I also don't understand why this is news. According to a CNN report, before Bush went to Congress, he was sent pointed and specific memos that the case he was building was predicated on information that was either unsubstantiated, contradicted overwhelming evidence to the contrary, or was outright fraudulent. When he ignored those memos and made his presentation to Congress, two high-level CIA managers resigned in protest.
That asks the question, is lying about the reason for war an impeachable offense?
I would say, "Hell, yes."
And as far as Clinton is concerned, I'd be more worried his sanity if he *didn't* lie when ambushed with a question about whether he'd cheated on his wife. But a ZCDD (zipper control deficit disorder) simply does not equate to sending over a thousand soldiers to their deaths, sentencing tens of thousands to lives with permanent, often disabling injuries, and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, all with the obvious and predicted result of destabilizing a country with the potential of becoming a hotbed of terrorism where none existed before.
Can you tell I've been thinking about this a lot lately?
And yes, there are still some who:
a. toe the party line, or b. believe whatever their President tells them.
It's stunning. And lest you think me less patriotic for taking swings at the MFFB (Monkey Faced Frat Boy), let me throw in a quick quote.
"...To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, it is morally treasonable to the American people."
That statement was uttered by a Republican. A war hero, no less. And his right to say it is cemented by the fact that he was even a President, and a popular one, too.
I don't see it as that big of a problem. I don't think, given the current technology, that it's possible to economically achieve orbit without shedding weight on the way. The trick is adding a piece that can either:
a. be made cheaply enough that losing it in the ocean or having it burn up isn't a big deal,
b. be made to survive high altitude descent without burning up and use a flotation device so it can be recovered, or
c. be made with a pop-out glider assembly or parasail and the smarts to glide to a general vicinity for pickup.
These are the problems I'd be trying to answer. The X Prize generate nifty solutions, but none of them appear to be robust enough to make orbit. So go for more of a shuttle approach, but reworked from the ground up to be more economical while building on the ideas that will probably win the X Prize.
i run an internationally political website, and if I used my real name, phone, address, etc, I would have been physically attacked, at best. This law does not affect me in any way as I am not doing any fraud, spam, con-games, nigerian emails, or what have you.
JeanBaptiste? AKA The Republicrat Rat? AT LAST, WE HAVE FOUND YOU! Guys! Get your baseball bats and your voter registration cards, we're gonna do a Tonya Harding on his ole punk ass tonight!
Every southern child past they age of three knows that y'all is a contraction of the words "you all" and refers to a group of people.
Y'all [yawl]: A useful Southern word that is consistently misused by Northerners when they try to mimic a Southern accent, which they do with appalling regularity. Y'all is always a plural because it means you-all, or all of you. It is never - repeat, never - used in reference to only one person. At least not by Southerners. "Where y'all goin'?"
"Ok, Bob, now you drew the short straw, so you'll have to go out there and clean the lens. Now here's how you do it: take this here high-tech, zero-loss, botanical fibre cleaning pad..."
"Um... isn't that a towel?"
"Well sure, to the untrained eye! Stay focused, Bob. Now, the first thing you'll want to do is gently blow the snow off. Then... Bob, have you brushed your teeth since you last ate?"
"Huh? Oh, yeah, sure."
"Floss?"
"Well... yeah."
"Gargle?"
"I don't think so... why?"
"Bob, you're going to want to gargle before you go out there, because the best cleaning solution we've been able to come up with is saliva."
"Yeah right!... You're kidding, right?"
"Bob, do I look like I'm a kidding kind of guy?"
"..... No."
"Bob, you'll need to gargle with something to make sure there are absolutely no food particles in your saliva. You don't want someone to mistake a piece of Fruit Loops for a new moon around Jupiter, do ya?"
"Oh, heck no!"
"Good man. So be sure to get the saliva really clean. And your tongue."
"Well, yea, sure."
"Because the next thing you're going to do after blowing the snow off is to apply the saliva with your tongue."
"So, you mean, lick the lens?"
"That's right, Bab, lick the lens."
(an hour later)
"Stan, that was just mean."
"Hey, he's a noobie! Everyone gets their tongue frozen to the lens at least once. We'll give him about 5 more minutes, then we'll go out with a cup of hot water and free him."
You mean you wouldn't "just" the engineer? "Trust"? "Thrust"?
No, I certainly wouldn't thrust an engineer with bad grammar. Unless she was really cute, that is. And then she can have as bad a grammar as she wants. Although that might make "dirty talk" rather amusing, and there's nothing like a good guffaw to ruin a great thrusting....
