it's sex. Sex is how the species reproduces itself. The outcome of a sexual relationship significantly colors one's view of the world, and the social impact is vast. Too much of an obsession with sex can destroy a family, as can too little.
The only reason we view sex as harmless is because the aggregate perceptions of our lifestyle have never been seriously examined, because we -want- sex to be viewed as harmless. But it isn't. Not at all.
Since abstinence education doesn't work, wouldn't the more enlightened way to curb gun violence be to have gun training programs at every high school, and teach people how to be responsible assault rifle owners?
See I lived in downtown Philly. Center City. And before that, I lived in Cleveland. I grew up in the burbs in tract housing, and I live in a townhouse now. So I'm -due- for the stix. By stix, I mean, I want to go outside and see the stars at night.
BS^2. I used to support the Palestinian cause, but then Arafat walked out of Camp David with a pretty sweet deal and started the Intifadah. Then, having trashed getting a Palestinian state that they claimed to wanted, the Palestinians danced in the streets to celebrate Sept 11th. My gut reaction then, was, not "oh dear, why do they hate us", but, "they hate us, kill them all."
Just read a Palestinian newspaper and see for yourself. American devils, jackals, demon consorters, I've seen enough and heard it all. It's time to let Israel evacuate Gaza and unilaterally declare a Palestinian state, and if those bomb wearing fools in the middle east can't run it, then to hell with them.
I did the city thing for a while but eventually the noise just drove me nuts. Yeah, walking around outside to get to bars is nice in your twenties. But, now that I'm old, I prefer to putter around in back yard than I do to go out. For commuting to work, I have a 2004 Pontiac GTO and take twisty back roads. Believe me, I don't mind the drive at all!
The average American McMansion has around 2500 sq feet and practically an acre of land. I doubt most people in Japan have that much real estate. After all, didn't Japan pioneer those hotels that are just little cubes you can barely fit in? Yeah, Americans like their technology, but they loved having big houses and lots of land even more.
I was stressing out when I wrote it. My wife is pregnant and it's budget time. If I was 22 and single, I would be less apprehensive about it. For me, for us, I think the equation is, to be on the side producing software for sale rather than being on the corporate consuming side. Corporate contracts are going to go to the lowest bidder, but, given that corporations always prefer to buy rather than make, even a slightly pricier niche product that already exists will be competitive with a custom solution with outsourced labor simply because it doesn't have the risks involved in project startup. So the future is in vertical market, integrated solutions. End to end stuff or things that can readily bolt onto an endpoint.
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You're right. I did mean CEV, not CRV. If Rutan can get the contract, that would be cool.
Actually, in all seriousness, why should the United States want to even be allied to France and Germany? Russia has proven herself as repeatedly clever, tough, and capable over the last 60 years. What have the French proven? Or the Germans? Russia has a huge landmass, a large and bright population, a stupendous record of military and scientific achievement despite extreme poverty. I'd say the Russians have it all over the Europeans. If we in the USA have to be allied to anybody overseas, I'd say we should hop into bed with the Russians. Scrap NATO, let's have US + Russia!
Let me run some names past you and see if you get it: Kursk, Stalingrad, Moscow, Kharkov, Kiev. In each of those places and countless others Russia lost more men and continued fighting the Nazis than France did prior to its surrender.
The Soviet alliance with the Nazis at the beginning of the war, a temporary affair by any historical record, is completely forgiven by the twenty million russian men and women that died fighting the Nazis during World War II. In nearly every unit of military measure the Russians bore the greatest brunt and made the deepest sacrifices in fighting the Nazis.
At the end of the day, the Russians were with the US fighting the Nazis, and the French were not. The French may have a heritage of liberty, but, the Russians, because of their sacrifices and courage, their scientific achievement, offer the potential to be a better ally and better friend than any western european power.
The point that I am trying to make, is that, having fought the cold war with the russians we as Americans learned a lot about them and in many ways have come to love them. While western Europe is barely capable of American respect (with the notable exception of the UK), the Russians have earned American respect in spades. Given that the United States and Russia were able to be fairly effective allies in World War II, one has to think, as an American, if Russia is the place for the Americans to make true alliances with, rather than the French and Germans.
I thought O'Keefe's aggressive reinstatement of the Prometheus project, his commitment to the CRV, were all right on the money.
