You'd argue that all government is bad government, but if you look around, any reasonable person will see that argument is nonsense. Only ideologues maintain that government is always the problem.
Has the thought ever occurred to you that some of us may see the expansion of government as evidence of a decline in society? It's like public schools in inner cities. Why are the expensive? It's because they are the only institution with money and so everyone hangs their hat on them. You can either underfund them and watch the kids suffer, because the community basically holds the kids hostage, or you can try and clear out the neighborhood leadership and get some business friendly people in there so that schools aren't the whole economy, or you can just throw money at it. Guess which option America does?
One line going down killing power for millions and affecting hundreds of power generation stations? That's a design flaw so big the federal governemnt would be within its rights to nationalize the entire power grid to sort that out
If the Federal Government were as competent as the electric industry, we might have won a war since World War II, had a balanced budget since Viet Nam, maybe not had two shuttles burn up or blow up, a few subs get crushed, spilled nuclear stuff all over the country trying to make a bomb, doled out dodgy flu vaccines... and that's really just to start.
One line goes down? OK, that happen
It wasn't just any line...
I'd file charges of negligent homicide against every CEO
GO right ahead, but I want to the right to sue the Federal Government for every time -it- fails. In fact, I would like a simple refund in my taxes every time I hit a bump in the road.
I haven't had the opportunity to work with it hands-on myself yet, just watch other people with the new gear and drool
Don't know that much about it myself. I've been out of the industry now for about three years.. I really do miss it though. There's something special about keeping the lights on.
That blackout was caused by Ohio utilities not having a good vegetation program and was ultimately a physical failure. If you want to guard against THAT sort of failure, then you need to have redundant transmission and generation. Good luck getting the greens to go with that.
Surely this problem was addressed in the 1960s or 1970s in the mainframe world, yet I've not heard much in the way of lessons we can apply to today's PC-type OSes.
Could be tough. Have computer in physically sealed room, only communicate with dumb terminals.
Yeah but this is something the compiler can fix behind the scenes for you. I mean, if they can have WCF built on top of a few attributes, they can have a string that you can just use.
I would say that threats to the power grid tend to be overstated.
a) Power grids in the USA are regional affairs, so, the worst that can happen is one section of the country might get whacked. b) Power companies frequently operate their own private physical networks for control... at least, that's the way it was in the early 2000's when I was into it. Our company had built their own private fiber optic loop. c) Extremely critical stuff is done with a phone call by people that know each other. Like, "turn the generator off", is something done not so automatically. d) There are loads of incompatible stuff out there in the field for remote control and SCADA. So, if you could go out there, and tell every customer to turn off all their equipment, remotely, you'd be so rich from just building a product that could do that, you would not want to go to jail, when you could be a billionaire. Just reading a power meter has dozens of protocols, formats, etc, and many of them are actually just wired up with a dumb phone line.
It's not impossible, I'm sure.. but, its not like hacking into a machine knowing that its running either Linux / Apache or Windows / IIS and going from there. All these pieces of embedded equipment have their own stuff, and the knowledge tends to be very specialized.
Why would anyone be shocked by something like this? It's not like it hasn't happened before. One thing about LIberals and Conservatives, they both like control. Their idealogies may not be the same but their methods aren't that different.
I would argue that everyone likes control, but if there is one thing conservatives and liberals can agree on, it is that republicans are not conservatives and democrats are not liberals, despite our flamewars to the contrary.
Because Obama personally ordered this? If you knew anything about the US system of governance, you'd know that the Judiciary is separate from the Executive.
Judiciary is the court. Dept of Justice is the Executive. Obviously, the government is a problem, no matter who runs it. I never understood why so many right wingers supported this sort of nonsense.
The irony is, if the right wing actually supported the left on some of their basic rights issues, they would get another break on government power.
The general worry of poor treatment of science is a valid one
you have to be careful to not generalize. Biology isn't something the right is interested in, unless it can produce new drugs, in which case, drug companies should pay for it, not the US taxpayer. In any case, modern medicine is backsliding anyway as diseases evolve faster than doctors can keep up. People do not have faith in the medical system and that really undermines biology.
But in the case of physics research, aeronautics, and space flight, you'd find way more votes on the right wing, than the left, for sure.