If Microsoft doesn't innovate, then why is it that the list of improvements in the Linux 2.6 kernel reads like a feature list of NT from the early 90's?
And NT's feature list reads like a feature list for VAX VMS from the mid-80's. Of course, that's because Microsoft hired away one of the top architects for VMS from DEC.
Innovation? No. Really good at copying other people's work with varying results? Oh yea. Definitely.
Polishuk also questioned the need for higher-speed networks. "Who's going to buy it when 40-Gb networks aren't getting off the ground?" he asked.
In other news, Bill Gates was heard to say, "Well sure, 640k wasn't nearly enough memory for all the cool stuff we came up with. But trust me this time: no one is ever going to need more than 4 gigs of RAM!"
There are people out there who don't trust Mozilla.
Perhaps, but more importantly, there are people out there that don't see the need to download another browser. The DOJ's limp-dicked final solution to M$ abuses of its monopoly guaranteed that IE, and any other industry buster software, will ship with Windows whenever Big Bad Bill's monster corporation decides.
Those of us that know enough to exercise our freedom of choice choose a better browser, and that, more often than not, has been Netscape, and then Mozilla.
But I don't think "trust" is really an issue to Granny and Grandpa Average User.
I see a lot of mention of various firewall technologies here, but no mention of my personal fave for Win98 boxes: Tiny Personal Firewall. Anyone still use that? I *love* that thing. I actually have a Win98 box that I use as a web server -- it's far too underconfigured to bother upgrading to anything else -- and it runs TPF. After bringing that up, it runs SQL Server, Tomcat, and James. It crawls, but it's functional, and I have no doubt that that is at least in part due to the Tiny Personal Firewall software.
Oh, and along the same lines, you refered to all this as, "The parasite business model. Companies that buy or create patents then just sue everyone. We've seen SCO and Unisys (LZW patent), this sort of action seems to suggest a failing in their product line."
If I, as the creator of an idea or design decide to patent the idea, I've essentially created a product in that patent. I can now profit from it by selling it to someone else. Then that entity can profit from it in their own way by implementing it in some fashion, licensing it, or selling it again.
It also becomes that entity's job to protect the patent. Yes, a business model based on revenues from legal suits can certainly be described as parasitic, but there is nothing legally wrong with what they're doing. If Company X is profiting from the use of that idea, the rights to which entity Y now owns, and doesn't want to pay royalties, then the court system is the next logical stop. Company X is always free to create from scratch a technique for doing the same thing without using entity Y's patented IP.
And if it was your hard earned idea, you'd be doing the same. Get over it.
I completely disagree. If I do the research, innovation, legwork, and investment to define a given idea/design, and that idea/design becomes 99% of your product, I should be able to get paid for that. I'm not your silent and unpaid partner. If I went to the trouble to patent it, you need to pay for that effort. *That's* the purpose behind the patent system -- ensuring that research and innovation are rewarded, not stolen. I shouldn't have to come up with a widget that uses all that research before you do just to prevent you from walking off with 100% of the profits while doing only 1% of the work.
Sure, but would average John Doe watch it? Bear in mind that the only way NASA can keep the public interested in the Mars rovers is to play wake-up music for them and give rocks names like "Snout" and "Tarmac". Something tells me that a 3-hour spacewalk to calibrate a spectrometer won't appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Give the astronauts pillows to fight with and make it a race. Two go out the air lock... only one can go back in...
Or follow the engineers around all day with the cameras. I'm telling you, just one episode that catches Mary Jane and Clyde making whoopee in the supply closet is all it takes to put ratings through the roof.
Next episode? Clyde's wife shows up at the lab, confronts Clyde, and right in the middle of it, Mary Jane walks in! WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT?! Tune in next week and find out....
WHOA -- I have to be honest with you, I'm not going to trust an update of my operating system to something I drag off a BitTorrent site. Perhaps someone can alleviate the apprehension -- what are the odds that some jerkweed is going to attach backdoor warez to that download?
Personally, I'm cautious enough that I'd rather download it directly from Microsoft than try to gain some perceived savings in downloading it from a 3rd party site.
Guys, you're completely missing the point of this article. The "scientist" that speculated that we're alone has an agenda, and that's to feed the creationists some much needed ammo. The problem with you guys is, you're too smart. What seems obvious to you will, with any luck, never occur to the target audience of the creationist extremists. "We've examined over one hundred stellar systems and we haven't detected a single earth-like planet! Well, geez, that makes us special, just like God intended!"
What we need to do is have an real scientist rebutt this kind of junk theory with matching CNN coverage.
Anyone in the crowd with credentials want to make that phone call? I would do it, but just being "really-stinkin-smart" and "not-a-sheep" doesn't qualify as credentials.
