It's been 20 years since I was in a public school, but I seem to remember them keeping a thing called "attendance" in every class, including homeroom, except that it was done with paper and pencil and was prone to error (my report cards NEVER had attendence columns that made sense).
What's wrong with automating it? What "right" is a kid giving up having the school know where he is? As a parent, I LIKE the idea that my kid can be tracked within a school.
Furthermore, as a parent I think that 2/3s of the problem with our schools is that discipline has gone to hell in a handbasket, and the school knowing where the students are is part of discipline. Even in high school these are still kids with poor judgement and little life experience.
I sometimes wonder if all the hullaballoo about this kind of thing isn't the byproduct of a bunch of high school slashdotters all frothy mouthed about their "rights" (which they largely don't have, except in their imaginations).
I'm kind of waiting for the "DVDShrink" application that runs continuously and keeps my HDD and my Tivo in sync, as well as stripping Tivo's DRM from the files so they can be dumped into DVDs easily, without paying even more for the privilege of burning them to CD.
The thing I like about Shrink is its utter ease of use and single-software solution. Point, click, rip, transcode..
Decrypter *is* nice (I use it for burning my ISOs to -R media), but it doesn't do the transcodes necessary to fit DVD-9s onto -R media. I haven't checked out DVD2One yet, so it may not be a huge deal, but I hate the kind of glued-together solutions of yore that you find at sites like Doom9; 5 different applications, a couple of different codecs, yadda...
I love this application; I can keep my originals safe and secure and use my copies for day-day use. But I read recently that there are some movies that are becoming hard to copy with it and that development of it has stopped.
Will someone be picking up the peices and continuing development, or is something else going to replace it?
Furthermore, I can't believe you tried to compare genocide/mass murder to the presence/lack of Internet access. Either you were trolling (and I took the bait - go me) or you really do believe what you said, in which case your ignorance is astounding. Here is a hint: no one dies from lack of Internet access.
Do I have to spell it out for you? How many fucking Chinese citizens were killed by the Chinese government in Tiananmen Square while advocating for the non-human rights of freedom of expression?
Is that not close enough to "ethnic cleansing"/"genocide"/"mass killing" for you, skippy, or do you need something else? I haven't even brought up the "Great Leap Forward" or any of the other Maoist "innovations".
Keep going, though, you, like so many of your pals, believe that taking away all the small aspects of the big rights is just fine. Keep believing it, as your attitude is giving them all the encouragement they need to take them away.
We can go back in history and include Cambodia, Nazi Germany,...
I guess hatred of America is so strong these days that the Slashbots feel compelled to defend every other government, even some of the most despotic and totalitarian.
That thing kind of reminds me of the old Sniffer cases that in turn reminded me of the old Kaypros; kind of a suitcase-sized (as opposed to this thing's briefcase sized) PC.
I'm surprised no one has made an actual oversized laptop out of one, including the LCD display and some real hardware expansion capability.
Done right, you'd have a great on-site server for testing or crash repairs. You need something sized right to match a real server.
We're not talking here about taking back what was wrongfully taken. Immigrants don't "take" anything; they pay rent for where they live, they work for money, etc.
Yes, all the rich immigrants with doctoral degrees don't take a thing, except maybe for the good spots at the luxury shopping mall.
The illegal immigrants are dirt-poor and eat up tons of public assistance resources (medicare, housing, etc), ruin public school systems by draining always-scarce resources for kids that don't speak English well or at all, haven't had any education, and are unruly and disruptive.
Don't tell me that all they do is come here and work hard and pay taxes.
And don't give me the phony lecture on their "value" to the economy. Black Americans (who live here and have LIVED here for centuries) face a 10% PLUS unemployment rate and a poverty rate that's shameful. If we "need" these immigrants to bus dishes/mow lawns/roof houses, why do we have such outrageous black unemployment? Why would anyone advocate a need for workers if millions of the native-born, English-speaking population were unemployed?