The bible belt is becoming more influential because it has more money. Northern liberals have been foolishly dismissing the bible belt as stupid now for 50 years and really at their own peril, for, while they have done so, the bible belt has utterly stacked the deck of American commercial policy to its advantage. The bible belt needs protectionist food, and free trade goods, so it can import cheap tools and labors to sell crops to a captive market, and lo, what is American trade policy? Gee... we write GM bailout size checks to American farmers every year and no one complains, because the bible belt has us convinced that this glaring exception to the free trade they advocate is not an exception at all.
There's a committed portion of the US population who don't need to "head..towards understanding the origins of life" because they are absolutely certain that they know exactly how life came about because some Bronze Age scroll tells them so. They're not going to take kindly to anything that could challenge their certainty.
Actually, you are totally wrong with this one. The very idea that man can create life would bolster, in their mind, that an intelligent being did in fact make all life. It's somewhat difficult to argue against the creation of life by intelligent means, when everyone will be able to dial up a new form of life with their cell phones at some point.
Christianity has a gnostic influence: there is that element that we all have it within us to be a God, if we only could unlock the secrets, and part of Christ's mission was to share them. It's that "with faith, man could move mountains", quote from Christ, and the idea that people could work miracles as God does because we are in his image. So, things like ESP, enhanced mind powers, exotic research into the origins of life, and yes, even funding for exotic physics, can and does certainly interest the right wing.
Look at which political parties actually fund advanced sciences. Sure, Democrats are in there with stem cells, but its Republicans that have, as of late, come through with money for laser research, tried to build a super conducting super collider, want to research new nuclear stuff, put the idea of building a permanent man in space. There are religious values driving both. Democrats would prefer to spend money on more basic, earthbound problems, and always wrestle with killing research and exploration to feed the poor, but Republicans, well, don't have that conflict.
It wasn't until the 1950s, I believe, that scientists began to realize that Venus and Mars were both utterly inhospitable. Indeed, the first Mariner photographs of Mars, that showed it to be almost moonlike, blasted with craters and seemingly ancient and dead, came as something of a shock to the academic community.
And secondly: Well, the socialists deliberately derailed the economy so that they can get elected
Well, the left has been bitching about corporations now for how many years, arguing the gov't should run the economy? So, they get into power, and a bunch of corporations suddenly go belly up, and now, socialists really don't want to take over the economy? It's absurd.
Face it, every time the left passes a regulation that might harm economic activity in the private sector, it doesn't matter to the left, because, they will wind up taking over that sector anyway.
It'd never make it. It'd be dismissed pretty much instantly. There's no protected class of "conservative", and being listed on Google isn't a protected right.
Would, or rather, should be, that Google's network belongs to Google and employing the government to force it to show Fox would in fact be a sort of socialism.
The problem with techies, they need to learn to think like a businessman. We control the information, get it together techies!
And that's the whole problem with techies. They think they control something because they provide a pipeline, but its the content that flows through the pipeline that is valuable, not the pipe itself. The techy value system is an empty railroad roaming the nation without any freight.
Is that you can think of a non-deterministic machine as the inverse of a deterministic machine. For my own education into the problem, I wrote a program that simulated an instruction set running backwards, but in the complete set sense.
So, if I put in a program to multiply, I could feed it two inputs A and B and get the multiplied value C. If I supplied C, the machine would be crunched "backwards" to get the various possibilities of A and B. Of course, in order for this to work without an explosion of possibilities, you would need a "magic" engine that knows the exact choice needed to arrive at a correct answer A and B at each step of the machine.
The next plan would have been to see if it were possible, given the bits of the solution set of C, and the engine, and the known symbols, to construct an uber table that can look up each of the steps of the engine... Now, how does one build that magic engine? That was what seemed to me the crux of the whole problem and unfortunately I got frustrated with it and walked away about a year. The whole mess is in source forge...
Slashdot Mirror
What people don't realize is that this study was funded by companies that produce black holes.
Seriously, how is the idea of Microsoft editions of Linux a troll. I'd say this should be +5 Funny.
You'd argue that all government is bad government, but if you look around, any reasonable person will see that argument is nonsense. Only ideologues maintain that government is always the problem.