That beast has "special stripes" and weighs in at nearly 3 tons. Geez frikkin' louise. I hope the "special stripes" impart special gas saving powers, because otherwise you might as well hook up a tanker of gas directly to the 444 bhp @ 6600 rpm engine.
Youch.
As for the new Batmobile, what the hell were they thinking? That doesn't look cool, it looks unfinished. It looks mismatched. And frankly, it looks like something my uncle Charlie put together out of the parts of his various demolished and blown up monster trucks after drinking all his Cow Palace Dirt Derby winnings. Fortunately for the kids, it never ran. But if a lightning storm had come up before the sheriff drug him away, it might have lived. Oh yes, it might have lived.....
Most programmers in the U.S. will make certain assumptions about the applications they're creating, assumptions that fit with the overall business paradigm normally used in the U.S. Someone raised outside the U.S. and, frankly, in a society with a much lower average technological and business level, will lack a full understanding of parts of a spec that assume that the normal reaction will take place.
When I look at a spec, my experience with other projects fills in the blanks. I've *never* been handed a spec that told me to the nth degree every label and field, every question and reply. And when these items are not there for a foreign programmer, their response will not be the same as mine, and their solution is not going to be valid in the face of U.S. cultural, societal, and business norms.
This is great. This is something the police know how to deal with - death threats. This isn't some dodgy dumb scam now, this is something they can beat someone up over, and they like that.
Policeman reading his email:
'Penis enlargement.' Delete. 'Great mortgage rates.' Delete. 'Hot teens.' File. 'Pay or die...' Wha-? You've gotta be kidding me... HONEY! Get me my flashlight!
Slashdot Mirror
A-f***in'-men.
s .dean.wmd/index.html
I also don't understand why this is news. According to a CNN report, before Bush went to Congress, he was sent pointed and specific memos that the case he was building was predicated on information that was either unsubstantiated, contradicted overwhelming evidence to the contrary, or was outright fraudulent. When he ignored those memos and made his presentation to Congress, two high-level CIA managers resigned in protest.
CNN also ran an interesting article in 2003 at:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/06/06/findlaw.analysi
That asks the question, is lying about the reason for war an impeachable offense?
I would say, "Hell, yes."
And as far as Clinton is concerned, I'd be more worried his sanity if he *didn't* lie when ambushed with a question about whether he'd cheated on his wife. But a ZCDD (zipper control deficit disorder) simply does not equate to sending over a thousand soldiers to their deaths, sentencing tens of thousands to lives with permanent, often disabling injuries, and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, all with the obvious and predicted result of destabilizing a country with the potential of becoming a hotbed of terrorism where none existed before.
Can you tell I've been thinking about this a lot lately?
And yes, there are still some who:
a. toe the party line, or
b. believe whatever their President tells them.
It's stunning. And lest you think me less patriotic for taking swings at the MFFB (Monkey Faced Frat Boy), let me throw in a quick quote.
"...To announce that there must be no criticism of the president or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, it is morally treasonable to the American people."
That statement was uttered by a Republican. A war hero, no less. And his right to say it is cemented by the fact that he was even a President, and a popular one, too.
Theodore Roosevelt.
femtowatt is one quadrillionth (10 ^ -15) of Watt
Unless my wife is defining it. Then it's
One Femtowatt = one quadrillion Watts
And if the Femtowatt is experiencing that time of the month, every single one of those Watts is walking on eggshells, you better believe it.
I don't see it as that big of a problem. I don't think, given the current technology, that it's possible to economically achieve orbit without shedding weight on the way. The trick is adding a piece that can either:
a. be made cheaply enough that losing it in the ocean or having it burn up isn't a big deal,
b. be made to survive high altitude descent without burning up and use a flotation device so it can be recovered, or
c. be made with a pop-out glider assembly or parasail and the smarts to glide to a general vicinity for pickup.
These are the problems I'd be trying to answer. The X Prize generate nifty solutions, but none of them appear to be robust enough to make orbit. So go for more of a shuttle approach, but reworked from the ground up to be more economical while building on the ideas that will probably win the X Prize.
My $.02.
i run an internationally political website, and if I used my real name, phone, address, etc, I would have been physically attacked, at best. This law does not affect me in any way as I am not doing any fraud, spam, con-games, nigerian emails, or what have you.
JeanBaptiste? AKA The Republicrat Rat? AT LAST, WE HAVE FOUND YOU! Guys! Get your baseball bats and your voter registration cards, we're gonna do a Tonya Harding on his ole punk ass tonight!