I don't get it; the only thing I can think of is that BUsiness Interests have largely washed their hands of the black population and written them off in exchange for illegal immigrants, and that the Immigration Advocates/Left have decided that while the Black population may suffer economically due to immigration, ultimately "they" will end up with some kind of permanent supermajority that will enable them to implement a socialist system once and for all.
If my parents robbed a bank when I was 6 and we moved into a nice house with all of life's luxuries, but they were ID'd when I was 15 and we had to give up everything and were homeless and penniless, what exactly would you expect or want to happen?
That the gain from breaking the law should be kept because it's a hard world out there?
Much has been made of the "need" for illegal immigrants to have licenses because they drive and help keep the US economy competitive.
We could also be more competitive if we allowed third world working conditions to go with the living conditions, and made sure we enforced those working conditions with an extremely corrupt politico-judicial-military system that enforced said conditions with a barrel of a gun.
We're working on that. We've been doing a *great* job at importing third world workers familiar with and willing to accept as normal third world working and living conditions. All we need to do is relax our labor laws enough to allow businesses to use our increasingly paramilitary law enforcement to break strikes and arrest labor organizers. Since unions and organized labor are all but moribund in this country, no one will stop them.
What's ironic about immigration is that The Left has given the Republicans and their Corporate allies a HUGE economic victory by failing to stop the mass immigration we've been experiencing over the past 10 years.
It's diluted the labor pool and helped keep wages down, but the Left has consistently worked against stricter immigration rules and routinely paints those oppposing mass immigration as ignorant, bigoted, lazy and racist. This is despite the fact that unemployment in the native-born black community hovers around 10-11%.
It sounds conspiratorial, but I think they would rather see both black and white unemployment around 8% instead of pushing black unemployment to 5% by having them do the work we "need" the Mexicans for.
Furthermore, they have openly worked against even deporting those immigrants here illegally, often passing municipal ordinances prohibiting local police from inquiring as to immigration status, trying to block prohibitions on granting driver's licenses and other legal documentation to illegal immigrants, as well as wanting to give an ID issued by a foreign government -- the Matricula Consular, the Mexican-consulate issued ID card -- equal footing with domestic government issued identification, despite the obvious lack of control and verification, not to mention the widespread corruption and criminality that easily penetrates even the President of Mexico's own office.
What's next? Voting privileges, too? Why yes, they HAVE been pushing the very idea that resident aliens should be able to vote, too.
This last bit is the only thing that makes any sense about the Left's support for mass immigration and illegal immigrants, despite the way it shafts domestic workers, particularly low/unskilled minority native-born workers who are the direct competitors to immigrant laborers. They must believe that by flooding America with poor, non-white immigrants that they will once and for all regain the majority electoral status that Nixon's "Silent Majority" strategy robbed them of in the late 1960s when Nixon got disaffected Southeners and socially conservative working class voters to support him over the increasingly radical Democratic party.
I'm sure someone here will accuse me of racism, bigotry or just simple ignorance. I know it's the knee-jerk reaction to someone who hasn't taken the Red Pill and adopted Marxism and Diversity as a religion. But c'mon -- how can you justify mass immigration, repudiation of immigration law by LAW ENFORCEMENT, the economic penalty being paid by labor, especially black labor, not to mention the financial victory to your own sworn enemies on Wall Street and the Republican party?
Imagine what it would be like if, when you were 6 years old, your parents had moved to the US because back in Mexico they had trouble affording a basic life (food, shelter, etc.) 16 years later, you're 22, you went to school, you speak English, you've got a job and friends and a normal life.
You're still an illegal immigrant, you know, and "breaking the law" every day. You're constantly threatened with the idea that you ought to be shipped "back" to Mexico, even though you don't know anyone there, don't remember it at all, and aren't really that good at speaking Spanish.
Tough shit. No, really. Breaking the law has consequences.
Surely selling prescription drugs in any kind of a shady manner (phony perscriptions, no prescriptions, not the drug advertised, etc) across state lines is a serious Federal offense, at least as serious as this drug crime is and should warrant its own Federal task force, RICO prosecutions, and the like.
I wonder why we haven't seen this and it takes MS/Pfizer joining forces to make an issue out of it. Does this make any sense?