It's not really about efficiency per se, it's more the raw $/mwhr cost of a gas plant tends to be better than an oil plant. Natural gas tends to be fairly cheap and oil is expensive. At some point, efficiencies give way to the raw cost of the fuel. Nuclear power plants are still the best though.
Let Brussels do its own security and get US troops out of NATO. Instead of constantly trying to make the French happy, form a new military alliance consisting of Russia, Great Britian, and probably Poland. By the way, we'll sell Poland the h-bomb.
Rumsfeld makes one comment about "old Europe", which is entirely accurate because of falling french and german populations, and it causes a transatlantic uproar. Meanwhile, Chirac and Shroeder criss cross the globe bashing America at every possible opportunity, and we're supposed to take that. It's total BS. The best thing for America to do would be to completely withdraw from NATO and announce to the world that European security is no longer a priority, then, hop into bed with Russia. You know, that country that actually didn't cave into the Nazis the way the France did.
The only reason to read a newspaper is read the columnists and local sports, and those you can get online.
The actual news is Associated Press anyway (look at the bylines) and so often the same story just gets repeated. Those same feeds are also picked up by the TV syndicates, and they are doing a great job on the web. For real news, Fox, CNN, MSNBC web sites are just killing print. If I want diversity, I can check out the web sites for anything from Al Jazeera to the Wall Street Journal. The automotive section of most newspapers fails compared to dedicated content like C&D, Motortrend, or Autoweek online.
Unfortunately I cannot do that because I am contractually bound to not discuss the company and its affairs online.
I have a client that is a very large utility, and the engineers that work the plants are old school, by the book, calculators for woosies I can take a derivitive in my head types. They don't compromise safety and they go by the -book- on everything. Every time I talk to these guys I'm filled with the greatest of admiration.
The real question is, how many effective words does that add to a language? We can, as an attacker, build a grammar generator and acronym extractor.
Let's say you already have a dictionary, as an attacker. You've got all the words already and hopefully you have them coded by part of speech. Then, from there, you can apply some common grammatical rules to generate sentences.
S -> I Verb a Noun
S -> Noun Verb Adverb
This does explode the amount of searching an attacker must do, but the attacker could do some human engineering and weight the search towards common forms first. The resulting attack would be much, much less than just iterating through every combination of character in an 8 character string.
Telling people to not use whole words as passwords because they might be included in dictionary searches seems like it might be a good idea, but the problem is that you usually wind up giving people an algorithm for password generation that might actually yield an even worse password. Where I work at, for example, the suggested practice is to use acronyms followed by numbers. You remember a pet phrase and extract out the acronym. "Eagles Will Beat the Cowboys on Sunday" might become ewbtcos42, some random number after that. Sounds good, but what's to stop an attacker from including acronyms based on common english phrases in an attack dictionary?
The 1917 telegram was a forgery, I do believe, or, in the very least, it was well done leak by the British. Chirac and Schroeder were both criticizing the USA before Bush was even elected, and he only served to reinforce their own message that America is a threat so that they can have their own brand of nationalism. It's laughable when you think about it, like, geez, what are we going to do do, conquer Europe? We already did and our troops are still there, and we're actually trying to -get out-.
England, UK, GB? Yeah, mixing England and the UK is bad but it is often American slang to use English to describe the whole island and then take Ireland as a separate entity, all of this despite having many people in the USA who are adamantly of scottish descent and have very mixed feelings about that, as if it mattered. But conversely most Europeans mix up the states a lot as well. They form their perceptions about America as if it were all a subset of New York.
Counterweight means rival. That's just the way it is. It doesn't mean that there has to be some sort of a stupid showdown, but the Euros need to stop mincing words and admit that they are rivals.
In my mind, it's simple enough. If Germany and France were American allies, they would be with us in Iraq, and they are not. You can say Iraq is an American mistake, and Europe doesn't need to participate, but, by the same token, World War I and World War II were European mistakes and the USA still participated. So I would say that the British are American allies, as are the Australian and other members of the coalition, but, the Germans and the French are not allies, just close friends.