Has the thought ever occurred to you that some of us may see the expansion of government as evidence of a decline in society? It's like public schools in inner cities. Why are the expensive? It's because they are the only institution with money and so everyone hangs their hat on them. You can either underfund them and watch the kids suffer, because the community basically holds the kids hostage, or you can try and clear out the neighborhood leadership and get some business friendly people in there so that schools aren't the whole economy, or you can just throw money at it. Guess which option America does?
One line going down killing power for millions and affecting hundreds of power generation stations? That's a design flaw so big the federal governemnt would be within its rights to nationalize the entire power grid to sort that out
If the Federal Government were as competent as the electric industry, we might have won a war since World War II, had a balanced budget since Viet Nam, maybe not had two shuttles burn up or blow up, a few subs get crushed, spilled nuclear stuff all over the country trying to make a bomb, doled out dodgy flu vaccines... and that's really just to start.
One line goes down? OK, that happen
It wasn't just any line...
I'd file charges of negligent homicide against every CEO
GO right ahead, but I want to the right to sue the Federal Government for every time -it- fails. In fact, I would like a simple refund in my taxes every time I hit a bump in the road.
I haven't had the opportunity to work with it hands-on myself yet, just watch other people with the new gear and drool
Don't know that much about it myself. I've been out of the industry now for about three years.. I really do miss it though. There's something special about keeping the lights on.
He was also a polymath.
And a poly-woman, for sure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Blackout_of_2003 [wikipedia.org]
That blackout was caused by Ohio utilities not having a good vegetation program and was ultimately a physical failure. If you want to guard against THAT sort of failure, then you need to have redundant transmission and generation. Good luck getting the greens to go with that.
Surely this problem was addressed in the 1960s or 1970s in the mainframe world, yet I've not heard much in the way of lessons we can apply to today's PC-type OSes.
Could be tough. Have computer in physically sealed room, only communicate with dumb terminals.
It wasn't Jefferson, it was Franklin
Yeah but this is something the compiler can fix behind the scenes for you. I mean, if they can have WCF built on top of a few attributes, they can have a string that you can just use.
I would say that threats to the power grid tend to be overstated.
a) Power grids in the USA are regional affairs, so, the worst that can happen is one section of the country might get whacked.
b) Power companies frequently operate their own private physical networks for control... at least, that's the way it was in the early 2000's when I was into it. Our company had built their own private fiber optic loop.
c) Extremely critical stuff is done with a phone call by people that know each other. Like, "turn the generator off", is something done not so automatically.
d) There are loads of incompatible stuff out there in the field for remote control and SCADA. So, if you could go out there, and tell every customer to turn off all their equipment, remotely, you'd be so rich from just building a product that could do that, you would not want to go to jail, when you could be a billionaire. Just reading a power meter has dozens of protocols, formats, etc, and many of them are actually just wired up with a dumb phone line.
It's not impossible, I'm sure.. but, its not like hacking into a machine knowing that its running either Linux / Apache or Windows / IIS and going from there. All these pieces of embedded equipment have their own stuff, and the knowledge tends to be very specialized.
and have the pleasure of intellisense adding stuff like String.Format...
I'll take fmt any day of the week.
Why would anyone be shocked by something like this? It's not like it hasn't happened before. One thing about LIberals and Conservatives, they both like control. Their idealogies may not be the same but their methods aren't that different.
I would argue that everyone likes control, but if there is one thing conservatives and liberals can agree on, it is that republicans are not conservatives and democrats are not liberals, despite our flamewars to the contrary.
Because Obama personally ordered this? If you knew anything about the US system of governance, you'd know that the Judiciary is separate from the Executive.
Judiciary is the court. Dept of Justice is the Executive. Obviously, the government is a problem, no matter who runs it. I never understood why so many right wingers supported this sort of nonsense.
The irony is, if the right wing actually supported the left on some of their basic rights issues, they would get another break on government power.
I guess Michele Bachmann or Sean Hannity is your idea of "enhanced mind powers". They better ask for their money back.
Let's see. How much is Sean Hannity worth these days?
Your car has an exploit, so I stole it and drove it into a wall to prove a point.
The general worry of poor treatment of science is a valid one
you have to be careful to not generalize. Biology isn't something the right is interested in, unless it can produce new drugs, in which case, drug companies should pay for it, not the US taxpayer. In any case, modern medicine is backsliding anyway as diseases evolve faster than doctors can keep up. People do not have faith in the medical system and that really undermines biology.