Bullshit. You are dead wrong. Israel would not fire on any country that would destroy them in retaliation.
Which is why in 1978, at the height of the cold war, Arab Nationalism and Hussein's military power, the Israelis unilaterally bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor under construction.
The Israelis don't wait for permission, and the Iranians wouldn't be able to fire back -- Israel has top of the line missles and guidance systems, decades of nuclear weapons experience and levels of targeting intelligence that the US only dreams about. Iran would be finished; they lack the sophistication in command and control systems and depth of offensive capability to take a first strike and hit back. On a megaton-for-megaton basis, the *Israelis* can hit the Iranians with more effect than the US can.
And that is what it is all about. Do you really think Iran or N. Korea would not prefer that everyone on the planet dies, rather than their country being conquered?
Mass suicide isn't their dream, it's furthering the 1000 year Kim dynasty. The Iranians are just too rational and also have some questionable internal loyalties among pretty much everyone under the age of 35. It's one thing to get them to go along with Hezbollah's activities in Lebanon; that's just good regional gamesmanship -- getting them to participate in something that could end Persian culture as we know it is quite another.
The third-party strike makes some strategic sense, but it presumes that the third party isn't willing and able to respond in kind.
Tehran would be a finely-glazed parking lot five minutes after even threatening the Israelis with a nuclear strike. It's taking serious diplomatic pressure from the US to keep the Israelis from hitting Iranian facilities *right now*.
I'm also willing to believe that the Chinese would also nuke first and ask questions later, and despite their rhetoric, the French and the British wouldn't take kindly to being targeted, either. You don't just threaten to nuke somebody; even if they agree with your position, you end up risking a retalition simply because the threatened country's internal political situation demands it.
Even the North Koreans have to understand that the nuclear threat doesn't do much for them but greatly increase the likelihood that Kim's dynasty and much of the population will be simply vaporized.
The Iranians are just too smart to pull a stunt like that.
I firmly believe that any "rogue" state threatening nuclear strikes on the US will result in DEFCON-2 and back-channel communications to all major diplomatic contacts that the United States will respond with significant nuclear retaliation to any nuclear strike, and that "...the rest of our nuclear arsenal remains at its fullest readiness." -- a not so subtle reminder that anyone getting in our way should consider whether or not they're willing to trigger a nuclear holocaust.
No state rogue or otherwise will now believe that complying with UN resolutions or appeasing a more powerful enemy will prevent attack.
Rogue states always believed that a mixture of diplomatic stalling (cf. Microsoft Anti-Trust Settlements) and, most importantly, the relatively high cost of ground invasion and the reluctance to do so in a post-Vietnam world, is what protected them.
I also don't believe that posession of a nuclear weapon is a deterrent to any U.S. military action, either, since these states seldom have the means to produce more than a handful of low-yield weapons and lack the ability to deliver them outside their own theater.
They're not defensive weapons unless they can be delivered against their adversary's homeland. You don't nuke your own country as a defensive measure against invading forces. Well you can, but that's like chopping off your leg..
Furthermore these states (with the possible exception of North Korea) are rational actors and realize that the use of any nuclear weapon against the United States or its allies would result in a nucleare retaliation that would end their governments and quite possibly close the book on their nations.
Ebbers and Lay _are_ the victims of antipathy; one's pretty much guaranteed to go to jail, while the other faces a strong possibility of going to jail (depending on how long Bush decides to hold back the justice department).
What differentiates the situations, though, is that Fiorina rammed home a merger that was extremely unpopular (although I believed wise) in addition to overseeing a number of changes to the company that many believed permanently damaged HP's innovation-oriented corporate culture.
In short, she was an "unpopular manager".
Ebbers and Lay were "bad capitalists"; they pursued aggressive and ultimately illegal business activities. Unfortunately, the antipathy towards them makes many other capitalists extremely uncomfortable, as it hits close to home (many businesses pursue an aggressive business and legal strategy, especially tax-wise), and often borrows from the rhetoric of class warfare.
This leads to a certain dampening of the antipathy towards these men, as it invokes a circle-the-wagons reaction. Carly's strategy was never particularly popular, either among HP fans or among investors.