Every southern child past they age of three knows that y'all is a contraction of the words "you all" and refers to a group of people.
Y'all [yawl]: A useful Southern word that is consistently misused by Northerners when they try to mimic a Southern accent, which they do with appalling regularity. Y'all is always a plural because it means you-all, or all of you. It is never - repeat, never - used in reference to only one person. At least not by Southerners. "Where y'all goin'?"
-- paraphrased from "How To Speak Southern"
"Ok, Bob, now you drew the short straw, so you'll have to go out there and clean the lens. Now here's how you do it: take this here high-tech, zero-loss, botanical fibre cleaning pad..."
... Bob, have you brushed your teeth since you last ate?"
... You're kidding, right?"
"Um... isn't that a towel?"
"Well sure, to the untrained eye! Stay focused, Bob. Now, the first thing you'll want to do is gently blow the snow off. Then
"Huh? Oh, yeah, sure."
"Floss?"
"Well... yeah."
"Gargle?"
"I don't think so... why?"
"Bob, you're going to want to gargle before you go out there, because the best cleaning solution we've been able to come up with is saliva."
"Yeah right!
"Bob, do I look like I'm a kidding kind of guy?"
"..... No."
"Bob, you'll need to gargle with something to make sure there are absolutely no food particles in your saliva. You don't want someone to mistake a piece of Fruit Loops for a new moon around Jupiter, do ya?"
"Oh, heck no!"
"Good man. So be sure to get the saliva really clean. And your tongue."
"Well, yea, sure."
"Because the next thing you're going to do after blowing the snow off is to apply the saliva with your tongue."
"So, you mean, lick the lens?"
"That's right, Bab, lick the lens."
(an hour later)
"Stan, that was just mean."
"Hey, he's a noobie! Everyone gets their tongue frozen to the lens at least once. We'll give him about 5 more minutes, then we'll go out with a cup of hot water and free him."
You mean you wouldn't "just" the engineer? "Trust"? "Thrust"?
No, I certainly wouldn't thrust an engineer with bad grammar. Unless she was really cute, that is. And then she can have as bad a grammar as she wants. Although that might make "dirty talk" rather amusing, and there's nothing like a good guffaw to ruin a great thrusting....
In Soviet Russia, the mice mount lasers on you!
Ok, yeah, that was weak...
If Microsoft doesn't innovate, then why is it that the list of improvements in the Linux 2.6 kernel reads like a feature list of NT from the early 90's?
And NT's feature list reads like a feature list for VAX VMS from the mid-80's. Of course, that's because Microsoft hired away one of the top architects for VMS from DEC.
Innovation? No. Really good at copying other people's work with varying results? Oh yea. Definitely.
When they get to X-Ray vision, even the sighted folks will sign up!
Well, I will at least.
Polishuk also questioned the need for higher-speed networks. "Who's going to buy it when 40-Gb networks aren't getting off the ground?" he asked.
In other news, Bill Gates was heard to say, "Well sure, 640k wasn't nearly enough memory for all the cool stuff we came up with. But trust me this time: no one is ever going to need more than 4 gigs of RAM!"
There are people out there who don't trust Mozilla.
Perhaps, but more importantly, there are people out there that don't see the need to download another browser. The DOJ's limp-dicked final solution to M$ abuses of its monopoly guaranteed that IE, and any other industry buster software, will ship with Windows whenever Big Bad Bill's monster corporation decides.
Those of us that know enough to exercise our freedom of choice choose a better browser, and that, more often than not, has been Netscape, and then Mozilla.
But I don't think "trust" is really an issue to Granny and Grandpa Average User.
I see a lot of mention of various firewall technologies here, but no mention of my personal fave for Win98 boxes: Tiny Personal Firewall. Anyone still use that? I *love* that thing. I actually have a Win98 box that I use as a web server -- it's far too underconfigured to bother upgrading to anything else -- and it runs TPF. After bringing that up, it runs SQL Server, Tomcat, and James. It crawls, but it's functional, and I have no doubt that that is at least in part due to the Tiny Personal Firewall software.
Without giving away too much (and getting fired in the process) there is a whole new tech on the horizon.
Bob, you're fired.
Oh, and along the same lines, you refered to all this as, "The parasite business model. Companies that buy or create patents then just sue everyone. We've seen SCO and Unisys (LZW patent), this sort of action seems to suggest a failing in their product line."
If I, as the creator of an idea or design decide to patent the idea, I've essentially created a product in that patent. I can now profit from it by selling it to someone else. Then that entity can profit from it in their own way by implementing it in some fashion, licensing it, or selling it again.