But in the case of physics research, aeronautics, and space flight, you'd find way more votes on the right wing, than the left, for sure.
The bible belt is becoming more influential because it has more money. Northern liberals have been foolishly dismissing the bible belt as stupid now for 50 years and really at their own peril, for, while they have done so, the bible belt has utterly stacked the deck of American commercial policy to its advantage. The bible belt needs protectionist food, and free trade goods, so it can import cheap tools and labors to sell crops to a captive market, and lo, what is American trade policy? Gee... we write GM bailout size checks to American farmers every year and no one complains, because the bible belt has us convinced that this glaring exception to the free trade they advocate is not an exception at all.
There's a committed portion of the US population who don't need to "head..towards understanding the origins of life" because they are absolutely certain that they know exactly how life came about because some Bronze Age scroll tells them so. They're not going to take kindly to anything that could challenge their certainty.
Actually, you are totally wrong with this one. The very idea that man can create life would bolster, in their mind, that an intelligent being did in fact make all life. It's somewhat difficult to argue against the creation of life by intelligent means, when everyone will be able to dial up a new form of life with their cell phones at some point.
Christianity has a gnostic influence: there is that element that we all have it within us to be a God, if we only could unlock the secrets, and part of Christ's mission was to share them. It's that "with faith, man could move mountains", quote from Christ, and the idea that people could work miracles as God does because we are in his image. So, things like ESP, enhanced mind powers, exotic research into the origins of life, and yes, even funding for exotic physics, can and does certainly interest the right wing.
Look at which political parties actually fund advanced sciences. Sure, Democrats are in there with stem cells, but its Republicans that have, as of late, come through with money for laser research, tried to build a super conducting super collider, want to research new nuclear stuff, put the idea of building a permanent man in space. There are religious values driving both. Democrats would prefer to spend money on more basic, earthbound problems, and always wrestle with killing research and exploration to feed the poor, but Republicans, well, don't have that conflict.
It wasn't until the 1950s, I believe, that scientists began to realize that Venus and Mars were both utterly inhospitable. Indeed, the first Mariner photographs of Mars, that showed it to be almost moonlike, blasted with craters and seemingly ancient and dead, came as something of a shock to the academic community.
And secondly: Well, the socialists deliberately derailed the economy so that they can get elected
Well, the left has been bitching about corporations now for how many years, arguing the gov't should run the economy? So, they get into power, and a bunch of corporations suddenly go belly up, and now, socialists really don't want to take over the economy? It's absurd.
Face it, every time the left passes a regulation that might harm economic activity in the private sector, it doesn't matter to the left, because, they will wind up taking over that sector anyway.
Coast to Coast AM wouldn't even touch that one.
Just being ahead of the curve.
It'd never make it. It'd be dismissed pretty much instantly. There's no protected class of "conservative", and being listed on Google isn't a protected right.
Would, or rather, should be, that Google's network belongs to Google and employing the government to force it to show Fox would in fact be a sort of socialism.
The problem with techies, they need to learn to think like a businessman. We control the information, get it together techies!
And that's the whole problem with techies. They think they control something because they provide a pipeline, but its the content that flows through the pipeline that is valuable, not the pipe itself. The techy value system is an empty railroad roaming the nation without any freight.
Is that you can think of a non-deterministic machine as the inverse of a deterministic machine. For my own education into the problem, I wrote a program that simulated an instruction set running backwards, but in the complete set sense.
So, if I put in a program to multiply, I could feed it two inputs A and B and get the multiplied value C. If I supplied C, the machine would be crunched "backwards" to get the various possibilities of A and B. Of course, in order for this to work without an explosion of possibilities, you would need a "magic" engine that knows the exact choice needed to arrive at a correct answer A and B at each step of the machine.
The next plan would have been to see if it were possible, given the bits of the solution set of C, and the engine, and the known symbols, to construct an uber table that can look up each of the steps of the engine... Now, how does one build that magic engine? That was what seemed to me the crux of the whole problem and unfortunately I got frustrated with it and walked away about a year. The whole mess is in source forge...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bicomp/
I feel a round 2, coming on.