On a Friday I went to Dell's site and specced out a 2U server. On the following Monday I got ahold of a woman from another department and got our company's dell login. I logged in, and the same server was instantly 20% more expensive.
Fortunately I printed the quote from the first one with the component pricing, and when I compared, the new server was uniformly more expensive on a per-component basis; it wasn't like disk or memory something had individually gone up.
I went back and re-quoted as a generic user and the price was still high, although I didn't think to dump any cookies or anything.
I suspected they just were reaming us, despite the fact that we never bought a server from them and we bought a fair number (50?) of PCs per year from them, which should have made us a "priority" customer.
I still don't get the inherent, undeniable privacy risk. I don't have a problem using Bayesian filtering for my email, and THAT requires knowing what's "regular" mail and "irregular" mail.
Couldn't some security system apply some statistical/abstract/hashed type record of what's "normal" that wouldn't allow someone to easily reconstruct an image of "normal", but would allow the system to rank a given set of actions as normal?
The way I see it, the anti-military western bloc [AMWB] (Canada, EU, etc) behavior can be defined thusly:
Regardless of the weapons any one "rogue" nation might possess, they don't pose a meaningful military threat to AMWB due to those nations' inability to realistically wage a war of aggression and/or occupation, plus those nations' enemies are seen as in their own neighborhood and not the AMWB nations themselves.
Despite the utopian rhetoric of the AMWB nations, some, like France, have a VERY activist foreign policy (Ivory Coast, as a recent example) and France's opposition to US policy in the Middle East may be significantly motivated by their own geopolitical interests.
Furthermore, many of these nations are motivated by economic self-interest and, particularly in the case of the Middle East, resent the Iraq action in particular as it undermines their economic activities.
I also have to wonder why, if the AMWB nations are truly motivated by utopian interest of peace, love, etc. why they haven't been willing to stop significant human rights abuses in Africa (Sudan, pretty much all of West Africa, Zimbabwe, etc). Furthermore, look at their pathetic track record in putting a lid on Yugoslavia's violence. None of that came to any serious halt until the US got deeply involved and initiated military action against Milosevic. EU-sourced Blue Helmets even stood by as (ie, Srebencia) Serbs killed hundreds.
I've heard that most European governments are largely slaves to their welfare states; despite the pacifist rhetoric, they can so barely manage their own economies that a projectable military force is impossible.
EMT = Eletrical Metallic Tubing, the lightest weight metallic conduit for electrical and data/voice cabling. Code requires it only in exposed locations or on abradable surfaces (basically anywhere sheathed cable might be abraded), and in most commercial installations.
Most American residential construction is the "stick" method of wall building, using pine 2x4s spaced every 18 inches. Romex wire is run through these horizontally and vertically and tacked to the studs every couple of feet.
It's dead cheap and easy compared to conduit, which has to be bent and can't readily be fit into a stick wall.
If you could afford it, it'd be best to run big diameter EMT from your hub location to your satellite locations. It's much easier to fish through, and even if it gets hard to fish a single new line through you can always empty and re-pull everything at once if you have to.
In an ideal world the house would have been planned for this to begin with and a wiring plenum would have run been established between all the floors (a riser plenum) and there would be a cross-shaped plenum in each and every room, as well as a plenum connecting all the rooms. With a few access panels here and there, you can go from any room to any room without a lot of painful, finished-wall fishing.
There's a commercial building accross the street that has a 3" raised floor encompassing every square foot of every floor of the building. Now that's what I call planning ahead.
If you want to stop spam, you have to be willing to do the law enforcement on the fraud and illegality associated with spam. Follow the money and you'll start solving the problem.
As long as you led criminals operate, they'll continue to break the spam laws.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been 20 years since I was in a public school, but I seem to remember them keeping a thing called "attendance" in every class, including homeroom, except that it was done with paper and pencil and was prone to error (my report cards NEVER had attendence columns that made sense).
What's wrong with automating it? What "right" is a kid giving up having the school know where he is? As a parent, I LIKE the idea that my kid can be tracked within a school.