It also becomes that entity's job to protect the patent. Yes, a business model based on revenues from legal suits can certainly be described as parasitic, but there is nothing legally wrong with what they're doing. If Company X is profiting from the use of that idea, the rights to which entity Y now owns, and doesn't want to pay royalties, then the court system is the next logical stop. Company X is always free to create from scratch a technique for doing the same thing without using entity Y's patented IP.
And if it was your hard earned idea, you'd be doing the same. Get over it.
I completely disagree. If I do the research, innovation, legwork, and investment to define a given idea/design, and that idea/design becomes 99% of your product, I should be able to get paid for that. I'm not your silent and unpaid partner. If I went to the trouble to patent it, you need to pay for that effort. *That's* the purpose behind the patent system -- ensuring that research and innovation are rewarded, not stolen. I shouldn't have to come up with a widget that uses all that research before you do just to prevent you from walking off with 100% of the profits while doing only 1% of the work.
(me): what are the odds that some jerkweed is going to attach backdoor warez to that download?
(schon): About the same that some jerkweed is going to attach a backdoor to any other torrent you download.
Exactly. And I don't. Download software, that is. Unless it's from the vendor, which in this case would be MS.
Sure, but would average John Doe watch it? Bear in mind that the only way NASA can keep the public interested in the Mars rovers is to play wake-up music for them and give rocks names like "Snout" and "Tarmac". Something tells me that a 3-hour spacewalk to calibrate a spectrometer won't appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Give the astronauts pillows to fight with and make it a race. Two go out the air lock... only one can go back in...
Or follow the engineers around all day with the cameras. I'm telling you, just one episode that catches Mary Jane and Clyde making whoopee in the supply closet is all it takes to put ratings through the roof.
Next episode? Clyde's wife shows up at the lab, confronts Clyde, and right in the middle of it, Mary Jane walks in! WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT?! Tune in next week and find out....
Out of curiousity, which company do you work for? I used to work for Shared Medical Systems, back before it became Siemens Healthcare Systems.
WHOA -- I have to be honest with you, I'm not going to trust an update of my operating system to something I drag off a BitTorrent site. Perhaps someone can alleviate the apprehension -- what are the odds that some jerkweed is going to attach backdoor warez to that download?
Personally, I'm cautious enough that I'd rather download it directly from Microsoft than try to gain some perceived savings in downloading it from a 3rd party site.
"psychical"? They used brainwaves to attack them?
Yow.
Guys, you're completely missing the point of this article. The "scientist" that speculated that we're alone has an agenda, and that's to feed the creationists some much needed ammo. The problem with you guys is, you're too smart. What seems obvious to you will, with any luck, never occur to the target audience of the creationist extremists. "We've examined over one hundred stellar systems and we haven't detected a single earth-like planet! Well, geez, that makes us special, just like God intended!"
What we need to do is have an real scientist rebutt this kind of junk theory with matching CNN coverage.
Anyone in the crowd with credentials want to make that phone call? I would do it, but just being "really-stinkin-smart" and "not-a-sheep" doesn't qualify as credentials.
That beast has "special stripes" and weighs in at nearly 3 tons. Geez frikkin' louise. I hope the "special stripes" impart special gas saving powers, because otherwise you might as well hook up a tanker of gas directly to the 444 bhp @ 6600 rpm engine.
Youch.
As for the new Batmobile, what the hell were they thinking? That doesn't look cool, it looks unfinished. It looks mismatched. And frankly, it looks like something my uncle Charlie put together out of the parts of his various demolished and blown up monster trucks after drinking all his Cow Palace Dirt Derby winnings. Fortunately for the kids, it never ran. But if a lightning storm had come up before the sheriff drug him away, it might have lived. Oh yes, it might have lived.....
Most programmers in the U.S. will make certain assumptions about the applications they're creating, assumptions that fit with the overall business paradigm normally used in the U.S. Someone raised outside the U.S. and, frankly, in a society with a much lower average technological and business level, will lack a full understanding of parts of a spec that assume that the normal reaction will take place.
When I look at a spec, my experience with other projects fills in the blanks. I've *never* been handed a spec that told me to the nth degree every label and field, every question and reply. And when these items are not there for a foreign programmer, their response will not be the same as mine, and their solution is not going to be valid in the face of U.S. cultural, societal, and business norms.
This is great. This is something the police know how to deal with - death threats. This isn't some dodgy dumb scam now, this is something they can beat someone up over, and they like that.
Policeman reading his email:
'Penis enlargement.' Delete.
'Great mortgage rates.' Delete.
'Hot teens.' File.
'Pay or die...' Wha-? You've gotta be kidding me... HONEY! Get me my flashlight!