Saying Chirac is not running on an anti-american platform in France is ridiculous. When he went on an Asian tour, he said that American culture is polluting the world. He then went further, and demanded that weapons sanctions be lifted off of China. That really helps us out in the States, since we're on the hook to defend Taiwan and Japan. And now Germany too has said that it wants to sell weapons to China. Thank god for the Dutch and British putting the kaibosh on that in the EU.
Well, in fairness, it was a bidirectional thing. Basically, what happened was that after World War I, the Grand Fleet was being cut down while at the same time the Americans embarked on a huge battleship construction program. This in turn led the British to revise their own building schedule and resume building battleships of their own.
The British jealously guarded their right to be on the high seas, saw an expanding America as a threat. Both the USA and UK were putting together war plans. Yes, the USA was thinking about invading Canada as an opening move in a war with Britian.
Fortunately for both Amerians and British alike, cooler heads realized that a battleship race between Britian and Germany was an underlying cause of World War I, and so it seemed awefully silly to repeat the same mistakes. So the Americans and British sat down and came up with the Washington Treaty, which limited the number of battleships in both navies.
After World War II, NATO, which, with respect to the Navy, was basically just the USA, with the UK as a vital but junior partner, embarked on a policy to ensure that no nation actually owned the seas. Eventually the British downsized their navy as a result of a famous 1960s paper that said the H-bomb made Navy's obsolete, but the USA did not. So right now the world's right to trade on the high seas is essentially the result of Pax Americana.
I read somewhere once that the original arctic explorers had to consume 10-15kcal/day simply because it was so cold that their bodies were on overdrive to stay warm.
A couple of quick disagreements. First off, you can't say that sex doesn't have societal consequences. In fact, if there is any single activity that does have societal implications, it's sex. Sex is how the species reproduces itself. The outcome of a sexual relationship significantly colors one's view of the world, and the social impact is vast. Too much of an obsession with sex can destroy a family, as can too little.
The only reason we view sex as harmless is because the aggregate perceptions of our lifestyle have never been seriously examined, because we -want- sex to be viewed as harmless. But it isn't. Not at all.
Compared to sex, guns are just toys.
Since abstinence education doesn't work, wouldn't the more enlightened way to curb gun violence be to have gun training programs at every high school, and teach people how to be responsible assault rifle owners?
See I lived in downtown Philly. Center City. And before that, I lived in Cleveland. I grew up in the burbs in tract housing, and I live in a townhouse now. So I'm -due- for the stix. By stix, I mean, I want to go outside and see the stars at night.
BS^2. I used to support the Palestinian cause, but then Arafat walked out of Camp David with a pretty sweet deal and started the Intifadah. Then, having trashed getting a Palestinian state that they claimed to wanted, the Palestinians danced in the streets to celebrate Sept 11th. My gut reaction then, was, not "oh dear, why do they hate us", but, "they hate us, kill them all."
Just read a Palestinian newspaper and see for yourself. American devils, jackals, demon consorters, I've seen enough and heard it all. It's time to let Israel evacuate Gaza and unilaterally declare a Palestinian state, and if those bomb wearing fools in the middle east can't run it, then to hell with them.
If that were the case, then I should be able to fly a giant balloon to 30,000 feet above my house and I most assuredly would be not.
I did the city thing for a while but eventually the noise just drove me nuts. Yeah, walking around outside to get to bars is nice in your twenties. But, now that I'm old, I prefer to putter around in back yard than I do to go out. For commuting to work, I have a 2004 Pontiac GTO and take twisty back roads. Believe me, I don't mind the drive at all!
The average American McMansion has around 2500 sq feet and practically an acre of land. I doubt most people in Japan have that much real estate. After all, didn't Japan pioneer those hotels that are just little cubes you can barely fit in? Yeah, Americans like their technology, but they loved having big houses and lots of land even more.
I was stressing out when I wrote it. My wife is pregnant and it's budget time. If I was 22 and single, I would be less apprehensive about it. For me, for us, I think the equation is, to be on the side producing software for sale rather than being on the corporate consuming side. Corporate contracts are going to go to the lowest bidder, but, given that corporations always prefer to buy rather than make, even a slightly pricier niche product that already exists will be competitive with a custom solution with outsourced labor simply because it doesn't have the risks involved in project startup. So the future is in vertical market, integrated solutions. End to end stuff or things that can readily bolt onto an endpoint.