Furthermore, as a parent I think that 2/3s of the problem with our schools is that discipline has gone to hell in a handbasket, and the school knowing where the students are is part of discipline. Even in high school these are still kids with poor judgement and little life experience.
I sometimes wonder if all the hullaballoo about this kind of thing isn't the byproduct of a bunch of high school slashdotters all frothy mouthed about their "rights" (which they largely don't have, except in their imaginations).
I'm kind of waiting for the "DVDShrink" application that runs continuously and keeps my HDD and my Tivo in sync, as well as stripping Tivo's DRM from the files so they can be dumped into DVDs easily, without paying even more for the privilege of burning them to CD.
The thing I like about Shrink is its utter ease of use and single-software solution. Point, click, rip, transcode..
Decrypter *is* nice (I use it for burning my ISOs to -R media), but it doesn't do the transcodes necessary to fit DVD-9s onto -R media. I haven't checked out DVD2One yet, so it may not be a huge deal, but I hate the kind of glued-together solutions of yore that you find at sites like Doom9; 5 different applications, a couple of different codecs, yadda...
I love this application; I can keep my originals safe and secure and use my copies for day-day use. But I read recently that there are some movies that are becoming hard to copy with it and that development of it has stopped.
Will someone be picking up the peices and continuing development, or is something else going to replace it?
Furthermore, I can't believe you tried to compare genocide/mass murder to the presence/lack of Internet access. Either you were trolling (and I took the bait - go me) or you really do believe what you said, in which case your ignorance is astounding. Here is a hint: no one dies from lack of Internet access.
Do I have to spell it out for you? How many fucking Chinese citizens were killed by the Chinese government in Tiananmen Square while advocating for the non-human rights of freedom of expression?
Is that not close enough to "ethnic cleansing"/"genocide"/"mass killing" for you, skippy, or do you need something else? I haven't even brought up the "Great Leap Forward" or any of the other Maoist "innovations".
Keep going, though, you, like so many of your pals, believe that taking away all the small aspects of the big rights is just fine. Keep believing it, as your attitude is giving them all the encouragement they need to take them away.
Its their country, their rules..
...
Let's take that idea to a logical conclusion:
Sudan...it iss their country, their rules.
Serbia...it is their country, their rules.
We can go back in history and include Cambodia, Nazi Germany,
I guess hatred of America is so strong these days that the Slashbots feel compelled to defend every other government, even some of the most despotic and totalitarian.
That thing kind of reminds me of the old Sniffer cases that in turn reminded me of the old Kaypros; kind of a suitcase-sized (as opposed to this thing's briefcase sized) PC.
I'm surprised no one has made an actual oversized laptop out of one, including the LCD display and some real hardware expansion capability.
Done right, you'd have a great on-site server for testing or crash repairs. You need something sized right to match a real server.
We're not talking here about taking back what was wrongfully taken. Immigrants don't "take" anything; they pay rent for where they live, they work for money, etc.
Yes, all the rich immigrants with doctoral degrees don't take a thing, except maybe for the good spots at the luxury shopping mall.
The illegal immigrants are dirt-poor and eat up tons of public assistance resources (medicare, housing, etc), ruin public school systems by draining always-scarce resources for kids that don't speak English well or at all, haven't had any education, and are unruly and disruptive.
Don't tell me that all they do is come here and work hard and pay taxes.
And don't give me the phony lecture on their "value" to the economy. Black Americans (who live here and have LIVED here for centuries) face a 10% PLUS unemployment rate and a poverty rate that's shameful. If we "need" these immigrants to bus dishes/mow lawns/roof houses, why do we have such outrageous black unemployment? Why would anyone advocate a need for workers if millions of the native-born, English-speaking population were unemployed?
I don't get it; the only thing I can think of is that BUsiness Interests have largely washed their hands of the black population and written them off in exchange for illegal immigrants, and that the Immigration Advocates/Left have decided that while the Black population may suffer economically due to immigration, ultimately "they" will end up with some kind of permanent supermajority that will enable them to implement a socialist system once and for all.
Choices have consequences.
If my parents robbed a bank when I was 6 and we moved into a nice house with all of life's luxuries, but they were ID'd when I was 15 and we had to give up everything and were homeless and penniless, what exactly would you expect or want to happen?
That the gain from breaking the law should be kept because it's a hard world out there?
Much has been made of the "need" for illegal immigrants to have licenses because they drive and help keep the US economy competitive.
We could also be more competitive if we allowed third world working conditions to go with the living conditions, and made sure we enforced those working conditions with an extremely corrupt politico-judicial-military system that enforced said conditions with a barrel of a gun.
We're working on that. We've been doing a *great* job at importing third world workers familiar with and willing to accept as normal third world working and living conditions. All we need to do is relax our labor laws enough to allow businesses to use our increasingly paramilitary law enforcement to break strikes and arrest labor organizers. Since unions and organized labor are all but moribund in this country, no one will stop them.
What's ironic about immigration is that The Left has given the Republicans and their Corporate allies a HUGE economic victory by failing to stop the mass immigration we've been experiencing over the past 10 years.
It's diluted the labor pool and helped keep wages down, but the Left has consistently worked against stricter immigration rules and routinely paints those oppposing mass immigration as ignorant, bigoted, lazy and racist. This is despite the fact that unemployment in the native-born black community hovers around 10-11%.
It sounds conspiratorial, but I think they would rather see both black and white unemployment around 8% instead of pushing black unemployment to 5% by having them do the work we "need" the Mexicans for.
Furthermore, they have openly worked against even deporting those immigrants here illegally, often passing municipal ordinances prohibiting local police from inquiring as to immigration status, trying to block prohibitions on granting driver's licenses and other legal documentation to illegal immigrants, as well as wanting to give an ID issued by a foreign government -- the Matricula Consular, the Mexican-consulate issued ID card -- equal footing with domestic government issued identification, despite the obvious lack of control and verification, not to mention the widespread corruption and criminality that easily penetrates even the President of Mexico's own office.
What's next? Voting privileges, too? Why yes, they HAVE been pushing the very idea that resident aliens should be able to vote, too.
This last bit is the only thing that makes any sense about the Left's support for mass immigration and illegal immigrants, despite the way it shafts domestic workers, particularly low/unskilled minority native-born workers who are the direct competitors to immigrant laborers. They must believe that by flooding America with poor, non-white immigrants that they will once and for all regain the majority electoral status that Nixon's "Silent Majority" strategy robbed them of in the late 1960s when Nixon got disaffected Southeners and socially conservative working class voters to support him over the increasingly radical Democratic party.
I'm sure someone here will accuse me of racism, bigotry or just simple
ignorance. I know it's the knee-jerk reaction to someone who hasn't taken the Red Pill and adopted Marxism and Diversity as a religion. But c'mon -- how can you justify mass immigration, repudiation of immigration law by LAW ENFORCEMENT, the economic penalty being paid by labor, especially black labor, not to mention the financial victory to your own sworn enemies on Wall Street and the Republican party?
Imagine what it would be like if, when you were 6 years old, your parents had moved to the US because back in Mexico they had trouble affording a basic life (food, shelter, etc.) 16 years later, you're 22, you went to school, you speak English, you've got a job and friends and a normal life.
You're still an illegal immigrant, you know, and "breaking the law" every day. You're constantly threatened with the idea that you ought to be shipped "back" to Mexico, even though you don't know anyone there, don't remember it at all, and aren't really that good at speaking Spanish.
Tough shit. No, really. Breaking the law has consequences.
Why _SHOULDN'T_ we? Are illegal immigrants somehow less human than you?
No, they're just less legal than legal immigrants and citizens.
Surely selling prescription drugs in any kind of a shady manner (phony perscriptions, no prescriptions, not the drug advertised, etc) across state lines is a serious Federal offense, at least as serious as this drug crime is and should warrant its own Federal task force, RICO prosecutions, and the like.
I wonder why we haven't seen this and it takes MS/Pfizer joining forces to make an issue out of it. Does this make any sense?
Bullshit. You are dead wrong. Israel would not fire on any country that would destroy them in retaliation.
Which is why in 1978, at the height of the cold war, Arab Nationalism and Hussein's military power, the Israelis unilaterally bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor under construction.
The Israelis don't wait for permission, and the Iranians wouldn't be able to fire back -- Israel has top of the line missles and guidance systems, decades of nuclear weapons experience and levels of targeting intelligence that the US only dreams about. Iran would be finished; they lack the sophistication in command and control systems and depth of offensive capability to take a first strike and hit back. On a megaton-for-megaton basis, the *Israelis* can hit the Iranians with more effect than the US can.
And that is what it is all about. Do you really think Iran or N. Korea would not prefer that everyone on the planet dies, rather than their country being conquered?
Mass suicide isn't their dream, it's furthering the 1000 year Kim dynasty. The Iranians are just too rational and also have some questionable internal loyalties among pretty much everyone under the age of 35. It's one thing to get them to go along with Hezbollah's activities in Lebanon; that's just good regional gamesmanship -- getting them to participate in something that could end Persian culture as we know it is quite another.
The third-party strike makes some strategic sense, but it presumes that the third party isn't willing and able to respond in kind.
Tehran would be a finely-glazed parking lot five minutes after even threatening the Israelis with a nuclear strike. It's taking serious diplomatic pressure from the US to keep the Israelis from hitting Iranian facilities *right now*.
I'm also willing to believe that the Chinese would also nuke first and ask questions later, and despite their rhetoric, the French and the British wouldn't take kindly to being targeted, either. You don't just threaten to nuke somebody; even if they agree with your position, you end up risking a retalition simply because the threatened country's internal political situation demands it.
Even the North Koreans have to understand that the nuclear threat doesn't do much for them but greatly increase the likelihood that Kim's dynasty and much of the population will be simply vaporized.
The Iranians are just too smart to pull a stunt like that.
I firmly believe that any "rogue" state threatening nuclear strikes on the US will result in DEFCON-2 and back-channel communications to all major diplomatic contacts that the United States will respond with significant nuclear retaliation to any nuclear strike, and that "...the rest of our nuclear arsenal remains at its fullest readiness." -- a not so subtle reminder that anyone getting in our way should consider whether or not they're willing to trigger a nuclear holocaust.
No state rogue or otherwise will now believe that complying with UN resolutions or appeasing a more powerful enemy will prevent attack.
Rogue states always believed that a mixture of diplomatic stalling (cf. Microsoft Anti-Trust Settlements) and, most importantly, the relatively high cost of ground invasion and the reluctance to do so in a post-Vietnam world, is what protected them.
I also don't believe that posession of a nuclear weapon is a deterrent to any U.S. military action, either, since these states seldom have the means to produce more than a handful of low-yield weapons and lack the ability to deliver them outside their own theater.
They're not defensive weapons unless they can be delivered against their adversary's homeland. You don't nuke your own country as a defensive measure against invading forces. Well you can, but that's like chopping off your leg..
Furthermore these states (with the possible exception of North Korea) are rational actors and realize that the use of any nuclear weapon against the United States or its allies would result in a nucleare retaliation that would end their governments and quite possibly close the book on their nations.
Ebbers and Lay _are_ the victims of antipathy; one's pretty much guaranteed to go to jail, while the other faces a strong possibility of going to jail (depending on how long Bush decides to hold back the justice department).
What differentiates the situations, though, is that Fiorina rammed home a merger that was extremely unpopular (although I believed wise) in addition to overseeing a number of changes to the company that many believed permanently damaged HP's innovation-oriented corporate culture.
In short, she was an "unpopular manager".
Ebbers and Lay were "bad capitalists"; they pursued aggressive and ultimately illegal business activities. Unfortunately, the antipathy towards them makes many other capitalists extremely uncomfortable, as it hits close to home (many businesses pursue an aggressive business and legal strategy, especially tax-wise), and often borrows from the rhetoric of class warfare.
This leads to a certain dampening of the antipathy towards these men, as it invokes a circle-the-wagons reaction. Carly's strategy was never particularly popular, either among HP fans or among investors.
On a Friday I went to Dell's site and specced out a 2U server. On the following Monday I got ahold of a woman from another department and got our company's dell login. I logged in, and the same server was instantly 20% more expensive.
Fortunately I printed the quote from the first one with the component pricing, and when I compared, the new server was uniformly more expensive on a per-component basis; it wasn't like disk or memory something had individually gone up.
I went back and re-quoted as a generic user and the price was still high, although I didn't think to dump any cookies or anything.
I suspected they just were reaming us, despite the fact that we never bought a server from them and we bought a fair number (50?) of PCs per year from them, which should have made us a "priority" customer.
Did any Mac in 1985 even have an expansion bus?
I'm not including the XL because it was a Lisa not a Mac, and the Lisa expansion slots were more useless then than ISA is today.
I'll agree with your main point, though.
I still don't get the inherent, undeniable privacy risk. I don't have a problem using Bayesian filtering for my email, and THAT requires knowing what's "regular" mail and "irregular" mail.
Couldn't some security system apply some statistical/abstract/hashed type record of what's "normal" that wouldn't allow someone to easily reconstruct an image of "normal", but would allow the system to rank a given set of actions as normal?
The way I see it, the anti-military western bloc [AMWB] (Canada, EU, etc) behavior can be defined thusly:
Regardless of the weapons any one "rogue" nation might possess, they don't pose a meaningful military threat to AMWB due to those nations' inability to realistically wage a war of aggression and/or occupation, plus those nations' enemies are seen as in their own neighborhood and not the AMWB nations themselves.
Despite the utopian rhetoric of the AMWB nations, some, like France, have a VERY activist foreign policy (Ivory Coast, as a recent example) and France's opposition to US policy in the Middle East may be significantly motivated by their own geopolitical interests.
Furthermore, many of these nations are motivated by economic self-interest and, particularly in the case of the Middle East, resent the Iraq action in particular as it undermines their economic activities.
I also have to wonder why, if the AMWB nations are truly motivated by utopian interest of peace, love, etc. why they haven't been willing to stop significant human rights abuses in Africa (Sudan, pretty much all of West Africa, Zimbabwe, etc). Furthermore, look at their pathetic track record in putting a lid on Yugoslavia's violence. None of that came to any serious halt until the US got deeply involved and initiated military action against Milosevic. EU-sourced Blue Helmets even stood by as (ie, Srebencia) Serbs killed hundreds.
I've heard that most European governments are largely slaves to their welfare states; despite the pacifist rhetoric, they can so barely manage their own economies that a projectable military force is impossible.
Why did he let them punk him?
I'm a reasonable guy and I'll let a friend or two join someone ahead of me, but the third guy gets told to get to the back of the line.
EMT = Eletrical Metallic Tubing, the lightest weight metallic conduit for electrical and data/voice cabling. Code requires it only in exposed locations or on abradable surfaces (basically anywhere sheathed cable might be abraded), and in most commercial installations.
Most American residential construction is the "stick" method of wall building, using pine 2x4s spaced every 18 inches. Romex wire is run through these horizontally and vertically and tacked to the studs every couple of feet.
It's dead cheap and easy compared to conduit, which has to be bent and can't readily be fit into a stick wall.
If you could afford it, it'd be best to run big diameter EMT from your hub location to your satellite locations. It's much easier to fish through, and even if it gets hard to fish a single new line through you can always empty and re-pull everything at once if you have to.
In an ideal world the house would have been planned for this to begin with and a wiring plenum would have run been established between all the floors (a riser plenum) and there would be a cross-shaped plenum in each and every room, as well as a plenum connecting all the rooms. With a few access panels here and there, you can go from any room to any room without a lot of painful, finished-wall fishing.
There's a commercial building accross the street that has a 3" raised floor encompassing every square foot of every floor of the building. Now that's what I call planning ahead.
If you want to stop spam, you have to be willing to do the law enforcement on the fraud and illegality associated with spam. Follow the money and you'll start solving the problem.
As long as you led criminals operate, they'll continue to break the spam laws.